Manstein Plan - Executing The Plan

Executing The Plan

In reality however, Guderian and the other panzer generals, Rommel among them, would simply disobey orders and advance to The Channel and further to the coastal French towns of Calais and Dunkirk as fast as they could without waiting for the infantry, only temporarily halted by Hitler's orders on 17, 22 and 24 May. The effects of the Manstein Plan were devastating for the Allied armies, as they were effectively encircled by Army Groups A and B, thus sparking a desperate evacuation from Dunkirk. The losses in the north and resulting lack of mobile reserves led to the defeat of the remaining French forces and Germany's complete victory over France.

This resounding success came as a complete surprise even to the Germans, who hardly had dared to hope for such an outcome. Most generals had vehemently opposed the plan as being much too risky; even those supporting it had mainly done so out of desperation, because Germany's geostrategic position seemed so hopeless. Count Ciano later in the war observed that "victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan", and Fall Gelb would have no lack of sires. The two most prominent among them would be Hitler himself and Halder. Because Hitler hadn't liked Halder's original plans, he had suggested many alternatives, some of them bearing some resemblance to the Manstein Plan, the closest a proposal made by him on 25 October 1939. Soon Nazi propaganda began to claim that the victory was a result of Hitler's military genius; Hitler praised Von Manstein with the words "Of all the generals, with whom I spoke about the new attack plan in the West, Manstein was the only one who understood me!". Halder after the war claimed he was the main inventor, supporting this with the fact that he had begun considering to change the main axis to Sedan even before 13 February — indeed as early as September 1939 — and that Von Manstein's original proposal was too traditional.

The Manstein Plan is often seen as either the result of, or the cause of a mid-twentieth century Revolution in military affairs. In the former hypothesis, expounded by Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart immediately after the events, the Manstein Plan is presented as a natural outcome of deliberate changes in the German military doctrine during the twenties and thirties by men as Guderian or Hans von Seeckt implementing Fuller's or Liddell Hart's ideas. Thus an explicit "Blitzkrieg-doctrine" would have been fully established by 1939 of which the Manstein Plan was but the most spectacular implementation and the Invasion of Poland an earlier application. The doctrine would have been reflected in the organisation and equipment of the German Army and Airforce and would have been radically different from the obsolete doctrines of France, Britain and the Soviet-Union — except for the contributions of some farsighted individuals in these countries such as Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Charles de Gaulle and of course Fuller and Liddell Hart themselves. That the earliest plans by Halder or Von Manstein and the final plan by Halder did not conform to this doctrine is then seen as an anomaly, to be explained by special circumstances.

In the latter hypothesis, promoted by Robert Allan Doughty and Karl-Heinz Frieser, the Manstein Plan is instead a return to the classic principles of the 19th century Bewegungskrieg but now radically adapted to the full potential of modern technology by a sudden and unexpected departure from established German doctrine through the Blitzkrieg-elements provided and executed by Guderian. It claims that the influence of Fuller and Liddell Hart in Germany was limited and much exaggerated by the two writers and that no explicit true Blitzkrieg-doctrine can be found anywhere in the official pre-war German army documentation. It finds further support in the fact that German tank production had no priority and that the plans of the German war economy were at first based on the premise of a long protracted war, not on the expectation of swift victories. The hypothesis allows for a gradual implementation during the thirties of technological advances in a shared moderated Bewegungskrieg doctrine used in all major powers prior to 1940, with more subtle differences between the nations. The Invasion of Poland would then not yet be a true Blitzkrieg campaign, but a classic annihilation battle instead. The lack of Blitzkrieg elements in the official German plans for Fall Gelb is seen as the normal and expected outcome of this situation. Only after the sudden success of the radical execution of the Manstein Plan by Guderian would Blitzkrieg have been adopted as an explicit doctrine, in this view making Operation Barbarossa the first deliberate Blitzkrieg campaign.

Guderian himself, who in both hypotheses plays a key rôle, presented the situation in his postwar book Erinnerungen eines Soldaten (literally "Memories of a Soldier" but translated under the title Panzer Leader) as basically conforming to the second hypothesis, with him being a lone voice struggling against the resistance by a reactionary majority of the German officer corps.