I am writing this review on June 16, 2022, seventy-eight years to the day since Marc Bloch was executed by the Nazis following his capture and torture while serving in the French Resistance. He was twenty days shy of his fifty-eighth birthday. By trade Bloch was a scholar, a distinguished medieval historian who was a student of the great Henri Pirenne. Bloch had fought in World War I and remained on the reserve officer list although by 1939 his age certainly qualified him for an exemption from military call-up. Bloch declined that option and returned to active service at the outbreak of hostilities between France and Germany after the German invasion of Poland. At the age of 53 he left behind a wife and six children to answer the call to service.

The catastrophic collapse of the French army and the capitulation after barely one month of actual fighting inspired Bloch to write this testament to his experiences and the causes of France's humiliating defeat at the hands of his country's most bitter foe. I pulled this book from my shelves immediately after finishing Michael Dobbs' fictional account of the event of May-June 1940. The first chapter of Bloch's book, Presentation of the Witness, echoes the account described in Dobbs' fiction.

The second chapter, One of the Vanquished Gives Evidence, describes the "hardening of the arteries" within the French military establishment. There are the usual criticisms of a peace time military: preparing for war by assuming that a new war will be a repeat of the last war, bureaucratization of the officer ranks featuring a multitude of processes requiring a mountain of paperwork to accomplish any task, promotion based on seniority so that any new thinking or youthful initiative was suppressed, a serious failure in military training to prepare commanders for actual fighting. I found his most penetrating argument to be the failure of the French military leadership to take into account the new forms of mechanized and aerial warfare that rendered geographical distances either irrelevant or easier to cover more quickly than was the case from 1914-1918. The Germans, having been the losing team in 1918, made adjustments just as a coaching staff makes adjustments in personnel, strategy or tactics following poor results in an athletic contest. Bloch was not an advocate for the always take the offensive strategy, nor did he object to the need to fall back after the army was pushed out of Flanders. He argues, in fact, that the retreats were not only badly organized, but that they were retreating to locations too close to the front so that by the time they reached the designated place on the map, events, i.e,. the Germans had already overtaken them. The commanders needed to retreat far enough back so that a new line of defense could actually be organized.

In addition to all of the above criticisms Bloch is unsparing in his criticism of French army intelligence, staff officers and what we would today call logistics and communications. He argues that the kinds of incompetence and unfitness he witnessed were never punished and no one was ever transferred out or demoted. That said, I suspect that the French army wasn't much worse off in this regard than the British or American armies in 1939. Neither were ready for a fighting war and it took some time to get them up to speed. The French did not have the advantages of time and distance that even the British enjoyed, although both the French and British squandered precious time during the eight months of "Phony War" between September, 1939 and May, 1940.

In his third and final chapter, A Frenchman Examines His Conscience, Bloch takes on the most difficult task, attempting a sociological analysis for the dry rot that infected the French as a whole and accounts for their failure as a nation to prepare for and execute an effective resistance to an existential foe whose triumph represented an overthrow of all France claimed to represent and the end of European civilization. Again, Bloch is unsparing in his analysis. There are the usual suspects, mainly the French Right and the military leaders who flipped from being the avatars of hatred for the Hun to settling down nicely under the occupation and the Vichy regime. But there's more to it than that. You could make a very good case that the same elements existed in Britain and were ready to cut a deal with Hitler to preserve some semblance of British independence and its Empire in the wake of France's collapse. There were after all prominent appeasers in both countries' political establishments. And appeasement was very popular with the majority of the ordinary citizens in both countries. I would argue that what France lacked was a leader of the stuff of Churchill who summoned his people to resist the invader to the very end, even if that end meant the end of Great Britain. Also and obviously France was on the wrong side of the English Channel.

Bloch is in some ways most bitter against the bourgeoisie, defined by him as that class that makes a living without the use of its hands. He blames their avarice, narrowness of outlook, and predilection to look for ways to avoid their responsibilities to defend the nation. He is critical of the political Left as well, although as a moderate man of the Left, for some reason he looks back regretfully on the failure of the Popular Front for which he lays blame on the middle class for its failure to give it a chance to succeed. That said he calls out the Communists for their program of undermining the nation's preparedness unless and until it served the policy of the Soviet Union.

"Those who seek, at any costs, to explain away such mental acrobatics could not, probably, do better than point out that the views held by those at the other end of the political scale were no less illogical. To refuse military credits, and then, twenty-fours later, to call for 'guns for Spain'; to preach anti-patriotism, and then, in twelve months' time, to demand the formation of a 'French Front'; to shirk the obligations of military service, and to invite the masses to do the same-these inelegant zigzags mark only too clearly the curve traced before our wondering eyes by those who danced upon the tight-rope of Communism."

