Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Chief advantage is that he takes the characteristics of Hitler's regime seriously. Many historians (headed by A.J.P. Taylor) interpret Hitler as a "normal" nationalist politician who calculated and miscalculated, rather than as an ideologically-driven paranoid psychopathic demon who found many willing allies. Weinberg does not make this mistake. He never makes this mistake:

p. 52: Certainly one should not overlook the belief of many that... once in power, the movement would find itself forced into a more reasonable course.... Many of those who deluded themselves in this opinion were to argue after WWII that Hitler had deluded them. But he had not lied to them; they had misled themselves. In many instances this self-delusion was greatly facilitated by the hope that Hitler did mean what he said about destroying the social democratic party and the trade unions...

p. 59: Those who hated the Weimar Republic... and publicly promised the German people an alternative structure with authority vested in one leader... understood... clearly... that there had indeed been a revolution in Germany in 1918 and that their own coming to power would mark a further dramatic break...

p. 62: The symbols, the rites, and the procedures of the new state all illustrated the deliberately different format of the new society. The supreme... ritual of the new dispensation was the parade.... Their purpose lay in the march itself: in its ritualistic submerging of all individuality, in its insistence on a pubicly visible community of preferably indistinguishalbe human beings ordered by a will exterior to themsevles...

p. 76: There is a most significant clue for today's readers in the reports on Hitler's public speeches during the 1920s. It was the attacks on the Jews which time and again were greeted by the audience with "applause" according to the police and newspaper reports...

A second great excellence of the book is that Gerhard Weinberg tells the story in a way that makes sense of human motivations--even those of the monsters Hitler and Stalin. As we read, we understand just why it was that Hitler was desperate to drive and conquer land to the east--desperate enough to launch his invasion of the Soviet Union even when an undefeated Britain lay at his rear. (p. 21):

p. 2: The German dictator Adolf Hitler had himself explicitly asserted... that the war he intended would not be for the Free City of Danzig but for living space in the East.... When Germany had conquered Poland and offered a temporary peace ot Britain and France... British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain explained that there could be no agreement with a German government led by Hitler.... This was, in fact, a struggle... about who would live and control the resources of the globe, and which peoples would vanish entirely because they were belieged inferior or undesirable by the victors...

p. 21: Germany was to seize the agricultural land needed to feed its population.... This crude Social Darwinism, in which racial groups fought for land which could provide means of subsistence... was derived from a view of history as deterministic as that of Marx but substituting race for class as the key to understanding.... Measured by the criterion of feeding a growing German population with the products of its own agricultural land, the boundaries Germany had once had were almost as useless as those of the 1920s, and thus a revision of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 could be only a propaganda excuse.... The vast reaches of additional land to be obtained would never be granted peacefully.... The bulk of the land to be conquered was in Russia, which, by what Hitler considered a stroke of particular good fortune for Germany, haad been taken over by... Jewish Bolsheviks who were incapable of organizating the... inferior... Slavic population.... The real obstacles to German expansion lay elsewhere.... France was the closest main enemy and Czechoslovakia the closest minor one. The sequence of wars would therefore be Czechoslovakia first, France second, then the drive East, and thereafter elsewhere. In the decade 1924-1934 Hitler had thought that a war with England could be postponed until after the one with Russia, but... by 1935 he was convinced of the opposite...

p. 48: As Hitler had emphasized to his military leaders on August 22, it was Poland as a people that was to be destroyed... it was assumed that massive slaughter of Poles and particularly the extermination of their political and cultural elite would both accompany and follow the campaign designed to destroy Poland's regained independence...

p. 33: A key element in National Socialist hostility to France was the role of the latter as the European home of the concept of human equality, and especially the extension of egalite to the Negro. Because racialism in Germany focused most directly on the Jews and... Gypsies, it has generally been overlooked that the next great danger to European racial purity was supposed to be the Negro, introduced into Europe and sponsored by France.

pp. 34-5: The struggle for existence in which the races of the world engaged... was fundamentally a struggle for space.... In Hitler's view, a people could choose between adjusting the population to a given space or adjusting space to population... by the conquest of additional land areas whose native population would be expelled or exterminated.... The foreign poilcy Hitler advocated thus promised war for new land beyond German's prewar borders... [to] be settled by German farmers...

