Defeat and Division: France at War 1939-1942

Abstract

Here are two thought-provoking books to savour and keep for reference. Emeritus Professor Douglas Porch’s Defeat and Division: France at War 1939-1942 is a thorough, engrossing and authoritative study of France’s armed forces, set in their political and social context. It is part narrative, part extended analytical dialogue with the existing literature. He offers his readers plenty of trenchant observations. After a short introduction, this first of two volumes begins with a succinct survey of French defence policy in the inter-war period (Chapter 1). Porch believes that while French governments of the 1930s—including the Popular Front—spent large amounts of money on modernizing their armed forces, rearmament was patchy. Production quotas could not be met, because industry was too old-fashioned and mismanaged. Rearmament was in the hands of ‘a multifaceted, Balkanized military organization, whose leadership lacked a coherent defence vision for inter-arm and inter-service cooperation.’ In seeking to determine how ready France’s armed forces were to face the German onslaught in May 1940 (Chapter 2), Porch concludes that the Third Republic failed to ‘socialize’ its soldiers and civilians for the coming struggle, partly due to ‘faulty strategic analysis [and] wishful thinking’. Furthermore, ‘given the negative reports on the state of readiness of French and British troops, and bottlenecks in the French armaments industry due to a lack of centralized planning, the prognosis was not good’.