Author: Robert TombsPublisher:
ISBN: 9781446426241
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 816
Book Description
That Sweet Enemy
Author: Robert TombsPublisher:
ISBN: 9781446426241
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 816
Book Description
Britain and the Defeated French
Author: Peter MangoldPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857720708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
The four years between the military defeat of France by Nazi Germany and D-Day were vital, dramatic and eventful years in Anglo-French relations. These years saw the first armed clashes between France and Britain since the Napoleonic Wars, including the infamous Royal Navy attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. They also saw a curious relationship developing between Britain and Vichy France. Vichy was at once a hostile power, under German domination, and at the same time a porous regime through which British influence on its politics, attitudes towards the Resistance and the transit of British soldiers and airmen through its territory en route to Spain, could flow quite freely. Britain had an ambivalent attitude towards Vichy - obviously adversarial, but also pragmatic. The history of Vichy France is often viewed as a sideshow in the overall context of World War II. However, Peter Mangold here shows that the Vichy attitude towards the allies, especially the British, was ambivalent and complex. His absorbing and up-to-date account, based on original historical research, highlights the conflicts within the Vichy regime and the ways in which contacts and connections with de Gaulle in London and the British Government were maintained. This exciting and fast-paced book brings to life the major characters in the story - not only Churchill and de Gaulle, but also Macmillan, Petain and Leclerc. In this book, Mangold deftly reassesses the complex international wartime chessboard and, in the process, reveals a little known aspect of the World War II story.
England's Last War Against France
Author: Colin SmithPublisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0297857819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 607
Book Description
Genuinely new story of the Second World War - the full account of England's last war against France in 1940-42. Most people think that England's last war with France involved point-blank broadsides from sailing ships and breastplated Napoleonic cavalry charging red-coated British infantry. But there was a much more recent conflict than this. Under the terms of its armistice with Nazi Germany, the unoccupied part of France and its substantial colonies were ruled from the spa town of Vichy by the government of Marshal Philip Petain. Between July 1940 and November 1942, while Britain was at war with Germany, Italy and ultimately Japan, it also fought land, sea and air battles with the considerable forces at the disposal of Petain's Vichy French. When the Royal Navy sank the French Fleet at Mers El-Kebir almost 1,300 French sailors died in what was the twentieth century's most one-sided sea battle. British casualties were nil. It is a wound that has still not healed, for undoubtedly these events are better remembered in France than in Britain. An embarrassment at the time, France's maritime massacre and the bitter, hard-fought campaigns that followed rarely make more than footnotes in accounts of Allied operations against Axis forces. Until now.
When Britain Saved the West
Author: Robin PriorPublisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030018400X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373
Book Description
From the comfortable distance of seven decades, it is quite easy to view the victory of the Allies over Hitler’s Germany as inevitable. But in 1940 Great Britain’s defeat loomed perilously close, and no other nation stepped up to confront the Nazi threat. In this cogently argued book, Robin Prior delves into the documents of the time—war diaries, combat reports, Home Security’s daily files, and much more—to uncover how Britain endured a year of menacing crises. The book reassesses key events of 1940—crises that were recognized as such at the time and others not fully appreciated. Prior examines Neville Chamberlain’s government, Churchill’s opponents, the collapse of France, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz. He looks critically at the position of the United States before Pearl Harbor, and at Roosevelt’s response to the crisis. Prior concludes that the nation was saved through a combination of political leadership, British Expeditionary Force determination and skill, Royal Air Force and Navy efforts to return soldiers to the homeland, and the determination of the people to fight on “in spite of all terror.” As eloquent as it is controversial, this book exposes the full import of events in 1940, when Britain fought alone and Western civilization hung in the balance.
Braddock's Defeat
Author: David Lee PrestonPublisher: Pivotal Moments in American Hi
ISBN: 0199845328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
Book Description
On July 9, 1755, British and colonial troops under the command of General Edward Braddock suffered a crushing defeat to French and Native American enemy forces in Ohio Country. Known as the Battle of the Monongahela, the loss altered the trajectory of the Seven Years' War in America, escalating the fighting and shifting the balance of power. An unprecedented rout of a modern and powerful British army by a predominantly Indian force, Monongahela shocked the colonial world--and also planted the first seeds of an independent American consciousness. The culmination of a failed attempt to capture Fort Duquesne from the French, Braddock's Defeat was a pivotal moment in American and world history. While the defeat is often blamed on blundering and arrogance on the part of General Braddock--who was wounded in battle and died the next day--David Preston's gripping new work argues that such a claim diminishes the victory that Indian and French forces won by their superior discipline and leadership. In fact, the French Canadian officer Captain Beaujeu had greater tactical skill, reconnaissance, and execution, and his Indian allies were the most effective and disciplined troops on the field. Preston also explores the long shadow cast by Braddock's Defeat over the 18th century and the American Revolution two decades later. The campaign had been an awakening to empire for many British Americans, spawning ideas of American identity and anticipating many of the political and social divisions that would erupt with the outbreak of the Revolution. Braddock's Defeat was the defining generational experience for many British and American officers, including Thomas Gage, Horatio Gates, and perhaps most significantly, George Washington. A rich battle history driven by a gripping narrative and an abundance of new evidence,Braddock's Defeat presents the fullest account yet of this defining moment in early American history.