Gerhard Weinberg also makes sense of Stalin's patterns of thought at the start of World War II.

He is the first author I have read who manages to make sense of both of Stalin's key blunders: his decision to sign the Nazi-Soviet pact and his peculiar blindness to Nazi plans to invade the Soviet Union. As Weinberg writes in his book Germany, Hitler, and World War II (p. 176), to Stalin in the late 1930s the best way to expand Soviet power and influence seemed to be to trigger a war between the "imperialist powers" Germany, France, and Britain. World War I, after all, had seen a great weakening of the imperialists through mutual bloodletting, followed by the (permanent) victory of Communism in Russia and (temporary) Communist regimes in Hungary and Bavaria. Another round of imperialist wars seemed likely to repeat the process, and bring further Communist regimes to power at its end.

Moreover, the Nazi-Soviet pact promised other advantages in addition to its function as "an encouragement to Germany... to launch herself into a war with the Western Powers which Stalin assumed would weaken both parties equally" (GHWWII, p. 170). It promised great additions to Soviet territory. It promised the disappearance of Poland, with which the Soviet regime had been at war less than two decades before. It promised a free hand for the Soviet Union with respect to Finland, the Baltic Republics, and Romania.

Once the Nazi-Soviet pact had been signed, Stalin became peculiarly blind to the possible threat posed by Hitler. Weinberg's belief--which seems reasonable--is that Stalin was blinded by his "basic Marxist perception of National Socialism as a tool of German monopoly capitalism" (p. 204). Hitler was a tool that the capitalists used in their rivalry for "markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities" with capitalists in other countries. The Soviet Union was already providing Germany with markets and raw materials: those were the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Germany was already getting everything from Russia it would get from a successful war. So from a capitalist perspective war with Russia made no sense.

What Stalin did not realize was the power of Hitler's belief that Germany needed land on which to grow crops to feed the Aryan race. Nazi racial agrarian expansionism was not a "propaganda gimmick" but the reason for Naziism itself. All the raw material deliveries Stalin could make would not appease Hitler, for his goal was not cheap raw materials to satisfy his (nonexistent) capitalist bosses but rather the annihilation of the Polish and Russian populations and their replacement by Germans.

Makes sense of the three great enigmas of World War II: Stalin's decision to sign the Nazi-Soviet pact, Hitler's decision to invade Russia, Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States:

p. 178: The whole project of crushing England and FRance had, after all, been undertaken only as a necessary preliminary, in Hitler's eye, to the attack in the East that would enable Germany to take the living space, the Lebensraum, he believed she needed.... [T]he campaign in the West was always expected to be the harder one. If in WWI Germany had struggled unsuccessfully in the West though victorious in the East, the fortunate willingness of the Soviet Union to assist her in winning the West this time could make it all the easier to win in the East against inferior Slavs ruled by incompetent Jews, as Hitler believed...

p. 41: The space Germany needed was to be found primarily in the East, in Russia.... The land area the Germanic farmers on was inhabited by Slavs... incapable of organizing a state or developing a culture. The only state organization ever successfully imposed on these inferior people... had been established and maintained by individuals of Germanic racial stock.... The enormous casualties Russia had suffered... decimated the Germanic stock.... The final blow came during the Bolshevik Revolution... [which] left behind an amorphous bloc of Slavs, ruled and exploited for the benefit of world capitalism by Jews...

p. 50: Under the impact of the world Depression... Hitler concluded that the United States was really a very weak country... a racial mixture... that included Negroes and Jews. Such a mongrel society, in which the scum naturally floated to the top... was a weak country, whose hope for strength had been destroyed in the past by the victory of the wrong side inthe Civil War and whose hope for the future, if there were any, lay with the German-Americans...

