what if the lowlands not neutral?

Allies in their pre-war planning did not expect the germans to attack the Netherlands. they had developed two plans with regard to Belgium, Plan E , which was an advance to the Escaut and the more ambitious Plan d, onto which they grafted the socalled 'breda variant" in which girauds mobile 7th army would advance to assist the dutch.

All of the French plans fell apart because of Belgiums and Dutch neutrality, and because they grossly under-estimated the speed of the Germans attacks. Had they been able to advance before the fighting got under way, the French could have entrenched within the ardenne 9where they would be protected better from armour and air attack, linked up with the defenders at liege, Namur and other points along the frontier and assisted the dutch in the defence of their country. The Dutch if they joined the allies early would almost certainly have flooded their canals and dykes well in advance of a german attack.

The French have often been criticized for their essentially defensive approaches, but this is a massive piece of misinformation. in fact the French hope to fight a decisive battle on their terms al la Foch style in april 1918. They kinda soughta were doing thet at gembloux and Hannut before being defeated and outflanked further south. The French could win a set piece battle against the germans, and a prewar entry by the Belgians and the Dutch would have assisted in that .

The attached article might be of assistance and interest in this matter

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2006/R3281.pdf

That Mr Hitler offered German troops to take Gibraltar.
Also the Canaries would have been a base.

The problem for Germany was that even if a neutral country didn't resist to any great extent it took manpower it didn't have just to provide a garrison. Despite taking control of most of Western Europe it had to spend huge resources trying to get and keep control of it. Places like North Africa, Greece Malta Crete even the Channel Islands required men to take or keep hold of.

Marcel said:

The Dutch believed naively that water would be their strong defense. Large area in front of the Grebbe line and the New Water line could be flooded, which they thought would stop an enemy from entering Holland, which is the western part of the Netherlands. They were convinced that"tanks would still into the soft, wet soil". Very naive of course as they did not include modern weapons in t thinking, like aircraft.

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Maybe they were fighting the last war not the next, I remember reading about a British force long ago dying of disease trapped behind flooded fields in the Netherlands. As I understand it to defeat the Blitzkrieg one thing you need is space, the Kursk salient was about 210 m across and Russian defensive lines behind it were even bigger.

pbehn said:

Maybe they were fighting the last war not the next, I remember reading about a British force long ago dying of disease trapped behind flooded fields in the Netherlands. As I understand it to defeat the Blitzkrieg one thing you need is space, the Kursk salient was about 210 m across and Russian defensive lines behind it were even bigger.

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Not even the last one, but the one before that. Last war that the Dutch were involved in was the Belgian campaign in 1830. But remember, the Blitz krieg was not totally accepted in 1940, it was a surprise to most of the countries.

Marcel said:

Not even the last one, but the one before that. Last war that the Dutch were involved in was the Belgian campaign in 1830. But remember, the Blitz krieg was not totally accepted in 1940, it was a surprise to most of the countries.

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It was a surprise to the British which is also a surprise because it is much like what they did in WW1 and were planning to do themselves.

Yes and No the the Surprise.

Many countries were trying to figure out how to bring mobility back the battlefield after the siege warfare conditions of WW I. So that is not a surprise. Using armor to punch holes in a line and then penetrate and attack rear areas was a pretty standard goal. The Surprise was how far and fast the Germans were prepared to penetrate and how well coordinated they were.
If you are going to penetrate more than 5-10 miles you need to bring your artillery with you. You need artillery that can be set up fast, this is as much or more training than features of the artillery pieces and tow vehicles (although horses are not going to keep up with tanks). The artillery has to be able to pick out firing sites, survey them (accurate placement on map) and set up the communications network before they can fire the first shot. German tactical air helped but usually gets too much credit.
Other armies may have talked about penetrating and shooting up rear areas (cavalry had been doing that for centuries) but if the intermediate goals include stopping and consolidating every few miles of advance and you don't have a good communications network, messengers, carrier pigeons and signal flags won't work then the advance stalls out fairly quickly regardless of what kind of gun your tank has or how fast it can drive down a road.

The British may have talked a good game about "fleets" of tanks swanning about the battlefield but without HE and smoke support (let alone infantry) while it may have looked good on the Salisbury Plain in demonstrations, it failed in the close countryside of Northern France.

Shortround6 said:

Yes and No the the Surprise.

Many countries were trying to figure out how to bring mobility back the battlefield after the siege warfare conditions of WW I. So that is not a surprise. Using armor to punch holes in a line and then penetrate and attack rear areas was a pretty standard goal. The Surprise was how far and fast the Germans were prepared to penetrate and how well coordinated they were.
If you are going to penetrate more than 5-10 miles you need to bring your artillery with you. You need artillery that can be set up fast, this is a much or more training that features of the artillery pieces and tow vehicles (although horses are not going to keep up with tanks). The artillery has to be able to pick out firing sites, survey them (accurate placement on map) and set up the communications network before they can fire the first shot. German tactical air helped but usually gets too much credit.
Other armies may have talked about penetrating and shooting up rear areas (cavalry had been doing that for centuries) but if the intermediate goals include stopping and consolidating every few miles of advance and you don't have a good communications network, messengers, carrier pigeons and signal flags won't work then the advance stalls out fairly quickly regardless of what kind of gun your tank has or how fast it can drive down a road.

