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Just click the link in the show description to support now. Determined command actually to their credit played with French psychology and the understood

of the French staff were clearly still nostalgic about World War I and had really clearly not learned the

lessons for the front lines.

Here are your hosts, Matthew Gault.

Matthew Gault.

Hello and welcome to War College.

I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Gault.

In World War II, France fell so fast to the Germans, the U.S. thought a fifth column had to have had

a hand in it. But what were the real reasons one of the world's

superpowers collapsed in only a few months? Was the German army that good? Were the French

who had held off the Germans for four years in World War I that bad?

Here to discuss it with us is Mark Maserofsky.

Mark, thanks for joining us.

It's a pleasure.

Can we start actually in a somewhat unusual place? Can we talk a little bit about the political situation of France before the war started.

But what was the government like?

Was it a liberal democracy?

What were the stresses?

There were some sort of worrisome developments in several years that

...