Overview

Airpower over the Rhine is a critical new perspective on the air battle between the French Air Force (FAF) and the Luftwaffe in the skies over France during May and June 1940. Author James F. Slaughter III examines how each country's leadership created the circumstances that enabled the Luftwaffe's victory over the FAF and Germany's ultimate defeat of France. Conventional wisdom--especially in the English-speaking world--purports that the FAF was a nonentity whose loss was all but guaranteed. But the FAF did, in fact, show up to fight. Slaughter traces this misconception to a largely collaborationist cover-up beginning with the Rion Trials in Vichy France that was then perpetuated by Cold War politics and popular mythology. This work compares and examines six fundamental areas that affected the development of the FAF and the Luftwaffe: aircraft and equipment, the aircraft industries, intelligence, the experiences of the Spanish Civil War, doctrine and training, and politics and air power. It also offers new details about and insights into Pierre Cot, a controversial French politician largely unknown outside France. Airpower over the Rhine explains Cot's internal and external impact on the development of the French Air Force and details what is known about his apparent efforts to spy for the Soviet Union.

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James F. Slaughter III is a course designer and adjunct professor at Norwich University in Vermont. He holds multiple degrees in history and education, including a PhD in history from the University of Wolverhampton. He has published a number of pieces on the history of World War II in Europe and regularly presents at conferences in the United States and abroad. He teaches and advises on many subjects at the university level in European and American history. His primary interests are France and Germany from 1870 to 1945, with an emphasis on the development of doctrine and security policy and the interaction of society and government. He resides in South Charleston, West Virginia, with his wife, son, and the family dog. Keith Brown is an audiobook narrator and voice actor with a facility for European accents and languages, including audiobook-fluent German, Russian, Italian, and French. Other voice-over projects Keith has recorded include corporate/eLearning, informational videos, and commercials. Keith has been performing his entire life, spending a decade as an instrumentalist until a transformative high school production of Les Miserables awakened his passion for theater. (Funny story: he auditioned for Javert but won the role of Valjean!) This led Keith to conservatory training and an almost ten-year career as an opera singer and actor. Keith appeared at Carnegie Hall and traveled around the US and abroad, cultivating his natural ear for language, his love of artistic collaboration, and the extraordinary stamina and vocal control that the life of a narrator demands. As an experienced on-air personality, Keith has also hosted and produced classical music programs, sharing the fascinating stories behind the pieces and engaging the listener as only a storyteller can. He was proud to broaden the horizons of classical music audiences all over the country with the syndicated show he created, GAMEPLAY, which celebrates the worlds of video game music.

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