Belgium 1940

There is also the theory that King Leopold's request for an armistice brought as much - if not more - time than the annihilation of his army would have done at that stage of the game.

With the BEF's northern flank open, what stopped the Germans from pushing on? was it Hitler's stop order, the inundations or what?

Liddell Hart may have been English, but even we're not always right all the time. As Andy implies, LH had his a vested interest in shaping the history of the campaign so he could say 'told you so'.

 

When dealing with this sensitive subject to English Ears , one relies on more than one source.

Written by Sir Admiral Keyes M.P. Admiral of the British Fleet May 1941
From his memoirs

I quote some important eyewitness passages for the man who was the British Liaison to the Belgian Army during the 18 days of fighting.
He remained with Leopold until May 27 before he returned to England.
Admiral Keyes diaries and papers and numerous documents prove beyond doubt that Churchill, his boss was fully aware of the fact that the Belgian army did not expose the flank of the BEF. The Belgian army by its brave and prolonged resistance until nearly two days after the BEF began its evacuation (without informing Belgians or French)
The Belgian Army held up the advance of what was originally 8 divisions and was increased to 14 divisions supported by the bulk of the Lutwaffe.
By holding up the Germans for this four day period and preventing them from cutting off the BEF’s retreat to the coast, made the Miracle of Dunkirk possible.
I’m not saying this; Lord Keyes Admiral of The British Fleet makes this written statement, based on his own eyewitness accounts.

"On the night of May 23, with grave misgivings King Leopold III fell back, as order by the General Weygand from his strong positions on the Scheldt to a very much weaker one behind the Lys river.
On May 24th General Weygand told the commanders of the British Army and French Northern army to attack with vigor southwards, in order to close the gap behind the German Panzer divisions, which had broken through.
By this time the Belgian army was heavily engaged, and it was evident to the Belgian GHQ that they were faced with an attack by eight German divisions, with the object of driving the Belgian army to the northward and severing its contact with the British army, which was now lying behind its pre May 10th phony war winter line on the frontier.
Although King Leopold did not know at the time and no message to this effect ever reached him. Lord Gort had already received orders to with draw to the coast.
In a message to Gort from Churchill “ It is now nessessary to tell the Belgians. I am sending to Keyes, but your personal contact with the King is desirable. Keyes will help.
We are asking them to sacrifice themselves for us.
Although Gort had his orders to tell king Leopold, he did not.
Mean while the fight on the Belgian front had been continuous for four days.
Every road, village and town in the small part of Belgium left was thronged with hundreds of thousands of refugees, and low flying aircraft was mercilessly bombing the refugees and the troops.
The Belgian Army was created solely for defense; it had neither tanks nor aircraft to mount any kind of offensive.
From the moment it was ordered to retreat to weaker and weaker positions, its fate was doomed.
With no RAF support, it maintained a 90-kilometer front.
Most British and French account fail to recognize the significance of the Battle along the Lys. Here the Belgian army suffered many casualties. Yet it may well be asked what would have happened to the BEF and The Northern French armies if the Belgians had not prepared to fight to the last. Before this important battle the King promised his troops, no matter what happens I will share your fate.
"Wat er ook moge gebeuren, mijn lot zal het uwe zijn”.
As long as the Belgian army could fight, it kept on fighting to the last. All reserves were in the fight up until the end.
Knowing he could do nothing further to help his Allies, King Leopold told Keyes, The British and the French that he intended to ask for an armistice.
His Government and the British Government asked King Leopold to leave his country and carry on the war from England.
As commander in chief of his army, he maintained his promise to his troops to share their fate. He made no separate peace and became a Prisoner of War "


Written by Sir Admiral Keyes M.P. Admiral of the British Fleet May 1941
From his memoirs

 

When dealing with this sensitive subject to English Ears , one relies on more than one source.

I can assure you nothing is sensitive to my English Ears

Did Keyes put this message he received from Churchill on the 27th May in his memoirs?

Belgian Embassy here assumes from King's decision to remain that he regards the war as lost and contemplates [a] separate peace. It is in order to dissociate itself from this that the constitutional Belgian Government has reassembled on foreign soil. Even if present Belgian Army has to lay down its arms, there are 200,000 Belgians of military age in France, and greater resources than Belgium had in 1914 which to fight back. By present decision the King is dividing the Nation and delivering it into Hitler's protection. Please convey these considerations to the King, and impress upon him the disastrous consequences to the Allies and to Belgium of his present choice.



