To Lose a Battle

France 1940

By: Alistair Horne

Narrated by: John Lee

In 1940, the German army fought and won an extraordinary battle with France in six weeks of lightning warfare. With the subtlety and compulsion of a novel, Horne's narrative shifts from minor battlefield incidents to high military and political decisions, stepping far beyond the confines of military history to form a major contribution to our understanding of the crises of the Franco-German rivalry.

©1969, 1990 Alistair Horne (P)2023 Tantor

You're going to need a French dictionary and a map

To Lose A Battle is an examination of the 6 week German invasion of France in May 1940 and is the third book in his trilogy of the period between 1870 and 1940. It is not new, having originally been written in 1969, but it has been updated several times since then. In the book Mr Horne examines the history of the period from the end of the First World War up to the beginning of the Second World War and then examines in detail the battle from Hitler's invasion of France through the signing of the armistice.

The European Theater of World War II may be the most written about event in history, so there is no lack of other books on this subject, many of them much newer than To Lose A Battle, but I found this book to be particularly interesting, although at times a bit too detailed. My interest was in the general actions of the armies and the reasons for the French failure to put up the expected defense, but the details of individual military units was too detailed for me and I had to fall back on maps of present day France to be sure where specific cities and rivers were located. The publisher of this book would do well to include pdf downloads of the maps in the Kindle version of the book to make listening easier and more informative. Still, the book does a good job of explaining what happened and why, and was especially interesting to me in that it explained in detail the how and why of Lord Gort's decision to try to save the BEF by evacuation back to England.

John Lee is, in my opinion, one of the best of the Audible narrators and this book was no exception. His narration was clear and never monotonous, although there were a few spots when his voice dropped a bit too low and I was not able to hear what he was saying. The only real complaint I have is that there are a lot of French quotes with no translation. Had this been the Kindle version I would have just asked for a translation into English, but not knowing French meant that I could not have even spelled the French well enough to get the English translation.

If you have an interest in what happened during that 6 week period this is a good book to listen to, even if you have read other books on the topic.

Interpretation of decisions of 6 week failures

A bit too much detail on the Meuse River crossings and not enough geographic explanation for attacks

Excellent overview of Fall of France

A little dated, but overall is a good summary of the critical campaign of 1940.