Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France

by Ernest R. May

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809089068
• ISBN13: 9780809089062
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Hill & Wang
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant Scholarship

I was amazed to find this book so shabbily reviewed! This is a work of brilliant scholarship and well written. One of the reviewers commented that the book is not original and that the fall of France was not strange. Originality exists on different levels. That human failings were behind the fall of France was commented upon almost immediately, beginning virtually on day one with Churchill's "The battle of France is over; the Battle of Britain must now begin" speech. But to document these failings, to detail the mistakes made, to prove that it was human failings at the heights of command in the French Army and polity, rather than equipment failures or unusual brilliance of the German high command, are no mean feat. Moreover, May's research is exhaustive. So many scholars today have a theory and tailor the research to support that theory. To this they add footnotes and a lengthy bibliography to convince the reader that they have been scholarly. This is not what May has done. He has pieced together from thousands of sources a very complex story, which has enabled him to tell that story "the way it really happened." Anybody who does that, especially in this day of jet-set historians, deserves the highest accolades. I doubt that any of the reviews given here are by people with May's expertize on the subject; yet they have the temerity of to dump on him. With a work like this, the only justifiable criticism is to find factual discrepancies, citing source and page. Noticeably, there are none in the reviews submitted.Professor May has written an excellent book and he is to be praised and congratulated on his achievement.

Masterful

Since I had read Ernest May's great The World War and American Isolation, 1914-1917, I decided to read this book, tho the subject is one I have read about before: The Ides of May: The Defeat of France May-June 1940, by John Williams, and The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry Into the Fall of France in 1940, by William L. Shirer. Neither of those books can hold a candle to this well-researched and well-written study. May brings new insights into the momentous events of 1938 to 1940, and they provide thought-provoking and well-reasoned answers to questions which have been the subject of study ever since the fall of France. I think May supports well his thesis that with a few different happenings Hitler could have been defeated in 1939 and even in 1940, with a result changing our whole subsequent history. (Incidentally, I question the indication that the book has 384 pages. It has 484 pages of text, 48 pages of footnotes, and a 50 page bibliography.) This is a book you will find well worth reading if the events of the time are of interest to you, and especially if you lived thru them as did I.

WHY FRANCE FELL

Harvard historian Ernest May has written an excellent, detailed account of why France fell, and fell so quickly, in May of 1940. He takes the title of his book, Strange Victory, from Marc Bloch's book, Strange Defeat. Bloch was a French historian and soldier who wrote his account shortly after the French debacle. Bloch stressed the defeatism of the French soldiers and the disorganization of the French Army command, which he saw personally. His book strongly reinforced the idea, common after the shockingly quick defeat, that France was a rotten apple waiting to be plucked from the tree. May disputes Bloch's account. He notes that French aircraft and armor were equal to or sometimes superior to that of the Germans. France held a slight edge in the number of first line troops. Morale was generally good among French soldiers (and not so good among the Germans, including the Generals, who mistrusted Hitler.) May posits that Germany succeeded because Hitler had superior strategic insight, including a better understanding than did his generals of the passivity and ineptitude of the British and French military command. Germany outwitted France on the battlefield by sending its main thrust through the Ardennes, a move that surprised the French and to which they were slow, fatally slow, to react. French troops often fought bravely, but their commanders did not have them in the right position, especially their first line units. Germany had a crucial advantage in military intelligence, particularly in their ability to interpret various bits of evidence and to weave a coherent pattern from it to inform their front-line commanders. The French intelligence service, by contrast, attracted lesser-grade officers who often transmitted undigested information, without analysis, to the French command. In short, May thinks that it was possible for France to defeat Germany. The French Army was considered the best in the world. Far from being defeatist, May cites contemporary sources expressing great confidence in any clash of arms with the Germans. Churchill said, in a House of Commons debate, "Thank God for the French Army." Specifically, May feels France missed a golden opportunity by failing to attack Germany in the Fall of 1939 while German troops were crushing Poland. But at no time did any senior French or British official propose such an operation. May's book devotes its first 380 pages to explaining the state of France and the French Army in the pre-war period. This is the best part of the book. He is especially good in comparing Hitler's bold thinking and decisive strokes with the paralysis that gripped French (and British) politicians. He is perhaps less thorough in describing the "Battle of France" itself, which he does in about 80 pages. If his thesis, that the issue was decided on the battlefield, is to be proved, in my view he needed to develop that thesis more carefully by examining closely the battlefield action. He certainly d