If the left flank of the BEF was not exposed why were BEF troops rushed into the area to fill the gap?

 

Once more we have the old mantra coming forward -
" It was all Britain's fault - they ran away at Dunkirk and left us to be occupied for four long years " - and so we have yet another Belgian telling us it was ALL our fault - and I am saying to that Belgian- you had better read a bit more History - sort out the wheat from the caff - then come back and tell us "Thanks for liberating us at such a high cost to your youth - and treasury " -THEN I might have soem sympathy

In another post we have this Lill1940 person telling us that Liddel Hart claimed that it wasthe King of Belgium who saved the BEF - I never bought that idea as I belived that Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke to be an honest man and he believed that .....

During his interview with the King - he was interupted by a man who spoke to the King in French but was not putting the whole case to the King..this was Van Overstraeten who was influencing the King......." left the Belgian HQ with many misgivings in my heart....."

You can read about "Brookies" view of that whole scenario in the book by General David Fraser - "Alanbrooke " ISBN 0-00-216360-8- it's always worth somemoney to get at the truth
Cheers

 

Gort knew already on the 26th of May that the Belgian army was unable to " fill the gap in the direction of Ypres "
and that the only hope of saving the situation was a counter attack by Gort or by reserves of which he had none ! So we are at odds as to what extent of BEF troops rushed into the area to fill the gap?
Besides the British had abandoned the Weygand Plan after the failure at Arras on May 21-22- 23.
The Belgians counted on the Weygand Plan for a determined attack south of Arras, the possibility of such an attack being successful had been diminished by the British failure at Arras.Thus Gort diverted troops north to Gravelines Douai- Bethune in the west. The wedge driven by the enemy between the British and Belgian was greatly widened, the Belgians already holding a front of 90 kilometers had no reserves left to throw into the gap.Already deployed toward a different objective, Gort was then in full flight to the coast.

The Belgians had suffered so seriously from low flying attack that they were on the verge of cracking, unless strong RAF intervention took place.
No such intervention ever took place.

 

I give up-You just seem to be cut and pasting. The later looks rather similiar to that on Wikipedia.

Goodnight

 

There is no doubt Sir That I Thank you every day of my life for the sacrifices made to liberate the country of my birth.
Perhaps if Britain had been better prepared in 1940.
Things could have been different.

 

Lill1940
There you go again - "IF Britain had been more prepared in 1940"

Supposing Belgium had been better prepared also - or the French - or the Dutch - the British were NOT responsible for the defence of Europe - at any time.....
I shall join Drew...'night !

 

I've been up the night listening to the wind rip the roof felt off....so I may as well do SOMETHING to pass the time!

On the subject of unpreparedness and who was or who wasn't...

Belgium's Neutrality actually stemmed from a huge domestic political crisis in 1935-36 caused by a proposed HUGE increase in defence spending; relatively speaking, Belgium had the "largest" Reserve-based army in Europe! 630-650,000 men out of a total population of only 12 million. But the Army had become very dated by the start of the 1930s, and Belgium was struggling to "keep up with the Jones'" the British and French whom she was "aligned" with, and Belgium was ALSO a full member of the Locarno pact.

The proposed defence budget increase was to allow the army to modernise - buy tanks, and new artillery, and more and more modern aircraft. Also, a defensive Line down the Eastern Frontier was proposed. Not just the cost of all this caused an uproar....the fact that the new defensive Line would defend mainly the Walloons of Eastern Belgium wasn't popular with the Flemms!

The uproar lasted about six months, all other government busines was being held up, a concensus Cabinet couldn't be formed. In the end, the General who was Minister of Defence and who drew up the plans had to resign, and the King intervened to cut through the crisis. Instead of increasing the size and potential of Belgium's military - the nation would opt for Neutrality and pull out of the Treaty of Locarno - thus saving at least the cost of yearly manouvers with her allies, joint planning, military conventions etc., etc."

Instead - a LIMITED budget increase for defence spending was agreed; this was enough to build a SORT OF a defensive Line, shaped roughly like a wineglass!

A long east-west curve of defenses - not Maginot-type, just pillboxes withing MG range of each other - protected Belgium's major urban centres in the North, Antwerp etc. In the very middle of this long curve, a long Line broke off straight down the centre of the country, again of pillboxes in mutual covering MG range. This was the KW-Line.....and, yes, it basically defended the Flemms, not the Walloons! It also stopped short halfway down the country to the French border!!!

