To Lose a Battle: France 1940

To Lose a Battle: France 1940 is the ultimate guide of Alistair Horne’s trilogy, which incorporates The Fall of Paris and The Value of Glory and tells the story of the nice crises of the rivalry between France and Germany. In 1940 Hitler despatched his troops to execute the Fall of France. A six-week battle with lightning ‘blitzkrieg’ warfare and mixed operations methods, the offensive ended the Phony Struggle and despatched the French forces reeling as their authorities fled from occupied Paris. For the Axis, it was a dramatic victory. However how was this spectacular end result attainable? In To Lose a Battle Alistair Horne tells the day-by-day, moment-by-moment story of the battle, sifted from the huge Nazi archives and the fragmentary data of the overwhelmed Allies. Utilizing eye-witness accounts of battle operations and private memoirs of main figures on each side, this guide steps far past the confines of navy accounts to type a serious contribution to our understanding of this necessary interval in European historical past. ‘Alistair Horne actually brings house the pathos and human folly of battle, and he writes brilliantly’

  The Occasions ‘Horne follows his line unfalteringly. All the small print are there: the small, fleeting triumphs, the better disasters, the bravery, the cowardice, the stupidity and the intelligence … that make battle so fascinating and so horrible’

  Economist ‘Horne completes his masterly trilogy … the definitive account of some of the environment friendly and astonishing campaigns of all time’

  The Occasions Literary Complement One in all Britain’s best historians, Sir Alistair Horne, CBE, is the writer of a trilogy on the rivalry between France and Germany, The Value of Glory, The Fall of Paris and To Lose a Battle, in addition to a two-volume lifetime of Harold Macmillan.