Euro Thursday: It has come to my attention....

Alright, so most people are familiar with how France was invaded during World War II. Germany invaded through Belgium, steamrolling over the small nation in order to have a convenient way around the Maginot line which defended the France-Germany border. Yes.

A lot of people also know that this happened before, back in WW I. The ironic part was that they actually did much better the first time, when it was a legitimate surprise. I know I had an entire post about France needing to get it together, but seriously now. Was it really that surprising that they would get invaded through Belgium again? They did it the first time, and that was before they had what everyone knew to be a straight up douchebag in control of their armies. It's not like the invasion itself was a surprise; Hitler had invaded Poland the previous year and actually waited out the winter to move all his troops into position to invade France, which is apparently far too busy looking at their impressively useless fortifications to realize that the man who had already violated the neutrality of multiple nations might not really mind having to go through a small, defenseless nation in a strategy that almost worked the last time this situation happened, and in fact would have worked wonderfully had the German general in charge hadn't decided to split up his troops.

To add insult to injury, France had an even better reason to be prepared for this: Belgium had the plans for the invasion, quite literally, in their hands. And the French had heard about it. A plane crashed, carrying the invasion plans, in Belgium. At this point, Hitler had a novel talking about his plans for world dominance and giving his enemies a nice little warning, and they had the invasion plans. So they sent one army group to hold off the roughly 800,000 German soldiers that were meant to be advancing. Germany didn't even revise their plans after this incident; they had evidently figured out that the rest of the world was, in fact, incredibly thick.

The development of the invasion plan over time. Note the lack of arrows in the bottom part of France, where the entirety of their defenses were organized. Also note: Holland was two revisions away from getting its shit wrecked.

So the French army stands around this whole winter, evidently doing pretty much nothing. Italy comes in at the end with a declaration of war that was the international equivalent of kicking somebody while they're down (a fairly weak kick, considering that Italy's claim to fame was finally having achieved punctuality). And then, Hitler brought the hammer down. Several million German troops stormed into France through (and nobody saw this next part coming) Belgium, taking everyone but the one French general who had warned of exactly this completely by surprise. That general's name was Dyle, and you can bet your ass that he got one of the best "I told you so" moments in history.

The only story that doesn't embarrass the allies coming out of this is that the English managed to get their troops out at Dunkirk in a "heroic and daring escape". Turns out, it was just the Germans being cautious and not advancing because they were already pretty surprised that this plan had kicked as much ass as it did.

Hitler wasn't that brilliant: The French were just that slow.