While not "powerful" in terms of armaments or huge fortresses, the KW-Line WAS fronted by landscape features - it ran along what river bottoms there were, and dams and dikes were dug, so that lowlying land in front of the Line could be flooded; a line of Cointet anti-tank fencing ALSO fronted the Line, between the flood areas and the pillbox line. It was never intended as a defence line that was to be held for a long time - it was a Line that the Belgian Army could fall back on, fill the gaps in between with rapidly-dug trenches, and man the empty pillboxes.

What the Belgians DID do east of the KW-Line was form units of Chasseurs Ardennais, mobile troops, some motorised, some bicycle-ised, with light armour (armoured cars). They were to patrol the more rugged country in the east of Belgium, harass an invader, and the Belgian Army would take position behind them and if necessary conduct a slow fighting retreat onto the KW-Line. But it was a very poor substitute for a defensive Line using some very nice rivers and features on the Eastern Frontier...

Belgium was one of those Neutrals who opted for "weak" neutrality; a sort of "walk softly and don't be seen to carry a big stick"! They purposely didn't buy "tanks"; instead, out of the new budget they bought a few dozen Vickers' "tractors" - tanks without turrets. THEN they mounted their own excellent 40mm A/T gun on them, gave them an armoured mantlet around the gun installation...made some of them even swivel...and called them "self-propelled guns" for of course artillery for indirect fire was okay, it was purely defensive, and that wouldn't offend any big, nasty neighbour...mind you, a Vickers' chasis, with an armoured turret that mounted a class leading anti-tank gun??
That duck quacked like a tank to me!:p

That was the problem with Belgium's defence spending - NOW, as a neutral, she began to spend SOME money in the last years of the 1930s....but COULDN'T spend so much that her role as a Neutral in any potential conflict could be called into question

Then the war started...

 

Belgium continued making small, but really stupid mistakes right up to may 10th 1940....

First of all - she called up ALL her Reservists on September 1st 1939....and kept them in uniform! Not ONLY did the government have to pay soldeirs' (minimal) wages, they ALSO had to pay support subsidies to ALL the families whose wage-earner was now in a trench somewhere! So not only was the belgian exchequer hit by THIS cost....it meant 630,000 wage-earners were taken OUT of the economy! Industrial output plummeted and Belgium was teetering on the edge of bankrupcy!

The Belgian Government DID intend to raise a huge War Loan from the British and French....but of course, they couldn't do it YET, as Belgium wasn't at war with anyone yet! Instead, the financial drain on the government's funds went on and on....

Unlike Switzerland, who got as many of ITS Reservists out of uniform again as soon as they could after each Alert in 1939-40, the Belgians kept their menfolk in uniform....tho' they tried to put SOME labour back into the economy by giving soldiers first a day's leave a week, then two days' leave....Montefiore suggests that part of the weakness of Eben Emael was down to the fact that the garrison had been told the night before that the leave allowance was going up to THREE days a week, and there had been a lot of..."celebrating"....:p

But there were other, more military mistakes made....particularly on the KW-Line; tho' the Line halted mid-country, the line of Cointet fencing along water features continued south/south-east, roughly along the line that it was agreed in a hurry (and covertly at first) that if Belgium was attacked, the French would advance up to....with the BEF covering the "join" between the french and the end of the pillbox element of the KW-Line...

Except, the Belgians kept....fiddling....with the Cointet fence line during the Phoney War. Along the pillbox line, the pillboxes stopped them moving the fence, but to the south they were constantly dismantling, adjusting the line, then reassembling again, in an attempt to improve the rather thin defence! They did this a total of three times in all....and they succeeded only in doing TWO things...

1/ moving the fence so far back from the water features and planned flooding in front of it that it became useless, and

2/ when the French suddenly had to move up to the fence line on the 10th and 11th of May 1940 - they found huge swathes of it still dismantled!

Technically speaking - you really can't get MORE "unprepared" than a nation having its defences dismantled and laying in the grass! :p

 

"Supposing Belgium had been better prepared "
There is no doubt that Belgium was better prepared.

Churchill himself said
[FONT=&quot]Winston Churchill had, nevertheless, admitted in 1943 (!): …We went at war, unprepared and almost unarmed…”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Further, in his memoirs, he stated about the British Expeditionary Force: “…it was only a symbolic contribution...”[/FONT]

 

Thus a little nation of 8 million souls approved expenditures to raise an Army of twenty infantry divisions, and one Calvary corps and troops for the fortifications, in all 650,000 men. To form a strong army of 650,000, Belgium had to mobilize 8% of her entire population or 46 % of the men between the ages of twenty and forty years of age. It was a tremendous effort and strain. Can any historian doubt had the British or French made the same effort and flexed its muscle, would Hitler have reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936?

