Mopping up

The Dutch troops in the south of their country continued to hold out, and the SS-VT Division was sent to mop up all resistance on Walcheren Island. The Deutschland Regiment led the attacks through flooded polders and minefields, before capturing the 3.2km (2-mile) causeway to the island with the help of air strikes.

The SS units move south

By 18 May, resistance in Holland was over and the German High Command ordered the SS units to swing south to help in the decisive battles in northern France. As the attack on Holland was getting under way, XIX Panzer Corps under Lieutenant-General Heinz Guderian had made its push through the Ardennes in southern Belgium and Luxembourg. His troops met negligible resistance in the poorly defended sector around Sedan, which the Belgian High Command thought was impassable to tanks. The French and British had fallen for the German deception plan: as soon as the fighting broke out in Holland they began moving their best troops northwards to help the Dutch and Belgians. The culmination of these two developments was that the cream of the British and French armies was in danger of being encircled in northern France and Belgium by the German tank thrust that was now heading at breakneck speed for the English Channel. Late in the evening on 20 May, Guderian's panzers captured Abbeville at the mouth of the River Somme, which was only a few miles from the Channel coast. Some 250,000 British and even more French soldiers were now cut off from their main supply bases in central France. The German High Command was determined to exploit its success, and every available panzer and motorized unit was dispatched to help Guderian's tanks crews.

The Totenkopf is ordered forward

Three days earlier, Eicke's Totenkopf Division had received orders to move forward from its barracks in the Rhineland to support the panzer advance. Once it crossed the Meuse in southern Belgium, it joined up with Colonel-General Hermann Hoth's XV Panzer Corps that formed the northern wing of the advance to the Channel. This was spearheaded by a former adjutant of Hitler - the as yet unknown Major-General Erwin Rommel. His 7th Panzer Division was almost a day behind Guderian's spearhead, and on 21 May was only just approaching the town of Arras. The Totenkopf's columns of motorized infantry were following up closely behind Rommel's tanks.

The British and French High Commands had already spotted the danger to their forces, and they prepared a plan to launch simultaneous armoured counterattacks from north and south to open a corridor and re-unite their shattered front. This would turn the table on the Germans and cut off their spearheads. It proved impossible to coordinate the attacks, though, and the French forces from the south never materialized. The British managed to attack using a scratch force built around a tank brigade and the French sent some light mechanized troops to help. The strike force was pitifully small: only 16 Matilda Mark IIs with two-pounder guns and 58 machine-gun-armed Matilda Mark Is, backed by two battalions of British infantry.

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