Strange Defeat
What we can learn from those who lost
Some time ago, I saw a note on Substack that recommend reading this book called ‘Strange Defeat’. This short book is about the German invasion of Belgium and France in 1940. It was written soon after these events by a French officer called Marc Bloch. After the defeat, Bloch joined the French resistance and did not survive to see the end of the war. Marc Bloch was not some grand General that was invested in seeing only specific narratives being told about the war. He was (just) a logistical officer whom also temporarily functioned as a liaison with the British forces. Marc Bloch was a historian by trade, and it is maybe for this reason that his views come across more like that of a spectator, than that of a participant. That is what makes this book a real gem. It is full of anecdotes and lively assessments of the culture and mindset of the French, and to a lesser extent the British forces. It tells the story of an army and its officers that are blind to the war to come, and utterly surprised when it actually arrives, and unable to adapt to a war that does not resemble the war of 1914-1918.
If I were to read this book some 10 years ago, while I was being deployed to Africa, it would not have made such a lasting impression on me. It certainly does now. Reading this book, while keeping the current news and forecasts in the back of your mind, the same words have a different meaning. There are many parallels to our current situation, the only difference is, we have not yet been attacked (directly) yet.
To give you an example, I would have read the following sentences with a completely different state of mind years ago. Not now, when some argue that Russia is not such a threat at all. This is what Marc Bloch wrote in 1940, just after being defeated by the Germans: “They whispered – I have heard them – that Hitler was not nearly so black as he was painted; that the nation would save itself a great deal of suffering by opening its gates to the enemy, instead of setting itself to oppose invasion by force of arms. How, I wonder, do these noble apostles feel to-day in that occupied zone which lies in starvation beneath the jack-boot of tyranny?”[1] Reading lines like these just give me a knot in the stomach.
Military adaptations
Let us look closer at the more distinctly military lessons that we can learn. Currently, all European armies are preparing themselves for a possible new war on our continent. Are we ready? What is the current state of affairs of our armed forces? There is much we can learn from the war in Ukraine, but then again, our possible future battle against the Russians might be different. Marc Bloch explains that the French were well aware of the German tactics. Like us now, they saw how Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, was being seized by the Germans. They saw how the Germans, with help of the Russians, invaded Poland while using new tactics and weapons. The Allies could have anticipated these tactics and speed of the German army if they had paid attention and most importantly, if they were willing to listen. Bloch describes how the culture and attitude in the French High Command was simply ignoring these observations. The information was there, but the willingness to adapt was not.
“Our leaders, or those who acted for them, were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war. In other words, the German triumph was, essentially, a triumph of intellect, and it is that which makes it so peculiarly serious.”[2]
The most important key takeaway of this book is for me the following: the conceptual and moral components of military force matter more than the physical component, which is mainly about hardware and personnel. You have to break the will to fight, instead of turning the war into a war of attrition. The Allies had more troops, tanks and were in the defence, which would further increase their advantage (when attacking, you on average need a 3:1 ratio).
Hundreds of book have been written about the German success and their ‘Blitzkrieg’. But instead of asking why the Germans were successful, you can also ask why the allies failed. In the words of Marc Bloch: “I saw men who had the day before gone into the line under murderous fire without turning a hair, run like rabbits just because three shells fell quite harmlessly on a road where they had piled arms in order to furnish a water-fatigue. In the course of May and June, again and again I heard ‘we cleared out because the Germans came’ ”. Bloch explanation for this change in behaviour is the following: “The Germans turned up where we didn’t expect them and where we had never been told we ought to expect them. Consequently, certain breakdowns, which cannot, I fear, be denied, occurred mainly because men had been trained to use their brains to slowly. Our soldiers were defeated and, to some extent, let themselves be too easily defeated, principally because their minds functioned far too sluggishly.”[3] For someone like me with a deep interest in how the human brain works, these lines of Bloch almost sound prophetic.
People don’t like uncertainty or unpredictability. It makes you feel continuously outmanoeuvred and most of all, helpless. You break moral not by having superior numbers, tales of Thermopylea demonstrate this is false, but by becoming unpredictable and intangible. Not seeing your enemy come for you is more frightening.
