BLITZKRIEG!

FOR MONTHS, British soldiers dug trenches, drank tea, trained and peered warily to the east, but nothing of note ever happened.

- By Phil Craig

The newsmen called it the "Phoney War", the "SitzKreig" and even "the Bore War". Then suddenly, on May 10, 1940, boredom was replaced with horror and shock, leaving the entire world astonished and heralding the resignation of Neville Chamberlain and the arrival of Winston Churchill as PM.

Germany's invasion of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France was one of the most dramatic and successful military operations of all time yet it was also a spectacular gamble. Compared to the French and British, Hitler's generals commanded fewer divisions (135 against 155), fewer tanks, fewer warplanes and about half the number of artillery guns.

France had the world's biggest army and had been preparing to defend its borders for many years. It had been joined by a smaller but highly professional British Expeditionary Force (BEF) supported by the world's most powerful navy.

So how did everything unravel in just six panic-stricken weeks? Primarily it was because the French had prepared brilliantly... to fight a different kind of war, a war of concrete, wire and artillery - the war of 1914-1918. They had spent millions of francs building a formidable series of defences called the Maginot Line along the Franco-German border. Newspapers were full of photographs highlighting its magnificent engineering and it was commonly believed to be impregnable.

And along with their static gun emplacements came a fixed, top-down military doctrine ideal for the attritional grind of the previous war.

Unfortunately this was not the war that the German military wanted to fight. Instead, Hitler's commanders had pioneered a new offensive style, something that today we'd call "combined arms warfare".

Infantry, armour and aircraft - linked by instant radio communication - would work together, striking and moving swiftly, isolating enemy strongpoints and hitting deep behind the lines to cut communication and supply chains, keeping their enemies off-balance.