I cannot blame the Belgians for 1940. Belgium is a tiny country. It could not be expected to stand up to the might of Nazi Germany.
No, that role was the duty of the major Western powers: France, Britain and the United States. France failed because of a combination of atrocious strategy and moral fear of a replay of the devastation of World War I. Britain also failed in the field in 1940, but was saved by her “walls of water” and by German strategic blunders in the air war.
But the greatest failure was that of the Americans, who pretended that the fate of free Europe had nothing to do with America, that America could remain aloof and out of the picture and not be attacked. Of course this was always ridiculous, and when the Americans were finally attacked, they proved as militarily incompetent, initially, as the French and the British: an entire US Army surrendered in short order in the Philippines, and most of the US Navy was blown up at the pier, caught utterly unprepared at Pearl Harbor. America, too, was protected by her walls of water long enough to recover and get her production on-line. France had no walls of water, and had no room to recover from the surprise: Paris is only a bit over 100 miles from the border.
What SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED, had the French, British and Americans had any courage and intestinal fortitude, was that all three should have intervened when Hitler rearmed the Rhineland in violation of the World War I Armistice. But none had the courage. The US turned its eyes aside and Britain and France caved diplomatically for the Anschluss. Only with the invasion of Poland did Britain and France finally bestir themselves to the inevitable war, but even then the Americans played the coward and remained out of the war.
If America could not bestir herself to resist the Nazis in 1936, or 1937, or 1938, or 1939, or 1940, or even 1941, how could little Belgium be expected to do anything effective against them.
The behavior of all of the Western powers: Britain with Chamberlain, France with Maginot, and the US with cowardly ostrich-hood, were all equally contemptible. Hoping that little Belgium could hold any line when the three great Western powers were cowering, wetting their pants, or pretending that the conquest of the world by evil was not their concern, was as foolish as the American, British and French strategy of the period.
What sticks in my craw is that Americans think that French performance in 1940 is to be crowed from the rooftops as an example of French weakness, while forgetting that the AMERICAN performance in 1940 was a display of even worse moral cowardice. PRETENDING that Hitler was of no concern to America - and that’s all it was, pretence - was not simply an “error” by the Americans, it was moral cowardice of the rankest sort. France lost in 1940, but she FOUGHT. America cowered in her cave and hoped the crocodile would eat her last. She finally got hers at Pearl Harbor and Bataan, but it would have been better had all three Western Powers stood up like men and FACED the threat before it became a calamity.