This book analyses British official reactions to the apparent decline of France, politically, socially and economically, in the three years before the outbreak of war in Europe. The book is based on public and private archival sources and on the memoirs and biographies of leading British figures and describes the British Government's efforts to cope with the desperate strategic situation created by its own military weakness and the malaise of the Third Republic, its own potential great power ally in a war with the Axis powers.
Leadership is crucial in every conflict and the willingness to accept responsibility is a vital dimension of leadership. Leadership and Responsibility in the Second World War examines of how well political, diplomatic, and military leaders, particularly in Great Britain, handled the daunting challenge of a worldwide conflagration. It seeks to determine if a connection can be delineated between leadership, responsibility, success, and failure -specifically if any connection can be found between reluctance to shoulder responsibility and failure to produce results. In so doing, the authors challenge widely accepted views on major wartime controversies, such as the role of Neville Chamberlain and his Conservative Party at the outbreak of the war, the reasons why the British failed to reach an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1939, and the motives that drove Claus von Stauffenberg to attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Leadership and Responsibility in the Second World War provokes reflection about questions of character, context, and circumstances in wartime leadership.
This book examines how the fall of France in the Second World War has been recorded by historians and remembered within society. It argues that explanations of the fall have usually revolved around the four main themes of decadence, failure, constraint and contingency. It shows that the dominant explanation claimed for many years that the fall was the inevitable consequence of a society grown rotten in the inter-war period. This view has been largely replaced among academic historians by a consensus which distinguishes between the military defeat and the political demise of the Third Republic. It emphasizes the contingent factors that led to the military defeat. At the same time it seeks to understand the constraints within which France’s policy-makers were required to act and the reasons for their policy-making failures in economics, defence and diplomacy.
On 16 May 1940 an emergency meeting of the French High Command was called at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. The German army had broken through the French lines on the River Meuse at Sedan and elsewhere, only five days after launching their attack. Churchill, who had been telephoned by Prime Minister Reynaud the previous evening to be told that the French were beaten, rushed to Paris to meet the French leaders. The mood in the meeting was one of panic and despair; there was talk of evacuating Paris. Churchill asked Gamelin, the French Commander in Chief, 'Where is the strategic reserve?' 'There is none,' replied Gamelin. This exciting book by Julian Jackson, a leading historian of twentieth-century France, charts the breathtakingly rapid events that led to the defeat and surrender of one of the greatest bastions of the Western Allies, and thus to a dramatic new phase of the Second World War. The search for scapegoats for the most humiliating military disaster in French history began almost at once: were miscalculations by military leaders to blame, or was this an indictment of an entire nation? Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Julian Jackson recreates, in gripping detail, the intense atmosphere and dramatic events of these six weeks in 1940, unravelling the historical evidence to produce a fresh answer to the perennial question of whether the fall of France was inevitable.
Some sixty years after the Far Eastern War ended, this innovative new collection brings together five distinguished UK-based scholars and five from Japan to reappraise their respective country's leadership in the Malaya and Burma campaigns. This leadership is analyzed on various levels, ranging from the grand strategic to operational. The Japanese contributors examine the reasons for their forces, brilliant advances in 1941-42, whereas the British writers have to account for the disastrous defeat, characterized by the poor leadership of senior commanders such as Bennett and Percival. Between 1943 and 1945, the tables were turned dramatically, so the failure of Japanese command decisions then comes under critical scrutiny and the British have to explain how defeat was transformed into victory. Above all, this volume should stimulate interest in different methods and styles of military leadership in view of the contrasting approaches of the British and Japanese in the Second World War.
An insightful account of the devastating impact of the Great War, upon the already fragile British colonial African state of Northern Rhodesia. Deploying extensive archival and rare evidence from surviving African veterans, it investigates African resistance at this time.
This book focuses on some new issues associated with British appeasement policy in the 1930s. It looks particularly at how the artificial split between international history and military history has led to the over-simplification of the factors involved in formulating the appeasement policy. It argues that, contrary to anti-appeasement mythology, Britain was not left defenceless in 1939, having in fact a highly sophisticated aerial defence system for which Baldwin and Chamberlain have received little credit. Conversely, the disaster of 1940 was not a consequence of the sins of the British appeasers, but the result of a seriously misconceived French strategy, and brilliant German planning. The book further argues that Anglo-Czech relations between 1935 and 1938 showed that both the Foreign Office and anti-appeasers had deep rooted anti-Slav prejudices. However, new Czech research shows a more sympathetic understanding of how, and why, Britain adopted the appeasement policy. Important new Soviet sources are also considered, such as notably the Maisky Diaries (2016), for their relevance to British policy.
The four years between the military defeat of France by Nazi Germany and D-Day were vital, dramatic and eventful years in Anglo-French relations. These years saw the first armed clashes between France and Britain since the Napoleonic Wars, including the infamous Royal Navy attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. They also saw a curious relationship developing between Britain and Vichy France. Vichy was at once a hostile power, under German domination, and at the same time a porous regime through which British influence on its politics, attitudes towards the Resistance and the transit of British soldiers and airmen through its territory en route to Spain, could flow quite freely. Britain had an ambivalent attitude towards Vichy - obviously adversarial, but also pragmatic. The history of Vichy France is often viewed as a sideshow in the overall context of World War II. However, Peter Mangold here shows that the Vichy attitude towards the allies, especially the British, was ambivalent and complex. His absorbing and up-to-date account, based on original historical research, highlights the conflicts within the Vichy regime and the ways in which contacts and connections with de Gaulle in London and the British Government were maintained. This exciting and fast-paced book brings to life the major characters in the story - not only Churchill and de Gaulle, but also Macmillan, Petain and Leclerc. In this book, Mangold deftly reassesses the complex international wartime chessboard and, in the process, reveals a little known aspect of the World War II story.
This volume of essays focuses upon Britain's international and imperial role from the mid-Victorian era through until the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Individual chapters by acknowledged authorities in their field deal with a variety of broad-ranging and particular issues, including: 'cold wars' before the Cold War in Anglo-Russian relations; Lord Curzon and the diplomacy of war and peace-making; air-power as an instrument of colonial control; Foreign Office efforts to frame and influence the historical narrative; Winston Churchill's alternative to, and the pursuit of, policies of 'appeasement'; British responses to conflict and regime change in Spain; the Secret Intelligence Service and British diplomacy in East Asia'; Neville Chamberlain and the 'phoney war'; efforts to combat American misperceptions of Britain in wartime; and British-American differences over the future of Italy's colonial possessions. This collection, along with the accompanying volume covering the period after World War 2, is dedicated to the memory of Professor Saki Dockrill.
The Agony of France is written in three parts in a thematic style to enable easy referencing both for the student of history and the general reader. The first part deals with the Defeat of France in 1940, examining scholarship over the last seventy years in order to extrapolate the major factors. The second part explores Vichy France, the political Collaboration, and the various shades of collaborationism from the criminal and dedicated to that of sheer survival. This part looks at the problems of a modern Western democratic society suffering under a military occupation, the role of the French Church during this period, and the appalling circumstances surrounding anti-Semitism. The third part explores the nature of French resistance, the role of de Gaulle, and finishes with the postwar recriminations and trials. Unlike many Anglo-Saxon histories, this book adopts a more sympathetic attitude towards the French plight, and examines the nature of de Gaulle’s myth-building that France liberated itself. The book demonstrates that historical mythology is part of every country’s history when seeking its own redemption from the past. It will be of use to the student of history, as well as a wider readership interested in the circumstances surrounding Vichy rule in France.
