Modern staff-college war games of the 1940 campaign sometimes conclude with German defeat. This causes a few historians to argue that Hitler’s triumph on the battlefield, far from being inevitable, might have been averted. It is hard to accept this view. In the years that followed the 1940 débâcle, the German army repeatedly demonstrated its institutional superiority over the Western Allies, who prevailed on battlefields only when they had a substantial superiority of men, tanks and air support. The Wehrmacht displayed a dynamic energy entirely absent from the 1940 Allied armies.
