Suchergebnisse

Little attention has been paid to the murky, ultra-business of gathering intelligence among and forming estimates about friendly powers, and friendly or allied military forces. How rarely have scholars troubled to discover when states entered into coalitions or alliances mainly and explicitly because their intelligence evaluation of the potential partner concluded that making the alliance was, from the originator's national security interest, the best game in town. The twentieth century has been chosen to enhance the coherence of and connections between, the subject matter of this under-explor

The historiography of the German defeat of France and her allies in 1940 has focused mainly on the first fortnight of what was a six-week campaign. Most writers have concentrated on either the German Wehrmacht's breakthrough of the thin French defences on the River Meuse, on the evacuation of over 330 000 Allied troops from Dunkirk and the nearby beaches, or on the political level of an unravelling Anglo-French partnership. The continuing fight of the French armies, with some assistance from the British and others in the last month of operations ( c.25 May to 25 June), has been almost invisible, reduced to the status of an epilogue. This article re-examines questions of French command and control, force strength, and combat performance, focusing particularly on a series of case studies of French divisions that resisted the second-stage German offensive, Fall Rot (Case Red) from 5 June 1940. The evidence deployed offers a considerably more complex — and for the French, more creditable — picture of how resistance was reorganized after the shocks of May 1940. The German victory was not some kind of stroll in rural France, but came about only after very hard fighting that has been lost from sight in most evocations of the `fall of France'.

Focusing on the political, diplomatic and strategic context in which the French note of the consequences from Germany's renunciation of the Locarno Treaty (Ministry of Defense, April 1936) was written, the author examines two levels; 1) rearmament policy and France's strategic posture; 2) France's diplomatic options and policy recommendations. Set within the long-term context of French attempts to resurrect the military alliance with Britain, the article also studies the machinery in place for the making of strategic policy in France in 1936. In his conclusion, the author mentions that the French military organization was far stronger in analyzing hypotheses than it was at building bureaucratic and political coalitions to accurately respond to identified threats. A tendency characteristic of French policy circles to review the options, reviewing them again, but settle and act upon none. Instead of putting the blame on one sole person (Gamelin), the author prefers to call it cultural and characteristic of France's entire inter-war defense and intelligence community. O. van Zijl