MEMORIAL DE LA BATAILLE DE FRANCE T1

May-June 1940: An ill-fated battle lost in forty-five days. Everything has been said, or almost, about these forty-five days, be it in wide-ranging books covering part or all of the period, or monographs talking about specific aspects of the battle. Never has a book however tackled all the fighting on a day-to-day basis, sector by sector from Holland to Menton, with such precision. The most emblematic of the forty-five days’ fighting is described, naturally, but also the other, lesser known but far more numerous days which have been forgotten or just com- pletely ignored.

This was the quotidian tragedy of men, completely overwhelmed as they were by the pace of the battle, pushed about all over the place by their command structure, many of them paying the ultimate price, that these volumes propose to share. A different vision and a totally unpublished view of a battle lost. A memorial of the Battle of France. For more than forty years, Jean-Yves Mary has been interested in the May-June 1940 events. At first, the Maginot Line, of which he is one of the specialists, thanks to several books which have become reference works, and to the setting up of the Musée de la Ligne Maginot and intermediary posts on the site at Fermont started in 1978. By meti- culously studying the various breakthroughs the Germans made during those tragic two months, these studies have given rise to the publication of several very documented books about the Panzerdivisionens’ dazzling progression. Compiling the information gathered over the years has prompted the author to take on this ambitious project...