One of the ironies of this work is the unwavering spiritual and moral commitment to France and his belief in the French people while simultaneously criticizing the military, the politicians of all parties, the industrialists, the middle class, the factory workers, the secondary schools, the universities and the press. There is no doubt that France in 1940 was badly divided country lacking completely in a national esprit de corps. But in Marc Bloch, a Frenchman of Jewish extraction whose ancestors fought for France in 1793 and 1870, and who served in both world wars, and joined the resistance after surrender, France had a son who loved it unstintingly and serves as an outstanding example of the virtues of manliness that deserves gratitude and emulation by the generations whose freedom he fought for, ( )

This is a fascinating testimony about the factors in the French army, government and society in general that, according the author, accounted for the French collapse and premature (in Bloch's opinion) surrender in the face of the German invasion in 1940. Marc Bloch was a veteran of the trenches of World War I and by trade a highly respected historian, so analysis of the type he undertook here was his stock and trade. When war was declared in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, Bloch returned to the military as a reservist, and was set to work as an officer working out the tracking and distribution of petrol supplies for the French First Army. As such, Bloch was in a position to see first-hand the hardening of the arteries that had taken place within the French military, both during the long period of inactivity known as the Phony War and then during the tragically short period of actual fighting once Germany invaded. Bloch describes, here, the scene on the beaches during the Dunkirk escape. Among those taken off the beaches, Bloch spent a short time in England, and then returned to what he thought would be the battle to defend his country. Attempts to assemble French troops to create a counter-attack came to an end with the capitulation by the French government. Bloch describes his thought process at the time, feeling that the honorable thing to do would be to allow himself to be captured as a soldier. But he had five children, and didn't think abandoning them for the duration of the war for the sake of symbolism was the right thing to do. Do to the fact that he was by this point a middle-aged man, he was able to simply put on civilian clothes and disappear in plain sight without drawing suspicion from the occupying forces who were soon everywhere. Eventually, he made his way home. Living in Vichy France and trying to return to his academic work, Bloch (according to the wikipedia page on his life) found his activities greatly curtailed by the Vichy regulations that severely limited where and how Jews could find work. When the German army rolled into Vichy in 1942, Bloch joined the underground. He was caught and executed in 1944.

This book was written in 1940, almost immediately after the French surrender. There are a few footnotes that Bloch entered to amend or add to the information presented in around 1942. Bloch discusses a great many reasons that came together to create a France wholly incapable of fighting off the German Army. A top-heavy military structure with too much jealousy and too little cooperation between branches, a complacency born of a wholesale refusal to take a clear look at the way warfare had changed since the first world war, the widespread loathing for and distrust of the working classes and the democratic process in general among the country's governing and industrial classes, to the extent, Bloch says, that some even thought that not only was it inevitable that Germany's autocratic system would defeat France, but that perhaps it was preferable that they would. In the field, according to Bloch (and he certainly wasn't alone), the French Army was done in by a lack of adequate training and equipment, poor leadership in crucial posts, and the dismay and sometimes even panic derived from the surprising speed and fury of the German attack (which Bloch takes pain to point out should not have been surprising). Bloch describes commanders who ordered withdrawals from perfectly defensible positions without orders and before the German army had even arrived because they couldn't imagine their troops (or themselves) standing up to such a lightning attack. In addition, the refusal to look clearly at how war was evolving added to the French leaderships' refusal to bulk up their supply of tanks and aircraft. (Elihu Root, in his The Secret History of the War, reviewed above, finds even more sinister sources for these withdrawals, claiming that they were ordered by traitors within the French high command. Root has a similar theory about the refusal to modernize the French Army. Bloch doesn't quite go that far, but in 1940, writing from home, he wouldn't have the evidence Root might have had for that surmise.)

Bloch takes the reader on a tour of French pre-war society, taking industrialists, labor leaders and academics (including himself) to task for the ways in which the nation fell short and laid themselves open to defeat. Bloch goes on to provide a more global context with a final section acute and highly readable political philosophy. The combination of Bloch's status as an expert historian and as a first-hand participant in so many of these events, plus Bloch's lucid and enjoyable writing style, makes this an entirely fascinating testimony and analysis of a fascinating if tragic historical saga. ( )

Marc Bloch made his reputation in Medieval history, but as a good Frenchman he re-enlisted for his second world war, in 1939. On the spot for the astonishing collapse of the French army in 1940, he whiled away his time in a prison camp by penning this memoire of the campaign. Involved in resistance activities, he was shot by the Germans in 1944. The book deals with a number of the grievances felt by the French after the fighting in the spring of 1940, and explores the reasons that both parties, the French and the English, may have felt after the spring campaign, and the Dunkirk evacuation. Gerard Hopkins' translation has given us a book well worth reading, a worthy contribution to the literature of WWII. I reread this book in 2013, and it held up well. ( )