Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "One of the thing that interested me was that May ran computer simulations of the battles, and the Allies always win."
I haven't read it, but the place where typical war games and simulations deviate from reality is in logistics, which as has been said, is what war is mostly about. Anyone who's ever been in a fight knows that sometimes the weaker party prevails. Also, note that the author is not a military historian, but instead is a "distinguished diplomatic historian", LOL:
In Strange Victory, the distinguished diplomatic historian Ernest R. May argues that Germany's success is even more of a puzzle than Bloch could have imagined, for we now know that its armed forces were measurably inferior to those of France and its allies, even in tanks, and its top military leaders all considered an attack on France to be a long-odds gamble.
fsbassociates.com
The truth is that French troops surrendered because they were surrounded, cut off in a classic battle of maneuver. It's a simple military fact that battles of maneuver result in the surrender of large numbers of relatively unbloodied troops. Without a supply line, you cannot fight for very long. Even Confederate soldiers surrender when they are surrounded, with no direction to retreat, no food, no orders, and/or no ammunition. These facts of life are not included in most (amateur) war simulations.
If you want to learn more about the surrender, look for links in .mil web sites. Ignore the amateurs writing books for the entertainment of civilians. The fact is that with the German defeat of France, the US military did not go about trying to improve the martial ardor of its soldiers, but instead began developing the equivalent of Germany's Panzer divisions. This was for a reason, LOL. This simple fact should be enough to indicate to you what the cause of France's defeat was, unless you have obscure political motivations that blind you.
-- Carl |
