Gamelin or the Constrained Strategy

The name of Maurice Gamelin inevitably calls to mind the generalissimo held responsible for the defeat of 1940, a military disaster of incalculable consequences. His condemnation seems beyond appeal. Yet a thorough study of the man tends to challenge many certainties about his actual culpability. Casting a dispassionate eye — far removed from bitter indictment or tearful apology — on one of the principal actors of the tragedy of 1940 amounts to a supplementary inquiry. General Gamelin attempted in vain to be a great strategist, without ever having the full freedom to develop and conduct an effective war strategy; it is precisely this unadaptable war strategy that lies at the heart of this work — a "constrained" strategy, one that France and its representatives deliberately bridled, and which serves as the guiding thread of the biography of the man who sought to pursue it with integrity, and whose memory, 150 years after his birth, deserves not to be tarnished too carelessly.

The author: Christophe Aknouche, a graduate of the Saint-Cyr military academy (class of "Lieutenant Tom Morel") and a senior active-duty officer currently heading an establishment of the French Army Service Corps, is one of the principal contributors to the reference journal Histoire de guerre blindés et matériel (GBM). He was the first recipient of the "Louis Bossut" military history prize for his thesis on the evolution of the concept of tank employment in the French Army between 1930 and 1936.