ISBN 0-8090-8906-8
594 pages

Introduction; maps; Notes; Bibliography; Acknowledgments; Index

Appendices: Organizational diagrams; orders of battle; graphs of balance of forces; tank and aircraft specifications

   Sixty years and more after the event, it's nearly impossible to conceive of the shock waves of incredulity generated by the collapse of France in 1940. In trying to answer the question of how such an unexpected collapse could have occurred, commentators during the war and immediately thereafter usually pointed to four main factors contributing to the French defeat:

• Superiority of German forces
• Impact of "blitzkrieg" doctrine
• Failure of French leaders and doctrine
• "Moral decay" of the French nation

   Since then, historians have steadily attempted to make more sense of the events and their underlying causes. Recent scholarship has refined and in some cases refuted these original, rather simplistic notions, and thoughtful writers such as Anthony Adamthwaite, Martin S. Alexander, Robert Allan Doughty, and Eugenia C. Kiesling—among many others—have contributed a great deal to our understanding of the circumstances of the French collapse. In doing so, many new facts and theories have been published. The oft-maligned General Maurice Gamelin, for example, has been rehabilitated in Alexander's important Republic in Danger.
    By now, serious students of the campaign take differing views of many of the original "facts":

• The best German units were no better than the best French units, many French tanks were better than German tanks, and in sum Allied aircraft outnumbered the Luftwaffe
• Despite the catchiness of the term, "blitzkrieg" was still a doctrine not fully understood, not completely accepted, and not perfectly wielded by many German leaders
• French doctrine itself was not inherently bad, and most French leaders were highly competent
• "Moral decay" was mostly in the eye of the beholder

   Ernest R. May seconds some of the more recent conclusions about the campaign and develops many new ideas of his own in this excellent book which might well be the first to examine the battle—and everything that led up to it—in such great detail from both sides of the line. He shows a mastery of French, German, British, and Belgian sources as his narrative progresses in widening spirals while he examines events from one perspective, then circles back to see how another participant has arrived at the same point, then loops back again to examine another thread leading to the same event, before carrying the reader forward yet again. It's an effective, engaging technique, although May seems a bit of a tease sometimes, arriving as he does at some critical points which he barely describes before backtracking for dozens of pages, only to arrive at the same place again from another direction and renewing his inspection of the same event in much greater detail. May also writes in a visual, almost photographic style, painting the scenes and the men with picturesque descriptions of rooms and decor and faces and uniforms.
    He begins with a review of Hitler's gradual rise to utter ascendancy over the Wehrmacht and Foreign Ministry with his daring, winning gambles over the Rhineland, Austria, Munich, and the corpse of Czechoslovakia. He then backtracks to discuss Hitler's youth and Mein Kampf before segueing into the German hierarchy of command and its decision-making process and some interesting material on the Forschungsamt's interception and decryption service, and the "brown friends"—signals intelligence circulars—routed to German leaders. It's especially interesting to note the extent to which Hitler appears to have used and valued sigint insights (as opposed to, for example, Roosevelt; see Secret Messages by David Alvarez). In the process, May sketches the most important members of the Nazi regime.
    Having described the events that most influenced Hitler's way of thinking about his opponents, the author after the first hundred pages of the book turns his attention to the focus of the Fuehrer's thinking in 1939, French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, and describes the events, notably World War I, which shaped Daladier and French diplomacy and military planning in the inter-war years. Along the way he offers some commentary on the Maginot Line.

   The Maginot Line thus in itself did not commit France to a defensive strategy. On the contrary, the existence of the Line made it possible for France, despite its overall inferiority in numbers, to contemplate matching the Germans in a war of maneuver, for only so many troops on either side could mass within the area not covered by fixed defenses—that between the Ardennes massif and the Channel coast. Though some French politicians and even some military men advocated complete commitment to a defensive strategy with construction of fixed fortifications all along the Belgian frontier, what in fact happened was erection of a very thin defensive line combined with preparation for a war of movement, perhaps in northeastern France but preferably on the Belgian plain.
    The building of the Line may have encouraged a tendency among the French people to believe that France could be safe no matter what happened on the other side of the Rhine—a "Maginot Line mentality." But the illusion was never universal, nor did it last long. The remilitarization of the Rhineland occurred in March 1936. By that spring, when Daladier became war minister, few knowledgeable people in France believed that the Maginot Line did more than ensure that, if the Germans attacked, it would not be through Lorraine. And this was an accurate perception, for the Line always seemed to German military men to be almost impenetrable.

