Strange Victory Hitler Conquest of France eBook Ernest R May
Download As PDF : Strange Victory Hitler Conquest of France eBook Ernest R May 
A dramatic narrative-and reinterpretation-of Germany's six-week campaign that swept the Wehrmacht to Paris in spring 1940.
Before the Nazis killed him for his work in the French Resistance, the great historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous short book, Strange Defeat, about the treatment of his nation at the hands of an enemy the French had believed they could easily dispose of. In Strange Victory, the distinguished American historian Ernest R. May asks the opposite question How was it that Hitler and his generals managed this swift conquest, considering that France and its allies were superior in every measurable dimension and considering the Germans' own skepticism about their chances?
Strange Victory is a riveting narrative of those six crucial weeks in the spring of 1940, weaving together the decisions made by the high commands with the welter of confused responses from exhausted and ill-informed, or ill-advised, officers in the field. Why did Hitler want to turn against France at just this moment, and why were his poor judgment and inadequate intelligence about the Allies nonetheless correct? Why didn't France take the offensive when it might have led to victory? What explains France's failure to detect and respond to Germany's attack plan? It is May's contention that in the future, nations might suffer strange defeats of their own if they do not learn from their predecessors' mistakes in judgment.
Strange Victory Hitler Conquest of France eBook Ernest R May
This book demonstrates how careful study of an historic episode within a policy perspective can put to rest many widely accepted interpretations of Nazi Germany’s surprise victory over France in the first phases of the Second World War, while drawing important lessons on improving critical choices by political leaders.To illustrate my point, here is a short quote from the concluding chapter: “at any time or place, executive judgment involves answering three sets of questions: “what is going on?”; “so what?” (or “what difference does it make?”); and “what is to be done?” the better the process of executive judgment, the more it involves asking the questions again and again, not in set order, and testing the results until one finds a satisfactory answer to the third question—what to do (which may be, of course, to do nothing) (Kindle location 8688).
Let me emphasize, this is not a postulate of the type of “ten rules for becoming a genius decision makers” as favored by writers of popular books on leadership aiming at the many ignoramus readers. One has to read the book as a whole in order to appreciate the validity of this summing up and its validity conditions.
Therefore, this book should be obligatory reading for all policy, intelligence and national security scholars and professionals. I know I cannot expect political leaders to read the book as a whole. But not pondering at least the concluding chapter is a grave dereliction of their duty.
Professor Yehezkel Dror
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Strange Victory Hitler Conquest of France eBook Ernest R May Reviews
This was all new to me, very interesting but so much information to absorb. I had read many times before that Churchill and others had foreseen that Hitler should have been confronted and stopped much earlier and a large World War could have been prevented. One point that May touches upon and which I feel is equally important for the allies early failures is the popularity of Hitler and his racist views not only among the German population but among the population of the countries he conquered, France included.
Quite good and very detailed description of the runup to the military campaign that resulted in the defeat of France in 1940. If anything, there's too much detail but that's why it's 600 pages plus. Interesting how chancy the whole operation in the Ardennes was for the Germans and how the whole thing could very well have gone the other way at any time. As Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a damn near-run thing. Interesting also how the defeat of France became retrospectively inevitable when at the actual time it was just the other way around, i.e. the French and British considered a German victory as almost impossible. The author explains very well why the French and British had the edge; from well-built fortifications to quality of equipment to numbers of troops, tanks, planes etc. and how thy managed to fritter away their advantages. A warning for our own time?
A couple criticisms accounting for the four stars rather than five the author's writing style put me regularly to sleep, either that or the excessive detail, and I'm still not convinced by the explanation for the "pause" that allowed so many soldiers and so much equipment to escape via Dunkirk. The author's reasoning is good it's just that there seems to me there must be a more cogent explanation somewhere. Very good otherwise.
Did you know that Hitler amassed a fortune, partly from royalties paid to him by the German post office for permission to use his picture on stamps? Or that he used eighty thousand of these Reichmarks to pay the divorce settlement of General Brauchitsch, in order that Brauchitsch remain undisgraced so that he could become commander in chief of the army in 1938. Or that Admiral Canaris, head of army intelligence, hated tall men with small ears? I'm not clear that these points add to the narrative, but they are (to me) remarkably memorable and show something of the complexity and fragility of the events leading to the second world war.