p. 195: It had been an assumption of Hitler's since the 1920s that Germany would at some point fight the United States... because his aims for Germany's future entailed an unlimited expansion of global proportions... a war with the United States had long been part of the future...

p. 197: ... the decision was to trump American quantity with quality, to build superbattleships which by their vastly greater size could carry far heavier armament firing over greater distances... The Germans hoped to... construct six superbattleships...

pp. 201-2: As long as Germany had to face the United States essentially by herself, she needed time to build her own blue-water navy.... If, on the other hand, Japan would come into the war on Germany's side, that problem was automatically solved...

p. 203: Hitler had already issued orders to his navy... to begin sinking American ships... even before the formalities of declaring war. Now that Germany had a big navy on its side, there was no need to wait even an hour...

The brutality of the conflict at all levels:

p. 42: The Poles were, in German eyes, an East European species of cockroach, their state was generally referred to as a Saisonstaat--a country just for a season--and the expression polnische Wirtschaft--Polish economy--was a phrase commonly applied to any hopeless mess...

p. 300: By February 1942, of the 3.9 million Soviet soldiers captured up to then by the Germans... some 2.8 million were dead...

p. 464: How did the Germans see themselves... continuing the war? Germany placed increasing emphasis on the U-Boat war... nerve gas... the V-1... the V-2...

p. 466: ...the terror of the German system of... military justice... 5000 executions per year... 30,000 German soldiers shot through military discipline during World War II...

Weinberg does not suffer from the hindsight disease:

p. 40: No one in the British government... had any faith in the Soviet Union's ability to mount offensive operations into Central Europe, a view much laughed at... but perhaps not so inaccurate.... That the Red Army in 1944-45 could move into Central Europe vast armored forces supported by an enormous array of American trucks is hardly proof that such operations were a plausible contingency in 1939...

pp. 678-679: On the one hand, the allied landing force had to be large enough and strong enough to seize a substantial beachhead.... [The] assault would be launched against an enemy whose forces in the West, over fifty divisions, were certain to be vastly greater than those which could be landed in the initial phase.... Any hope of success... rested on keeping down the rate at which the Germans could reinforce the point at which the landing had taken place...

p. 263: The appointment of Eisenhower to command the invasion should, in my judgment, be seen at least in part as a measure that would leave open the possibility of designating General Marshall to lead a second cross-channel attack if the first one did not work out...

p. 262: ...eight divisions would start an invasion against an area held by well over fifty-five... German divisions. It was obvious... that in the initial weeks of operations the Germans would have a vast superiority in numbers of men, tanks, and guns.... The critical point was whether the allies could get ashore and then build up their forces quickly while simultaneously keeping the Germans from concentrating their superior strength against the beachhead... deception... disruption of the transportation system...

Grand strategy:

p. 92: The... bombers... were built for effectiveness. And the single-engine short-range JU-87, built with France in mind... was by 1939 being supplemented by the... JU-88... a two-engine dive bomber, designed primarily for use against England.... It is no coincidence that Hitler ordered production of the JU-88 doubled on August 31, 1939... the main effort against England would be with the JU-88; there would be 1500 available by the summer of 1940, and a death blow... against England would follow in 1941...

pp. 135-6: ...on November 5, 1937... Germany, he asserted, needed space for her population.... Dependence on world trade would not do; it limited independence.... Germany would have to expand by seizing agriculturally-useful land. This would involve war... the only questions to be answered were "where and how?"...

p. 154: Hitler never expected that the lands he wanted could be secured without conflict. As his aims implied a war of conquest, the fact that Russia had come under the control of the Communist Party was... a stroke of unusual good fortune. It meant that... all those of real ability in Russia had been eliminated and replaced by inferior beings...

