Archive for October, 1995

Historians now explain the collapse of French military resistance in June 1940 in ways that make defeat seem inevitable. But at the time, the fall of France was, in the words of the British foreign secretary, “so unbelievable as to be almost surely unreal”. Thoughtful people everywhere recognized that the world had suddenly changed; this was either the beginning of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich, or–if Germany was defeated–the end of the European age.The fate of France was probably determined in 1936 when Belgium, France’s vital ally in the West, stuck its head in the sand and declared neutrality. Thereafter, the French [...]