Strange Defeat

Rating:
Summary: Superb evaluation of the French Defeat
Review: I keep returning to this book as among the best I've ever read. It is both good reading as military history and failure analysis: no one has been able to write so deftly and originally about why France fell so swiftly in 1940. Unlike other military history books, this one is not heavy on maps nor units nor armament, merely a very incisive and friendly discussion of why France fells so quickly.
Serving in both WW1 and WW2, he points a litany of reasons why the French army, which was better equipted than the Germans, collapsed so suddenly. Despite what I learned in highschool about the French defeat of WW2 (France was overconfident in the Maginot Line), Marc Bloch tells a different reason. The French army, aside from its reliance on the Maginot Line, failed to anticipate how modern weapons shortened space. The French army never understood how the speed of modern weapons had shortened space. Marc Bloch, serving at the front in 1940, recalled that the German offensive actually seem to overtake each French retreat: whenever Marc Bloch's unit retreated in 1940, they constantly found the Germans in their rear. The consequence was the French army was in a perpetual retreat and lacked the time to mount a proper counter offensive.
Marc Bloch also points to the cultural factors in the French defeat, namely the French education system which ignored history and visual arts in its cirriculum. He proposes a greater emphasis on both. I agree with the latter: in the US, we are saturated with images but we are visually illiterate. As for history, there is now too much emphasis on history without a comparable attempt to work things out in the present. This is a terrific book that reads like a no-holds barred fight.

Rating:
Summary: Superb evaluation of the French Defeat
Review: I keep returning to this book as among the best I've ever read. It is both good reading as military history and failure analysis: no one has been able to write so deftly and originally about why France fell so swiftly in 1940. Unlike other military history books, this one is not heavy on maps nor units nor armament, merely a very incisive and friendly discussion of why France fells so quickly.
Serving in both WW1 and WW2, he points a litany of reasons why the French army, which was better equipted than the Germans, collapsed so suddenly. Despite what I learned in highschool about the French defeat of WW2 (France was overconfident in the Maginot Line), Marc Bloch tells a different reason. The French army, aside from its reliance on the Maginot Line, failed to anticipate how modern weapons shortened space. The French army never understood how the speed of modern weapons had shortened space. Marc Bloch, serving at the front in 1940, recalled that the German offensive actually seem to overtake each French retreat: whenever Marc Bloch's unit retreated in 1940, they constantly found the Germans in their rear. The consequence was the French army was in a perpetual retreat and lacked the time to mount a proper counter offensive.
Marc Bloch also points to the cultural factors in the French defeat, namely the French education system which ignored history and visual arts in its cirriculum. He proposes a greater emphasis on both. I agree with the latter: in the US, we are saturated with images but we are visually illiterate. As for history, there is now too much emphasis on history without a comparable attempt to work things out in the present. This is a terrific book that reads like a no-holds barred fight.

Rating:
Summary: Good title, strange analysis
Review: While Bloch most assuredly was a patriot and served his country the best he could in both wars, his view of France and the French seems to be at odds with subsequent historical analysis. Bloch seems to blame the generals for the problems dealing with French impotence in the face of the Germans, but he doesn't seem to dig deep enough to examine alternative explanations, such as the fact that the French had not won a war since Napoleon and were fundamentally inept compared to other war machines. But since war is much more of a "natural" human state than peace, a society which does not educate and prepare for it is doomed to lose any battle where the enemy is better trained, disciplined, and focused. In many ways, Bloch's analysis ignores the political consequences of the lack of public understanding of the stakes at hand and instead looks at one aspect of examining the military humiliation of the "Phoney War". France was too divided politically and socially to win any battle verses the Nazi war machine. In many ways his analysis is more appropriate to why the French lost Vietnam than why it lost France to the Germans. But of course that happened long after he had been executed by the Nazis.
While this book has some good insights, it is not really anywhere near as good as Paxton's "Vichy France", but Paxton had the benefit of historical records unavailable to Bloch; however Bloch had the benefit of living the history that Paxton reveals.
But unlike the cowards like Sartre who sat out the war and watched the Germans rape his native land while the Vichy politicians acted as their cuckolds, he fought for his country and had an opinion that France was to blame for its own ignominy, instead of modern revisionists who sit back and attack those who stood up to evil.