The British Expeditionary Force on the Belgian border

On 11 October 1939 the British Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, rose in the House of Commons and for the first time since the outbreak of war spoke openly about what the army had been doing over the past weeks. “In the six weeks after the outbreak of war in 1914 we transported 148,000 men to France. In the five weeks since the outbreak of this war we have transported 158,000 men to France,” he announced. He added that the British Expeditionary Force had reached the Continent without loss, that the commitment to France had been “fulfilled, and more than fulfilled”, and that the troops were “busy consolidating their positions in the line”. Those positions lay along the Franco-Belgian border, where since 3 October British divisions had been taking over one sector after another from the French. Further to the south-east ran the famous Maginot Line, whose French garrisons were preparing for winter. Three October events – the takeover of the sector on 3 October, the minister’s speech on 11 October and the descriptions of the front carried by the press around 20 October – make up a single story: that of an army which arrived for a war and began to dig.

Taking over the sector

On 3 October General John Dill’s I Corps, made up of the 1st and 2nd Infantry Divisions, began to relieve the French units on the Belgian border east of Lille. On 12 October General Alan Brooke’s II Corps, with the 3rd and 4th Divisions, took its place alongside. The British sector formed a forward salient round Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing: it ran from Maulde on the Scheldt to Halluin, and from there along the river Leie (Lys in French) to Armentières. To the right of the British stood the French First Army; to the left, towards the sea, French units that were later formed into the Seventh Army. Lord Gort’s General Headquarters was in the area of Arras.

It was a sector of the front without an enemy. On the other side of the border lay Belgium, which since 1936 had pursued a policy of strict neutrality and refused any staff talks with France or Britain. Germany, which in the autumn of 1937 had assured the Belgians that their territory would be respected, stood several dozen kilometres further on, beyond Belgium’s eastern border. The British soldiers were therefore looking at Belgian customs posts rather than German trenches. Even so, everyone understood why they had been placed precisely here: in 1914 the right wing of the German armies had marched through Belgium, and the next blow was most likely to come from that direction. On the very day that Hore-Belisha was speaking in the Commons, the German staff was already working on a plan for an offensive through Belgium and the Netherlands, which Hitler had ordered two days earlier.

158,000

The speech of 11 October was the government’s first account of the army since the war began. For five weeks the press and Parliament had voluntarily kept silent about the troop movements so as not to help the enemy. Hore-Belisha related how at the War Office they had waited “night after night” for news of the convoys, which arrived at an average of three a day, and how the whole transport plan had been prepared in secret by a small group of officers with seven clerks and typists. More than 25,000 vehicles had been shipped to France, including tanks weighing 15 tons and more, which ordinary harbour cranes could not lift. The minister stressed how much the army had changed since 1914: then nearly 60 per cent of front-line troops had been infantry, armed with rifles and two machine guns per battalion; now infantry made up only 20 per cent, but every battalion had 50 Bren light machine guns and 22 anti-tank rifles. There were no complaints about equipment, and the “only serious shortages”, according to the minister, were cigarettes and a slow post.

The figure of 158,000, quoted in later chronicles as the strength of British forces in France on that day, comes from this very speech. The British official history gives a slightly different breakdown: by 27 September 152,031 army personnel and 9,932 airmen had been transported. The difference stems from a different way of counting, since the minister spoke of men shipped over five weeks, while the official history counts the army and the air force separately. Either way, the substance is much the same: four infantry divisions with their corps, rear and air units – the whole of the force promised to the French in the spring of 1939.

Answering members’ questions, Hore-Belisha revealed for the first time the names of the corps commanders, Dill and Brooke, and of Gort’s Chief of Staff, General Henry Pownall. He also confirmed that the British army was subordinate to the French command, its commander having only the right of appeal to the Cabinet in London. A party of war correspondents had just arrived in France, who were henceforth to describe the soldiers’ life. Their reports from the border villages, full of trench-digging, rain and boredom, shaped the British picture of the first winter of the war.

