Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France (Paperback)

~ Prof. Ernest R. May (Author) "Anyone with a taste for old movies can visualize the scene..." (more)
Key Phrases: motorized forces, postwar memoir, brown friends, Maginot Line, Plan Yellow, Soviet Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The collapse of France before the German onslaught of 1940 was not, as many historians have argued, the result of the Wehrmacht's absolute superiority or the terrible fury of blitzkrieg. Indeed, writes Ernest May in Strange Victory, France had more soldiers in the field than did Germany, their arms were evenly matched in many categories and superior in many others, and the German army was far from fearless. What carried the day for the Nazi invaders was a greater imaginativeness in planning. France and its allies "made no effort to understand how or why German thinking might differ from theirs," did not allow for surprise, believed that their defenses would shield them, and in any event paid little attention to the intelligence that their spies brought them, including irrefutable evidence that German forces were massing along the little-defended border with Lorraine, avoiding the heavily fortified (and, May allows, highly effective) Maginot Line.

The Allies soon overcame their lack of common sense, May continues in this penetrating study, while in the wake of his French victory, Adolf Hitler "became so sure of his own genius that he ceased to test his judgments against those of others, and his generals virtually ceased to challenge him." The outcome is well known. Still, May suggests, Hitler's comeuppance does not diminish the lessons to be learned from the fall of France--notably, that bureaucratic arrogance, a reluctance to risk life, and a reliance on technology over tactics will quickly lose a battle. Students of realpolitik, no less than history buffs, will find much to engage them in May's book. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

The book's title inverts Marc Bloch's classic Strange Defeat because, for Harvard historian May, it is the German victory that requires explanation. In this provocative analysis, May argues that the French and British defeat in 1940 was a consequence of neither moral decay nor military ineffectiveness. In the late '30s, the Wehrmacht was still a network of improvisations, by no means the formidable instrument of later mythmaking. After Poland had fallen, Hitler demanded an immediate attack on France, and his generals balked; an "encounter battle" in central Belgium was what the French expected and were prepared to fight. Instead, the Germans famously developed an alternate design, based on a thrust through the Ardennes. May argues convincingly that a major factor in the offensive's reorientation was the German army intelligence service's justified conviction that the French and British high commands would respond slowly to a large-scale surprise. More than enough evidence was available to turn French and British eyes to the Ardennes in the spring of 1940. But since 1933, May argues, generals and politicians on both sides of the English Channel had failed to read German intentions and German decision-making processes. Instead, they sacrificed thought to habit, and put unexpected events into preconceived models. This well-written book, suitable for general readers as well as specialists, offers no easy counterfactuals, no check lists for future guidance, but it illustrates the importance of common senseAits presence and its absence. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang (October 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809088541
• ISBN-13: 978-0809088546
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #677,574 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Analysis of The Opening Phases of WWII, November 7, 2000

By	R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France (Hardcover)

In this interesting book, Prof. May is concerned with determining why the Germans conquered France at the outset of WWII. He takes pains to rebut common misconceptions about the fall of France. The most important misconception is that the Germans were destined to win because of overwhelming technological and military superiority. While other authors have commented on this point, May shows well that the French and British Armies had superior manpower, were at least equivalent in the air, and had real advantages in armor capabilities and artillery. The Allies would also enjoy the tactical advantage of defending. May concentrates on how decisions were made and why decision making in Germany, France, and Britain was structured as it was. This results in an overlapping series of sections devoted to the crucial Allied and German decisions. The first section is devoted to why the Allies failed to confront Germany over the acquisitions of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Key issues here were the limitations imposed by domestic democratic politics and the inability of Allied leaders to understand that Hitler actually wanted war. This is an understandable failure. Chamberlain and Daladier, the latter a decorated veteran of the Western Front in WWI, thought that war would be catastrophic (they were correct,)and combat inconclusive (they were wrong), and couldn't imagine that any political leader with a shred of sense would choose war. Looking back over the 20th century, individuals like Hitler are depressingly familiar - Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Saddam Hussein - the list is easy to compile. Prior to the 30s, however, there had been no one on the European scene like Hitler since the time of Napoleon. As May points out, moreover, the position of the Western leaders was not based on a perception of French and British weakness but rather on the understanding, shared by the German military, that France and Britain enjoyed superiority.

