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,
Contemporary comment
While the French armies were being defeated, the government turned to elderly warriors from the First World War. At a time many civilians felt there must be a wicked conspiracy afoot, these new leaders blamed a leftist culture inculcated by the schools for the failure, a theme that has repeatedly appeared in conservative commentary since 1940. General Maxime Weygand said as he took over in May 1940, "What we are paying for is twenty years of blunders and neglect. It is out of the question to punish the generals and not the teachers who have refused to develop in the children the sense of patriotism and sacrifice." He also claimed that reserve officers who abandoned their units were the products of "teachers who were Socialists and not patriots". The new national dictator of Vichy France, Marshal Philippe Pétain, had his explanation: "Our defeat is punishment for our moral failures. The mood of sensual pleasure destroyed what the spirit of sacrifice had built up".
Early studies From Lemberg to Bordeaux (1941)
From Lemberg to Bordeaux: A German War Correspondent’s Account of Battle in Poland, the Low Countries and France, 1939–40 was written by Leo Leixner, a journalist and war correspondent. The book is a witness account of the battles that led to the fall of Poland and France. In August 1939, Leixner joined the Wehrmacht as a war reporter, was promoted to sergeant and in 1941 published his recollections. The book was originally issued by Franz Eher Nachfolger, the central publishing house of the Nazi Party.From Lemberg to Bordeaux via Library of Congress Catalog
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Tanks Break Through! (1940)
Tanks Break Through! (Panzerjäger Brechen Durch!), written by Alfred-Ingemar Berndt, a journalist and close associate of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, is a witness account of the battles that led to the fall of France. When the 1940 attack was in the offing, Berndt joined the Wehrmacht, was sergeant in an anti-tank division and afterwards published his recollections.Tanks Break Through! via Google books The book was originally issued by Franz Eher Nachfolger, the central publishing house of the Nazi Party, in 1940.Tanks Break Through! via Library of Congress Catalog
Strange Defeat (1940)
L'Etrange Defaite temoignage ecrit en 1940 (Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940) was an account written by the Medieval historian Marc Bloch and published posthumously in 1946. Bloch raised most of the issues historians have debated since and he blamed French leadership,
Guilt was widespread; Carole Fink wrote that Bloch
French interpretations
Martin Alexander (2001) wrote that many early French writers followed Bloch, asking why the French people accepted and even welcomed the defeat of the Third Republic. In The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (1997), Stanley Hoffman, a Frenchman who taught political science at Harvard, wrote that there was no "1940 syndrome". The syndrome was a hypothetical counterpart to the "Vichy syndrome" described in the 1980s by Henry Rousso and with "colonial syndrome" caused by the exposure of French atrocities in Algeria. French historians had shown little interest in the military events from April to June 1940, being more interested in the consequences, particularly the establishment of the Vichy regime in July 1940. Overlooked accounts of the campaign by participants, portrayed brave, puzzled French soldiers but the definitive history of the war fought by the fighting men had yet to be written. Alexander called the British and French in 1940 "neighbouring nations conducting a war in parallel rather than as one unified endeavour" and wrote that the relationship between the national histories was similar, parallel myths and literatures had come about and continued sixty years on.
German interpretations
Mungo Melvin (2001) wrote that German writing on the 1940 campaign sought answers to various questions,
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.
Fuller (1956)
In 1956, the English historian J. F. C. Fuller called the military operations on the Meuse in 1940, "the Second Battle of Sedan". Fuller called the German operation an attack by paralyzation but Robert Doughty wrote that what some writers later called blitzkrieg had influenced few German officers, except for Guderian and Manstein and that the dispute between Guderian and Kleist that led Guderian to resign on 17 May, showed the apprehensions of the higher commanders about the "pace and vulnerability" of the XIX Panzer Corps. Doughty wrote that the development of the German plan suggested that sending armoured forces through the Ardennes was traditional Vernichtungsstrategie (strategy of annihilation), to encircle opposing forces and destroy them in a Kesselschlacht (cauldron battle). Weapons had changed but the methods were the same as those at Ulm (1805), Sedan (1870) and Tannenberg (1914).
