The Phoney War
The History of the Uneasy Calm along the Western Front at the Start of World War II
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Narrated by:
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Steve Knupp
About this listen
Europe’s attempts to appease Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, most notably at Munich in 1938, failed, as Nazi Germany swallowed up Austria and Czechoslovakia by 1939. Italy was on the march as well, invading Albania in April of 1939. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1 of that year. Two days later, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, and World War II had begun in earnest.
Of course, as most people now know, the invasion of Poland was merely the preface to the Nazi blitzkrieg of most of Western Europe, which would include Denmark, Belgium, and France by the summer of 1940. The resistance put up by these countries is often portrayed as weak, and the narrative is that the British stood alone in 1940 against the Nazi onslaught, defending the British Isles during the Battle of Britain and preventing a potential German invasion.
Though the French would be decisively defeated soon after the Nazi invasion of Belgium and France in early 1940, they had not sat on their hands. As the power of Nazi Germany grew alarmingly during the 1930s, the French sought means to defend their territory against the rising menace of the Thousand Year Reich. As architects of the most punitive measures in the Treaty of Versailles following World War I, France was the most natural target for German retribution, so the Maginot Line, a series of interconnected strongpoints and fortifications running along much of France's eastern border, helped allay French fears of invasion.
The popular legend of the Maginot Line portrays the frontier defenses as a useless “white elephant” project that was prompted by a gross misapprehension of warfare's new realities in the mid-20th century and quickly overwhelmed by the forceful advance of the German blitzkrieg. English idiom today invokes this vision of the Maginot Line as a metaphor for any defensive measure strongly believed in but actually useless. Indeed, usages such as “Maginot Line mentality,” describing an overly defensive, reactive mindset, perpetuate the legend. As a French author and military liaison with the British, Andre Maurois, wrote about his disillusionment with the defensive line he originally enthusiastically supported: “We know now that the Maginot line-complex was a dangerous disease of the mind; but I publish this as it was written in January, 1940.”
In reality, the actual Maginot Line proved considerably more functional than memory has served. The true flaw in French military strategy during the opening days of World War II lay not in reliance on the Maginot fortifications but in the army's neglect to exploit the military opportunities the Line created. In other words, the border defense performed as envisioned, but the other military arms supported it insufficiently to halt the Germans. The French squandered the opportunity not because the Maginot Line existed but because they failed to utilize their own defensive plan properly.
This was what brought about the stasis along the Western Front near the end of 1939, a short period of time now referred to as the Phoney War, during which the Western Allies awaited some sort of action by the Nazis. Ultimately, the Allies had not expected the Germans would be able to move armored units through the Ardennes Forests, a heavily wooded region spanning parts of Belgium, France and the Netherlands. To their great surprise, the Germans had no trouble rolling across these lands in the span of weeks, and by invading France from the north, the Germans simply avoided the Maginot Line. The French surrendered in June 1940, and the British narrowly escaped disaster by transporting thousands of soldiers and equipment across the English Channel at Dunkirk.
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- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 22 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Concluding his acclaimed series on the Eastern Front in World War I, Prit Buttar comprehensively details not only these climactic events, but also the "successor wars" that raged long after the armistice of 1918. New states rose from the ashes of empire and war raged as German forces sought to keep them under the aegis of the Fatherland. These unresolved tensions between the former Great Powers and the new states would ultimately lead to the rise of Hitler and a new, terrible world war only two decades later.
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Explains a lot about
- By Elizabeth on 02-27-20
By: Prit Buttar
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The First World War: A Captivating Guide to World War 1, the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of Somme
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Desmond Manny, Colin Fluxman
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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If you want to discover captivating stories of people and events of World War 1, then pay attention...Three captivating manuscripts are included in this audiobook: World War 1: A Captivating Guide to the First World War; The Battle of Verdun: A Captivating Guide to the Longest and Largest Battle of World War 1; and The Battle of the Somme: A Captivating Guide to One of the Most Devastating Events of the First World War.
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No, Gavrilo Princip was NOT lynched!
- By Magnus Almgren on 12-31-19
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A World Undone
- The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918
- By: G. J. Meyer
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 27 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. While the world slumbered, monumental forces were shaken. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities, and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with England as its ally. As crowds cheered their armies on, no one could guess what lay ahead in the First World War.
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A great book!
- By Jodi Bernard on 07-11-23
By: G. J. Meyer
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Deathride
- Hitler vs. Stalin: The Eastern Front, 1941-1945
- By: John Mosier
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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John Mosier presents a revisionist retelling of the war on the Eastern Front. The conventional wisdom is that Hitler was mad to think he could defeat the USSR, because of its vast size and population, and that the Battle of Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war. Neither statement is accurate, says Mosier; Hitler came very close to winning outright.