The whole project of crushing England and France had, after all, been undertaken only as a necessary preliminary, in Hitler's eye, to the attack in the East that would enable Germany to take the living space, the Lebensraum, he believed she needed.... [T]he campaign in the West was always expected to be the harder one. If in WWI Germany had struggled unsuccessfully in the West though victorious in the East, the fortunate willingness of the Soviet Union to assist her in winning the West this time could make it all the easier to win in the East against inferior Slavs ruled by incompetent Jews, as Hitler believed...

p. 668: ...many of Germany's military leaders were... becoming convinced that they were losing the war.... they preferred that the defeat come about in the least messy way possible. Hitler... still wanted and hoped to win... and saw the need for Germany to hold as much of the occupied territories as possible as a basis for victory or at least an advantageous or partial peace. When given unpleasant advice by those military advisors he trusted... Doenitz... Model, he was quite prepared to accept it...

Gerhard Weinberg has a keen analytical mind:

pp. 685-6: The Germans suffered not only from shortages of troops and equipment but also from an excess of commanders.... Army Group B, led by Field Marshal Rommel, commanded the 7th and 15th Armies on the channel coast.... Directly under the C-in-C West was a Panzer Group West under General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg. Rommel and Geyr, however, did not agree.... Rommel... wanted the armored divisions stationed close to the coast; Geyr believbed that they ought to be held back.... Rundstedt tried to work out a compromise, bu tthe real effect... was that the armored divisions were divided, wikth three assigned to each army group... while four were held back as a mobile reserve... at the orders of Hitler and... OKW, not the C-in-C West. When this confusion in command was paired with successful strategic deception, and tactical surprise because of ignorance of the weather, the prospects for the German defenders were far less than they might have been...

p. 854: What had happened in the interim... was the decision of Kurita to turn around and head for the San Bernardino Strait once more.... Kurita's battleships and cruisers now ran into the small escort carriers of Kincaid's 7th Fleet rather than the fleet carriers and fast battleships of Halsey. The escort carriers were small converts from merchant ship designs... [to] provide temporary air cover for landing operations. Never built, armored, or armed for major fleet actions, the six escort carriers and six destroyers commanded by Admiral Cliften A.F. Sprague were on Octoer 25 the only protection of... 6th Army against Kurita's four battleships, eight cruisers, and accompanying destroyers. Kurita and Sprague each made a decision.... Kurita... believed that he was facing tgh efleet carriers which in reality were hundreds of miles away.... Kurita never realized that what he was up against was a small group of vulnerable escort carriers supported by a handful of destroyers. Throughout the battle Kurita... handled his ships as if engaged in battle with a major enemy fleet. Sprague, who knew all too accurately what he was up against, called for reinforcement but decided... attack was the best defense. He hurled his force... ordering the destroyers to charge with torpedo attacks and the escort carriers to launch and relaunch their planes... with bombs, torpedoes, and anything else they could find.... [T]his tactic served to reinforce Kurita's confused assessment: with his ships constantly swerving to avoid torpedoes and dodge bombs, the admiral neither reconsidered his view of the situation nor kept a close rein on his own warships.... In the wild melee... three of the Japanese cruisers were severely damaged while Kurita's flagship, the Yamato, turned to avoid torpedoes and thereby kept the admiral from effective control.... One of the American escort carriers, the Gambier Bay, was sunk as were several of the destroyers which had charged the larger and more numerous Japanese warships with incredible bravery, but the continued bombing damaged two more of Kurita's cruisers..... Kruita decided to turn away a second time... to reorganize his forces.... [A]s Kurita returned to the charge, he failed to take advantage of the situation. Confused by reports of still another carrier force approaching and by renewed air attacks, Kurita finally turned away from Leyte and retired through San Bernardino Strait...

Gerhard Weinberg has space for usually ignored heroes...

p. 95: In November 1939 a German by the name of Johann Georg Elser... did carry out a daring and well-conceived plan to blow up Hitler...

p. 513: General Alexander von Falkenhausen proceeded to run the least oppressive of all the German occupation administrations.... He tried to assert military rule... to keep the exactions within reason, and to avoid or limit the sorts of horrors inflicted on other occupied peoples. Within the limits of the situation, he had some success in containing the efforts of Goering and Himmler... kept the people from starving... held the murder of Belgium's Jews to some 25,000 out of a total of about 90,000.... No wonder Falkenhausen was placed in a concentration camp...

p. 292: Neville Chamberlain had taken England and led France into a war with Hitler, the only leader of a great power who took such a step without his own country being attacked...

