The Strange Capture, May 1940 – Unpublished Notebooks of a 1st Army Staff Officer

"That evening, a coded telegram was received from Grand Headquarters, the content of which was as follows: 'Commander Fauvelle has set out your situation to me and to Mr Paul Reynaud. I do not underestimate your difficulties. I am counting on you to save everything that can possibly be saved, in honour of the colours in your keeping.' For anyone who can read between the lines, we have no further relief to expect from the rest of the French armies."

Colonel Pierre Montjean, staff officer of the 1st Army and head of the "Operations" section of the 3rd Bureau, was captured by the Germans at Steenwerck on 29 May 1940. In the first days of his captivity, still in shock, he retraced the chain of events. The account he gives of those twenty days that preceded this "strange capture" constitutes an extraordinary and precious testimony, since the archives of the 1st Army were burned. It plunges the reader into the heart of a headquarters in the midst of the débâcle: a stunning reading experience.

Pierre Montjean (1895–1982), who entered Saint-Cyr top of his class, was a cavalryman seriously wounded in Champagne in 1917. A graduate of the École Supérieure de Guerre, he served on Marshal Pétain's staff from 1930 to 1934. It was during this period that he became the Marshal's "pen" and drafted several of his important speeches. In his notes, internal reports and lectures, he would unsparingly denounce the lack of resources available to the French armed forces in the face of the evolution of warfare.

It was during the débâcle of May 1940 that the destiny of General Montjean was overturned: as an officer of the 3rd Bureau of the 1st Army, he watched the German Panzers triumph in three weeks by applying the very ideas he had never ceased to advance for the French army's cavalry. Taken prisoner alongside General Prioux, he would spend five years in captivity in Germany before commanding, after his liberation, the materiel branch of the French forces in Germany.