page_title: Historiography of the Battle of France
section_title: German interpretations
hierarchical_section_title: Historiography of the Battle of France / Early studies / German interpretations
caption_attribution_description: English: Evolution of Fall Gelb (Fall Gelb No3 is omitted) - With ref. of File:1939-1940-battle of france-plan-evolution.jpg
context_page_description: The Historiography of the Battle of France describes how the German victory over French and British forces in the Battle of France had been explained by historians and others. Many people in 1940 found the fall of France unexpected and earth shaking. Alexander notes that Belgium and the Netherlands fell to the German army in a matter of days and the British were soon driven back to the British Isles,
  But it was France's downfall that stunned the watching world. The shock was all the greater because the trauma was not limited to a catastrophic and deeply embarrassing defeat of her military forces – it also involved the unleashing of a conservative political revolution that, on 10 July 1940, interred the Third Republic and replaced it with the authoritarian, collaborationist Etat Français of Vichy. All this was so deeply disorienting because France had been regarded as a great power....The collapse of France, however, was a different case.
  — Alexander
context_section_description: Mungo Melvin (2001) wrote that German writing on the 1940 campaign sought answers to various questions,
  How brilliant was the Manstein–Hitler operational idea, strategically? Was it realistic in its objectives to "force a decision on land", to crush the enemy and end the war in Germany's favour? Was the French defeat a foregone conclusion to German eyes? Would the defeat of the BEF on the sands of Dunkirk have decided the war in Germany's favour?
  — Melvin
  Melvin wrote that Germans writing in 1940 showed apprehension rather than confidence. German army officers were astonished by the swiftness of the victory, the French collapse and the British escape. Later historians have hindsight and British writers can make much of Dunkirk but German writers take the view that although it was a big operational and perhaps strategic blunder, this could not be blamed on a German failure to have formed a concept of the war; Dunkirk might not have been decisive but was a fatal blow to German strategy. Melvin called the German victory a "stunning operational success"; the Germans had exploited Allied mistakes and recovered from theirs, despite the tensions in the German high command.
caption: Map of Dyle Plan and Fall Gelb (Case Yellow)
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