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From celebrated military historian Lloyd Clark comes a riveting and richly detailed reassessment of one of the greatest military victories of the Second World War.

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The German campaign in France during the summer of 1940 was pivotal to Hitler´s ambitions and fundamentally affected the course of the Second World War. Having squabbled about fighting methods right up to the start of the campaign, the German forces provided the Führer with a swift, efficient and decisive military victory over the Allied forces.

In achieving in just six weeks what their fathers had failed to accomplish during the four years of the First World War, Germany altered the balance of power in Europe at a stroke. Yet, as Lloyd Clark shows in this enthralling new book, it was far from a foregone conclusion. Blitzkrieg tells the story of the campaign, while highlighting the key technologies, decisions and events that led to German success, and details the mistakes, good fortune and chronic weaknesses in their planning process and approach to war fighting. There are also compelling portraits of the officers who played key roles, including Heinz Guderian, Erwin Rommel, Kurt Student, Charles de Gaulle and Bernard Montgomery.

Clark argues that far from being undefeatable, the France 1940 campaign revealed Germany and its armed forces to be highly vulnerable - a fact dismissed by Hitler as he began to plan for his invasion of the Soviet Union - and offers a gripping reassessment of the myths that have built up around one of the Second World War´s greatest military victories.

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This genuinely revisionist account of the Battle of France in 1940 proves a deeply shocking fact - we are essentially still in thrall to the view of Blitzkrieg tactics that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels wanted us to have, even over three-quarters of a century later. Lloyd Clark´s brilliant analysis proves that Fall Gelb (the Germans´ Plan Yellow) wasn´t all about unstoppable, superior panzers and Stukas, but was in fact an audacious, highly risky infantry-based plan that could have gone badly wrong given a different Allied mindset. Andrew Roberts

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Lloyd Clark is a senior academic in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Professorial Research Fellow in War Studies, Humanities Research Institute, University of Buckingham. He is the author of several books, including Anzio: The Friction of War, Arnhem: The Greatest Airborne Battle in History and Kursk: The Greatest Battle, has contributed to numerous others and lectures on military history all over the world. He lives in rural Hertfordshire with his wife and three children.

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