Download or read book Armoured Warfare and the Fall of France 1940 written by Anthony Tucker-Jones and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-01-27 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At 21:00 on 9 May 1940 Codeword Danzig was issued alerting Adolf Hitler's airborne troops that they were about to spearhead an attack on Belgium and the Netherlands. The following day his blitzkrieg rolled forward striking the British Expeditionary Force and the French armies in Belgium and in northern France at Sedan. The desperate attempts of the allied armies to stem the Nazi tide proved futile and, once their reserves had been exhausted and the remaining forces cut off, Paris lay open. By early June, it was all over - trapped British, Belgian and French troops were forced to evacuate Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne and the defeated French army agreed to an armistice leaving the country divided in two. This dramatic story is shown in a sequence of over 150 historic photographs that Anthony Tucker-Jones he has selected for this memorable book. The images he has chosen cover every aspect of this extraordinary campaign, but his main focus is on the vital role played by the armoured fighting vehicles of both sides. The book is a graphic record of the destruction wrought by the Wehrmacht's lightning offensive through the Low Countries and France.
Download or read book France 1940 written by Philip Nord and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revisionist account of France’s crushing defeat in 1940, a world authority on French history argues that the nation’s downfall has long been misunderstood. Philip Nord assesses France’s diplomatic and military preparations for war with Germany, its conduct of the war once the fighting began, and the political consequences of defeat on the battlefield. He also tracks attitudes among French leaders once defeat seemed a likelihood, identifying who among them took advantage of the nation’s misfortunes to sabotage democratic institutions and plot an authoritarian way forward. Nord finds that the longstanding view that France’s collapse was due to military unpreparedeness and a decadent national character is unsupported by fact. Instead, he reveals that the Third Republic was no worse prepared and its military failings no less dramatic than those of the United States and other Allies in the early years of the war. What was unique in France was the betrayal by military and political elites who abandoned the Republic and supported the reprehensible Vichy takeover. Why then have historians and politicians ever since interpreted the defeat as a judgment on the nation as a whole? Why has the focus been on the failings of the Third Republic and not on elite betrayal? The author examines these questions in a fascinating conclusion.
Download or read book The Breaking Point written by Robert A. Doughty and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging narrative of the small-unit actions near Sedan during the 1940 campaign for France. • Reconstructs the fighting in and around Sedan by German panzer forces under the famous Heinz Guderian and their French opponents • Examines both sides of the battle, from privates up to generals • Recommended reading by the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps "Doughty's lively study should appeal to soldiers and civilians."—Journal of Military History
Download or read book The Fall of France written by Julian Jackson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 16 May 1940 an emergency meeting of the French High Command was called at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. The German army had broken through the French lines on the River Meuse at Sedan and elsewhere, only five days after launching their attack. Churchill, who had been telephoned by Prime Minister Reynaud the previous evening to be told that the French were beaten, rushed to Paris to meet the French leaders. The mood in the meeting was one of panic and despair; there was talk ofevacuating Paris. Churchill asked Gamelin, the French Commander in Chief, 'Where is the strategic reserve?' 'There is none,' replied Gamelin.This exciting book by Julian Jackson, a leading historian of twentieth-century France, charts the breathtakingly rapid events that led to the defeat and surrender of one of the greatest bastions of the Western Allies, and thus to a dramatic new phase of the Second World War. The search for scapegoats for the most humiliating military disaster in French history began almost at once: were miscalculations by military leaders to blame, or was this an indictment of an entire nation?Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Julian Jackson recreates, in gripping detail, the intense atmosphere and dramatic events of these six weeks in 1940, unravelling the historical evidence to produce a fresh answer to the perennial question of whether the fall of France was inevitable.
Download or read book Military Innovation in the Interwar Period written by Williamson R. Murray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-13 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of major military innovations in the 1920s and 1930s.