The next set of decisions examined by May are the failure of the French and British to attack Germany during the invasion of Poland. Here, May excoriates the French in particular for the their timidity and lack of imagination. Finally, there is a sustained and excellent series of chapters on German and Allied, particularly French, planning for the anticipated invasion of France. May details the numerous crucial differences between the behavior of decision makers on both sides. Particularly important to May is the comparison of decision making procedures between the two sides, a comparison which exposes the inferiority of Allied command. Poor intelligence gathering, poorer intelligence interpretation, lack of coordination between intelligence services and operational planning, mediocre leadership within the French Officer Corps, lack of interservice cooperation, and poor relations between political and military leaders were all features of the Allied effort. The Germans, in contrast, clearly made the most of their comparatively limited resources. May is careful also to stress that while the Germans were good, they were also incredibly lucky. A huge series of contingencies had to break their way and this is what happened. For example, if the Germans had attacked in the winter of 1939-1940, as Hitler wanted originally, their existing attack plan would probably have resulted in a stalemate in Belgium. A variety of fortunate events led them to postpone the invasion and reformulate their attack plan into the successful assault through the poorly defended Ardennes region.

This book has some deficiencies. It is well written and very well researched. May succeeds in avoiding anachronistic judgements and gives a good sense of the perspectives of key decision makers uncontaminated by knowledge of what would follow. By covering a whole series of decisions, however, May dilutes the impact of the book. A good comparison is Richard Frank's Downfall, a book about the decision to use nuclear weapons to end WWII. Frank's concentration on a single decision gave his book dramatic focus without sacrificing the import of the book. May is very interested in the nature of executive decision making in the arena of international affairs. He would like readers to draw conclusions from this book. He does point out some similarities between France in the 30s and contemporary America; a military nervous of engagement without huge political support, a reluctance to risk casualties, and reliance on technology. But, he is careful to avoid facile historical generalizations. Indeed, one of his points is that historical generalization can be profoundly misleading. His final conclusion is that decision makers should be smart, critical, and embrace procedures that test their assumptions. Sensible, but I don't think you need a 400 page plus book to prove this point.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WHY FRANCE FELL, January 6, 2002

By	Michael B. Crutcher (Louisville, KY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France (Hardcover)

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 does remind us that, when well led, some French troops fought bravely. But overall, Marc Bloch is more convincing in showing us dispirited French soldiers, confused, despairing, ready to surrender. This attitude was demonstrated by the French political leadership. Reynaud, the French Premier, telephoned Churchill at night after learning of the Germany breakthrough at Sedan, saying: "We have been defeated!" And May cites Bloch's description of French General Blanchard: "During all that time, he sat in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us, as though hoping to find on it the decision which he was incapable of taking."

May has given us a fine description of pre-war France, its political tensions, and its inefficient military set up. He does a nice job of drawing morals from the French experience, the most important of which probably is, if you're successful at doing something, you're likely to be blindsided from a completely unexpected direction (read Trade Towers and Anthrax.) But he probably gives too little credence to how sick French society was in the 1930's and how this affected their willingness to fight. Read Eugene Weber's The Hollow Years for more on this. Marc Bloch captures this defeatism in Strange Defeat, which should be read together with Professor May's fine book to get a more balanced view of the French defeat.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dramatic Reinterpretation, November 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France (Hardcover)

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? One will have to decide on their own answers. 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.

Thoroughly researched, Ernest May writes a dramatic narrative-and reinterpretation-of Germany's six-week campaign that swept the Wehrmacht to Paris in spring 1940. Besides his point of view to be read and pondered, several intriguing pictures and maps are included.