When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance

Winner of the Society for Military Historys Distinguished Book Award

Deeply researched and forcefully written . . . deftly explains the confused politics and diplomacy that bedeviled the war against the Nazis.Wall Street Journal

Neiberg is one of the very best historians on wartime France, and his approach to the fall of France and its consequences is truly original and perceptive as well as superbly written.Antony Beevor, author of The Second World War

An utterly gripping account, the best to date, of relations within the turbulent triumvirate of France, Britain, and America in the Second World War.Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny

The most shocking single event of World War II, according to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but the fall of France in the spring of 1940. The Nazi invasion of France destabilized Washingtons strategic assumptions, resulting in hasty and desperate decision-making. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of Americas bewildering responsepolicies that placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined its alliance with Britain.

FDR and his advisors naively believed they could woo Vichy Frances decorated wartime leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, and prevent the country from becoming a formal German ally. The British, convinced that the Vichy government was fully subservient to Nazi Germany, chose to back Charles de Gaulle and actively financed and supported the Resistance. After the war, Americas decision to work with the Vichy regime cast a pall over US-French relations that lasted for decades.