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Catastrophe: History’s Most Disastrous Defeats

Khalid Elhassan January 15, 2025 17 min

Catastrophe - Napoleon retreats from Moscow — Napoleon retreats from Moscow. ABC

12. Catching the French Flat Footed

Catastrophe - German troops march past the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 1940 — German troops march past the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 1940. Bundesarchiv Bild

The Germans attacked and burst through the Ardennes, then raced to the English Channel to sever France’s armies in the north from the rest of the country. The French were caught wrong footed: their mobile forces were advancing into Belgium, and couldn’t be turned around in time to stop the Germans pouring out of the Ardennes. Worse, they lacked adequate reserves to plug the widening gap. Collapse quickly followed, and the same country that two decades earlier had fought the Germans for four bloody years and emerged victorious in WWI, capitulated and signed a humiliating surrender after just 40 days’ fighting in WWII.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.