Rommel Reported He'd Been Attacked by Five Divisions. It Was 74 British Tanks.

On 21 May 1940, near Arras, around 74 British tanks drove straight into the flank of Erwin Rommel's 7th Panzer Division. Rommel reported he had been attacked by hundreds of tanks, even five divisions. The truth was a scratch British force armed mostly with machine guns, riding tanks the German anti-tank guns simply could not kill. This is the full story of the Arras counterattack of 1940, codenamed Frankforce. Lord Gort threw together 58 Matilda I and 16 Matilda II infantry tanks and two battalions of the Durham Light Infantry and sent them into the side of the most feared army in the world during the Fall of France. The German 37mm anti-tank gun, nicknamed the "door knocker," bounced off the Matilda's 78mm armour again and again. One British tank took fourteen direct hits and drove on. Only when Rommel personally formed a gun line of 88mm anti-aircraft guns and 105mm field guns, running from gun to gun under fire, was the attack finally halted. We unpack the British infantry-tank doctrine of slow, thickly armoured machines built to escort infantry, the panic this scratch force caused in Rommel's 7th Panzer and the SS Totenkopf Division, and the connection many people get wrong. Arras fed German anxiety about their exposed armoured corridor, fed into the Halt Order of 24 May, and helped buy the time that made the Dunkirk evacuation possible. We also keep the historians honest. The attack itself was repulsed, France was not saved, and the exact weight of Arras in the Halt Order is still argued over to this day. Welcome to British Command, the channel that corrects the record on the British and Commonwealth high command of the Second World War. No myth-making, no flag-waving, just rigorous, sourced military history with a verdict at the end. If that is your kind of history, subscribe and stay for the next one. WHAT THIS VIDEO COVERS The strategic trap of May 1940 and the German sickle cut to the Channel Why the British Expeditionary Force was almost encircled The infantry tank versus cruiser tank doctrine, explained simply The Matilda I and Matilda II, their armour, armament and that 78mm plate The 37mm door knocker and why it failed against the Matilda Frankforce, Lord Gort and Major General Harold Franklyn's improvised attack Rommel's 7th Panzer Division, the Ghost Division, caught on an open flank The panic of the elite SS Totenkopf Division Rommel's 88mm gun line and how the British advance was stopped What Rommel actually reported, hundreds of tanks and five divisions The Halt Order of 24 May and the road to Dunkirk An honest reckoning of what Arras did, and did not, achieve MAJOR RESEARCH SOURCES L.F. Ellis, The War in France and Flanders 1939 to 1940, British official history, 1953 Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend, The 1940 Campaign in the West, 2005 B.H. Liddell Hart, editor, The Rommel Papers, 1953 Julian Jackson, The Fall of France, The Nazi Invasion of 1940, 2003 Brian Bond, France and Belgium 1939 to 1940, 1975 FURTHER READING Ernest R. May, Strange Victory, Hitler's Conquest of France, 2000 David Fraser, Knight's Cross, A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, 1993 Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, 1952 If your father or grandfather served with the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1940, in the Durham Light Infantry, the Royal Tank Regiment, or any unit that fought its way back to Dunkirk, share their story in the comments. Those accounts matter, and they are getting harder to find every year. #WW2 #Rommel #BattleofArras #Dunkirk #TankWarfare