Strange Victory, Strange Defeat

Before he was killed by the Nazi’s for his work in the French resistance movement, the French historian Marc Bloch wrote a short book called “Strange Defeat” in which he sought an explanation for what at the time seemed an inexplicable French failure to defend themselves successfully or at least for a protracted period of time from German attack. Bloch emphasized that the allies were overconfident, that the Germans achieved surprise and that the allies were unduly influenced by a desire to keep casualties low. He also noted how slow the French command system was when it came to making and implementing a decision. For someone writing during the war without free access to the usual historical sources Bloch did a much better job of explaining things than the conventional wisdom of the time which could be summarized as – the Germans used “blitzkrieg” to overcome the decadent French. It has taken decades of chipping away at this conventional wisdom to get back to and build upon Bloch’s analysis.

In 2000, Ernest R. May’s book “Strange Victory” was published-the title being a tip of the hat to Bloch’s earlier work. May elaborated on the strangeness noting that the allies possessed more men, more artillery, and more (and better) tanks than the Germans. A critical contribution of May was to explain in depth the origins of the “Manstein Plan” i.e the thrust through the allegedly impassable Ardennes forests which cut off and surrounded the substantial and qualitatively better portion of the French army which charged into Belgium intent on blocking an anticipated German flanking movement through northern Belgium – a repetition of the German strategy in world war I.

It was not a simple case of future German Field Marshall Erich von Manstein coming up with a clever idea which was then adopted by Hitler because it appealed to Hitler’s instincts for the unorthodox and the attack. Manstein got help both in the plan’s development and in by-passing organizational obstacles to get it in front of Hitler. While Hitler was predisposed to like this kind of thing, acceptance of the plan overall was greatly assisted by the work of German military intelligence which first, detected in the French dispositions the intent to drive into Belgium, second detected and took into account the inflexibility of the French decision making process and third tested the “Manstein plan” through a series of war games where it was assumed that French reaction time would be slow. The war games showed that the plan would be a success even though French reaction times were faster in the war games than they proved to be in the event.

John Mosier’s book “The Blitzkrieg Myth” does a good job of explaining that the Germans had a long tradition of distinguishing between a mobile “war of maneuver” and a more static “war of positions”. German doctrine viewed maneuver warfare as the decisive form and called for the creation of conditions favorable to maneuver whenever possible. This doctrine covered France’s defeat in 1870 by German marching infantry and horse drawn artillery as effectively as it covered France’s defeat in 1940 by German motorized forces and Stuka dive bombers. A German elaboration on Mosier’s argument specific to 1940 can be found in Karl-Heinz Frieser’s “The Blitzkrieg Legend”.

An early issue of Strategy & Tactics magazine (#27?) contains a table which shows that, man for man, the French did approximately the same damage to the Germans as did the Russians in the first six weeks of the German invasion of Russia in 1941. This suggests that factors other than “decadence” were involved in the French defeat. No one ever accused Stalin’s Russia or its military of decadence yet they performed no better than the French in their first encounter with the Germans.

On the issue of blitzkrieg, the revisionism discussed above can be carried too far. The German air force was numerically superior to the allies at the front and did a much better job of supporting the land battle. German tanks may have had thinner armor and lighter guns than allied tanks but they were generously equipped with radios facilitating maneuver and reaction speed and were used in masses which assured numerical superiority at the decisive point of contact. German air ground cooperation, much of it improvised for the campaign, was the most advanced in the world at the time. It was the tank, the airplane, the internal combustion engine and the radio that provided the Germans with the tools to restore maneuver to their campaigns.

Still, now that we have some emotional distance from events, it is possible to acknowledge how confident the allies were in 1940 and the many ways in which that confidence was justified. Similarly we can now recognize the German victory as a feat of arms well within the zone of historical and doctrinal tradition rather than a product of some vague and invincible hi-tech novelty. This in turn leads to the conclusion that the outcome of the campaign and subsequent history could have been very different. Almost as bitter as defeat is the knowledge that your fate was truly in your own hands.