Why did France and England not bomb the Germans when they crossed the Ardennes?

French airforce alerted the french defense ministry about a 250 km long traffic jams of tanks and infantry in the Ardennes but the generals said this can't be real and ignored it. The german fronts were squeezed into one narrow street for hours like the Persians in 300.
Could WW2 have ended right there if they had called french and uk air force and bombed them?

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Gamer hacks bro

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Superior German airpower in the early war.

but was the Luftwaffe even there?

I wish we had bombed

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Real answer: French high command was too invested in their theory that Germany would attack across the Belgian plains farther westward, as they did in WW1.
They refused to believe that reports from Luxembourg and the Ardennes were accurate, or of the scale of the German movement in the area. They did not really understand that the attack was at Sedan until the 14th, by which point Guderian’s XIX corps was across the River and the local French defenders were routed in panic.
Also the Luftwaffe was able to achieve local air superiority in the critical area for the critical timeframe.
Basically the Allies only had about 12 hours in which to react, and they didn’t.

>Why did France and England not bomb the Germans when they crossed the Ardennes?

That's not how gentlemen behave.

It worked so well they tried it again in 1944

A second missed opportunity occurred at the Meuse River crossings at Sedan on the 13th-14th.
2 panzer and GD divisions were only able to get one bridge across the river, and were under fire from the French forces overlooking the bridgehead. They were unable to move the majority of their vehicles across during this period.
Allied air forces launched a series of heavy attacks against the bridge, but miraculously they didn’t hit it.
If they had, the German attack would have been delayed by a significant amount of time as they had no more bridging equipment in the area.

You are a good boy.

so, somebody wanted the Germans to succeed at first and forced the hand of fate?

The Germans were extremely lucky, and the French were quite poorly prepared and their command structure was extremely rigid and unable to respond properly to changing battlefield circumstances.
However the Germans were also extremely well trained and highly motivated, and possessing of an extremely flexible command system which gave large leeway in decisions to junior commanders on the scene in order to exploit rapid developments.
It’s worth noting that these qualities which made the Germans so effective were severely reduced as the war in the east went on, and by 1943 no longer really applied.

Yes. While the treaty of versailles set many limitations on the military and associated education, Germany had a lot of its training grounds and manufacture moved to Russia and kept training and producing everything in secret over there. The Weimar Republic replaced the former regime but there were still very powerful, influential and organized factions left that kept on preparing for world war 2, hence the many coups, civil war and its consideration as a continuation of world war 1.

Good answers, you know your shit. The Wehrmacht also invested significant resources into mobile anti-aircraft batteries as they knew they could never realistically put as many planes on the battlefield as two of the world's superpowers, Britain and France, could. Some German accounts said that the Allied air attacks were very brave, but very futile. A lot of good men died in those air attacks from AA.

and they had Pervitin.

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You're talking about something unrelated to the battle of France in 1940

Implying they were incompetent is bullshit, there simply was a lack of interest to die for the North. France was split in two, with the south (Vichy) supporting the Nazis and many civilians of the Northern Government intentionally sabotaging and openly opposing its own regime. The rest is very well written, though

What? Vichy did not exist yet

No, it’s well documented that French command and doctrine was extremely flawed. They were entirely committed to a method of warfare based on grand battle doctrine which required extensive planning and pre positioning of assets and units in just the right manner to fit with their operational assumptions on how the war would unfold. Their supreme commander was an oaf who refused to listen to his subordinates who were starting to be concerned about the Ardennes sector on the 10th and 11th of may 1941. Additionally the entire French officer corps was generally poorly trained and inexperienced compared with the Germans. The French enlisted men in the Sedan/Meuse sector were mostly green, untrained and had been shuffled around the area and units repeatedly mixed up and reformed, so they had no feel for their defensive zone nor unit cohesion.
IIRC the it was French 55th ID began to route on the 13th after reports of German tanks coming across the River, abandoning over 100 artillery guns that were in positions to hammer the bridgehead.
So it’s true that the French were poorly motivated but this was not due to politics on the part of the average French soldier it was mostly due to the general feeling that the army was poorly led and the officers incompetent and were going to get the men killed. Defeatism if you will.
Isolated French units did fight extremely hard, and XIX corps ended up leaving the GD division on the southeast flank in order to forestall the French counter attack as 1&2 panzer pivoted westward on the 15th.

It didnt, but those that went on to rule Vichy France did. There was an internal conflict going on long before the nazis appeared and is the main reason Germany didn’t bother to take control of the south. France was on the verge to join a political union with Britain but pro-Vichy politicians hindered it with the backing of Roosevelt, who was sceptical of Free France.

Thank you for elaborating and details, the military aspect is certainly beyond my expertise

not at all, there was some political infighting but nothing to do with a "North-South" opposition. The main reason Germans did not want to directly control the South was to avoid the French fleet in the mediterannean going in the hands of the British