The French withdraw from the Saar

At the beginning of October 1939 the French divisions that had advanced a few kilometres into the German Saar in September returned to their own territory, to positions in front of and behind the Maginot Line. They withdrew slowly, by night, unit by unit, in accordance with an order issued by the Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, as early as 21 September. On the occupied strip of German land, between the border and the Siegfried Line, only weak covering outposts remained. In practice, this ended the only offensive operation the French Army undertook while the Wehrmacht was fighting in Poland. Warsaw had surrendered a few days earlier, Hel surrendered on 2 October, and on the Wieprz the last large grouping of the Polish Army was fighting its final battles.

Chronologies place the French withdrawal from the Saar under 4 October. No study points to a single day on which it took place, because the retreat lasted several weeks. The order was issued on 21 September, the main forces left German soil around the turn of September and October, and the last covering outposts did not leave until 16–17 October, during the German counter-attack. Some French authors write that the last soldiers were back across the border as early as 30 September, but they mean the main forces, not the outposts. The date of 4 October captures well the moment when the French Army as a whole was back in its starting positions, even though its forward screens remained on the German side for almost two more weeks.

An offensive that never developed

The French advance into the Saar began on 7 September, and the main attack got under way on 9 September. Troops of General André-Gaston Prételat’s Second Army Group occupied most of the Warndt Forest west of Saarbrücken and a dozen or so deserted villages in the valley of the Blies. They reached their furthest point, some eight kilometres in, around 12 September. Most of their losses were caused by mines, which the Germans had sown thickly across the evacuated border zone. That same day Gamelin halted the attack, and at the conference in Abbeville the prime ministers Édouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain concluded that Poland could not realistically be helped and that the West must prepare for a long war. From then on the French were merely to hold the ground they had taken and reconnoitre the German fortifications.

On 17 September the Red Army entered Poland, and for the French high command the question of helping its Polish ally was closed. Gamelin decided that keeping troops in the German forefield no longer made sense and might become dangerous. The occupied strip was narrow, cut by the valleys of the Saar and the Blies, where the Germans had blown the bridges, and in places only a few kilometres separated it from the main line of German fortifications. If the Germans, now free of the fighting in Poland, moved their divisions and aircraft to the west, the French units could be attacked with rivers at their backs, on ground they had not had time to fortify. Autumn was also approaching, and the soldiers had no prepared winter quarters in the forefield. On the Maginot Line shelters, fortifications and supply facilities awaited them.

The order of 21 September

On 21 September Gamelin ordered preparations for the withdrawal of the main forces to French territory. The retreat was to be gradual and secret, under cover of darkness, so that the Germans would not notice when and where the French were leaving each village. Only light covering forces – outposts, patrols and reconnaissance groups – were to remain on the occupied ground, and they too were to withdraw without engaging if attacked in strength.

The decision met with opposition from some generals. The loudest protest came from General Henri Giraud, who believed that ground won with difficulty, and at the cost of men lost on the mines, was being given up without a fight, and that with a little boldness the army could have reached the Rhine. Other commanders, such as General Victor Bourret of the Fifth Army, thought the opposite: without heavy artillery and special ammunition for destroying bunkers an attack on the Siegfried Line was unrealistic, and staying in front of it to no purpose only exposed the troops to losses.

The retreat was indeed as slow as the advance had been. At the end of September the main forces pulled out of one sector after another by night. The Germans tried to harass them. On 28 September the French repulsed a local counter-attack by German infantry around Bischmisheim and Ommersheim, east of Saarbrücken. By the turn of September and October the divisions of the Third and Fourth Armies, which had carried out the September attack, were back in France, in their starting positions in front of the Maginot Line or in its fortifications. Only outposts remained on German soil, in a few places.

The Germans return to the west

The French withdrawal coincided with the end of the campaign in Poland and with the start of a great movement of German troops in the opposite direction. As early as the last days of September the Wehrmacht high command began transferring divisions from the Vistula to the Rhine by rail and motorway. Luftwaffe fighters and bombers were returning as well. On 27 September, the day Warsaw surrendered, Hitler told the commanders of the armed services that he intended to attack France through Belgium and the Netherlands that very autumn. Against the backdrop of the Phoney War, in which there had been almost no fighting in the west for weeks, a great turn was thus being prepared, though neither Paris nor London yet knew its scale.

The Allies, too, were preparing for winter. On 3 October I Corps of the British Expeditionary Force began taking over from the French a sector of the Belgian border east of Lille. The best motorised French divisions took up positions on the Belgian border, where a German attack was most feared, while in Lorraine the troops manned the Maginot Line and its forefield and went over to the defensive.

The German counter-attack

On 16 October the German First Army under General Erwin von Witzleben, reinforced by divisions arriving from Poland, attacked along the whole sector the French had occupied in September. The blow struck empty air. In accordance with their orders the French covering outposts withdrew, fighting only brief delaying actions, and on 17 October the last of them left German territory. The Germans recovered all the lost ground and in a few places pushed a few square kilometres into France. Local skirmishes went on until 24 October. After that the front in Lorraine fell silent until May 1940.

The whole Saar operation, from the advance on 7 September to the German counter-attack, cost the French, according to French figures, about 2,000 men killed, wounded, missing and sick. Polish studies give 1,750 soldiers and 98 officers killed, wounded and missing. German reports for the period up to 17 October spoke of 196 killed, 356 wounded and 114 missing, and of 11 aircraft lost.

Place in the war

The withdrawal from the Saar closed the only chapter of the 1939 campaign in which the French Army stood on German soil. The offensive did not draw a single German division away from Poland, and the retreat, carried out just as the fighting in Poland was ending, showed that the Allies had opted for a long, defensive war. They believed that the naval blockade would weaken Germany and that their own rearmament, backed by American industry, would allow them to go over to the offensive in 1941 at the earliest. In Poland, and later among the Polish authorities in exile in France, the retreat hardened the bitter conviction that the allies had broken their promise to attack “with their main forces” on the fifteenth day of mobilisation.

For Germany it was the breathing space it needed. A few days later, on 6 October, Hitler offered peace in a speech to the Reichstag, and on 9 October he issued a directive for the preparation of an attack on France and the Low Countries. Over the winter of 1939/1940 the date of the attack was postponed many times, and in the meantime the plan was changed so that the main thrust went through the Ardennes. On 10 May 1940 the Wehrmacht attacked, broke the front on the Meuse and defeated France in six weeks. The Maginot Line, behind which the French divisions had withdrawn in October 1939, was simply bypassed. Gamelin was dismissed on 19 May 1940. Witzleben, whose First Army broke through the Maginot Line in Lorraine in June 1940, became a field marshal and later one of the conspirators against Hitler. After the attempt on Hitler’s life of 20 July 1944 he was sentenced to death and executed on 8 August 1944.