![]() ![]() Much of this is no longer novel, especially to readers of Ernest R. Most French tanks had no radios, and the fuel tanks in the heavy Type Bs were so small that they often simply ran out of petrol. ![]() On the other side, the Allies had more (and often better) tanks than the Germans, but numbers were not decisive. In the campaign itself, the Germans owed their success more to individual initiative than to careful planning-for example, a devastating Luftwaffe attack on 13 May only took place because an officer disregarded an order to change the plan. Similarly, the doctrine of armoured warfare was only slowly gaining ground among German commanders, the majority of whom remained cautious and conservative. Hitler did not possess a strategic blitzkrieg concept at the start of the war, and the Germans still had an army which was only semi-modern, short of motor vehicles and tanks and heavily dependent on horse transport. Frieser's The Blitzkrieg Legend develops the thesis that the German success arose, not from the application of a carefully conceived blitzkrieg strategy, but from "the accidental coincidence of the most varied factors" (p. ![]() These are two very different books on the German victory in the West in May-June 1940. ![]()
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