The Fall of France in 1940 was, perhaps, the ultimate Black Swan event - it was just inconceivable, yet after the event myth-making on both sides depicted it as inevitable. The combination of French embarrassment with its Vichy regime, British embarrassment at being so roundly defeated, meant it was easier to describe German military brilliance rather than allied ineptitude. So the value of this book is in trying to piece together what made it happen. And it does this brilliantly, on the strategic level, the sympathy in Britain with German reaction to the harshness of the Versailles dismemberment of the country, France and Britain's absolute abhorrence of returning to land warfare in Europe and Hitler's willingness to gamble on the allied powers reluctance all facilitated Hitlers expansionism up to 1938.
May shows that public opinion in Britain and France led the governments in their desire to stop Hitler, but that the Prime Ministers in both countries still used every lever to try to avert the land war. The overall story is well known, what was new to me was the detail about the German and French power structure and personalities. Which is well drawn.
On the military/tactical side the detail is even more fascinating. Its pretty clear that even up to the 15th May 1940, five days after the invasion of France, there was no English, French or German general or politician who could conceive of an overall German victory. In their minds they felt that a German attack could be contained and that a counterattack would either bog down the Germans in a war they didn't have the resources for, or it might actual take the war into the Rhineland and destroy the German state. The major surprise for me was that this was the view of most of the German generals also. The French, assuming victory in the long run, wanted the land war to fought on Belgian soil, and wanted the British to contribute more troops and airpower than the British felt was wise. There is a very detailed description of the German war games, their superior tactical intelligence and their shrewd estimates of how the French, once deployed, would be slow to redeploy out of Belgium. The book is clear that if the Allies had attacked Germany in the west, while the Germans were invading Poland, that even Germany estimates indicated, a German defeat. This reluctance to invade Germany, was feed by French military overconfidence and Political caution.
The actual attack plan evolved after many revisions - Hitler ordered and postponed the attack on France, Belgium and the Netherlands about twenty times (by my count), and with each postponement came times for revisions. So even though the Allies, and in particular the Dutch, had very clear information about German invasion plans, in the end the plans changed so many times that the Allies grew bewildered and made their plans according to their own views of what should happen.
On 10th May 1940 the Germans feinted an invasion of the Low Countries, drawing the major parts of the British and French forces into Belgium, then launched a massive armoured invasion through the Belgian Ardennes forest, hitting weakening French forces, whose orders were never more than to defend while awaiting reinforcements. The German advance was so quick, that these reinforcements never arrived. However May states that the battles which did occur were never overwhelming German victories, and that the famed Blitzkrieg was more to do with fast deployment by attackers, unsettling defenders and not allowing them to regroup, rather than a devastating blow.
The fall back to Dunkirk seems to have been caused by Allied disorganisation as much as German power. The stalling of the German forces outside Dunkirk, resulting in the evacuation rather than capture of 300,000 allied troops seems to have been a result of fear on behalf of the Germans (von Runstedt in particular) that the German forces were overextended and needed to regroup to meet a counterattack.
One complaint I have is the absence of description about the British military. I would have welcome as thorough and overview of the British military, as of the French, in particular what became of them after Dunkirk. May is very clear how perilous, strategically and tactically, the overwhelming German victory in France actually was. In the end it seems a warning to democracies about temerity in using force, for it Germany had even been halted in France in 1940, it is likely that the Holocaust would not have happened, and that the Hitler Regime would have been overthrown by its own military.
This book demonstrates how careful study of an historic episode within a policy perspective can put to rest many widely accepted interpretations of Nazi Germany’s surprise victory over France in the first phases of the Second World War, while drawing important lessons on improving critical choices by political leaders.
To illustrate my point, here is a short quote from the concluding chapter “at any time or place, executive judgment involves answering three sets of questions “what is going on?”; “so what?” (or “what difference does it make?”); and “what is to be done?” the better the process of executive judgment, the more it involves asking the questions again and again, not in set order, and testing the results until one finds a satisfactory answer to the third question—what to do (which may be, of course, to do nothing) ( location 8688).
Let me emphasize, this is not a postulate of the type of “ten rules for becoming a genius decision makers” as favored by writers of popular books on leadership aiming at the many ignoramus readers. One has to read the book as a whole in order to appreciate the validity of this summing up and its validity conditions.
Therefore, this book should be obligatory reading for all policy, intelligence and national security scholars and professionals. I know I cannot expect political leaders to read the book as a whole. But not pondering at least the concluding chapter is a grave dereliction of their duty.
Professor Yehezkel Dror
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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