In exchange, they had destroyed the French, Belgian, Dutch, Polish and British armies. Total Allied losses including the capture of the French army amounted to 2,292,000. Casualties, killed or wounded, were as follows:

• France - 90,000 killed, 200,000 wounded and approximately 1,800,000 captured. In August, 1940 1,575,000 prisoners were taken into Germany where roughly 940,000 remained until 1945 when they were liberated by advancing Allied forces. While in German captivity 24,600 French prisoners died, 71,000 escaped, 220,000 were released by various agreements between the Vichy government and Germany, and several hundred thousand were paroled because of disability and/or sickness.^[65] Most prisoners spent their time in captivity as slave labourers.
• Britain - 68,111 killed, wounded or captured
• Belgium - 23,350 killed or wounded
• The Netherlands - 9,779 killed or wounded
• Poland - 6,092 killed, wounded or captured
• Czechoslovakia - 1,615 losses, including 400 killed.

[

Historiography

After the war the French Parliament instituted a Committee to investigate the causes of the defeat; its work unfinished, it was disbanded in 1951.^[66] French interest in the events was afterwards rather limited with few major histories appearing.^[67] This left the field to British and American writers. Three important works appeared in the sixties: Guy Chapman's Why France Collapsed (1968); Alistair Horne's To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (1969) and William Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (1969).^[68] The last two works, also translated into French, had a major influence on the public perception of the campaign.^[69] They conformed to some earlier French works, as Marc Bloch's Étrange Défaite ("Strange Defeat", posthumously appearing in 1946) and Jacques Benoist-Méchin's Soixante jours qui ébranlèrent l'occident ("Sixty Days that shook the West", 1956) in describing France as a nation in moral crisis with a weak leadership and the people torn apart by political divisions. Strikes and budgetary limitations would have prevented an adequate preparation for war. France, terminally in decline, would have been defeatist and defensive and this would have been reflected in the attitude of a "sclerotic" High Command, unable to adapt itself to modern tactics. This situation is then contrasted to that in Germany, where the assumed acceptance of Blitzkrieg tactics would have made a German victory almost inevitable. A more modern writer using this conceptual framework is Eugen Weber in his The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (1994).

In France this approach to the subject has always remained popular as shown by later works as Jean Baptiste Duroselle's La Décadence (1979). Especially outside this country^[70] in reaction to these traditional "decadentist" works a more revisionist school has developed.^[71] The revisionist historians emphasize on the one hand the very deep structural demographic and economic disadvantages for France, that would have made it difficult to attain parity with Germany anyway, whatever the state of the people, leadership or command; and on the other hand the fundamental contingency of history, indicating the actual choice for a strategy as the main cause of defeat. When the structural approach is dominant it often results in depicting the French defeat as predetermined by the circumstances, whereas the more "contingent" view tends to consider a French defensive success as quite possible.

An early revisionist work was Adolphe Goutard's La Guerre des occasions perdues ("The War of the lost opportunities", 1956), claiming that the war could have been won with a correct strategy. In the sixties the "international history" school around Pierre Renouvin saw the low birth rate, the manpower losses in the previous war and a slow industrial innovation cycle as the main factors. At the same time Canadian historian John Cairns in a number of articles warned against the tendency to read the defeat into all previous events. In the seventies Robert J. Young argued in his In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning, 1933-1940 (1978) that the French leadership in its military planning rationally adapted to the conditions present in preparing for a long war of attrition against Germany. The Israeli-American historian Jeffrey Gunsburg in his Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat of the West, 1940 (1979) saw the failure of France's allies to match the French war effort in proportion to their population as the main allied weakness. French historian Robert Frankenstein in his Le prix du réarmement français, 1935–1939 (1982) showed that France made an enormous rearmament effort, in the end surpassing German production in both tanks and aircraft. In 1985 Robert Doughty in his The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919–1939 tried to replace the image of a merely stagnant French military doctrine with that of an as such understandable adaptation to manpower shortages in form of very methodical tactics, as opposed to the flexible German Auftragstaktik. The traditional presumed antithesis with German Blitzkrieg tactics was made even more problematic by Karl-Heinz Frieser's Blitzkrieg-Legende (1995), which claimed that Blitzkrieg was neither the basis of German long term geostrategy nor the tactical basis of the official German attack plan of May 1940. Pointing out that in strategic battlefield simulations of the campaign it is hard to make the Allied side lose, American historian Ernest May in his Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (2000) emphasizes the failure of Allied intelligence to predict the German strategy.

[

See also

• British Expeditionary Force order of battle (1940)
• Blitzkrieg
• Military history of France during World War II
• Battle of the Netherlands
• Vichy France
• Western Front

[

Notes

[

References

[

Further reading

[

External links

• BBC - History - WW2: Fall of France Campaign (Flash animation of the campaign)
• Official German account of the Battle of France (as published in 1940)
• Battle of France (Serbian)
• Armistice Agreement Between Germany and France, 22 June 1940

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