Robin Higham

This 2012 books seeks to explain how Great Britain's Royal Air Force and France's Armee de l'Air came to such dramatically different outcomes in the spring and summer of 1940. The author, Robin Higham, is a former RAF pilot who acquired advanced degrees in military history and taught the subject at Kansas State University in the United States for a number of years. He has written a number of works on military aviation history, many of which are collaborative efforts.

Higham makes his case in this 410 page tome, of which 290 pages are the actual text, photographs, and charts that make up the heart of the book. The remaining 107 pages are given over to extensive endnotes, a lengthy bibliography, six appendices that illustrate France's mercurial political and military leadership between the world wars as well as the arcane Armee de l'Air organizational structures as they existed at the beginning of World War II.

The book is divided into four parts with a total of seven chapters arranged roughly in chronological order (more about that later). This volume is a precursor to the same author's book "Unflinching Zeal", the story of the British and French air arms during the Battles of France and Britain. The contents of this book span the period November 1918 through May 1940. Part I, Legacies of World War I, contains a single chapter, while Part II, The Interwar Years, 1918-1934, contains two. Part III, The Road to War, 1932-1940, has three chapters, while Part IV, War, 1938-1940, reverts back to a single chapter.

In this book, Higham lays out his argument that the RAF and the Armee de l'Air differed in just about every way possible in the years leading up to the Second World War. Military and civilian leadership, cultural and social systems, financial systems, communications and maintenance systems all differed between the two countries. While serious mistakes were made on both sides of the Channel during the run-up to war, those errors made on the British side were eventually overcome, while those on the French side were not. Therein lies the reason Great Britain won the Battle of Britain while France lost the Battle of France.

As for how Higham sought to explain all this to his reader, I can say this...I had not gone far in my reading before I began to question how I could survive to finish the book. There is no question that Higham put a great deal of effort into writing this book. However, the author's writing style is not capable of getting the reader to understand the points being made. Organization of the proofs is a significant issue. As one can see from the book's table of contents, numbered parts containing just a single chapter just don't make sense to me, and this book has two of the four parts in that condition.

Things get worse as one takes a deeper dive into the chapters. Timelines change tack with regularity, with the author rarely staying the course long enough to make his point. Each chapter contains titled subchapters supported by paragraphs. Facts suddenly appear then disappear in those paragraphs without further discussion, as if the sentences were meant to stand by themselves unconnected to the previous or following text. In comparison/contrast works one generally makes the case for a topic first from one side to the other. In this work the author blends and blurs distinctions to the point that the reader gets easily confused.

The author's chosen topic is a rich one, especially as the French side of the story is not covered well by French authors for obvious reasons. I believe the author got in over his head with his approach to the book as he chose to pursue several aspects of the issue simultaneously--the political, the cultural, the military, and the technical. Higham tries to cover all of these in less than 300 pages, it was just too much. The cultural aspect is a really interesting take on French miltary performance in 1940, the path that Kenneth Pollack took successfully in his 2018 book "Armies of Sand" which spoke to the impact of culture on Arab armies in the post-World War II era. I think that even just looking at the technologies of the two air arms would have been a productive study as well--Hurricane and Spitfire versus MS. 406, D.520, and MB.152.

Unfortunately for the reader, Higham tries to cover all the bases here with the result that he reaches none of them. The two and a half stars I awarded on this rating were for the significant effort it took to get this much material into print.… (more)