Author Description

"Before the Nazis killed him for his work in the Resistance, the great French historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous short book, Strange Defeat, in which he puzzled over Germany's six-week conquest of his nation in the spring of 1940. In Strange Victory, the distinguished diplomatic historian Ernest R. May argues that Germany's success is even more of a puzzle than Bloch could have imagined, for we now know that its armed forces were measurably inferior to those of France and its allies, even in tanks, and its top military leaders all considered an attack on France to be a long-odds gamble.". "Strange Victory, a study not only of those six weeks but of the years and days leading up to the German invasion, makes it clear how Hitler, though a lazy, ill-informed psychopath, outguessed his own experts as to how French and British leaders would respond to German actions. May's narrative, laced with vivid character sketches, draws on little-used German, French, and British archives to show how German intelligence officers found the keys to plan a successful surprise attack on the Western front, and, on the Allied side, how French and British officers failed to see or understand the plain signs of Germany's intentions, even though they had well-placed spies in Berlin. His interpretative history suggests new ways to think about the decisions taken on both sides, and new ways to see how this history relates to issues of our own time."--BOOK JACKET.