Book 21: [The Ides of May: the Defeat of France, May-June, 1940] by John Williams



This is an excellent history, well written and extremely well researched. That it is extremely frustrating to read says nothing about the author and everything about the subject matter. For this book is about the utter failure of the French nation and French army to prepare for war against Germany in the 1930s/1940s, and the failures and miscalculations that allowed the German armed forces to roll over the French in only two month's time.

Williams' research, in particular his extensive use of the diaries of the French leaders, allowed him to recreate conversations and take the reader inside conferences as the situation becomes more desperate and the participants more frantic.

A particularly fascinating section is Williams' description of the first two days of the German occupation of Paris, following the French leaders' agonizing yet clearly sound decision not to defend the city.

As Williams put it succinctly in his foreword:

"This is the history of the defeat of the French Army in the battles of May and June 1940. It is a story of unrelieved catastrophe in which the whole fabric of France was involved . . . When the cease fire took effect on June 25, the French Army had been in action for forty-six days--but it was already beaten by the middle of May. . . . {I}t was clear that the primary blame for what was, after all, a military defeat lay squarely with the French General Staff and High Command. The generals and the operations planners went to war in 1939 still thinking largely in terms of 1914-1918. Staking their faith on the old doctrine of the defensive, they continued to see warfare as static. They rejected the new theories of mobile war based on the concentrated use of tanks and aircraft and, instead, perpetuated the trench mentality of World War I. . . . Thus when the massed German panzers and dive bombers struck westward on May 12, the French were at the mercy of a fast-moving armored onslaught that proved irresistible. . . . The fall of France in June 1940 was a tragedy of lost military opportunities: lost during the eight months' lull in the West when the French army chiefs might still have revised their strategic and operational planning to counter the coming mechanized attack; and earlier, during the whole two decades from 1919 when they persistently refused to read the signs and continued to envisage and prepare for a type of war that was obsolete.

The book is, basically, a 375-page explication of this premise. It's therefore a difficult reading experience a lot of the time, but it is a fascinating one nevertheless.

I would have liked to read some "falling action," as the book stops immediately upon the signing of the armistice between France and Germany. Some information about the actions of Vichy France and the French armed forces that remained in the French colonial territories at that time, among other topics, would have been helpful to put the events of the book in better context. ( )

991 The Ides of May: The Defeat of France May-June 1940, by John Williams (read 5 Jan 1969) An absorbing account of the fall of France in 1940. While the book is somewhat superficial, it does present in all its awful detail the story of France's fall--I should not say "all." German sources are little used. And while the sketch covering the period from 1870 to 1939 is swiftly and competently done, there is no epilogue: sketching the events after June 1940. I think the future course of Gamelin, Weygand, Reynaud, etc., might well have been referred to. So much to read; such interesting and absorbing things; this book is not momentous but the events it details are stupendously so. ( )