Paul's Reviews > Strange Defeat

Perhaps the best book I'll read in 2023! Without question, I am an avid reader of history, thus when I saw the title Strange Defeat for the first time, I was intrigued. Why? I’d read many books about the lightning-fast Blitzkrieg of the WWII-era German Army and how they overwhelmed France in 1940, but I’d never read anything from the perspective of a French Army soldier of that timeframe. Time to get the book!

The author, Marc Bloch, has a very unique qualification for such a “Statement of Evidence” as he subtitled his book. He served in WWI as a junior French officer, remained on the reserve roles during the inter-war period, and then served again as a captain in the French Army in 1938-1940. Additionally, he was a history professor as his primary profession making his thoughts even more enlightening. The book is not a litany of post-conflict young officer complaints, although at times you can feel his emotional exasperation rising off the pages which is understandable after such a holistic national defeat. Instead, Strange Defeat is a compilation of some first-hand examinations of what he saw and experienced, while he also attempted to look at the much bigger operational and strategic picture. Overall, an exceptional book on which an entire college course could be based. Below are the most significant excerpts that are worthy of additional thought.

- “This war has taught me a lot, and one of its greatest lessons has been that there are a great many professional soldiers who will never be fighters, and a whole heap of civilians who have fighting in their blood.” P4. PJK. So true. Just because you’ve worn the uniform doesn’t mean you’re automatically a good soldier.
- An historian is not often bored. He always has the resources of memory, observation, and writing to keep him busy. But the feeling that one is serving no useful purpose in a nation at war is intolerable. P7.
- The one thought in everybody's mind was to get clear of this damned stretch of coast before the enemy could smash through our last defences; to escape captivity by the sole road open to us - the sea. P18. Towards evening we re-embarked at Plymouth, and dropped anchor at dawn off Cherbourg. P21. PJK. I never knew that some French were evacuated from the beaches vic Dunkirk. I’ve read many times about the British evacuating their forces from the mainland continent at this time, but never thought about what happened to the other Allied forces, the French who found themselves pushed back to the same area.
- Old Joffre was wiser. “Whether I was responsible for the winning of the Battle of the Marne,” he said, “I do not know. But of this I feel pretty certain, that, had it been lost, the failure would have been laid at my door.” P25. PJK. The responsibility of command; if your team loses, you are to blame.
- Whatever the deep-seated causes of the disaster may have been, the immediate occasion (I shall attempt to explain later) was the utter incompetence of the High Command. P25.
- In short, we could have played our part without difficulty and operations beautifully planned by our own staff and the enemies, if only they had been in accordance with the well-digested lessons learned at peacetime maneuvers. P49. PJK. Seems to indicate that the French Army of the interwar period did not fund and engage in quality training exercises - a recipe for future disaster.
- They relied on action and on improvisation. We, on the other hand, believed in doing nothing and behaving as we always had behaved. P49.
- Unfortunately, our leaders were not drawn from among those who suffered least from a hardening of the arteries. P50. PJK. In other words, the French leaders were old and set in their ways unable to adapt to a rapidly changing situation.
- Let us, if we like, condemn the strategic blunders which compelled our troops in the Nord Department either to abandon to the enemy, or to jettison on the Flanders beaches, the equipment of three motorized divisions, several regiments of mobile artillery, and all the tanks belonging to one of our armies… If we were short of tanks, aeroplanes, and tractors, it was mainly because we had put our not inexhaustible supplies of money and labor into concrete. P52. PJK. BLUF – the French abandoned lost of critical mechanized equipment , of which they could not spare. And instead of investing in such new equipment in the interwar period, they invested in a static fortification between them and Germany – they did not invest wisely. This is the challenge of the Pentagon; how to invest every dollar wisely.
- There can be no real cooperation without comradeship, and comradeship can be achieved only when there is some degree of daily contact. That holds true of all dealings between men, no matter what their nationalities. P78.
- There is no better protection against a hardening of the mental arteries than adaptable minds and physical keenness. P106. PJK: Pure awesomeness. In other words, to be ready for future battles, one must have mental and physical agility no matter one’s age. Your body cannot be soft, and neither can your mind.
- The worst cases of mental paralysis were the result of that mood of outraged amazement which laid hold of men who were faced by a rhythm of events entirely different from the kind of thing that they had been led to expect. P107.
- “Do anything you like Sir, but for Heaven's sake do something! P109.
- Soldiers have always held up as a fine example old Joffre's habit of, no matter what the circumstances, having a good night's sleep. How much better it would have been if our leaders had taken a leaf out of his book. P112.
- … “It's a terrible thing to have to fight a war in one's own country”, and then hurriedly correcting himself, “not that it really matters where a war is fought. A soldier's first duty is to destroy the enemy wherever found.” P114.
- Is it fair to expect that in a war of rapid movement men will have time to learn the lessons of their initial mistakes? The military authorities of 1914-18 were given a breathing space of four years. We had only a few weeks. P120.
- Besides, we had had before our eyes, ever since the summer of 1939, the practical lessons of the Polish campaign. They were clear, simple, and relevant. For what the Germans did later in the West was precisely what they had done earlier in the East. They made us a present of eight months of inactivity, and those eight months should have been used by us in thinking out afresh the whole strategic problem and then putting through the necessary reforms. We failed to take advantage of this opportunity. P121. PJK: This point is perhaps the biggest lesson of the French failure in 1940. They had a chance to learn about the most modern of battlefield tactics that their biggest threat was utilizing… and they did nothing.
- The soldier is only too conscious of the sacrifice he has been called upon to make. If they turn out to have been useless, that, he feels, is not his responsibility. His leaders, ever fearful of his criticism, encourage him to find scapegoats anywhere rather than in the Army. Thus is born the fatal legend of the ‘stab in the back’ which reactionary movements and military coups d’etat always find so useful. P127. PJK. Never thought about this point that the author makes. It’s almost common sense thus I need to watch for this in future world events.
- Among those who did even a little reading (and they were pretty thin on the ground) I scarcely ever saw one with a book in his hands which might have helped him to a better understanding of the present by shedding on it the light of the past. P146. PJK. I love this line “… shedding on it the light of the past”; I hope to use this at some point in the future!
- I detest Nazism, but… it did put at the head, both of its armed forces and of its government, men who, because their brains were fresh and had not been formed in the routine of schools, were capable of understanding ‘the surprising and the new’. All we had to set against them was a set of bald-pates and youngish dotards. P161. PJK. Interesting assessment of the leaders of both countries in 1940. Perhaps another key reason the French lost.