"Revisionist history" at its finest: an important book

At its best, what is known as "revisionist history" helps us look at an historical event from a different, stimulating, even important perspective. Unfortunately, "revisionist history" has developed something of a bad reputation in recent years, due mainly to some bizarre cases of people actually DENYING that an event, in particular the Nazi Holocaust, occurred at all. It's one thing to say that if Lee had won at Gettysburg, then the South would have won the Civil War, but it's another thing to deny that the Civil War ever happened! Fortunately, denial is not at all what "Strange Victory" is about. Instead, this is "revisionist history" at its best - brilliant, wise, troubling, even mind-boggling. If Ernest May is correct, than all of history could easily have turned out far differently, if only...Basically, what Ernest May does in "Strange Victory" is to present a well-argued case that the Nazi victory over France in 1940 not only was far from inevitable - in a Hegelian, Marxist, or any other sense -- but if anything that the ALLIES should have defeated the NAZIS - and fairly easily, at that! Personally, I think the interesting question with a lot of history is why do people so often take it as a given that just because something happened, that it was preordained to happen and/or could not have happened otherwise? And yet, we know that random events like weather (for instance, fog on the East River on the night of Aug. 29, 1776, which permitted Washington to escape unnoticed by the British and thus keep the Revolution alive to fight another day; or the terrible Russian winter of 1941/1942 helped prevent the Nazis from conquering the Soviet Union; the death of Alexander the Great; etc.) can have tremendous implications for the course of history. Basically, this comes down to two opposing views: 1) the Hegelian/Marxist view that history is "inevitable", or at least deterministic in the sense that it is driven by forces that humans have little control over; and 2) the view that there is little, if anything, preordained about history, and that the belief in inevitability really stems from things like "hindsight bias," which makes history appear far more pre-ordained than it really is. In "Strange Victory," Ernest May offers us an excellent example of the second category of analysis, helping us to, as Oxford scholar (and author of the controversial revisionist history, "The Pity of War") Niall Ferguson puts it, "recapture the chaotic nature of experience and see that there are no certain outcomes." The bottom line is that just because something happened a certain way doesn't mean it HAD to have happened that way, and the Nazi victory over France in 1940, as laid out in "Strange Victory," is one of those cases.So how, then, does May explain (as he puts it) the question: "if the Allies in May 1940 were in most respects militarily superior, were not badly led, and did not suffer from demoralization (not yet, at least), what then accounts for G

Interesting & Well-Written Look At Fall Of France in 1940

Much of what Harvard historian Ernest May presents in this fascinating and well written book detailing the amazing circumstances surrounding the inexplicably quick defeat of the Allied forces in France at the hands of the Wehrmacht in May and June 0f 1940 is beyond dispute; numerically and technologically the combined forces of the French, British and other forces outgunned and overshadowed their Nazi opponents. Yet in terms of leadership, military philosophy, and a resident willingness to face the true nature of the threat that faced them, they were miserably much more deficient. In this masterfully argued book, Professor May chooses to place most of the stress for this stunning reversal of fortune on the shoulders of the admittedly inept leadership and lack of imagination of the Allied leaders, both military and political. While such an interpretation is indeed hard to argue with, stressing it so prominently tends to belie a welter of complex interacting factors that the author gives short shrift to. For example, anyone familiar with other excellent books detailing the quick defeat and capitulation of the Allied forces such as William Shirer's "The Fall Of The Third Republic" or Phillipe Burrin's "France Under The Germans" understands the massive effect of other salient factors in the collapse of the third republic and the allied forces, factors including reluctance to produce war materials in the midst of the Depression's deprivations, the deeply painful and heartfelt memories associated with the possibility of repeating another bloodbath like that of the "Great War", and the sheer fact that most of the civilized intelligentsia throughout Europe, including those in Germany itself, believed that only a madman would start another such holocaust. Indeed, William Shirer actually lived in both Paris and Berlin during the period in question, and his own explanation of what happened and why is much more complex than is Professor May's. By the way, the fact that Hitler was indeed such a psychopath was not as clear then as it is in retrospect. Therefore, in my opinion, simply laying the blame on the Allies' admittedly execrable failures in leadership and amazing lack of imagination is a reductionistic exercise in describing some quite necessary but certainly not sufficient conditions to explain the stunning reversal the quick Nazi victory represented. All of these factors as well as a general failure of nerve and a shameful moral cowardice on the part of the leaders led to a general discounting of the horrific possibility of another war. This isn't to quibble with the accuracy of the extensive research in the book, nor to take issue with its entertaining and edifying narrative. Rather, it is to contest the author's unnecessarily narrow attribution of cause to the obvious aspects of failures in both civic and military leadership. One need not go far from the case at hand to demonstrate how important factors other than leadership are in determining the o