In another example, Bloch explains what the effects are on front-line troops and staff-officers and support in the rear-area. “The worst cases of mental paralysis were the result of that mood of outraged amazement which laid hold of men who were faced by a rhythm of events entirely different form the kind of thing that they had been led to expect. From this form of psychological shock the officers in frontline formations were certainly not immune, but its ravages were most obvious farther back.”[4] Bloch has much to say about the differences between troops of the line and staff-officers, much of which is still (unfortunately) applicable today. The point here is, if we want to prepare our troops mentally for war, we should not only focus on the troops doing the fighting. Those in the rear will possibly have more difficulty in adapting than those in at the frontline. This may even be more applicable than ever, when you consider that the war in Ukraine shows us that there is practically no safe rear area anymore due to the increased range of weapons and transparency of the battlefield.
Bloch also has another interesting take on the French inability to adapt. In contrary to the first world war, the allies now only had weeks to adapt. As I explained earlier in a post, time is the most valuable military resource. When you prohibit your opponent to learn and adapt, then your relative advantage of using new tactics can pay off, especially when this relies on surprise. Bloch explains that it is difficult to adapt in advance to a new war: “But for most men the amount of intellectual effort involved in adapting themselves, in advance, to a given situation, is probably far greater and more difficult an achievement than the practical reorientation forced upon them empirically by the necessities of a concrete set of facts.”[5] This is still true today. We cannot know what a next war will bring and we have historically been wrong, almost always. Armies have much difficulty to change in times of peace, most of the actual adaptations happen under fire. If you want to read more about military adaptation, see this post.
Ready for war?
The book contains many anecdotes of situations and officers that display behaviour that is detrimental to fighting and winning a war. If you are serving in the armed forces, or have done so in the past, you will surely recognize them, despite the fact that these anecdotes go back some 85 years ago. Bloch has, for example, much to say about the age of NCO’s and officers. “There is no better protection against a hardening of the mental arteries than adaptable minds and physical keenness.”[6] Many of the French Generals were around 60 years old. Not that there was a lack of capable junior officers, the system just didn’t allow them to climb the promotional ladder. Some hoped that this problem would solve itself when the war started, then the good leaders will be sorted out. I myself have heard this argument being used by colleagues and it sounds like a logical conclusion. Until I read this book where Bloch explains the error in this reasoning: “It may have been assumed that the weeding-out process would get going automatically in the course of the fighting but if that was so, then those responsible forgot that the war might very well not last for four years.”[7]
The book brilliantly describes how many officers mistook peace-time activities as being representative for real war. Men (and women) can become too accustomed to their current positions, or their perceptions of how wars ‘ought to be played out’. Bloch describes the sentiment in the following passage, which is unfortunately all too human, but not desirable for any army: “They had long lived in the conviction that the terms of their service would keep them from the ‘front’. But the enemy broke the contract. Why had not someone made it clear to these decent, conscientious men, most of whom were rather too old to be in harness, that in a war of movement there is always the risk that what today is the rear may turn out tomorrow to be the front?”[8]
Another anecdote that needs no further explanation, but that some of you will likely and unfortunately recognize: “When we were suddenly called upon to act swiftly, our leaders, more often than not, mistook feverish activity for quick decision.”[9]
The overall problem Bloch describes can be attributed to a certain mindset or attitude. The men back then were not ready for war, mentally. This one sentence says it all: “They (the Germans) relied on action and on improvisation. We, on the other hand, believed in doing nothing and in behaving as we always had behaved.”[10]
Conclusions
Whether you are an active duty soldier or just interested in how we ought to prepare for war, then this book is well worth your time to read. I have but scratched the surface of many great stories and anecdotes in this book. Some are actually funny and most are recognizable even in our time, meaning that armies do not change that much culturally. Bloch might come across as being overtly sceptical about the French and Allied forces, but he was a proud Frenchman that bravely continued to fight the Germans after the occupation. He may not have had a crucial position within the French army during the war, but this book shows that sometimes we must listen to that peculiar staff officer in the back of the command post, silently listening. Marc Bloch had an excellent assessment (albeit in hindsight) of what was going on in the French army before and during the German invasion. Sometimes we can learn more from defeat than from victory, but let us learn from someone else’s defeat, not our own.
[1] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P108
[2] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P39
[3] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P47
[4] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P85
[5] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P94
[6] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P85
[7] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P85
[8] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P86
[9] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P54
[10] Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat P46
Bibliography:
Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat (2019: Must Have Books, Victoria)
A counterpart to this book is “Strange Victory” by Ernest May, a Harvard historian. One of its main points is that experts on the German side were often wrong as well, and for many of the same reasons.
Germany invaded poland on it's own. There was no help from USSR.