France '40 Gold Team Game

[ComradeP]

That sounds reasonable.

The player controlling the Dutch Army could take control of the French Seventh Army, as parts of it moved into the Netherlands and it would add to the "intended" command confusion of French units near the Dunkerque coastline are not controlled by the player controlling the BEF or the Belgian Army.

As a Dutchman, one of the mysteries of the battle is why the Dutch command sent no less than 5 divisions of the field army, both corps behind the Grebbe and Peel positions and the Lichte Divisie to mostly walk around the countryside for a few days, having only a limited impact on the Fallschirmjaeger and none on the troops coming in from the East. Many infantrymen didn't see a single German soldier before the surrender, the men in North and South Holland thinking they were actually winning the war as they penned in and encircled the Fallschirmjaeger that didn't land south of Rotterdam.

The deployment of the army was a compromise between defending forward and defending Fortress Holland. The Fallschirmjaeger and air landing assault was poorly planned and poorly executed, it was a disaster worse than Crete in some ways as on Crete the Fallschirmjaeger and air-landed Gebirgsjaeger managed to save themselves. The Dutch response was fatal to their own defensive effort, however.

For reasons that make very little sense to me, and probably never will make sense, the high command decided to switch variants after the German invasion, thus making both the Grebbe line ánd the Peel-Raam position untenable. All those trenches that you can see next to the Peel-Raam position were meant for III Army Corps in the forward deployment variant. The Dutch army still used modified WWI trench tactics, not the zone defence used by more modern forces. This meant that manpower per meter was decent, but that there were no reserves (Dutch divisions were already small and this exacerbated the problem) and the echeloned trench positions were not mutually supporting. The accounts of men holding out in bunkers (which were thought of as being able to stop the invasion, just like the misplaced belief in the Maginot Line and Belgian forts) until everyone was dead or wounded because "the rest of our men will be here soon" are truly saddening. As the Germans were breaking through the Grebbe Line, reserves had to be brought in from elsewhere to counter-attack as the substantial forces manning the rest of the line doctrinally couldn't leave their positions. The Grebbe scenario models this well.

For the French players, perhaps the player controlling Second Group of Armies could control the reinforcements arriving later, to complicate counter-attacks against the German spearhead as attacks from forces outside the pocket inwards and forces inside the pocket outwards were poorly coordinated.