The British may have talked a good game about "fleets" of tanks swanning about the battlefield but without HE and smoke support (let alone infantry) while it may have looked good on the Salisbury Plain in demonstrations, it failed in the close countryside of Northern France.

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Great post SR, no army is ever as good as its promo videos but while the army were using messengers and semaphore the air force of the same had constructed a network covering the whole of Great Britain where every combatant was a trained pilot with a radio and an aeroplane. While on the ground there was a nationwide network of RADAR operators and ROC observers. The army had no excuse in either attack or defence.

The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark were basically screwed regardless of what they did: they were too small to support armed forces capable of resisting either Germany or France, even collectively. Belgium had -- and has -- some pretty severe internal divisions, and a formal military alliance with France or Germany could tear the country apart.

swampyankee said:

The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark were basically screwed regardless of what they did: they were too small to support armed forces capable of resisting either Germany or France, even collectively. Belgium had -- and has -- some pretty severe internal divisions, and a formal military alliance with France or Germany could tear the country apart.

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I agree, if all of low countries or Benelux as they now are were a single entity with present day France at the time, the sensible course would be to remove civilians and turn the whole are into a militarized collapsing defensive zone, however that is only acceptable when war is declared or completely certain.

swampyankee said:

The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark were basically screwed regardless of what they did: they were too small to support armed forces capable of resisting either Germany or France, even collectively. Belgium had -- and has -- some pretty severe internal divisions, and a formal military alliance with France or Germany could tear the country apart.

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You could say that about a lot of small countries, like Finland and Switzerland, both of which were at different times in the firing line of nations much bigger and stronger than they. Sweden too came close to being overwhelmed by Germany, and at one stage even Britain and France were on the verge of overt aggression to the Swedes.

It is in the nature of small nations that they would be highly subject to the whims of their larger neighbours, but only a few leaders took the view that small nations had to bow to the bidding of their larger neighbours. Hitler was one of them. He believed it Germany's right to bully and cajole any smaller neighbour, that might was right and the rule of law counted for nothing.

The democracies had power to exercise similar disdain to the wishes of the neutrals but like most nations, were far more observant of the rules of law, respect of the wishes of the neutrals even to the point where it affected their own chances of survival

In the case of the Netherlands, she had pursued a policy of neutrality since 1830 which had been respected during WWI. She expected the same would happen for WWII. Very nearly this was the case, but at the last minute the Germans decided to include the conquest of Holland as part of fall gelb

Belgium had entered into a mutual defence arrangement with France in 1920, and despite having been virtually overrun in WWI, had continued to fight alongside the allies for an extended period. That the Belgians were permitted to abandon that treaty in 1936 by their own free will, disproves in spades the theory you are suggesting that small nations were the plaything of larger nations at every juncture.

Successful pursuit of true neutrality is difficult and requires the expenditure of more resources on defence, not less, This was the undoing of the interwar neutrals. They put too much faith in the League of Nations and not enough dollars into defence. Both Belgium and Holland had, in their own right, the potential economically to have major impact on military operations. History shows us that the Belgians fielded more than 20 divisions for the campaign, the dutch the equivalent of 13. Collectively, with about 35 divs available, had those formations been adequately trained and equipped, they could have mounted a very effective defence. As it was, strung out too thinly, not mobile enough and lacking adequate AA and AT defences, with unmodernised fortifications and manpower not well trained enough in the modern application of warfarer, they were torn apart fairly easily. This did not have to be the case, but their leaders neeed to spend more on defence in order to achieve that outcome.

1n 1939 Belgium forbade British and French troops to cross the boarder or enter Belgium territory. If they had been our Ally and allowed this to happen then the Germans would not have had the time to build up sufficient numbers for the Invasion Of France. RAF vases could have been further forward and the whole structure of the was could have been different... as it the 3 months Belgium held the Allies, let the Germans gain the time they needed

The Dutch army was actually far more successful than people think, and was anticipated by the Germans. The Germans expected to take the Netherlands in one or two days, but it took them four days, and only after Rotterdam was bombed the Netherlands surrendered. The Dutch destroyed far over 300 German aircraft, among them over 200 German Ju52 transport aircraft (about about a third of their transport fleet). The German paratroopers that landed near The Hague to capture the government and the queen, were effectively beaten. Don't forget that the Dutch hadn't been in a war since Napoleon.