Download or read book Panzer IV vs Char B1 bis written by Steven J. Zaloga and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle of France in 1940 involved the first large-scale tank-against-tank battles in history. The massive clashes at Stonne, Hannant, and Gembloux involved hundreds of tanks on both sides, yet have faded from memory due to the enourmity of the French defeat. This book examines two of the premier opposing tanks of the Wehrmacht and the French Army, the German PzKpfw IV and the French Char B1 bis. With a complete history of the design, development, and deployment of these armoured fighting vehicles, the story of these great battles is once again brought to life.
Download or read book To Lose a Battle written by Alistair Horne and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2007-06-28 with total page 1243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1940, the German army fought and won an extraordinary battle with France in six weeks of lightning warfare. With the subtlety and compulsion of a novel, Horne’s narrative shifts from minor battlefield incidents to high military and political decisions, stepping far beyond the confines of military history to form a major contribution to our understanding of the crises of the Franco-German rivalry. To Lose a Battle is the third part of the trilogy beginning with The Fall of Paris and continuing with The Price of Glory (already available in Penguin).
Download or read book Case Red written by Robert Forczyk and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even after the legendary evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940 there were still large British formations fighting the Germans alongside their French allies. After mounting a vigorous counterattack at Abbeville and then conducting a tough defence along the Somme, the British were forced to conduct a second evacuation from the ports of Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest and St Nazaire. While France was in its death throes, politicians and soldiers debated what to do – flee to England or North Africa, or seek an armistice. Case Red captures the drama of the final three weeks of military operations in France in June 1940, and explains the great impact it had on the course of relations between Britain and France during the remainder of the war. It also addresses the military, political and human drama of France's collapse in June 1940, and how the windfall of captured military equipment, fuel and industrial resources enhanced the Third Reich's ability to attack its next foe – the Soviet Union.
Download or read book The Fall of France in the Second World War written by Richard Carswell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how the fall of France in the Second World War has been recorded by historians and remembered within society. It argues that explanations of the fall have usually revolved around the four main themes of decadence, failure, constraint and contingency. It shows that the dominant explanation claimed for many years that the fall was the inevitable consequence of a society grown rotten in the inter-war period. This view has been largely replaced among academic historians by a consensus which distinguishes between the military defeat and the political demise of the Third Republic. It emphasizes the contingent factors that led to the military defeat. At the same time it seeks to understand the constraints within which France’s policy-makers were required to act and the reasons for their policy-making failures in economics, defence and diplomacy.
Download or read book 1940 The Fall of France written by General Andre Beaufre and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The French Army s Tank Force and Armoured Warfare in the Great War written by Tim Gale and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship has challenged the assumption that military commanders during the First World War were inflexible, backward-looking and unwilling to exploit new technologies. Instead a very different picture is now emerging of armies desperately looking to a wide range of often untested and immature scientific and technological innovations to help break the deadlock of the Western Front. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the development of tank warfare, which both the British and the French hoped would give them a decisive edge in their offensives of 1917 and 1918. Whilst the British efforts to develop armoured warfare have been well chronicled, there has been no academic study in English on the French tank force - the Artillerie Spéciale - during the Great War. As such, this book provides a welcome new perspective on an important but much misunderstood area of the war. Such was the scale of the French tanks’ failure in their first engagement in 1917, it was rumoured that the Artillerie Spéciale was in danger of being disbanded, yet, by the end of the war it was the world’s largest and most technologically advanced tank force. This work examines this important facet of the French army’s performance in the First World War, arguing that the AS fought the war in as intelligent and sensible a manner as was possible, given the immature state of the technology available. No amount of sound tank doctrine could compensate for the fragility of the material, for the paucity of battlefield communication equipment and for the lack of tank-infantry training opportunities. Only by 1918 was the French army equipped with enough reliable tanks, as well as aircraft and heavy-artillery, to begin to exercise a mastery of the new form of combined-arms warfare. The successful French armoured effort outlined in this study (including a listing of all the combat engagements of the French tank service in the Great War) highlights a level of military effectiveness within
Download or read book Sixty Days that Shook the West written by Benoist-Méchin and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Division Leclerc written by Merlin Robinson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'General Leclerc' was the nom de guerre adopted by the Gaullist officer Philippe de Hautcloque, to protect his family in occupied France. He became France's foremost fighting commander, and his armored division (the '2e DB') its most famous formation. Starting as a small scratch force of mostly African troops organised and led by Leclerc in French Equatorial Africa, it achieved early success raiding Italian and German positions in co-operation with Britain's Long Range Desert Group. Following the Allied victory in North Africa it was expanded and reorganised as a US Army-style armoured division, with American tanks and other armoured vehicles. Shipped to the UK, in spring 1944, it was assigned to Patton's US Third Army, landing in time for the Normandy breakout and being given the honour of liberating Paris in August 1944. Combining a thorough analysis of their combat and organisation with detailed colour plates of their uniforms and equipment, this is the fascinating story of Free France's most effective fighting force.
