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 STRANGE DEFEAT

The medievalist Marc Leopold Benjamin Bloch (1866-1944), one of France's greatest historians,
stemmed from a family with its own long history of close identification with the French state. His
great grandfather served in the revolutionary army in 1793, his father in the Franco-Prussian War
of 1870, and Bloch himself in the French infantry in World War I, and again in 1940. Although
Bloch achieved his reputation with studies of institutions from bygone centuries (notably medi-
eval monarchy and feudalism), he was too ardent a French patriot and too dedicated a historian
to let the collapse of his beloved France around him pass by without comment. His manuscript,
based on his own military experience and written under difficult circumstances, was published
posthumously as Strange Defeat, an excerpt from which follows. After the fall of France, Bloch,
who was Jewish, tried unsuccessfully to get his family to safety in the United States, and joined
the Resistance. Bloch was captured by the Nazis on June 16, 1944, and along with fellow resis-
tance members was interrogated, tortured, and executed. In this passage, Bloch exposes the weak-
nesses within the French army that left it unable to duplicate its stout defense of France from 1914
to 1918. In 1940, in contrast, French forces crumbled with astonishing speed, suffering a truly
Hstrange defeatH and ushering in a partial German occupation of the country.

W e have just suffered such a defeat as no one

would have believed possible. On whom or
on what should the blame be laid? On the French
system of parliamentary government, say our gener-
als; on the rank and file of the fighting services, on
the English, on the fifth column-in short, on any
and everybody except themselves .... Whatever the
deep-seated causes of the disaster may have been, the
immediate occasion ... was the utter incompetence of
the High Command... .
Those who teach history should be continually
concerned with the task of seeking the solid and the
concrete behind the empty and the abstract. In other
words, it is on men rather than functions that they
should concentrate their attention. The errors of the
High Command were, fundamentally, the errors of a
specific group of human beings ....
Misunderstandings are bound to occur at times in
all armies, no matter what their nationality, between
administrative and executive services. But it is not
always the former who are responsible. Problems
look different according to the angle from which
they are observed, and those whose functions are not
the same can hardly be expected to see eye to eye.
The 'thinking oneself into the other fellow's shoes'
is always a very difficult form of mental gymnastics,
and it is not confined to men who occupy a special
position in the military hierarchy. But it would be
foolish to deny that staff officers as a whole have
been a good deal to blame in this matter of sympa-
thetic understanding. Their failure, when they did
fail, was ... due ... not so much to contempt as to lack
of imagination and a tendency to take refuge from
the urgency of fact in abstractions. In the days before
the real fighting had begun, we spent a lot of time
working out troop movements on the map. But how
many of us ever adequately realized what problems
of detail, what frictions of psychology, are involved
when, in lhe depth of winter, men are asked lo leave
billets in which they have settled down and move
somewhere else into what are, only too often, bad
and unsuitable quarters? But that is not the worst of
the staff's shortcomings. More than once during the
First World War it was brought home to me how inef-
ficient the High Command could be when it came
to calculating accurately the length of time needed
for an order, once issued from H.Q., to pass through
its various recipients until finally it reached the for-
mations who would have to act upon it. No amount
of 'instructions' will ever succeed in convincing
the unimaginative that a runner's pace is slow, and
that he will often go wrong when roads and tracks
have been turned into a sea of mud .... I am not at
all sure that the conduct of the Second World War
was entirely free from similar mistakes. The blame
for them falls, not on individuals, but on the whole
method of training in vogue at the time ....
What drove our armies to disaster was the cumu-
lative effect of a great number of different mistakes.
One glaring characteristic is, however, common to all
of them. Our leaders, or those who acted for them,
were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war. In
other words, the German triumph was, essentially, a
triumph of intellect-and it is that which makes it so
peculiarly serious.
Let me be more precise. One fact, but that one of
radical importance, differentiates our contemporary
civilization from any of those that preceded it. Since
the beginning of the twentieth century the whole idea
of distance has changed. This alteration in its spatial
values came about in little more than a single genera-
tion. But rapid though it was, it has become so much
a part of our mental habit that we are inclined to for-
get how revolutionary its effects have been .... The
·privations resulting from war and defeat have had
upon Europe the repercussions of a Time Machine
in reverse. We have been plunged suddenly into a
way of life which, only quite recently, we thought
had disappeared for ever.... Now, when bicycles are
- the quickest means of transport available, and heavy
loads have to be carried in donkey-wagons, every
trip to market becomes a major expedition. We have
gone back thirty or forty years! The ruling idea of
the Germans in the conduct of this war was speed.
We, on the other hand, did our Lhinking in terms of
yesterday or the day before. Worse still: faced by the
undisputed evidence of Germany's new tactics, we