Gerhard Weinberg dislikes many people: Philippe Petain, Pierre Laval, Field Marshall Montgomery, Eric von Manstein, Heinz Guderian, A.J.P. Taylor, Pius XII:

p. 488: ... Pius XII, who had not been unduly worried by the actions of German occupation forces in Europe, now asked that Black soldiers not be included among the Allied units stationed in Rome...

p. 695: Marshall Petain, Laval, and assorted French collaborators--who in 1940 had found it inadvisable to leave Metropolitan France for French North Africa--now found it expedeient or necessary to move back with the retreating Germans... to southwest Germany...

p. 768: Eisenhower temporarily placed Montgomery in charge of all forces north of the German spearheads.... The short-term problem was that Montgomery applied his slow methodical approach to a counter-stroke which came far too late.... As he explained to Brooke on December 22, he had no confidence in the American 3rd Army attack and "expected to have to deal unaided with both 5th and 6th Panzer Armies." Three days later Montgomery... called for vast withdrawals in the south, including the evacuation of all of Alsace and Lorraine, as otherwise there could be no offensive in the north in the spring or summer of 1945. these predictions... completely erroneous in regard to the Americans, the 3rd Army attack, and the whole course of the fighting, explain his caution when a very different approach might well have been appropriate...

But there is one thing seriously, seriously wrong with my copy. It is missing about fifty pages--the end of the text and the bulk of the bibliographic essay. Shame on Cambridge University Press for bad quality control.

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Donald Cameron Watt (1989), How War Came (New York: Pantheon Books).

In sharp contrast, I was disappointed by Donald Cameron Watt's book. It set my teeth on edge. There is no doubt about the work that has gone into it, and the extraordinary knowledge of the details of European foreign relations in 1938 and 1939 that Donald Cameron Watt possesses. Yet the whole of the book is a lot less than the sum of its parts. I finished it very unsatisfied with the broad strokes of the picture the author has painted, fine as the details may be.

A first reason that book set my teeth on edge is the author's blurred picture of Hitler. I think he hates him too much to be able to see him. Donald Cameron Watt rejects the idea that Hitler had a long-term plan for world domination through German annexation, enslavement, and extermination of the "sub-humans" in Eastern Europe. He writes that Hitler was not:

capable of so long and sustained an effort of foresight and planning. Nor... is there... in... Mein Kampf ... an original draft of a [long-term] programme..." (p. 32). He also rejects the idea of Hitler as a "German nationalist... the master of improvisation, the Machiavellian... short-term in all he did, reacting only to the external stimuli..." (p. 33).

I think that Cameron Watt is more-or-less completely incorrect. Many of Hitler's key decisions--to occupy Czechoslovakia in March 1939, to attack Russia in June 1941, to declare war on the United States in December 1941, to try to exterminate the Jews, to slaughter rather than ally with Communist-hating Poles, Belorussians, and Ukrainians, to kill Russian prisoners of war by the millions rather than use them in industry--make a lot of sense if one takes Mein Kampf very seriously, and only make sense if one takes Mein Kampf very seriously.

It is only Donald Cameron Watt's failure to pursue his story beyond 1939 that allows him to reject the vision of Hitler's mind as dominated by the ideas of the Aryan race, of living space for Germany, and of world domination. And that alone makes the book a bad book: it is about a late 1930s that did not exist, save in the mind of A.J.P. Taylor.

But it is not just that Donald Cameron Watt rejects the consensus vision of Hitler that leads him into trouble. It is his acceptance of a counter-vision of Hitler as an "ignorant outsider," a political naif. He claims that Hitler's:

viewpoint was that of the pothouse politician, the cafe critic. What he knew of politics... he took entirely from the press of pre-war Vienna and post-war Munich. To the natural crudities and over-simplicities of his sources of information, he added the resentment of the small-town bourgeois, the declasse's belief in conspiracy and corruption as political norms, and the violence of the adolescent rebel against over-strict parental authority..." (p. 33)

He cannot take Hitler seriously: so Hitler's successes must have been due to the simple blind luck of the incompetent amateur. It is this underlying judgment that informs the book. Because it is an inadequate picture of Hitler, it makes much of the book's narrative suspect.

