- Well, I have been working on a book on the French Campaign for a very long time, and other researchers too (but our various books will be different and independent from each other even if we share some information from time to time). I feel the history of this campaign still has to be published, in any case in the way I see it.

If someone tries to overtake me and publish a competing book before I do in order to shoot me down he'll fall on his nose for he'll never be able to have MY thoughts and write MY book (and conversely I couldn't write someone else's book...), both being quite original, as you know. "THE" cult-book on the French Campaign now is "Invisibles vainqueurs", to which I very strongly contributed (50 % of the text - not the loss statistics - aprox. 74 % of the pictures, the dust jacket, etc.) and not "Ils étaient là...", published a few years ago. I guess there must be a reason for this difference, perhaps precisely my "wild nonsense" (élucubrations) - see below.

Of course I can't give away all my little secrets here but I can give you an example on top of the Facon plagiarism I mentioned in my other reply. I published it 1991 in "Invisibles vainqueurs" already so it's not new any more but almost nobody read my 30 pages in very small (too small) print except a few bilious, vicious people who heroically mentioned my "wild nonsense" in their low-grade magazines without ever giving one single example (quotations) of this wild nonsense.

Well, part of this "nonsense" was as follows : Since 1940 most French people and authors writing on 1940 wail and cry all the time, reporting sinister disasters only. "We had got nothing (in matter of armaments), we could do nothing, we were overwhelmed by huge quantities of German soldiers and giant armaments, oh, poor little us", etc. By now (almost) everybody knows this to be completely wrong. I gave an example : I always had read that French fighters were poorly armed and had a tough time trying to fight German aircraft possessing a powerful armament with huge quantities of ammunition (you always make your enemy bigger and stronger, this started when our ancestors lived (?) in caves).

In particular even French heroes among fighter pilots, having fought all the way (some of them on the fabulous D.520) and won many victories (considering the short time) were still complaining, 30-50 years later, about the "good cannon" which alas had "60 rounds only". Of course German cannon were supposed to be fed with at least 120, why not 300 rounds. (Remember that many Me 109 E-3s, and their cannon drums, were shot down during the Phoney war, some of them were captured). What a surprise it was to me when I started reading GERMAN documents and first-hand accounts : hear hear, German cannon equipping the Me 110 and part of the 109s had got... 60 r p g! Much later I "discovered" the respective technical data of the French and German cannon : clearly the French one was much, much better (in muzzle velocity or Vo, in rate of fire and in range... in one word, in everything). Besides, the French started introducing belt-fed cannon in June 1940 (Bloch 155) with 120 r p g, whereas the Germans waited until the introduction of the MG 151 about February or April 1940 (I'm not quite sure).

So there is still a lot to be said and I'm trying to do so. Be patient!