Clark does an excellent job of describing the first critical five days of the campaign. paints a very different look at the German victory. “In this new volume, acclaimed historian Lloyd Clark. Blitzkrieg emphasizes operational and tactical evidence to persuasively argue that the 1940 campaign was decided not by tanks and dive-bombers alone, but through an updating of German military experience infused, but not dominated, by technology.” -Dennis Showalter, World War II Magazine Lloyd Clark–a prolific military historian and a master of sources–makes a strong case for an alternative perspective. “ Blitzkrieg is a particularly successful synergy of correspondence and interviews, archival material from four countries, and the massive body of published literature.
More than earlier studies, like Alistair Horne’s To Lose a Battle, Clark focuses not on generals and premiers but on the voices and experiences of the soldiers involved.” -Thomas E. provides a good battlefield view of a crucial phase of World War II. Their surprise victory proved the apex of their achievement far from being undefeatable, Clark argues, the campaign revealed Germany and its armed forces to be highly vulnerable, lessons not learned by Hitler as he began to plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union. And while speed was essential, 90 percent of Germany’s ground forces were still reliant on horses, bicycles, and their own feet for transportation.
The Germans recognized that success depended not only on surprise but on avoiding being drawn into a protracted struggle for which they were not prepared. The tactic was not really new, and far from being a foregone victory, this narrative of the campaign shows that Hitler’s invasion was incredibly risky and could easily have failed had the Allies been even slightly less inept or the Germans less fortunate. It altered the balance of power in Europe in one stroke and convinced the entire world that the Nazi war machine was unstoppable.īut as Lloyd Clark, a leading British military historian and academic, argues in Blitzkrieg, much of our understanding of this victory, and blitzkrieg itself, is based on myth. The fall of France was a stunning victory. In the spring of 1940, Nazi Germany launched a military offensive in France and the Low Countries that married superb intelligence, the latest military thinking, and new technology to achieve in just six weeks what their fathers had failed to achieve in all four years of the First World War.
0 kommentar(er)
