Battle of Abbeville 1940
Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.
Key facts
| Date | 4 June 1940 | Wikidata |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 1940 | Wikidata P585 (point in time) |
| Era | World War II era (1939–1945) | derived from year |
| Location | France | Natural Earth (modern borders) |
| Continent | Europe | Natural Earth |
| War / conflict | World War II | Wikidata P361 |
| Participants | United Kingdom | Wikidata P710 |
| Coordinates | 50.1058, 1.8358 | Wikidata P625 |
About the battle
The Battle of Abbeville took place from 27 May to 4 June 1940, near Abbeville during the Battle of France in the Second World War. On 20 May, the 2nd Panzer Division advanced 56 mi (90 km) to Abbeville on the English Channel, overran the 25th Infantry Brigade of the 50th (Northumbrian) Infantry Division and captured the town at 8:30 p.m. Only a few British survivors managed to retreat to the south bank of the Somme and at 2:00 a.m. on 21 May, the III Battalion, Rifle Regiment 2 reached the coast, west of Noyelles-sur-Mer.
The 1st Armoured Division (Major-General Roger Evans) arrived in France from 15 May without artillery, short of an armoured regiment and the infantry of the 1st Support Group, that had been diverted to Calais. From 27 May to 4 June, attacks by the Franco-British force south of the Abbeville bridgehead, held by the 2nd Panzer Division, then the 57th Infantry Division, recaptured about half of the area. The Allied forces lost many of their tanks and the Germans much of their infantry, some units running away over the River Somme bridge. On 5 June, the divisions of the German 4th Army attacked out of the bridgeheads south of the Somme and pushed back the French and British, depleted by their counter-attacks, to the Bresle with many casualties.
In 1953, the British official historian, Lionel Ellis, wrote that the Allies lacked battlefield co-ordination, which contributed to the Allied failure to defeat the Germans and magnified the cost of…
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Battle of Abbeville (revision 1370998159), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; shortened by selecting paragraphs and trimming at a sentence boundary; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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