Yet another reason that the book set my teeth on edge is that Donald Cameron Watt presents a false picture of Munich: the sacrifice by Britain and France of Czechoslovakian independence in the fall of 1938. Throughout the rest of the book the making of policy is accurately portrayed as the dog's breakfast of accident, coincidence, mistake, and chaos that it always is. However, in three pages--26 to 28--the author shifts into a different mode and portrays the British policy that led to Munich as a series brutal-but-necessary decisions made by keen-eyed defenders of Britain's national interest:

">..a committee of senior civil servants and military advisors... a comprehensive scheme for British rearmament... nam[ing] 1939 as the year of maximum danger... essential to... 'appease' as far as possible one or more of the potential enemies.... categorical warning that war in 1938 would entail the gravest risks of British defeat.... south-eastern europe as an area where the expansion of German influence might be restrained but could not be stopped.... The danger lay in the French alliance with Czechoslovakia.... The French would have to be persuaded to get the Czechs to see sense.... Neville Chamberlain... appeal personally to Hitler.... The conference at Munich... (pp. 26-8).

This has the effect of making British policy leading up to Munich seem much more (and British policy after Munich seem much less) rational and coherent than it was in fact.

Then there are the places where Donald Cameron Watt simply contradicts himself in a relatively short span of pages.

On page 22 he harshly criticizes the British cabinet for being out-negotiated by Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1935: "Ribbentrop confronted the British at the opening meetng with a blunt alternative: either an agreement with Germany which fixed German naval strength at 35 percent of that of Britain or an end to the talks. The British Cabinet accepted..."

By page 36 Ribbentrop has become an incompetent boob: "Neither his contemporaries nor historians have dealt kindly with this man.... Vain, arrogant, pompous, and empty-headed are among the kinder epithets which have been showered upon him."

On page 33 Hitler is the "ignorant outsider... pothouse politician... cafe critic" whose reliance on the press produced "natural crudities... over-simplicities" in Hitler's view of the world.

By pages 34-5 it is Hitler's reliance on the press which gives him his "... almost instinctive sense of timing... shrewd idea of the limits of... tolerance and support, how they could be confused by their own double standard of morality..."

Which is it? Was Hitler's close reading of the press a source of strength or weakness? Was Ribbentrop an incompetent ex-champagne salesman who had no business running foreign policy, or the man who outmanoeuvered the professional diplomats of Britain in 1935?

And then there are the things Donald Cameron Watt says that simply are not true.

Let me give three examples:

• First, to claim that "in May 1945 Britain was the only power whose people could say that they had entered the war by choice, to fight for a principle, and not because their country was attacked" (p. 623) is to forget completely the existence of the French Third Republic, whose leaders took a much greater risk in declaring war on Hitler: they had no English Channel to serve as a moat between them and the panzer divisions.

• Second, to claim that Neville Chamberlain's 1939 guarantee of Polish independence "...left no option whatever for the British government. If the Poles took up arms, then Britain fought too..." (p. 185) is simply false. Chamberlain had intended to and did, as he told his sister two days later, guarantee "only... Poland's independence, not her territorial integrity." (p. 185-6).

• Third, Donald Cameron Watt attempts to justify the week wasted in August 1939--when time was of the greatest essence--getting the Anglo-French military staff mission to Russia to discuss concrete war plans. He claims that "...it was much too far to fly without landing on German-controlled territory. Any reader of spy fiction would know that a journey by train was much to open to skulduggery.... There were perfectly sound military reasons for not sending British warships through the Baltic.... What was left was the City of Exeter of the Ellerman line... slow" (p. 382). But airplanes could fly north of the Axis Powers: London-Copenhagen-Stockholm-Riga-Moscow. And airplanes could fly south of the Axis Powers: London-Paris-Marseille-Malta-Belgrade-Kiev-Moscow.

