Wenkin, Hugues Panzerwaffe. Volume 2: Le temps des victoires. 1939: Pologne, 1940: France

From autumn 1939 to summer 1940, German tanks rushed from victory to victory, crushing any resistance in their path. German propaganda and its most famous generals recounted these moments of martial lust as if they were a military "walk in the park", refusing even to recognise the brave sacrifices of the defeated. The archives of the units and Berlin offices lift the veil of history that they deliberately concealed. The tanks passed their baptism of fire in Poland and suffered 30% losses. Technical details that the generals, who were initially sceptical about the tanks' potential, chose to ignore in the euphoria of the moment. With his dual perspective as historian and engineer, the author offers a new key to understanding these first German successes. After describing the tactical functioning of the German armoured units in the first volume, Hugues Wenkin makes the thousands of pages of German documents comprehensible, which have so far remained opaque to historians who have not mastered the technical aspects of the equipment and its maintenance. This second volume offers a decidedly different perspective, explaining in particular the incomprehensible stopping of the tanks at Dunkirk. By returning to the primary sources, it clears away the smokescreen put up by Goebbels' propaganda that hid the Achilles heel of the Third Reich's mighty tanks.