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The Luftwaffe was effective, but its strength was as much in the terror it caused in the high command of the Allied powers, and in its use in support of paratroop attacks on key points. It helped, but on the few big battles in Belgium prior to Allied encirclement, it was hardly decisive. In those battles, the main German army was stopped cold.
The armored division was something that took everyone by surprise. The Allied powers were utterly ignorant of it, and the German command didn't think it would work as Guederin said it would. The key was it speed of movement behind the lines. Guederin crossed into France at a point where the Allies had believed terrain would prevent armored advance, and thus had defended lightly. Breaking the scattered defenders, the armored division was able to move very quickly in a Sickle Cut to completely cut off the main Allied army in Belgium. Neither side believed it was possible for an effective fighting force to move as quickly as Guderins panzers moved, and before any reaction was possible the Allied army in Belgium was surrounded. Cut off and unable to break out, they were forced to Dunkirk.
The Blitzkrieg legend was developed after the fact to explain this sudden victory. It was not a matter of fighting, though, so much as operational surprise. British and French tanks were better, and gave the Germans fits. Their troops fought hard. Had the Allied planners thought such an attack was at all conceivable, it would have been impossible.
Further, had the Allies pushed into Germany during the occupation of Poland, the war may well have ended right there, or been fought in large part on the banks of the Rhine.
Likewise, had Stalin not kept himself willfully blind to the imminent, and increasingly obvious German attack, the German advance to the gates of Moscow would never have happened.
That's another case where the memory of the last big war, and another Potemkin element, the Westwall (Siegfried Line) made the Allies stop in front of a ghost. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
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