Gamelin halts the Saar Offensive

On 12 September 1939 the commander-in-chief of the French army, General Maurice Gamelin, decided to halt the advance in the Saar before his troops reached the main position of the Siegfried Line. That same morning the Anglo-French Supreme War Council met for the first time, at Abbeville in northern France. There the prime ministers, Édouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain, took note that France would not throw its troops against the German fortifications and that the Western Allies would prepare for a long war rather than try to save Poland by an attack in the west. For Poland, which had been fighting for twelve days, this meant that the promised offensive would not come, although no one informed it of this officially.

An offensive that had barely begun

The French entry into the Saar, which chronologies date to 7 September but which got fully under way only at dawn on 9 September, was advancing slowly and methodically. The divisions of General André-Gaston Prételat’s 2nd Army Group had taken most of the Warndt Forest and a dozen or so deserted German villages. They reached their furthest point, a depth of about 8 kilometres, at around 12 September. Most of their losses were caused by German mines, while the German 1st Army avoided battle and waited behind its fortifications. Not a single German division had been transferred from Poland to the west in the meantime.

In Poland the situation was getting worse by the day. German panzer divisions had reached the outskirts of Warsaw on 8 September, and the capital, bombed from the air since the first day of the war, was preparing for a siege. On the Bzura the Poznań and Pomorze Armies had launched a counter-attack on 9 September, while in the south the Germans were advancing towards the San. Gamelin, who before the war had reckoned that the Poles would hold out for several months, concluded as early as 8 and 9 September that the question of Polish resistance was “settled”. In his “Personal Instruction No. 1” to General Alphonse Georges he wrote that once the Poles had lost the line of the Narew and the Vistula, the bulk of the German forces could turn against France, and that French units advancing towards the Siegfried Line might then be surprised by a strong counter-attack or by an attack through Belgium or Switzerland. He feared this more than the assessments of his own intelligence justified: as late as 11 September it was reporting that the Germans had relatively small forces in the west.

The telegram to Rydz-Śmigły

At the same time Gamelin kept up the belief in Poland that France was doing all it could. On 10 September, in reply to urgent requests from the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, he sent a telegram assuring him that more than half of his active divisions on the North-Eastern Front were engaged, that the Germans were putting up “vigorous resistance”, and that the war had taken on a positional character against an enemy prepared for defence. According to some accounts he added that the Germans had already been forced to transfer at least six divisions to the west. This was untrue: only a small part of the French forces was in action, and not a single German unit had been withdrawn from Poland. Gamelin’s reckoning rested on a peculiar arithmetic: he counted only the active divisions of the 2nd Army Group earmarked for offensive operations. Ten such divisions made up half the forces he had envisaged for an offensive to relieve the Poles, and on that basis he spoke of half his troops being engaged.

On that same day, 10 September, a Polish military mission under General Stanisław Burhardt-Bukacki arrived in Paris to press for help to be speeded up. Gamelin received it courteously but promised nothing. “Since the 13th I have been quite unable to get to General Gamelin,” the general reported a few days later. On the morning of 10 September Gamelin told the head of the British mission at his headquarters that he considered his obligations to Poland “more than fulfilled”.

The Abbeville conference

The British had been pressing for a meeting of the Supreme War Council since the first days of the war. In London, moreover, the fear was not of French passivity but that Daladier, shaken by the rapid German advance in Poland, might wish to undertake some rash action into which unprepared British forces would be drawn. On 11 September Chamberlain proposed a meeting the following day at Amiens or Abbeville. It was called at a day’s notice, without an agreed agenda. Poland’s representatives were not invited.

The Abbeville conference began shortly before noon on 12 September. It was attended by Daladier, Chamberlain, the British Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, Lord Ernle Chatfield, and Gamelin, who reported on military matters. Chamberlain had deliberately not brought the British chiefs of staff with him, so Gamelin was the only military authority at Abbeville. The question of Poland came up at the very start. Daladier stated that the Saar Offensive was developing well and might in time grow into a larger operation. Chamberlain replied by praising French restraint so far: time was on the Allies’ side, and premature action would be a mistake. Daladier, aware of France’s dependence on British help, did not insist.

