ABSTRACT
The Battle of Gembloux was fought on the French side by the First Army under General Georges Blanchard, itself a part of General Gaston Billotte's First Army Group. The Moroccan Division began its move some eighty kilometers from Gembloux on 10 May. The fate of the mechanized attack on 14 and 15 May demonstrated the weaknesses of the "Blitzkrieg" tactical system, weaknesses which French doctrine intended to exploit to gain a "first and serious advantage and an indisputable moral ascendancy." The doctrine of the Wehrmacht of May 1940, often labeled as "Blitzkrieg" or the "tank-plane team," was not in fact so simple. French doctrine likewise sprang from its grand strategy: a status-quo power with half the population and a third of the industry of Germany, France had paid proportionally an even more terrible blood price than Germany in the First World War.
