On May 1, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin held his own parade in Moscow’s Red Square for the Communist May Day celebration, while in June the Führer displayed his growing might once more to the visiting Yugoslavian regent, Prince Paul, his future ally.
On April 20, the largest ever was held in Berlin to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday, complete with the paratroopers, wheeled artillery, tanks, half-tracks for motorized infantry, and overhead Luftwaffe fly-bys that would mark the coming campaigns and revolutionize warfare forever. (Aug.The year 1939 was one of massive military parades across Europe. This well-written book, suitable for general readers as well as specialists, offers no easy counterfactuals, no check lists for future guidance, but it illustrates the importance of common sense-its presence and its absence.
Instead, they sacrificed thought to habit, and put unexpected events into preconceived models. But since 1933, May argues, generals and politicians on both sides of the English Channel had failed to read German intentions and German decision-making processes. More than enough evidence was available to turn French and British eyes to the Ardennes in the spring of 1940. May argues convincingly that a major factor in the offensive's reorientation was the German army intelligence service's justified conviction that the French and British high commands would respond slowly to a large-scale surprise. Instead, the Germans famously developed an alternate design, based on a thrust through the Ardennes. After Poland had fallen, Hitler demanded an immediate attack on France, and his generals balked an ""encounter battle"" in central Belgium was what the French expected and were prepared to fight. In the late '30s, the Wehrmacht was still a network of improvisations, by no means the formidable instrument of later mythmaking. In this provocative analysis, May argues that the French and British defeat in 1940 was a consequence of neither moral decay nor military ineffectiveness. The book's title inverts Marc Bloch's classic Strange Defeat because, for Harvard historian May, it is the German victory that requires explanation.
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