Belgian Army - History - World War II
Belgium, in an effort to provide for its political and economic security, entered into a number of international pacts and associations: it became part of the French alliance system under a Franco-Belgian military agreement in 1922, was one of the first signatories of the League of Nations, and, in 1925, signed the Locarno Treaty with France and Germany to guarantee their borders. On the economic front, Belgium established the Belgian-Luxembourg Economic Union in 1922, and participated in the Treaty of Oslo in 1930, which established preferential customs arrangements among the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
A "bolt from the blue," an attaque brusquee was an abrupt attack in peacetime not by a nation's mobilized army but by its standing actives, whether air or ground forces. Their aim was to disable the enemy's command center before mobilization could take place. From the late 1920s, it was feared that the rebuilt Reichsheer of the Weimar Republic could carry out such a coup, against France or Belgium. This threat led the potential victims to provide their own permanent peacetime covering forces, the couverture, even as they also prepared for a full war.
French and Belgian defense policy aimed to protect their countries' industrial and population centers. They and the British hoped to repulse an attaque brusquee and to achieve a war of position, the kind of war they could reasonably hope to win. It was expected that another war would proceed through three fairly well defined stages: an initial attack and its defeat; a prolonged period of stalemate behind which the democracies built up their resources; and, then, a carefully prepared offensive that would topple the overstretched Germans, whose economy could not sustain military spending at the initial rate. This was how the western Allies envisaged campaign termination.
Blitzkrieg, unlike the attaque brusquee, employed an ultimate weapon-the mobilized German army spearheaded by armor and ground support aircraft. The blitzkrieg was designed to avoid a war of attrition, and so its methods aimed to cancel the defender's distinct advantages in modem warfare. Attacking on one or two critical axes, a blitzkrieg sought to destroy the enemy army by maneuvering with a degree of speed and audacity that would paralyze the enemy's command elements and render all counterattacks futile. The blitzkrieg allowed the attacker to determine the battle's pace, location, and participants.
As in France, the general public in Belgium was unwilling to maintain a large standing army during peacetime, so, to economize on the numbers of soldiers necessary, fortifications were resorted to. The defensive plans worked out with the French (1920-1936) made Belgium part of a French continuous front but at the cost of committing the Belgian army to defend long and exposed positions close to the German and Dutch frontiers through which a German attack might come. This was a school of thought termed "integral defense."
During the late 1930s, the Belgian army gradually moved toward defensive plans that entailed, at considerable domestic political risk, abandoning two-thirds of the country to a German invader to save the army to fight on a defensible position that covered major industrialpopulation centers and saved the army from encirclement at the outset of a campaign. This current of thought, known as "defense-in-depth," went hand-in-hand with the neutral foreign policy pursued after 1936. Both were to be "exclusively and entirely Belgian." So factious, however, were its domestic politics that only neutrality achieved a consensus in favor of rearmament.
The Belgian army mobilized exactly according to plan, having prudently begun in August 1939. Its eight active divisions, the two divisions of Chasseurs Ardennais, and the first eight reserve divisions were at their stations by the outbreak of war. Not until early November did the second reserve of eight divisions follow.
The Belgian army had 48 obsolete light tanks and little motorized transport, and its reserve divisions were badly demoralized after a winter spent mobilized in the expectation of attacks that never came. Soldiers' frustrations were heightened by the release of comrades whose work was judged in the national interest.
The Mechelen (Malines to francophones) incident is well known. On 10 January 1940 German staff officer with a full set of German plans for the invasion scheduled for a week later crashlanded in Belgium, and the Belgians recovered the plans almost intact. The Belgians did not doubt the plans' authenticity, but they provided only a precis for the Allies, whose intelligence services did not think them authentic, since there were no other signs of an impending offensive. Believing an attack imminent, the Belgians appear to have offered the Allies entry in exchange for political reassurances. The British refused these.
German troops invaded Belgium on May 10, 1940, and quickly defeated the Belgian opposition. The Belgian forces surrendered after 18 days, but some of the armed forces escaped to Britain and continued to fight with British and Allied forces.
After the Allies jumped into Normandy and later liberated Belgium, the Belgian government called for volunteers. DAca,!a,,cHaese said 53,000 men answered that call and joined the newly-formed Belgian Army.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