   From Daladier, the Maginot Line, and the complexities of French rearmament in the late 1930's, May moves on with his review of the West to cover Gamelin, showing how Daladier and the general worked closely together and "were both in the forefront of efforts to prepare France's ground forces for what would soon be called Blitzkrieg." While discussing the Deuxieme Bureau, May covers interesting sources of information about Germany such as a spy in the Forschungsamt, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, a brother of Erhard Milch, and others. The Army's monopoly on secret intelligence also comes into play—as it will later—during incidents such as the German remilitarization of the Rhineland and the Anschluss.
    All of this leads to Munich. From the political intrigues of Daladier, Paul Reynaud, Georges Bonnet, Alexis Leger, and Georges Mandel, the author rolls into a chapter about the high water mark of appeasement and a chapter on Neville Chamberlain which offers a fairly favorable assessment of his policies.
    Spurred on by Gamelin, Daladier had gradually increased France's defense budget. With Hitler's occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia, the word "peace" disappeared from Daladier's vocabulary and he imposed another large round of military spending and extended the length of service for reservists. And, by every measure, French public opinion swung in support of Daladier's policies of standing up to Germany, even at the cost of war. May dwells on this contradiction to the facile post-war assessment that France had "no stomach for war."

    Though important French political figures such as Flandin and Laval continued to argue for accommodating Germany, and though essentially pacifist constituencies still populated the Socialist Party and a number of labor unions, the French body politic had profoundly changed. In September 1938, prior to Godesberg, Daladier had reckoned that strong right-wing and left-wing groups might be prepared to take to the streets if the government called for war on behalf of Czechoslovakia. In March 1939, he had to reckon with the possibility that crowds would take to the streets if the government did not show itself willing to risk war to prevent Hitler from making some other state his victim.

    The mood had also changed in Britain, and May notes the unprecedented nature of the change.

    On the last day of March, Chamberlain rose in the House of Commons and issued an apparently unqualified guarantee that Britain would defend Poland if Poland were attacked by Germany. A government that a half-year earlier had resisted going to war for a faraway country with democratic institutions, well-armed military forces, and strong fortifications now promised with no apparent reservations to go to war for a dictatorship with less-than-modern armed forces and wide-open frontiers.

    By mid-April 1939, Daladier and Chamberlain had issued guarantees that would, before long, become guarantees of war.
    May reminds readers of two important facts, often obscured by other post-war writing. First, the French and British were truly convinced of their own military superiority over Germany, and, second, they did indeed, by most measures, have better units and equipment than the German Army.

   ...Germany by most quantitative measurements was not nearly so well prepared for a major war as were France and Britain. The Wehrmacht had many fewer vehicles and was much more reliant on horses. Halder estimated that each German infantry division needed forty-five hundred horses and two thousand horse-drawn vehicles. The German army was to commence war in September 1939 with almost six hundred thousand horses and, early in its Western offensive of May-June 1940, was to be suffering a severe shortage of them. German equipment was generally inferior. France's tanks were better gunned, better armored, and more reliable. (As many as half of Germany's basic tanks, the Panzer Is and Panzer IIs, broke down simply propelling themselves across the level plains of Poland. The Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs, of which they had very few, were the only tanks the Germans themselves thought a match for those of France or Britain.) In dogfights in the fall of 1939, German fighter planes did so badly against French fighters that the Luftwaffe was ordered to avoid one-on-one engagements. If Allied leaders had not believed France and Britain to be militarily at least a match for Germany, exasperation would not have sufficed to produce declarations of war in behalf of Poland.

