Major-General Robert Adam Mungo Simpson Melvin (born 1955) CB OBE is a retired British Army officer, and a military historian.

[3] He went on to be Chief Army Instructor at the Royal College of Defence Studies in 2009 before retiring in 2011.

[6] Manstein is widely regarded as the most gifted German commander of World War II, but he was also a convicted war criminal who never acknowledged his own or the German Army's responsibility for the crimes committed on the Eastern Front while he held major commands there.

Melvin's conclusion was that Manstein was a product of his age, his class, his education and his own stubborn personality, all of which blinded him to the ethical conflict between his duty as a German officer to obey the orders of the legitimate government, and the increasingly criminal nature of the Nazi regime.

[8] Tom Nagorski in The Wall Street Journal found fault with Melvin's concentration on detailed descriptions of Manstein's work as a military commander.