"Marc Bloch agreed that the débâcle was due at least in part to the abysmal quality of French generalship. A decisive factor was the German decision to switch the direction of their main attack from Luxembourg and the Low Countries, as Hitler had originally planned, to the line running between Liège and Namur, through the supposedly impenetrable forests of the Ardennes. The French would have fared better against the original strategy; they were wholly taken by surprise when five panzer divisions thrust their way through the Ardennes and captured the bridges over the River Meuse. Thereafter, their reactions were culpably slow or inept. Yet what happened in 1940 was more than just a military failure. At root, as Bloch argued, it was a collapse of morale."
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Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 389
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marc_Bloch
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Marc Bloch
Marc Bloch (6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian, soldier and resistance fighter who, together with Lucien Febvre and Henri Hauser, was the co-founder of the enormously influential Annales School of historiography. The author of a variety of books, including his magnum opus The Historian's Craft, which he wrote as a political prisoner prior to his execution by the Gestapo for his work in the French Resistance, Bloch was instrumental to the foundation of the Annales. Histoire, Scien
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