Army Group B, under General von Bock, was to attack in the north, occupying Holland and northern Belgium.
Two German Army Groups were to be involved in the plan. The Germans expected the Allies to help them by advancing into Belgium at the start of their offensive, exposing more Allied troops to capture. The whole purpose of the German “sickle cut” strategy in 1940 was to cut the Allied armies in half by breaking through the French lines in the Ardennes and then dashing for the Somme estuary. The evacuation from Dunkirk was made possible by a combination of German mistakes and a brave decision made by Lord Gort, the commander of the BEF. At the end of 4 June enough of the BEF had escaped from the trap to enable Churchill to convince his cabinet colleagues to fight on, regardless of the fate of France. Instead the BEF was able to fight its way to Dunkirk, where between 27 May and 4 June a total of 338,226 Allied troops were rescued from Dunkirk and the beaches. All the Germans had to do to trap the BEF without any hope of escape was turn north and sweep along the almost undefended channel coast. After only ten days German tanks reached the Channel at Abbeville, splitting the Allied armies in two.
For over six months the two armies had faced each other across the Franco-German border, but on 10 May the German offensive in the west began, and that all changed. Even without Belgium and Holland the Allies outnumbered the Germans by almost two-to-one in artillery and by nearly 50% in tanks. If Belgium and Holland came into the war, then the combined Allied armies could field 144 divisions, three more than the Germans. Only eighteen days before the start of the evacuation the combined British and French armies had been seen as at least equal to the Germans. Operation Dynamo, the evacuation from Dunkirk of 27 May-4 June 1940, is one of the most celebrated military events in British history, and yet it was the direct result of one of the most crushing defeats suffered by the British army. Daily totals of men evacuated from Dunkirk.
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