Download or read book Tank Commander written by Bill Close and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable World War II survival story and combat memoir by “an indestructible wartime tank commander” (The Telegraph). In campaign after campaign, from the defense of Calais in 1940 to the defeat of Germany in 1945, Bill Close served as a tank commander in Britain’s Royal Tank Regiment—and he survived. His tanks were hit eleven times by enemy shellfire and he bailed out. He was wounded three times. He finished the war as one of the most experienced and resourceful of British tank commanders, and in later life, he set down his wartime experiences in graphic detail. His book is not only an extraordinary memoir; it is also a compelling account of the exploits of the Royal Tank Regiment throughout the conflict. As a record of the day-to-day experience of the tank crew of seventy-five years ago—of the conditions they faced and the battles they fought—it has rarely been equaled.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the French Air Force written by Greg Baughen and published by Fonthill Media. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 10 May 1940, the French possessed one of the largest air forces in the world. On paper, it was nearly as strong as the RAF. Six weeks later, France had been defeated. For a struggling French Army desperately looking for air support, the skies seemed empty of friendly planes. In the decades that followed, the debate raged. Were there unused stockpiles of planes? Were French aircraft really so inferior? Baughen examines the myths that surround the French defeat. He explains how at the end of the First World War, the French had possessed the most effective air force in the world, only for the lessons learned to be forgotten. Instead, air policy was guided by radical theories that predicted air power alone would decide future wars. Baughen traces some of the problems back to the very earliest days of French aviation. He describes the mistakes and bad luck that dogged the French efforts to modernise their air force in the twenties and thirties. He examines how decisions made just months before the German attack further weakened the air force. Yet defeat was not inevitable. If better use had been made of the planes that were available, the result might have been different.
Download or read book French Tanks of the Great War written by Tim Gale and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2016-08-31 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed history of France’s development of tanks and the combat the tanks served in during World War I, by an armored warfare expert. The French tank corps was an essential part of the French army from 1917 onwards, yet its history has been strangely neglected in English accounts of the Western Front. Using information derived from the French military archives at Vincennes—much of which has never been published in English before—author Tim Gale describes the design and development of the tanks, the political and organizational issues that arose between the French military and civilian bureaucracy, and the record of these pioneering fighting vehicles in combat. All the major engagements in which French tanks participated are depicted in graphic detail, often quoting directly from recollections left by individual tank commanders of their experience in battle, and each operation is assessed in terms of its impact on French tactics in general and on tank tactics in particular. The Nivelle offensive and the battles of Malmaison, the Matz, Soissons, and Champagne are featured in the narrative, and the actions of the French tanks serving with the U.S. army are covered, too. Much of the material in Tim Gale’s study will be entirely new to non-French speakers. The story will be fascinating reading for anyone who is interested in the Great War, the French army, military innovation and the history of armored warfare. Praise for French Tanks of the Great War “Gale’s book . . . is very easy to dip into.” —Military Modelling “It is a wealth of information and I would definitely recommend it.” —Forgotten Weapons
Download or read book The Fall of France 1940 written by Samuel M. Osgood and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
