To Lose a Battle

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Authors: Alistair Horne

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PENGUIN BOOKS

TO LOSE A BATTLE

Sir Alistair Horne was born in London in 1925, and has spent much of his life abroad, including periods at schools in the United States and Switzerland. He served with the R.A.F. in Canada in 1943 and ended his war service with the rank of Captain in the Coldstream Guards attached to M15 in the Middle East. He then went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature and played international ice-hockey. After leaving Cambridge, Sir Alistair concentrated on writing: he spent three years in Germany as correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph
and speaks fluent French and German. His books include
Back into Power
(1955);
The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916
(Hawthornden Prize, 1963);
The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71
(1965);
To Lose A Battle: France 1940
(1969);
Small Earthquake in Chile
(1972, paperback reissued 1999);
A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–62
won both the
Yorkshire Post
Book of the Year Prize and the Wolfson History Award in 1978 (revised paperback edition 2006). His other publications include
The French Army and Politics 1870–1970
(1984), which was awarded the Enid Macleod Prize in 1985,
Harold Macmillan, Volumes I and II
(1988–91),
A Bundle from Britain
(1993), a memoir about the USA and World War II;
The Lonely Leader: Monty 1944–1945
(1996);
Seven Ages of Paris: Portrait of a City
(2003);
Friend or Foe: A History of France
(2004) and
The Age of Napoleon
(2004). In 1969 he founded a Research Fellowship for young historians at St Antony’s College, Oxford. In 1992 he was awarded the CBE; in 1993 he received the French Légion d’Honneur for his work on French history and his Litt. D. from Cambridge University. He was knighted in 2003. He is currently working on an authorised biography of Henry Kissinger, as well as a second volume of his own memoirs.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted material:

Excerpts from
Panzer Leader
by General Heinz Guderian, translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. Published in the United States of America in 1952 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., and reprinted with their permission.

Excerpts from
The Rommel Papers.
Copyright 1953 by B. H. Liddell Hart. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

The poems ‘Spring Song’ (or, ‘Crocus Time’) and ‘Baku, or the Map Game’ from
Siren Song
by A. P. Herbert, published by Methuen & Co. Ltd. and Doubleday & Company, Inc. Copyright 1940 by Alan Patrick Herbert. Reprinted by permission of Sir Alan Herbert, his agents, A. P. Watt & Son, and Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Excerpts from
The Second World War
by Winston Churchill, published in the United States of America by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Excerpts from
Berlin Diary
by William Shirer. Copyright 1940, 1941 by Wiliam Shirer. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. Inc.

La France a perdu une bataille!
Mais la France n’a pas perdu la guerre!

(France has lost a battle!
But France has not lost the war!)

GENERAL DE GAULLE’S PROCLAMATION IN LONDON
AFTER THE FALL OF FRANCE

When at last… the will-to-live of the German nation, instead of continuing to be wasted away in purely passive defence, can be summoned together for a final, active showdown with France, and thrown into this in one last decisive battle with the very highest objectives for Germany; then, and only then, will it be possible to bring to a close the perpetual and so fruitless struggle between ourselves and France.

ADOLF HITLER
,
Mein Kampf
(1925)

Alistair Horne

To Lose a battle

France 1940

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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First published in Great Britain by Macmillan London Ltd 1969
First published in the United States of America by Little Brown and Company 1969
This revised edition published by Macmillan London Ltd 1990
Published with a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr in Penguin Books 1990
Reissued in Penguin Books 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

978-0-14-193772-4

Contents

Tables and Maps
Foreword to 1990 edition
Preface to 1990 edition
Preface to 1979 edition
Acknowledgements

Part One (1919–40)

1 Grandeur and Misery of Victory: 1919–30
2 ‘Thank God for the French Army’
3 Fortune Changes Sides
4 Palinurus Nods
5 ‘Queer Kind of War’
6 Gamelin
7 The Sickle and the Reaper
8 Towards the Brink