The British Expeditionary Force in France

On 4 September 1939, the day after Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, the first elements of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) sailed from Portsmouth for France. They were advance parties: staff officers, quartermasters, signallers and service troops who were to receive the main body at the ports and bases. A quarter of a century earlier, in August 1914, an army of the same name had crossed the Channel and within a few weeks was fighting at Mons and on the Marne. This time the British soldiers would wait eight months for battle. The arrival of the BEF was the most visible sign that Great Britain was taking the war seriously, and at the same time a measure of how little it could do on land for Poland in 1939.

The army that was never meant to be

After the First World War British governments for years assumed that no major war would break out within the next decade, and set their spending accordingly. Money for rearmament, when it finally appeared, went above all to the navy and the air force. The army was to police the empire, defend the country against air attack and, if need be, send a small force to the Continent. As late as early 1938 the doctrine of “limited liability” still held: Great Britain did not intend to field a large army for a war in Europe, and the equipment for its few regular divisions was being prepared with a colonial war in mind rather than a clash with the Wehrmacht.

The change came after the Munich Agreement, which had deprived France of the allied Czechoslovak army. In the spring of 1939 Anglo-French staff talks began. The French were alarmed to hear that at the start of a war the British could send only two divisions. At the end of March, in the days of the guarantee to Poland, the government of Neville Chamberlain decided to double the Territorial Army, and at the end of April to introduce peacetime conscription, the first in the country’s history. The French were promised two corps of two regular divisions each, together with an air component, ready in France within 33 days of mobilisation. The General Staff prepared a detailed movement plan, designated W4, and the air force a plan of its own for its units. There were no staff talks with Belgium, which clung strictly to its neutrality.

The crossing

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, Great Britain ordered general mobilisation. As early as 2 September ten squadrons of Fairey Battle light bombers flew to airfields around Reims. They made up the Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF) of Air Vice-Marshal Patrick Playfair, part of Bomber Command. They were based in France solely so that their short-range aircraft would be nearer their targets in Germany, and they were not under the command of the expeditionary force. On 3 September the War Cabinet gave command of the BEF to the hitherto Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Vereker, Lord Gort, whose place in London was taken by General Edmund Ironside.

On 4 September the first advance parties sailed from Portsmouth, and on 9 September the first convoy of troopships left Southampton and the Bristol Channel ports. For fear of air attack the main body did not sail to the ports on the Strait of Dover but took the longer route to the west coast of France. The troops began landing at Cherbourg from 10 September, while equipment, ammunition and stores went to Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, where the main unloading began on 12 September. Supply bases were set up in Brittany and on the lower Loire, and the units gathered in assembly areas inland, well away from the frontier. The railways could not keep up: the journey from Cherbourg to the ports where the vehicles were waiting took some thirty hours instead of seven.

The transfer was carried out without loss. By 27 September the Royal Navy and merchant ships had carried to France, according to the British official history, 152,031 army personnel and 9,932 airmen, more than 21,000 military vehicles, 36,000 tons of ammunition, 25,000 tons of fuel and 60,000 tons of frozen meat. Not a single life was lost. It helped that in the first weeks of September Hitler, still hoping to avoid a real war with the Western powers, was restricting submarine operations. The only German attempt to interfere with the shipments was the laying of a few mines near Dover and Weymouth, which the Germans wrongly believed to be the embarkation ports. From 11 September the British began closing the Strait of Dover with a mine barrage, completed at the end of October.

Under French orders

Lord Gort arrived in France in mid-September (sources give dates from 14 to 19 September). His instructions from the government laid down that he would be subordinate to the French commander of the North-Eastern Front, General Alphonse Georges, and was “loyally to carry out” his orders. If, however, he judged that any of them endangered the safety of his troops, he could appeal to the government in London before carrying it out. The government also wished the British units to be kept together as far as possible. Above Georges stood the commander-in-chief of the French army, General Maurice Gamelin. British liaison missions were attached to both headquarters. BEF General Headquarters was set up around Arras, with its branches scattered among the surrounding villages. Gort’s Chief of Staff was General Henry Pownall.

The BEF also included the Air Component of Air Vice-Marshal Charles Blount: reconnaissance and army co-operation squadrons flying Westland Lysander and Bristol Blenheim aircraft, and fighter squadrons of Hawker Hurricanes. Unlike the AASF, it was under Gort’s command. This division, which meant that three separate air forces – one French and two British – were operating in France, proved awkward. In January 1940 both British formations were placed under the joint command of Air Marshal Arthur Barratt.

Four divisions on the Belgian frontier

The promise of the spring was kept. On 3 October I Corps under General John Dill, made up of the 1st and 2nd Infantry Divisions, began taking over a sector of the Belgian frontier from the French. On 12 October II Corps under General Alan Brooke, with the 3rd and 4th Infantry Divisions, entered the line. The 3rd Division was commanded by General Bernard Montgomery. The British sector lay east of Lille and ran from Maulde on the Scheldt to Halluin, and then along the River Lys to Armentières, covering the industrial complex of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing. To the right of the British stood the French First Army. Directly ahead there was no enemy, only neutral Belgium.

The four regular divisions, reinforced by corps troops, formed an efficient, fully motorised professional army, the first of its kind that Great Britain had sent overseas. Set against the French forces, numbering dozens of divisions, it was nevertheless a small contingent. It lacked an armoured division, the first formation of which was promised in a few months at the earliest, as well as modern tanks and anti-aircraft artillery. Mobilisation in France, begun on 2 September, was putting several million men under arms.

The Polish perspective

In Poland the news of the British and French declarations of war was cheered outside the embassies, and reports of British troops landing in France sounded like a promise of early help. The alliance of 25 August bound Great Britain to give Poland “all the support and assistance in its power”, but in the staff talks the British had promised no land offensive, and their plans had from the outset assumed a defensive posture in the West and a slow build-up of forces. At the moment the first BEF parties were coming ashore, the Wehrmacht was cutting through the Polish Corridor. By the time the British divisions were taking up positions near Lille, the campaign in Poland was drawing to a close. No soldier of the BEF fired a shot at the Germans in September 1939. The only Allied offensive on land was the limited and swiftly abandoned French offensive in the Saar, in which the British took no part.

Place in the war

For the BEF the Phoney War had begun. All winter the soldiers dug anti-tank ditches and built concrete pillboxes, later known as the Gort Line. By May 1940 some 40 miles of anti-tank obstacles and more than 400 pillboxes had been built. The first BEF soldier was killed on patrol only on 9 December 1939. In the same month King George VI visited the troops. A dispute over these defences, the so-called pillbox affair, contributed to the dismissal of the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, in January 1940. In December the 5th Infantry Division arrived in France, from January 1940 Territorial Army divisions followed, and from April a third corps. By the end of April 1940 the British army in France numbered 394,000 men, of whom roughly a quarter of a million were in front-line units. Ten divisions stood at the front. Even so, this was still only a small part of the Allied forces in the West.

In the autumn of 1939 Gamelin adopted the Dyle Plan: in the event of a German attack on Belgium, French forces and the BEF were to advance deep into that country, to the line of the River Dyle. On 10 May 1940 the plan was put into effect, and the British, just as the Germans had expected, marched straight into the trap that had been set. The main German thrust came through the Ardennes. Cut off from the rest of the French forces, the BEF fell back to the Channel, and in Operation Dynamo, between 26 May and 4 June, more than 300,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk. BEF General Headquarters was disbanded on 31 May 1940. The army that in the autumn of 1939 had cautiously taken up positions on the Belgian frontier saved its men but abandoned almost all its equipment. Four years would pass before it stood on the Continent again in the strength of whole armies.