Marie Claude, thank you for the correction on the 100,000 French soldiers who did resist to death in 1940.

Yes Stalin was unprepared for war, having massacred his generals. The point was neither France nor Britain held much weight in Stalin’s pre-Molotov-Ribbentropp deliberations, though the French were far more eager for an alliance than Chamberlain, since they were the ones facing the prospect of invasion for the third time in 70 years, and Dunkirk has only been made noble by the fact that some there lived to fight another day. Had Britain accomodated Hitler it would be a completely different story.