Centered meticulously on the nature, practices and decline of the Vichy quasistate, Mr. Relying on archival records, including files opened after Mr. Neiberg offers a mesmerizing account of how the U. You may change your billing preferences at any time in the Customer Center or call Customer Service. You will be notified in advance of any changes in rate or terms.
The defensive line only partially defended France and indeed left the country open to an invasion via Belgium. The French army simply hid behind the Maginot Line and waited for the Germans to attack. When the Germans finally did attack through the Ardennes, the French army was trapped in bunkers, and its fortifications were immediately outflanked. Even when the Germans invaded Belgium, the French General Staff continued with their cautious policy and were slow to respond to the German threat.
While the French army was large and had been well resourced, it had not been modernized. It was still based on the idea that the next war would resemble the Great War. As a result, the French did not believe that any war with Germany, would be a mobile one, but rather a war of attrition. This meant that they failed to develop tank tactics that took advantage of their tanks offensive capabilities.
The Somua S35 tanks did not realize their true potential until German commanders commandeered them and utilized on the Eastern Front. During the invasion, German Panzer tanks quickly overcame the French defenses on the plains of Northern France. The French air forces were also no match for the Germans in aerial combat. The French army was unable to cope with the German Blitzkrieg tactics and was quickly defeated after only six weeks of fighting.
In , the French general staff was led by General Maurice Gamelan, an officer widely respected. A veteran and war hero of the First World War, he was credited with developing the strategy that led to the decisive French victory at the Marne in He had also tried unsuccessfully, to modernize the army.
But Gamelin was suffering from a serious illness, whose symptoms included poor concentration levels, memory loss and other cognitive difficulties. They were slow to respond to the Germans, and there was a marked reluctance to take any initiative and go on the attack.
The political leadership of France was also very poor. According to one French commentator during the war, they could not inspire the French people, they were more interested in fighting among themselves that the Germans. France was bitterly divided between the left and the right. This lack of unity in France was crippling at a crucial juncture in the war. The division also extended to the relationships between the military and political leadership of France.
The French Generals were rights wing and distrusted the left-wing politicians who ran France. French ministers also did not trust the judgment of their generals.
The French officer corps was more worried about a Communist revolution than a German invasion. For example, General Weygand was more concerned with maintaining social stability in the wake of the German invasion than actually fighting the Germans.
Many later accused some French Generals of being traitors. If France had a leader of the caliber of Clemenceau in , perhaps the outcome of the Battle of France could have been different. The U. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle.
After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted U. Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision making that drove US policy from to The Royal Navy carried out evacuations from ports down the French coast almost as far as the Spanish frontier. Meanwhile, the victorious Panzers raced in different directions across France, finishing off pockets of resistance, crossing the River Loire in the west on 17 June, and reaching the Swiss frontier a few days later.
The end came with the surrender of France on 22 June. Hitler insisted on signing the document of capitulation in the same railway carriage used when Germany had surrendered in The humiliation of France was complete. It ripped up the balance of power in Europe, and overnight left the strategic assumptions on which Britain had planned to fight Hitler completely obsolete. With France out of the equation, Britain's war for the next four years was fought in the air, at sea, and in the Mediterranean - but not on the Western Front.
The legacy for France itself was complex. Resistance groups formed, but risked bringing savage reprisals on the civilian population if they attacked the occupying forces.
While de Gaulle formed an army and a government in exile in Britain, he was technically a rebel. The Vichy regime was authoritarian and collaborated with the Germans. Arguably, the wartime divisions within French society that were created by this arrangement are still not fully healed.
Historians have located the seeds of the French defeat in low morale and a divided pre-war society. This may be so, but in purely military terms, the Germans were a vastly superior force although not in numbers.
They used their mechanisation and manoeuvre more effectively, and benefited from domination in the air. German military doctrine was more advanced, and generally their commanders coped much better with high-tempo operations than did their Allied counterparts. Allied command and control was cumbersome, and the Anglo-French operational plan was deeply flawed. However, the very success of the risky blitzkrieg approach led the Germans to gamble even more heavily on their next major operation - the invasion of Russia.
But this time the strategy failed, with consequences for the Nazi regime that were ultimately fatal. Search term:. Read more.
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