The Continent Falls: Poland, Norway, and the Six Weeks That Broke France, 1939-1940

The French had more tanks than the Germans. And better ones. Six weeks later their army had ceased to exist.

In May 1940 the French army was held to be the best in the world. With its British ally it fielded roughly 3,400 tanks against some 2,400 German machines, and the best armour on the field was French - plating and guns the standard German anti-tank weapon could not defeat at fighting ranges. The force that destroyed it was, in the main, a marching army: ten panzer divisions in a force of about 135, the rest moving on foot behind more than half a million horses.

There was no blitzkrieg. The word barely appears in German military writing of the period; it was coined by the English-language press and adopted by German propaganda after the victory it was invented to explain. Even the winning plan was not the German plan - the real one crash-landed in a Belgian field in January 1940, and the gamble that replaced it was one the German high command spent the decisive week trying to stop. France was beaten by a command system that took forty-eight hours to decide what its opponent decided in an afternoon, by armour scattered along the front mostly without radios, and by a strategic reserve spent on the first morning. Asked where that reserve was, the French commander-in-chief answered that there was none.

Drawing on the German army's own war diaries - the documents of men who expected their plan to fail - this book follows the war from the Polish river line where the German advance was stopped for a week, through the eight strange months in which the only fighting was at sea, to Norway, the lost campaign that made Churchill Prime Minister on the morning the Germans attacked in the west, and then day by day through the six weeks themselves.

What you'll learn:

• Why the army with more and better tanks lost in six weeks - and why speed of decision, not machinery, was the real battlefield
• How a courier's crash landing forced the plan that won, over the German General Staff's own objections
• How a hundred miles of German armour sat in the Ardennes on a handful of roads for days - and was never attacked from the air
• Why Dunkirk was a German decision three days before it was a British achievement
• How losing the Norway campaign brought down one British government and made Churchill Prime Minister - on 10 May 1940 itself
• How the blitzkrieg legend was manufactured after the fact, by both sides, each for its own reasons

This book is for you if:

• You want the 1940 campaign as the records show it, not as the propaganda of that summer framed it
• You suspect "the French didn't fight" can't survive as many as ninety thousand French dead in six weeks - and you're right
• You care how institutions fail: how an army with no slack shattered faster than anyone believed possible
• You prefer named sources, honest ranges for contested figures, and no reconstructed dialogue

The Continent Falls is Volume 2 of The Second World War Chronicles, a ten-volume history of the war. It follows The Peace That Wasn't: Europe from Versailles to Poland, 1919-1939 and stands alone - a short recap covers everything a new reader needs. Get your copy and read the six weeks the legend was built to hide.