All these flaws in the book cast major doubt on Donald Cameron Watt's major conclusions.

Consider his claim that the cause of World War II was a breakdown in the international system, a breakdown in deterrence. He writes that:

Hitler did not, could not, believe in the firmness of Britain's determination... assured... that an attack on Poland meant... war with Britain, he preferred to listen to his own private oracle.... Against stupidity even the gods fight in vain..." (p. 186)

But he also says that "When [Hitler realized] that settling with Poland would... involve war with Britain, he did not postpone... for more than a week..." (p. 624). Deterrence did not fail: Hitler thought that war with Poland, Britain, and France would be a good thing (albeit not as good a thing as war with Poland alone).

There is one final thing that sets my teeth on edge. Donald Cameron Watt writes like a, what shall I call it?--let me use Monty Python's words--an upper class twit.

For example, there is a passage on page 481 where Donald Cameron Watt is reaching for analogies to make the German plan of attack on Poland understandable to his readers. He writes of how the left flank of Army Group North was to be "...the eastern end of the great encircling manoeuvre planned by the German High Command on the model of a Zulu impi." But few save those who have taken detailed courses in British Imperial History will know what a Zulu impi is. He goes on: "...or the Roman armies against Carthage at Cannae." Once again, few who have not had a British upper-class classical education will recall the actions of the commander Grace-of-Baal of the Thunderbolt Clan of the New City of the Phoenicians and the Roman Republican commanders Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Caius Terentius Varro at Cannae.

These historical examples are not analogies to make the German plan of battle more understandable.

They are, instead, counters in a game of intellectual one-upmanship that Donald Cameron Watt is trying to play against his readers.

That he wants to play such games tells me something about him.

But what turns this passage from a display of superior British depth of knowledge into a classic example of upper-class-twitness is that Donald Cameron Watt gets it wrong. It has been too long since he read Polybius in the original Latin. The Roman generals did not encircle the Carthaginians at Cannae. The Carthaginian general Hannibal encircled the Romans.

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Ernest May (2000), Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France (New York: Hill and Wang: 0809089068).

This is an extremely well-written and an extraordinarily fascinating book. Anyone seeking to understand the sudden and complete fall of France to the Nazis in June of 1940 needs to read it. Anyone curious about the sudden and catastrophic fall of France will enjoy reading it. A number of the lines of analysis are genuinely fresh: for example, the high reputation enjoyed by the French army on the eve of World War II, German commander-in-chief Walther von Brauchitsch's and general staff chief Franz Halder's musings on whether to try to stage a coup against Hitler, and the grand strategy of the Franco-British alliance according to which the "phony war" of no blood and no shooting between the end of the Polish campaign and the spring of 1940 makes sense.

Yet in the end the book overreaches. It claims much too much to be credible. And it's focus is too narrowly May's focus. May is a student of intelligence operations. Therefore he concludes that the fall of France came about because of an intelligence failure: the failure of the allies to plan for a German attack through the Ardennes forest. But for this one failure, May writes, it is "more than conceivable that the outcome [of the war] would have been not France's defeat but Germany's and, possibly, a French victory parade on the Unter den Linden in Berlin" (p. 9).

May is wrong. France's other non-intelligence failures in 1940 were extraordinarily comprehensive, affecting all possible levels of the war:

1. grand strategic: no plan to inflict any damage at all on German war-making potential given the Soviet Union's willingness to supply Germany with raw materials.
2. strategic: placing the (reserve) seventh army on the left flank with instructions to link up with the Dutch, and not replacing it with other reserve formations.
3. logistical: France ended the campaign of 1940 with more operational planes than it began the campaign with.
4. organizational: the inability to actually transmit orders and get them obeyed; what May calls the "cumbersomeness of French (and British and Belgian) procedures for making decisions" (p. 9).
5. operational: the failure to mount any significant attacks at all on the flanks of the French breakthrough.
6. tactical: no idea how to deploy the French superiority in tanks and artillery (both in quantity and quality) to make a difference on the battlefield.
7. political: no desire to continue the war once the first German breakthrough had been accomplished.

