Why Btonze Age?

[Anomalocaris]

German veterans went on record calling it the biggest traffic jam in history.

The German success was not so much a German victory but a French failure. Since this was yet another instance where the troops were extremely vulnerable to airstrikes that didn't happen.

Bottom line is that they did it. The forests were permeable.

Militaries that do not enjoy overwhelming numerical superiority always have to gamble and thin out forces where the enemy is judged less likely to successfully attack, in order to provide adequate margins of superiority at the critical sector of the front where a decision is judged likely to be obtained.

An army that defends everything defends nothing.  So the fact that the French gambled that Germans can't successfully attack through the Ardennes was unfortunate, but that they lost the gamble is not in itself indictment of the fundamental quality of the french army.

The German army made many such gambles on the eastern front, and were more often wrong than right.

On both occasions when getting this right was critical to the entire outcome of the war in the east, the Germans gambled wrong, and left large, critical important sectors poorly defended against powerful Soviet penetrating attacks, and suffered calamitous defeats and losses of men, material and strategic position as a result.  The second time was definitely a larger defeat than the French suffered in terms of territory, men, equipment, and initiative. Only the fact that distance was so much greater on the eastern front than between Belgium and Paris saved Germany from being taken out by one single strategic thrust through an poorly defended sector during late summer 1944.

But No one seem to argue that the German army was therefore an incompetent force.