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On 22 April 2004, Louis Capdeboscq contributed some good thoughts to the 'technological determinism versus cultural superiority' argument surrounding the defeat of the French, Dutch, Belgians and British by the Germans in May-June 1940. Louis also added a good list of books on the campaign by French (or Francophone Belgian) historians. My original point was the more general one that the focus of French historiography is on what they see as the 'big issues' of Vichy France and the French recovery. The France 1940 campaign can be - and has been - used to support almost any interpretation or explanation for success and failure in warfare. Briefly, this is a campaign that people have argued about since it happened, and probably always will. Opinions stretch from Marc Bloch's original *L'Etrange Défait* of 1946 (translation published as *Strange Defeat* in 1968), which argued for a social and cultural interpretation, that fractures in French society caused a collapse of the nation in arms, to Ernest R. May's deliberately-titled *Strange Victory* of 2000, which argued that the French defeat came primarily from bad generalship and a bad plan (including, as Louis points out, the Breda variant, without which some things might have been different). The problem is that France 1940 seems to be one of those rare occasions in warfare in which *everything*, including random chance and the weather, went right for one side and wrong for another, including that circumstances and random events favoured the German doctrinal style and not the French. This makes it highly risky to cite it as evidence to support any one argument, and is one of the reasons why French historiography has shied away from it, preferring to dwell on the issue of the soundness of long-term French war planning 1938-1942. For John A. Lynn to use France 1940 in *Battle* as his chief example of why technology does not determine warfare since 'the key German advantage was conceptual not mechanical' is contentious and controversial rather than conclusive. Stephen Badsey
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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