After the surrender of the French government in May 1940, the British were concerned that the resources of the French Empire, and particularly the powerful French fleet, would be put at the disposal of the Germans. The British, dependent upon their naval power and the resources of the Empire and Commonwealth to continue the war, sought to neutralize the threat of the French fleet and saw an opportunity to gobble up certain French colonies for themselves. Thus, even while Britain was locked in a deadly struggle with Nazi Germany, she continued the centuries-old imperial rivalry with her nearest neighbor and recent allies. The British attack on the French Mediterranean fleet at Mers el Kebir is well known, but less often remembered are the British operations against Vichy forces in West Africa, Syria and Madagascar. As the latent threat of the French fleet was the chief source of British concern, the conflict was largely a naval one, but there were substantial land operations in Syria and Madagascar. In Syria and Lebanon, Operation Exporter pitted 20,000 British, Indian, Australian and Free French troops against 35,000 Vichy French who fought with much greater skill and determination than expected. Operation Ironclad, the invasion of Madagascar, saw three brigades of infantry, supported by light tanks, make the first large scale British amphibious assault since the ill-fated Gallipoli landings in WWI. John D Grainger narrates and analyses all the British operations, by land, sea and air, against the French up to the Anglo-American Torch landings in North Africa. He reveals the initial reluctance of the British forces to really get stuck into their erstwhile allies and the reverses that resulted from underestimating the will of the Vichy French to fight. The complicating factor of De Gaulle's Free French is another major theme. Above all, what emerges is that these are fascinating campaigns in their own right that have been unduly neglected.

Winner of the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award Shocked by the fall of France in 1940, panicked US leaders rushed to back the Vichy government—a fateful decision that nearly destroyed the Anglo–American alliance. According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the “most shocking single event” of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response—a policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain. The successful Nazi invasion of France destabilized American planners’ strategic assumptions. At home, the result was huge increases in defense spending, the advent of peacetime military conscription, and domestic spying to weed out potential fifth columnists. Abroad, the United States decided to work with Vichy France despite its pro-Nazi tendencies. The US–Vichy partnership, intended to buy time and temper the flames of war in Europe, severely strained Anglo–American relations. American leaders naively believed that they could woo men like Philippe Pétain, preventing France from becoming a formal German ally. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle. After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted US–French relations for decades. Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision making that drove US policy from 1940 to 1943. Tracing the key diplomatic and strategic moves of these formative years, When France Fell gives us a more nuanced and complete understanding of the war and of the global position the United States would occupy afterward.

Genuinely new story of the Second World War - the full account of England's last war against France in 1940-42. Most people think that England's last war with France involved point-blank broadsides from sailing ships and breastplated Napoleonic cavalry charging red-coated British infantry. But there was a much more recent conflict than this. Under the terms of its armistice with Nazi Germany, the unoccupied part of France and its substantial colonies were ruled from the spa town of Vichy by the government of Marshal Philip Petain. Between July 1940 and November 1942, while Britain was at war with Germany, Italy and ultimately Japan, it also fought land, sea and air battles with the considerable forces at the disposal of Petain's Vichy French. When the Royal Navy sank the French Fleet at Mers El-Kebir almost 1,300 French sailors died in what was the twentieth century's most one-sided sea battle. British casualties were nil. It is a wound that has still not healed, for undoubtedly these events are better remembered in France than in Britain. An embarrassment at the time, France's maritime massacre and the bitter, hard-fought campaigns that followed rarely make more than footnotes in accounts of Allied operations against Axis forces. Until now.

This book is an analysis of all the British operations, by land, sea and air, against the French up to the Anglo-American Torch landings in North Africa. Above all, what emerges is that these are fascinating campaigns in their own right that have been unduly neglected.

The four years between the military defeat of France by Nazi Germany and D-Day were vital, dramatic and eventful years in Anglo-French relations. These years saw the first armed clashes between France and Britain since the Napoleonic Wars, including the infamous Royal Navy attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. They also saw a curious relationship developing between Britain and Vichy France. Vichy was at once a hostile power, under German domination, and at the same time a porous regime through which British influence on its politics, attitudes towards the Resistance and the transit of British soldiers and airmen through its territory en route to Spain, could flow quite freely. Britain had an ambivalent attitude towards Vichy - obviously adversarial, but also pragmatic. The history of Vichy France is often viewed as a sideshow in the overall context of World War II. However, Peter Mangold here shows that the Vichy attitude towards the allies, especially the British, was ambivalent and complex. His absorbing and up-to-date account, based on original historical research, highlights the conflicts within the Vichy regime and the ways in which contacts and connections with de Gaulle in London and the British Government were maintained. This exciting and fast-paced book brings to life the major characters in the story - not only Churchill and de Gaulle, but also Macmillan, Petain and Leclerc. In this book, Mangold deftly reassesses the complex international wartime chessboard and, in the process, reveals a little known aspect of the World War II story.