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That's the Explorers Podcast. Hello, everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War, episode 182, the fall of

France, the invasion of the Netherlands. One of the challenges when covering major campaigns on a podcast is how to organize events.

I've always thought that jumping around too much geographically can be very confusing,

but that means that we'll have to bounce around through the first five days of the German

invasion over the following handful of episodes.

This is because on the morning of May 10th, German operations would begin against the Netherlands,

Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.

We're going to discuss them in roughly that order, focusing primarily on the days between

May 10th and May 15th for each geographic area and term.

The reason I think that this time frame makes the most sense is due to the fact that by the 15th,

the events in the Netherlands in Belgium had largely been decided, although the fighting was not yet complete.

In France, the German forces was crossed the muse on the 13th, and by the 15th, it was clear that the attacks in the South were a major point of effort

for the German army, which shifted the complexion of the entire campaign as the French

tried to find a way to stop the German advance.

But there will be plenty of time to talk about the French later.

Today we start with the Dutch.

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