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Speaking the un-speakable
- By Jonathan Gardner on 09-27-10
By: John Mosier
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Strategy
- The Indirect Approach
- By: B.H. Liddell Hart
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Liddell Hart stressed movement, flexibility, surprise. He saw that in most military campaigns dislocation of the enemy's psychological and physical balance is prelude to victory. This dislocation results from a strategic indirect approach. Reflect for a moment on the results of direct confrontation (trench war in World War I) versus indirect dislocation (Blitzkreig in World II). Liddell Hart is also tonic for business and political planning: Just change the vocabulary and his concepts fit.
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Wrong Edition
- By Anonymous User on 02-20-20
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Tower of Skulls
- A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Vol. 1 (July 1937 - May 1942)
- By: Richard B. Frank
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 26 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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This story casts penetrating light on how struggles in Europe and Asia merged into a tightly entwined global war. It features not just battles, but also the sweeping political, economic, and social effects of the war, and are graced with a rich tapestry of individual characters from top-tier political and military figures down to ordinary servicemen, as well as the accounts of civilians of all races and ages.
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Outstanding
- By Patrick on 03-16-20
By: Richard B. Frank
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Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East
- By: David Stahel
- Narrated by: Stewart Crank
- Length: 17 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Using archival records, in this book, David Stahel presents a history of Germany's summer campaign from the perspective of the two largest and most powerful Panzer groups on the Eastern front. Stahel's research provides a fundamental reassessment of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, highlighting the prodigious internal problems of the vital Panzer forces and revealing that their demise in the earliest phase of the war undermined the whole German invasion.
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Best book on Operation Barbarossa so far
- By Amazon Customer on 09-14-21
By: David Stahel
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Britain at Bay
- The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941
- By: Alan Allport
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 21 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is the many-faceted, world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely the military and political dimensions of the conflict's first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles questions such as: Could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the rights ones? How well did the British organize and fight? How well did the British live up to their own values? What difference did the war make in the end to the fate of the nation?
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A History worth your read
- By Norm the Nonfiction Reader on 08-18-21
By: Alan Allport
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The Second Sino-Japanese War
- A Captivating Guide to Military Conflict That Began Between China and Japan, Including Events Such as the Japanese Invasion of Manchuria and the Nanjing Massacre
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Jason Zenobia
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Many people in the West look upon the Second Sino-Japanese War, which took place in the 1930s and 1940s, as a sort of sideshow to the larger Second World War, but there is no separating the two. Imagine the Pacific War, the theater of World War II that took place in the Pacific. If the Japanese were not busy fighting on another front, they would have had millions of more troops available to fight the Americans and the British. In all likelihood, World War II would have ended the same way, but it would have taken much longer and cost that many more lives.
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A good summary of Japan leading up to WW2
- By M Maurer on 11-18-21
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The Iraq War
- By: John Keegan
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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John Keegan, whom the New York Review of Books calls "the best historian of our day", now brings his extraordinary expertise to bear on perhaps the most controversial war of our time. In exclusive interviews with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, John Keegan has gathered information about the war that adds immeasurably to our grasp of its causes, complications, costs, and consequences.
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A Solid, Quick Overview
- By Charles on 12-08-04
By: John Keegan
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Nomonhan, 1939
- The Red Army's Victory that Shaped World War II
- By: Stuart D. Goldman
- Narrated by: John FitzGibbon
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Stuart Goldman convincingly argues that a little-known, but intense, Soviet-Japanese conflict along the Manchurian- Mongolian frontier at Nomonhan influenced the outbreak of World War II and shaped the course of the war. The author draws on Japanese, Soviet, and western sources to put the seemingly obscure conflict - actually a small undeclared war - into its proper global geo-strategic perspective.The book describes how the Soviets, in response to a border conflict provoked by Japan, launched an offensive in August 1939 that wiped out the Japanese forces at Nomonhan.
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Nomonhan: Why Japan Demurred
- By William R. Todd-Mancillas (Name includes hyphen and capitalized M). on 08-03-14
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The Allure of Battle
- A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost
- By: Cathal J. Nolan
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 25 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive". Cannae, Konigsberg, Austerlitz, Midway, Agincourt - all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But these legendary battles may or may not have determined the final outcome of the wars in which they were fought. Cathal J. Nolan's The Allure of Battle systematically and engrossingly examines the great battles, tracing what he calls "short-war thinking".
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Missing important facts and not well researched
- By Andrew on 02-24-18
By: Cathal J. Nolan