Summer Series 2010: OCCUPATION: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944

Summer Series 2010: Reviewing the Books! has begun. First up is a book that was a gift from my regular guest-blogger, Charles Cameron:

Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944 by Ian Ousby

“France Fell because there was corruption without indignation”

                                                     – Romain Rolland

“‘Stalin let fly with some choice Russian curses and said that now Hitler was sure to beat our brains in.”

                                                     – Nikita Khrushchev, on the Fall of France.

 One of the mystifying events of twentieth century military history is the rapid collapse and defeat of France in 1940 under the tank treads of von Rundstedt’s and Guderian’s panzers. France, an ancient great power, possessed of a vast colonial empire and a well-equipped army, which had held out through four years of terrible trench warfare in the Great War, was brought to her knees in a mere six weeks despite having twice the number of guns and a third more tanks than the Wehrmacht, plus the aid of 300,000 Tommies of the British Expeditionary Force. Equally remarkable as their destruction in combat operations, was the bewildering speed with which the French, a people with centuries of martial glory and valorous performance on the battlefield, acquiesced to German occupation and quietly resigned themselves to vassalage in the Nazi New Order. It is this complex and depressing history that Ian Ousby seeks to explain in OCCUPATION: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944. 

Ousby, who made extensive use of French primary and secondary source material, peels away the hazy mist of postwar Gaullist revisionism to show a France grown weary democracy, of the bitter political divisions intrinsic to the Third Republic, suspicious of Jews, antifascist refugees and perfidious Albion, resentful of having to shoulder the burdens of war and all too eager to lay them down at the first opportunity. Ousby quotes an Army officer and later Resistance leader, Henri Frenay:

Then I saw our men, who had fought so well right up to the last moment, throw down their weapons, cast away their equipment and join together dancing on the road or in the clearings. Forgotten was the disaster, the surrender, self-respect, the dignity which the defeated should maintain in the presence of the victor. No, I was not wrong: in the looks of the young German soldiers who passed I read astonishment and contempt.

Compiègne in 1940 is not to be confused with Appomattox.

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