ignored, or wholly failed to understand, the quick-
ened rhythm of the times .... We interpreted war in
terms of assagai [spears of African Zulu tribesmen)
versus rifle made familiar to us by long years of colo-
nial expansion. But this time it was we who were cast
for the role of the savage! ...
The truth of the matter was that the Germans
advanced a great deal faster than they should have
done according to the old rules of the game. And
so it went on. 'Niggling' was how I heard our strate-
gic methods described by a colleague of mine, one
of those younger men who did at least know how to
think in contemporary terms, and suffered under
a perpetual sense of frustration because of the way
in which they were consistently ignored by their
superiors .... It was perfectly obvious tllat as soon
as the Army of the Meuse had been broken, and the
enemy began to show signs of becoming active on
our front, the only hope of re-establishing the general
situation lay in our 'disengaging,' and establishing a
new defensive line sufficiently far back to ensure that
it would not be overrun before it had been properly
organized. But nothing of the sort was done. Instead,
small groups of reinforcements were continually
dribbled into every breach as it occurred, with the
inevitable result that they were cut to pieces ....
There can be no doubt that our whole plan of
campaign was wrong. What should have been the
reply ofthe Anglo-French forces to the German inva-
sion of B~lgium? The problem had been discussed all
through the winter by the various 'G' staffs. 1Wo solu-
tions, among many others, found particular favor.
One school of thought maintained that we ought
to stand on a line in Belgium based at its northern
end .... The other school favoured immediate offen-
sive action across the frontier. ... As everybody knows,
it was this second plan that ultimately carried the
day, and it seems fairly certain that General Billcrtte's
personal influence was decisive in imposing this
decision.
Not only were the German tanks a great deal more
numerous than Intelligence had led us to suppose;
some of them were quite unexpectedly powerful.
48 ·THE WORLD IN PLAMES
The extent to which our Air Force was outclassed was
truly appalling ....
There can be no doubt whatever that it was the
collapse of the Armies of the Meuse and at Sedan
which, by uncovering the rear of the troops engaged
in Belgium, led to the complete failure of the entire
scheme ....
It can be seen from what I have said that the war
was a constant succession of surprises. The effect of
this on morale seems to have been very serious. And
here I must touch on a delicate subject. I have no
right to do more than record impressions which are
those only of a looker-on. But there are some things
that must be said, even at the risk of hurting a good
many feelings. Men are so made that they will face
expected dangers in expected places a great deal more
easily than the sudden appearance of deadly peril
from behind a turn in the road whi~h they have been
led to suppose is perfectly safe. Years ago, shortly
after the Battle of the Marne [World War I French
victory in September 1914 that halted the German
drive toward Paris), I saw men who the day before
had gone into the li.ne under murderous fire with-
out turning a hair, run like rabbits just because three
shells fell quite harmlessly on a road where they had
piled arms in order to furnish a water-fatigue. 'We
cleared out because the Germans came.' Again and
again I heard that said in the course of last May and
June. Analysed, the words mean no more than this:
'Because the Germans turned up where we didn't
expect them and where we had never been told we
ought to expect them.' Consequently, certain break-
downs, which cannot, l fear, be denied, occurred
mainly because men had been trained to use their
brains too slowly. Our soldiers were defeated and, to
some extent, let themselves be too easily defeated,
principally because their minds functioned far too
sluggishly.
Not only did we meet the enemy too often in
unexpected places, but for the most part, especially,
and with increasing frequency, in a way which nei-
ther the High Command nor, as a result, the rank
and file had anticipated. We should have been per-
fectly prepared to spend whole days potting at one
another from entrenched positions, even if the lines
had been only a few yards apart as they were in the
Argonne during the last war. It would have seemed
to us the most natural thing in the world to carry
out raids on occupied saps. It would have been
well within our capacity to stand firm in face of an
assault through a curtain of wire more or less cut by
'Minenwerfer' [mine-thrower], or to have gone over
the top courageously in an attempt to rush a posi-
tion that had already been flattened-though, as a
rule, not very completely-by artillery fire. In short,
we could have played our part without difficulty in
operations beautifully planned by our own staff and
the enemy's, if only they had been in accordance
with the well-digested lessons learned at peace-time
manoeuvres. It was much more terrifying to find
ourselves suddenly at grips with a section of tanks
in open country. The Germans took no account of
roads. They were everywhere. They felt their way
forward, stopping whenever they ran up against
serious resistance. Where, however, the resistance
was not serious and they could find a 'soft spot,'
they drove ahead, exploiting their gains, and using
them as a basis from which to develop the appro-
priate tactical movement or, rather, as it seemed, to
take their choice of a number of alternative possi-
bilities already envisaged in accordance with that
methodical opportunism which was so character-
istic of Hitler's methods. They relied on action and
on improvisation. We, on the other hand, believed
in doing nothing and in behaving as we always had
behaved.