[...]Evaluation: Ernest May, Strange Victory | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion[...]…

Ajay – bingo. I should have also mentioned G M Fraser’s brilliant war memoir ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’, which is an excellent example of the ‘War is shit, even when you’re winning’ genre.

Seems you don’t know a thing about WW2. That is why you resorted to ad hominem. If i wrote that Italian Military Fascist Government saved Jews when occupied Nizza and resisted German pressure while Vichy Government willingly sent them to the ovens , then you would probably call me Fascist… that is your level.
A caricature level.

Yes, absolutely. “The gap between victory and defeat is often no wider than a sabre’s blade. Win – and the public will forget all about the rotten food, and the shoddy boots, and the ambulances that never came. Lose – and they’ll talk of nothing else.” (Flashman at the Charge.)

As for May, I like the (few) bits I’ve read. Certainly, every campaign produces enough examples of cock-up and incompetence to fill several books: the losers look for them, the victors ignore them. Once in while you get revisionist works pointing out the mistakes of the victors (Dizzy Allen’s _Who Won the Battle of Britain?_ is one such), but generally these don’t sell so well. France was defeated on the strategic level, but owing to the fundamental attribution fallacy, every other aspect of the defeat is often dragged in to the ‘explanation’.

I was in the Marc Bloch room at the Sorbonne last year – there’s a plaque on the wall pointing out that he was ‘Tue par les Allemands’, which is not as Jean Monnet as I’ve come to expect.

In numbers Germany would never won against French alone, worse, allies still had the BEF. But Germans had a functional Command and Control doutrine with integrated close air support. Germans kept moving the French couldn’t catch up. Typical Boyd OODA loop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

But that doesn’t explains everything, French could have resisted much more time, they had weapons, resources but the dysfunctional French society- too pacifist, too nihilist, too stiff or in one word a society in denial to let facts show – made the rest.

I don’t understand why you rate Democracies with overall “questioned their assumptions, criticised superiors, and threw out bad ideas”.European History is made mostly by Dictatorships.