 

Belgium should be grateful ?
Belgium will always be grateful.

But, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me !

The Belgian territory has always been strategic to launching and invasion of France or Britain.
How convenient if the British or French rush to Belgian territory to check an potential invader.
Do they do this to come to the aid of the small nation at peril ? Or do they do this to keep the fighting from their own shores or homeland.
The Belgian people were fed up with her bullying neighbors fighting the issues on their soil.
Its really quite simple.
You live in your house and your neighbor behind you lives in their house. Another neighbor who lives in front of your house, dislikes your neighbor who lives behind you.
The neighbor in front of you had no where to go but go through your house to get to the neighbor behind you.
He forces his way through the front of your house, the neighbor behind you apparently comes to your aid and tries to hold the aggressor in check. All the while your house is the one being destroyed.
So I ask you, was the motivation really to save the house in the middle, or was the motivation to fight the invader on some else property all the while keeping destruction from occurring in your own house.
Lesson from WWI, do everything possible to prevent anyone from settling their issues on your property.
Yes the Belgians failed in this, but not without making a supreme effort to deter the Nazi's from invading.
As mentioned earlier in this string, had the British and French matched Belgium's preparedness even with all its
imperfections
things might have been different.
And why did Belgium with draw into armed neutrality ? Well when the Nazi's reentered the Rhine Land Britain and France did nothing.

The Belgian people said to themselves, well here we go again, the issue will be fought out on Belgian soil.
Owing to the small size of our country it would spell utter destruction for Belgium
Once the French failed to check the Nazi drive in the Sedan, it was over.
The Belgian army retreated in compliance with orders, until with its back to the sea, Our King Leopold III kept his promise to share the fate of his troops and prevent further loss of life to his people.
Even your King George V knew this and was prevented from speaking his mind on the matter, what was officially written and what he truly felt were two different things.
The British and French Guarantees by treaty to protect Belgium's neutrality was a mere hidden agenda to keep the fighting away from Britain and French soil.

 

It's really interesting to have a Belgian point of view on this period. It would be nice to hear a few French views as well. Reading a few French publications its obvious they do not view the BEF's actions as a 'heroic retreat against all odds '.

 

The Belgian territory has always been strategic to launching and invasion of France or Britain.

Hmm...how many invasions of Britain have been launched from Belgium?

Do they do this to come to the aid of the small nation at peril ?

Strangely enough - when Belgium withdrew from the Locarno pact and all her obligations under it to others for their shared defence....both Britain and France aid that they would continue to fulfil THEIR Locarno pact obligations to the defence of Belgium anyway! Leopold didn't exactly refuse...

Or do they do this to keep the fighting from their own shores or homeland.
The Belgian people were fed up with her bullying neighbors fighting the issues on their soil.
Its really quite simple.


Yes it is - but not in the way YOU mean. The Central Belgian Plain was for centuries the "direct route" into Northern France; even at the french border there's a distinct lack of useful terrain features to allow a defensive line to be built there, in ANY century's technology....to the plan was to proactively advance into central Belgium, link up with the Belgians and stop the Germans there, in terrain just as suitable to THEIR tanks as it was to the German panzers

Yes the Belgians failed in this, but not without making a supreme effort to deter the Nazi's from invading.

Belgium did nothing to "deter" the German invasion; quite the opposite. To be strong enough to deter was to make yourself, even as a Neutral....a potential threat. Hence an airforce short on bombers but with lots of "corps"/recce aircraft; no tanks etc., etc.

And why did Belgium with draw into armed neutrality ? Well when the Nazi's reentered the Rhine Land Britain and France did nothing.

Actually, as the supposed reason for Belgian neutrality this is complete bal.....derdash. Is that really what they teach in Belgian schools nowadays???

May I recommend the words of your own government of 1940 to you??? They even wrote a book on it detailling exactly what happened when and WHY - "Belgium: The Official Account of what happened 1939-1940" published in London for the Belgian Ministry of Foregin Affairs by Evan Bros. Limited, London in 1941.

 

A few years back, twelve years after he died, I at least cleared out some old school stuff of my dad's - he had been a primary school teacher (P5/6/7, it was a two teacher school!) and came across an original first edition of it in a box of assorted books!