page_title: Historiography of the Battle of France
section_title: Fuller (1956)
hierarchical_section_title: Historiography of the Battle of France / Early studies / Fuller (1956)
caption_attribution_description: English: The evolution of PlanYellow between 1939 and 1940
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: 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, was 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.
caption: Maps showing the evolution of Fall Gelb (Case Yellow)
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