The gap between the Maginot Line and the sea

That boredom had its roots in the geography of the French fortifications. The Maginot Line, built from 1929 onwards and named after the War Minister André Maginot, in its full form protected only the border with Germany and Luxembourg, from the Rhine to the area of Longuyon and Montmédy. Its great underground forts, with barracks, power stations, kitchens and narrow-gauge railways in their tunnels, held garrisons ranging from several hundred to more than a thousand men. Further west, along the Belgian border all the way to Dunkirk, the Maginot Line hardly existed. For a long time France had been unwilling to wall itself off in concrete from its Belgian ally, and when the Belgians declared their neutrality after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, it began to build far more modest fortifications there: isolated blockhouses, a few small forts near Maubeuge and anti-tank ditches. On the low-lying, marshy plain of Flanders, moreover, the high water table made it impossible to drive deep tunnels. This “gap” between the Maginot Line and the English Channel was the weakest point of the French defences, and it was precisely this that was entrusted to the British.

As the French army withdrew in October from the strip of the Saar it had occupied in September back behind the Maginot Line, and the German offensive failed to come, the front in the east froze. Contemporary chronicles described French soldiers settling in for the winter in the underground barracks and tunnels of the forts, and the British building new fortifications along the “gap”. This was not a single event of that day but a picture of the whole period. In the Maginot Line the fort garrisons lived like the crew of a ship buried in the earth, with ventilation and electric light but no sun, while the infantry divisions holding the intervals between the forts were quartered in huts and in border villages whose inhabitants had been evacuated inland in September.

In the British sector the French had already dug an anti-tank ditch along much of the border, covered by concrete blockhouses. Gort decided to extend it and to organise a defence in depth, with several successive positions across the base of the salient east of Lille. Work began as soon as the sector had been taken over. In November twelve field companies of engineers from Territorial Army divisions arrived from home, together with units of the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps, mostly men with hardly any military training, who dug ditches and threw up breastworks. Some 700–800 machines were also brought over: bulldozers, excavators and concrete mixers. By May 1940, according to the British official history, some 40 miles (65 km) of anti-tank obstacles had been built, covered by more than 400 concrete pillboxes. These fortifications became known as the Gort Line.

That same autumn a song was written that captured the mood of the time better than anything else. The Irish lyricist Jimmy Kennedy, a captain in the BEF, wrote the words to Michael Carr’s music for “We’re Going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line”. On 17 October Adelaide Hall sang it at the first big wartime concert for the troops, broadcast by the BBC. The soldiers sang about hanging their washing on the German fortifications, but in reality they stood in trenches on the border of a neutral country, waiting for the enemy to come to them.

Place in the war

The takeover of the sector on the Belgian border set the seal on the strategy that Britain and France had settled on before the war: defence in the west and a slow build-up of forces, with an offensive postponed for years. Poland, whose campaign had just ended with the capitulation of its last units, could no longer gain anything from it. Hore-Belisha’s words about 158,000 men sounded in London like proof of efficiency, but they were spoken in the week in which Hitler offered peace on the ruins of Poland, by then already partitioned between Germany and the USSR.

From December 1939 British brigades took turns serving in front of the Maginot Line in the Saar to get to know the real front, and at the beginning of May 1940 the entire 51st Infantry Division took over a sector of its own there. In November 1939 Maurice Gamelin won the British over to the Dyle Plan, which provided for an advance into Belgium as soon as Germany attacked it. A dispute over the pace of pillbox construction in the BEF’s sector contributed to Hore-Belisha’s dismissal in January 1940. By May 1940 British forces in France had grown to ten divisions. On 10 May the BEF left its fortifications and advanced deep into Belgium, while the main German thrust came through the Ardennes, south of the gap it had been meant to defend. After 22 May, cut off from the main French forces, the British divisions fell back onto the Gort Line and then towards Dunkirk, from where they were evacuated to England in Operation Dynamo. The pillboxes built throughout the winter served for only a few days. The soldiers who in the autumn of 1939 had sung about the washing on the Siegfried Line would reach it only years later.