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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Lightening War:
Blitzkrieg in the West, 1940 Good accounts of the
campaign in France are hard to find. I
could name Alistair Horne’s ‘To Lose a Battle’ and Ernest
R. May’s ‘Strange Victory’, but both of them tend to concentrate on
the political aspects of the campaign.
While Horne does present considerable details of the battle, there are
few good histories of the military side of the campaign.
Ronald E. Powaski,
however, has written an excellent and easy to read narrative of the battle.
He starts with an account of the German plans being discovered by Belgium
and the heartbreaking description of the outcome of that incident.
How much, we are left to wonder, might have happened if the Belgium’s
had fallen into step with the other allies at that point?
Powaski is scathing on
the allied problems and the German problems.
He outlines the problems with the French forces in clear and simple tones
– unlike Horne who feels the need to rub them in – and discusses how Hitler
forced the war-winning plan on his subordinates. Some problems with the
book: Powaski does not discuss many
of the events after Dunkirk, leaving them to consider the implications of the
French campaign and why it was Hitler’s last significant victory.
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