    After more than 200 pages of background material leading up to the beginning of war, Strange Victory turns its attention to Germany's military preparations after the invasion of Poland for the attack on France, returning to its opening passages and the picturesque description of Hitler's conference calling for immediate action against the West.
   May jumps back into this part of the narrative with some odd (and unattributed) remarks about Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, and his dislike of tall men with small ears, as well as his insistence on frequent reports from his staff about the bowel movements of his dachshunds. This moves on to Canaris' opposition to Hitler and to the Army plot to prevent a "premature" offensive by "fundamental changes"; that is, a military coup. But the resolve of the senior officers melted in the face of Hitler's overwhelming personal authority. With the Army's passive acceptance, only the weather could delay the offensive, and it did. During the weather-induced delays, German plans fell into Allied hands at Mechelen. Meanwhile, Canaris' deputy, Oster, passed along to the Dutch each new invasion date as it was set.
   With the capture of German plans, May explains the evolution of German thinking from October of 1939—more or less a replay of the WWI Schlieffen Plan—to the "Manstein" Plan, the credit for which May gives largely to Hitler himself.
   While the invasion plan was evolving, German intelligence was reading and breaking almost 90 percent of French military radio traffic. The Wehrmacht also gained thorough knowledge of French and Belgian fortifications from spies and German contractors, and camera-equipped aircraft provided valuable photos of Allied positions along the frontiers. All signs indicated the British and French were unprepared for the attack. May quotes extensively from German intelligence documents about British, French, and Belgian armies, soldiers, and officers, and then describes German war games run by Halder to test the various plans of attack. One thing all the war games proved: the panzers must move quickly and steadily. Guderian's staff officers set about procuring amphetamines to keep the troops awake.
   At this juncture the scene shifts back to the French side of the border and May delves into French plans and capabilities. "In August 1939, General Gamelin had said that the French army was ready, but he had not said for what." Although Gamelin had promised offensive action to relieve Poland would commence almost as soon as war broke out, precious little was done. Of course, Gamelin expected Poland to resist for three or four months, taking the war into winter and allowing France until spring to complete its preparations. While some staff officers clamored for an offensive, Gamelin insisted "Not everything is in place." He sent a long memorandum to Daladier indicating that the only way to carry out a successful French attack was through Belgium, but this might have been mere misdirection, and, in any event, the Allies were not about to violate the neutral. Against "makeshift" German divisions, the French concentrations seemed huge. Daladier, Gamelin, and most other senior French leaders were confident of French superiority and ultimate victory. But they were in no hurry to attack.

   The point that needs to be underlined again is that French decision-makers acted as they did not because they thought French forces inferior to German forces or likely to lose if a grand battle unfolded. The optimism...was pervasive.... Notes written by Gamelin on September 5 show that he had a quite accurate estimate of German forces actually in the field.... He noted that, for the moment, France had an advantage of between three and four to one. He decided to launch only a token offensive almost certainly because he had no doubt that France was eventually going to be victorious and had no reason to hurry decisive battles that events might render unnecessary. Paradoxically and ironically, the French government may have foregone a chance to win, not lose, the war of 1939-1940 not because of lack of confidence but because of overconfidence.

   The author proceeds to explain in detail how the terrain, the forces, French intelligence, and the political situation all pushed Gamelin along the path for which he was already predisposed—to await a German move, then rush his best troops into Belgium to seize a forward defense line against the expected enemy spearheads. The military planning, such as the role of the BEF, is carefully described, along with some revealing flourishes, such as quoting a French officer: "Some would add with asperity that it is not advisable to put the British in a position where it is possible for them to evacuate by sea."
   May concisely summarizes the critical position of Belgium and examines the leading figures of that nation, then circles back, as he often does, to earlier material, adding detail about the evolution of the Allied military planning, looking again at the Mechelen incident (this time from the Allied perspective), and arriving at the role of King Leopold and the Belgians. The comedy of errors of the Allied response to Mechelen is retold nicely with interesting twists such as the revelation that the French had tapped the phone of the Belgian ambassador in Paris. While in retrospect all this might seem to highlight the unreality of Allied planning and expectations, May reminds readers that the facts as they existed at that particular moment were not unfavorable to the Allies.

   It is worth a pause to note, however, that, as of January 1940, if General Gamelin's presumptions had been probed and tested, they would have seemed rock-solid. Van Overstraeten and Belgian military planners were following his "suggestions." The German documents retrieved at Mechelen-sur-Meuse indicated quite precisely how German operations would have proceeded had Hitler not reluctantly canceled his order for an offensive to commence on January 17. There would have been a messy situation in the Netherlands, for the Dutch planned to make a stand fifty miles east of Breda, expected French forces to back them up, yet had not communicated this expectation to anyone in France, but elsewhere, Belgian, French, and British forces would have been in exactly the right positions to meet and check a German attack, especially given the aid they would have received from the weather.
   Unhappily for the Allies, the realities of January changed....

   From Belgium the scene shifts to Finland. More than almost anyone, Daladier perceived military support of the Finns as a means of solidifying political support at home, knocking Berlin's "ally" out of the arena, and causing German collapse by halting the transport of Swedish iron ore to the Reich. On this he staked much. May lucidly explains how the French premier misunderstood British commitments—or else London misled him—so that when the Russo-Finnish War ended without Allied intervention, the political result at home was Daladier's replacement by Paul Reynaud.
   Moving on to the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, May gives a perfunctory account of the action with an emphasis on the political fall-out, which paradoxically strengthened Reynaud while weakening Chamberlain. The story advances to Chamberlain's resignation at the time of the German offensive in France, then loops back to a variety of other political fronts earlier considered by the Allies—Finland, the Balkans, the Caucasus—during the Phony War, and how London and Paris failed to see how radically the situation was changing closer to home.