In the absence of the intelligence failure that gave the German Ardennes offensive a few days of operational surprise, France would have been defeated anyway--not in six weeks, but in twelve. At some time and at some place in the first month of combat a German breakthrough would have occurred, and afterwards the French would have proven as inept at repairing the consequences of such an alternative breakthrough as they proved inept in actual history when faced with the German crossing of the Meuse.

Consider, for example, the fate of France's four heavy armored divisions. By the time the seven German panzer divisions had broken through the front of the French ninth army on the Meuse on May 14 and 15, they had some 1200 operational tanks between them. In the next several days, the French high command committed all four of France's heavy armored divisions--with some 1000 tanks among them--to the breakthrough front.

The French first armored division was to counterattack the German forces from the northwest. As May tells the story (p. 435), this armored division, commanded by General Bruneau, was overrun by Erwin Rommel's division while it was out of gas. Bruneau had "...received urgent orders to... join up with the Ninth Army... most of his artillery was behind him. So were his fuel trucks. When Rommel's tanks came rolling down, Bruneau's Char B tanks were waiting to gas up. Rommel... started firing at once.... Bruneau's heavy tanks were proof against Rommel's cannon, his light tanks were not. And his tank crews could not communicate... the [radio] batteries had run down... [the next] morning, it had no more than twenty tanks left out of an original 170..."

The French second armored division was ordered to concentrate in front of the breakthrough. As William Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Republic tells the story (p. 689): "...The trains with the tanks and artillery were not able to start [moving] until the afternon of the 14th.... The wheeled vehicles with the supplies [moving separately] ran into the panzers racing west from Sedan and, having no combat elements, withdrew south of the Aisne.... The tanks and tracked artillery were finally uinloaded from their flatcars... between Saint-Quentin and Hirson.... The division was hopelessly dispersed over a large triangle between Hirson, La Fere on the Oise, and Rethel on the Aisne" and was destroyed in detail.

The French third armored division was given to General Huntziger, on the southern flank of the breakthrough, before the German attack across the Meuse had even begun: "At 3 P.M. on May 12 Huntziger signaled La Ferte that he wanted strong reinforcements to repel a prsopective German attack.... Three of the strongest elements in the general reserve proceed[ed] immediately to join Huntziger's Second Army: the Third Armored, Third Motorized, and Fourteenth Infantry divisions.... The infantry division was a crack unit commanded by... General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny..." (p. 410). But as the breakthrough took place, Huntziger withdrew: he saw his mission as one of covering the flank of the Maginot Line against a German attack headed southeast. Meanwhile Guderian's tanks were headed straight west toward the English Channel. Huntziger never used the units he had been given for any counterattack.

The French fourth armored division was not activated until after the German attack had already begun. Commanded by Charles de Gaulle, it harassed the southern flank of the German breakthrough for a time, and then was committed to trying to eliminate one of the German bridgeheads over the Somme. It was the only one of the four to still be in any coherent shape as a unit three weeks after the campaign began.

May writes (pp. 459-60) that if things had turned out differently:

historians would have been explaining why Germany launched an offensive that failed.... [T]he essential thread in the story... hangs on the imaginativeness of German war planning and the corresponding lack of imaginativeness on the Allied side. Hitler and his generals perceived that the weakness of their otherwise powerful enemies resided in habits and routines that made their reaction times slow. They developed a plan that capitalized on these weaknesses.... French and British leaders... could not react promptly once events began to be at odds with expectations...

But the fate of these four armored divisions should have given May pause. They were committed to contain and counterattack the breakthrough at exactly the right moment. In less than three days after the breakthrough the French fed 1000 tanks and supporting unis into the battle. And yet they made only the slightest difference.

The lesson, I think, is clear: French failure in 1940 was so overdetermined that to say that any one single factor was a "but for" cause of French defeat is highly implausible. But if you place to one side May's repeated claims that things might easily have turned out differently had only the French and British had better intelligence, this book is an excellent and entertaining book.