1000 Years of Annoying the French
Author: Stephen ClarkePublisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453243585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 764
Book Description
The author of A Year in the Merde and Talk to the Snail offers a highly biased and hilarious view of French history in this international bestseller. Things have been just a little awkward between Britain and France ever since the Norman invasion in 1066. Fortunately—after years of humorously chronicling the vast cultural gap between the two countries—author Stephen Clarke is perfectly positioned to investigate the historical origins of their occasionally hostile and perpetually entertaining pas de deux. Clarke sets the record straight, documenting how French braggarts and cheats have stolen credit rightfully due their neighbors across the Channel while blaming their own numerous gaffes and failures on those same innocent Brits for the past thousand years. Deeply researched and written with the same sly wit that made A Year in the Merde a comic hit, this lighthearted trip through the past millennium debunks the notion that the Battle of Hastings was a French victory (William the Conqueror was really a Norman who hated the French) and pooh-poohs French outrage over Britain’s murder of Joan of Arc (it was the French who executed her for wearing trousers). He also takes the air out of overblown Gallic claims, challenging the provenance of everything from champagne to the guillotine to prove that the French would be nowhere without British ingenuity. Brits and Anglophiles of every national origin will devour Clarke’s decidedly biased accounts of British triumph and French ignominy. But 1000 Years of Annoying the French will also draw chuckles from good-humored Francophiles as well as “anyone who’s ever encountered a snooty Parisian waiter or found themselves driving on the Boulevard Périphérique during August” (The Daily Mail). A bestseller in Britain, this is an entertaining look at history that fans of Sarah Vowell are sure to enjoy, from the author the San Francisco Chronicle has called “the anti-Mayle . . . acerbic, insulting, un-PC, and mostly hilarious.”
Strange Victory
Author: Ernest R. MayPublisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1466894288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 604
Book Description
Ernest R. May's Strange Victory presents a dramatic narrative-and reinterpretation-of Germany's six-week campaign that swept the Wehrmacht to Paris in spring 1940. Before the Nazis killed him for his work in the French Resistance, the great historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous short book, Strange Defeat, about the treatment of his nation at the hands of an enemy the French had believed they could easily dispose of. In Strange Victory, the distinguished American historian Ernest R. May asks the opposite question: How was it that Hitler and his generals managed this swift conquest, considering that France and its allies were superior in every measurable dimension and considering the Germans' own skepticism about their chances? Strange Victory is a riveting narrative of those six crucial weeks in the spring of 1940, weaving together the decisions made by the high commands with the welter of confused responses from exhausted and ill-informed, or ill-advised, officers in the field. Why did Hitler want to turn against France at just this moment, and why were his poor judgment and inadequate intelligence about the Allies nonetheless correct? Why didn't France take the offensive when it might have led to victory? What explains France's failure to detect and respond to Germany's attack plan? It is May's contention that in the future, nations might suffer strange defeats of their own if they do not learn from their predecessors' mistakes in judgment.
The Seven Years' War
Author: Daniel MarstonPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135975108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 94
Book Description
The closest thing to total war before the First World War, the Seven Years' War was fought in North America, Europe, the Caribbean and India with major consequences for all parties involved. This fascinating book is the first to truly review the grand strategies of the combatants and examine the differing styles of warfare used in the many campaigns. These methods ranged from the large-scale battles and sieges of the European front to the ambush and skirmish tactics used in the forests of North America. Daniel Marston's engaging narrative is supported by personal diaries, memoirs, and official reports.
Why France Fell
Author: Guy ChapmanRepresenting War and Violence
Author: Joanna BellisPublisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783271558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
An examination of written and other responses to conflict in a variety of forms and genres, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. War and violence took many forms in medieval and early modern Europe, from political and territorial conflict to judicial and social spectacle; from religious persecution and crusade to self-mortification and martyrdom; from comedic brutality to civil and domestic aggression. Various cultural frameworks conditioned both the acceptance of these forms of violence, and the protest that they met with: the elusive concept of chivalry, Christianity and just wartheory, political ambition and the machinery of propaganda, literary genres and the expectations they generated and challenged. The essays here, from the disciplines of history, art history and literature, explore how violence and conflict were documented, depicted, narrated and debated during this period. They consider manuals created for and addressed directly to kings and aristocratic patrons; romances whose affective treatments of violence invitedprofoundly empathetic, even troublingly pleasurable, responses; diaries and "autobiographies" compiled on the field and redacted for publication and self-promotion. The ethics and aesthetics of representation, as much as the violence being represented, emerge as a profound and constant theme for writers and artists grappling with this most fundamental and difficult topic of human experience. JOANNA BELLIS is the Fitzjames Research Fellow in Oldand Middle English at Merton College, Oxford; LAURA SLATER holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship from The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Contributors: Anne Baden-Daintree, Anne Curry, David Grummitt, Richard W. Kaeuper, Andrew Lynch, Christina Normore, Laura Slater, Sara V. Torres, Matthew Woodcock,