Fuller had also written that the German army was an armoured battering-ram, covered by fighters and dive-bombers working as flying artillery, which broke through at several points. Doughty wrote that the XIX, XLI and XV Panzer corps had been the vanguard of the advance through the Ardennes but the most determined French resistance at Bodange, the mushroom of Glaire, Vendresse, La Horgne and Bouvellement, had been defeated by the combined attacks of infantry, artillery and tanks. The XIX Panzer Corps had only acted as a battering ram against the French covering forces in the Ardennes. Only long after 1940 was the importance of German infantry fighting and of combined operations south and to the south-west of Sedan recognised. Doughty also wrote that Fuller was wrong about the role of the Luftwaffe, which had not operated as flying artillery because German ground forces depended on conventional artillery. German bombing around Sedan on 13 May had managed to deplete the morale of the French 55th Division and ground attacks had helped to force on the ground advance but French bunkers were captured by hard infantry fighting, supported by direct-fire artillery and tanks, not destroyed by bombs; only two tanks of the French Second Army were reported destroyed by aircraft.
Recent analyses
May (2000)
In 2000, American scholar Ernest R. May argued that Hitler had a better insight into the French and British governments than vice versa and knew that they would not go to war over Austria and Czechoslovakia, because he concentrated on politics rather than the state and national interest. From 1937 to 1940, Hitler stated his views on events, their importance and his intentions, then defended them against contrary opinion from the likes of Ludwig Beck, the German army chief of staff until August 1938 and Ernst von Weizsäcker the Staatssekretär (State Secretary, the deputy Foreign Minister). Hitler sometimes concealed aspects of his thinking but he was unusually frank about what came first and his assumptions. May referred to Wheeler-Bennett (1964),
and that in Paris, London and other capitals, there was an inability to believe that someone might want another world war. Given public reluctance to contemplate another war and a need to conciliate more centres of power, to reach consensus about Germany. The rulers of France and Britain were reticent, which limited dissent at the cost of enabling assumptions that suited their convenience. In France, French Prime Minister Daladier withheld information until the last moment, then presented the cabinet a fait accompli in September 1938 over the Munich Agreement, to avoid discussion over whether Britain would follow France into war or if the military balance was really in Germany's favour or how significant it was. The decision for war in September 1939 and the plan devised in the winter of 1939–1940 by Daladier for possible war with the Soviet Union, followed the same pattern.
Hitler miscalculated Franco-British reactions to the invasion of Poland in September 1939, because he had not realised that a watershed in public opinion had occurred in mid-1939. May also wrote that the French and British could have defeated Germany in 1938 with Czechoslovakia as an ally and also in late 1939, when German forces in the west were incapable of preventing a French occupation of the Ruhr, which would force a capitulation or a futile German resistance in a war of attrition. France did not invade Germany in 1939, because it wanted British lives to be at risk too and because of hopes that a blockade might force a German surrender without a bloodbath. The French and British also believed that they were militarily superior and guaranteed victory through the blockade or by desperate German attacks. The run of victories enjoyed by Hitler from 1938–1940, could only be understood in the context of defeat being inconceivable to French and British leaders.
May wrote that when Hitler demanded a plan to invade France in September 1939, the German officer corps thought that it was foolhardy and discussed a coup d'état, only backing down when doubtful of the loyalty of the soldiers to them. With the deadline for the attack on France being postponed so often, OKH had time to revise Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) for an invasion over the Belgian Plain several times. In January 1940, Hitler came close to ordering the invasion but was prevented by bad weather. Until the Mechelen Incident in January forced a fundamental revision of Fall Gelb, the main effort (schwerpunkt) of the German army in Belgium would have been confronted by first-rate French and British forces, equipped with more and better tanks and with a great advantage in artillery. After the Mechelen Incident, OKH devised an alternative and hugely risky plan to make the invasion of Belgium a decoy, with the main effort switched to the Ardennes, to cross the Meuse and reach the Channel coast. May wrote that the alternative plan has been called the Manstein Plan but that Guderian, Manstein, Rundstedt, Halder and Hitler had been equally important in its creation.