   The experience of France and Britain in the spring of 1940 is a classic case of intelligence surprise. In retrospect, one can see scores of pieces of information available to both governments that indicated what Germany was planning. The French and British governments simply failed to pay attention.... This is not to say that the French and British governments should have anticipated exactly what was to happen or when; there is nothing extraordinary in having failed to perceive that the Germans had shifted the main line of attack from the Low Countries to the Ardennes or turned its axis east to west instead of north to south. But the signals that this might be the case were abundant and distinct; it is simply astonishing that Allied leaders continued to discount such a contingency and made relatively few preparations for it.

   May devotes a very strong chapter to understanding the Allied intelligence failure, a failure all the more inexplicable given their sources in Germany as well as the earliest successes of what would become known as Ultra. However, the author makes it clear that the post-war memoirs by various French intelligence officers—who purportedly knew exact details of the German plan, and the date, and warned Gamelin but were ignored—are totally off the mark. In fact, as May demonstrates, the Allies possessed remarkably clear clues about German intentions, but the intelligence officers failed to find anything conclusive in the them, and in any event the Allied commanders had already made up their minds about how the battle would unfold.

   Intelligence on German deployments and intelligence targets did not establish unquestionably that the Germans intended to attack across Luxembourg, through the Ardennes, and thence west by north through Sedan and Charleville-Mezieres. But it seems almost incredible that General Gamelin and others in the Allied high command were not concerned that the Ardennes area—essentially the border of Belgian Luxembourg, running from Longwy at the northern terminus of the Maginot Line to Sedan, on the Meuse—had the thinnest coverage of any portion of the front.

   This is an important and complicated topic, and May gives an entire chapter to describing the reasons for the Allied intelligence failure, reasons he attributes to "individuals, organizations, doctrines, and culture." He follows this with one final chapter of preliminaries through the months of March, April, and May again as the Allies debate the wisdom of ventures in Scandinavia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, and endeavor to wangle an invitation from Belgium for their troops to occupy defensive positions there before the Germans invade. Along the way, the French pass up two more opportunities to alter their plans and dispositions in ways which would have put them in much more favorable positions for dealing with the schwerpunkt of Fall Gelb.
   Finally, 380 pages into his 460 pages of text, May brings his narrative back to 10 May 1940, a date already touched upon several times, for good. For the first time the author discusses the precise intentions for each Allied army in the Dyle-Breda Plan, inspects the composition of each army, and compares it to its German counterparts.
   In describing the opening moves of the campaign in considerable tactical detail, May emphasizes some important points about the thin margin between victory and defeat.

• The 2nd and 3rd DLMs of General Prioux badly mauled the 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions of General Hoepner at Hannut, and only because Prioux retired behind the main French line as ordered was the German position in Belgium not seriously disrupted.
• Rommel's critical crossing of the Meuse at the Houx sluice was costlier and less certain than generally recognized, and would not have taken much more on the French side to prevent it altogether.
• That Guderian was able to reach Sedan almost unhindered (and unmolested from the air while his tanks were nearly gridlocked on the narrow roads of the Ardennes) was considered a "miracle" by all involved, and his crossing of the Meuse—which utilized such concerted airpower, according to May, that "rarely afterward would there ever be such a comparably concentrated bombardment from the air"—nearly failed, and led to a series of seesaw engagements around the bridgehead on 14 and 15 May (while the spearheads were rushing westward) that nearly tipped the balance back in favor of the French.

   With the Germans across the Meuse and the strongest elements of the Allied armies having rushed headlong into exactly the wrong positions, May ceases his detailed explanation of maneuver and combat, and focuses on the more general aspects of the conclusion of the blitzkrieg campaign and the fall of France.
   The final chapter ticks off a lengthy list of important points about why it all came to pass as it did, offers a number of lessons that can be learned from the fall of France and applied to current intelligence assessment as well as political-military planning, reiterates that the French defeat was far from fore-ordained, and aptly sums up the premise of the book.

   France capitulated in 1940 because its armies were defeated in battle. Many writers on the fall of France do not accept this simple-seeming assertion, for they portray France's defeats on the battlefield as the last gasps of a nation already doomed. I think such an interpretation is wrong.

   Strange Victory is a big, ambitious book full of information and nuance, supported by reams of endnotes quoting memoirs and official documents, but written in a remarkably crisp and accessible style, picturesque and endlessly looping though it is. It's a first-class account of the fall of France, a distinguished addition to the literature of World War II, and one of the best new books of the year 2000. Highly recommended.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Hill and Wang (which is a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
   Thanks to Hill and Wang for providing this review copy.