Strategy and Scapegoatism: Reflections on the French National Catastrophe, 1940
TL;DRAbstract
The French military collapse in 1940 was one of the great military catastrophes in world history. A striking image of the defeat dates from 16-17 May: a sea of some ten thousand French prisoners, captured at a cost of one German officer and forty enlisted men, as Rommel's Panzerkorps drove deeply through the French lines.1 Yet the French rout has been consigned to virtual oblivion by much of the recent literature, which presents Maurice Gamelin, the French Commander, as almost entirely disconnected from the events of May 1940. The defeat appears
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The French military collapse in 1940 was one of the great military catastrophes in world history. A striking image of the defeat dates from 16-17 May: a sea of some ten thousand French prisoners, captured at a cost of one German officer and forty enlisted men, as Rommel's Panzerkorps drove deeply through the French lines.1 Yet the French rout has been consigned to virtual oblivion by much of the recent literature, which presents Maurice Gamelin, the French Commander, as almost entirely disconnected from the events of May 1940. The defeat appears
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