Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France Hardcover – September 20, 2000

Written in 2000, yet highly pertinent for anyone interested in the Second World War, author Ernest R. May details the calculated risks that Hitler took, and plain luck his Generals experienced, in the years leading up to the French defeat -- a catastrophe the French military never imagined. Decisions by France and Britain that could have stopped Hitler's drive to dominate Europe were not made until it was too late. Had France resisted the 1936 German remilitarization of the Rhineland, German popular opinion might have driven Hitler from office as Chancellor of the Reich,
In Five Parts, May examines Hitler's Gemany; The Western Allies; The German plan to take Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland, then invade France as early as November 1939. One section describes Allied Intelligence failures during the Winter-Spring SitzKrieg, and an unexpected Ardennes breakthrough of Panzer divisions, while French and British units were in the north, facing a German diversionary attack on Belgium and Holland. May counters a misconception that France had lost the will to fight. If anything, the military was overconfident of victory: French armaments, tanks, even fighter planes were superior to German models, but their tactical use, poor Allied generals, and failed intelligence services were not. Combined with a "Maginot Line Mentality" that relied on fixed defenses,the end came in little more than a month. With maps, charts, notes, bibliography and index, the book is 598 pages long.

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.

This book is a very radical re-interpretation of the military fall of France in 1940. The author posits that it was luck, not superior German doctrine, leadership and tactics that decided the outcome. The problem when making such a radical hypothesis is that one also needs to provide support in terms of data and an intellectual argument. This, unfortunately, is where the book falls flat on its face. It looks at very specific events and then interpolates them outward to cover the entire struggle. For example, he cites one or two cases where the French airforce performed well. The implication is that it did well in general. Unfortuantely the reality is, when one looks at the whole, the French airforce did not perform well. This example pretty much illustrates the weakness of Dr. May's methodology - analogy (an incorrect one) being stretched out to cover the entire picture.

Note - please read my response to one of comments to this review for more details (I cut and paste this immediately below).

A customer says:
Sir, What about the map on page 359. If the French hadn't been caught up in internal politics WWII would have played very differently. What May is noting is that the Germans were not superior to the Anlgo-French alliance and if they had gone one the offensive the war would have been different. Also, Ernest May researched this with a team of professional researchers in all countries that partook in this cataclysmic event. In fact, if you had read the Monograph properly you would note that in the acknowledgements, a researcher for this man was Maurice Vaïsse, maybe you should google search him.

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Your post, in reply to an earlier post on May 15, 2016 6:49:20 PM PDT
Yoda says:
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In the beginning of the book Dr. May states that a variety of war games played have shown that the German's victory can be attributed to luck. He says this explicitely. Then he goes about supporting his argument that supporting his argument, through analogy and looking at only limited air and land encounters, that this "proved" that the French military was on a par with the German. The question here is do the analogies he uses exemplify the overall situation of the French and German (on the aggregate) as opposed to just in the limited locales and circumstances he uses to prove his point? I would argue no. Logic as follows: a) French command and control much slower than German. There are few serious scholars that would argue against this. b) French useage of armour was nowhere as concentrated as German. The French only used armour on company level, not divisional level concentration. This concentration enabled the germans to be decisive in the critical points. Again, few scholars disagree with this. c) French tactics emphasized another repeat of the WW1 (i.e., trench warfare with slow command and control needed) while German emphasized very fast command and control in a mobile environment. Again, few scholars disagree with this. d) French doctrine gave lower level command echelons little initiative. Again, few scholars disagree. e) French deployed tanks very late before the German invastion while the GErmans mastered this arm. Again, few scholars would argue this point. I highly recommend reading steven zaloga's book on French tanks (especially volume 1) published by Osprey puplishing. It shows all that this implied (i.e., lack of French training, doctrine in supply and use, etc.).

ALl of the above are reasons that Dr. May's book is so revisionist. It goes against the grain of military thought and scholarship on the topic. It also shows why he was wrong in ascribing so much to the poor political situation of the French as the main cause of defeat. It was one but far from the only one or the most important.