Gamelin announced that the purpose of the operation was to help Poland by diverting the Germans’ attention, but that he did not intend to throw his forces against the main German defensive line and had already issued orders to that effect. He also opposed air raids on targets in Germany as a premature waste of strength. When Chatfield asked whether he would change his plans if the Poles held out longer than expected, Gamelin replied that he would not: longer Polish resistance would merely give Britain and France more precious time for preparations and keep the Germans from transferring forces from the eastern front to the western. Chamberlain summed up that the only real help for Poland was to win the war.

The participants also agreed that until air defences had been strengthened and stocks built up, intensive air operations against the Reich should be avoided, so as not to provoke German raids on British and French industry. They discussed Germany’s possible moves after the end of the campaign in Poland, the attitude of Italy, Spain and the Balkan states, and the war at sea. The official part of the proceedings was over by 1.30 p.m. In the French version of the minutes the conclusions were set out in four points: the aim of the war was to overthrow Hitler; in the west one should act without haste and husband one’s strength; little could be done for Poland; and the outcome of the war would be decided in the west. The British “conclusions” recorded that the Allied armies would not undertake large-scale operations on the western front in the initial phase of the conflict. The press communiqué, by contrast, spoke of the determination of both powers and their will to give Poland “all possible assistance”. Shipments of war equipment to Poland through Romania were not abandoned, although most of the consignments set out only after 12 September and never arrived in time.

The order of 12 September and its revision

The orders Gamelin had spoken of were set out in “Personal Instruction No. 4”, dated 12 September and delivered to the commanders the following day. The advance was to stop in front of the main position of the Siegfried Line, and the troops were to hold the strip of ground they had taken. So abrupt a halt met with objections from some of the generals, among them Georges, and on 15 September, in “Instruction No. 5”, Gamelin agreed to an approach to the forefield of the Siegfried Line and an attempt to shell selected sectors of it with artillery. There was, however, no longer any talk of an assault. According to the Polish historian Wojciech Mazur, who has studied the French and British archives, by mid-September nobody was under any illusion that Gamelin would go beyond the limits of a “trial”.

The Polish ally was not informed of the decisions taken at Abbeville. The head of the French military mission in Poland, General Louis Faury, merely passed on to the Chief of Staff of the Commander-in-Chief, General Wacław Stachiewicz, news that the date of the great offensive had been postponed. Accounts differ in detail: according to some studies the offensive was moved from 17 to 20 September, while Stachiewicz himself recalled that on 16 September he heard of a delay of several days, to around 21 September. The Allies’ position could nevertheless be sensed in Poland. On 15 September the head of the Polish military mission in London, General Mieczysław Norwid-Neugebauer, telegraphed that the British were determined to wage war until Hitler was defeated, but that “for the present we have been left to ourselves and can count only on material aid”.

Assessment

In Polish historiography the decision of 12 September was long regarded as “the betrayal of Abbeville”. The historian Leszek Moczulski called it a classic felony, that is, the betrayal of an ally on the field of battle, and many authors stressed that France had failed to keep to the date of the offensive “with the bulk of its forces” on the fifteenth day of mobilisation, that is, 16 September. Other scholars, Mazur among them, point out that Abbeville brought no fundamental change: since the spring of 1939 French and British plans had envisaged only limited operations in the west and a long war, and after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact Poland had ceased in the Allies’ eyes to be the core of a lasting eastern front. The council was, moreover, only a consultative forum, and its conclusions required the approval of the governments. French critics, such as the future Marshal Alphonse Juin, considered the decision shameful and strategically mistaken, and German generals such as Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl said after the war that a French attack in September would have struck a weak screen. Some military historians reply that with the doctrine of the day, obsolete artillery and aircraft, and the pace of French mobilisation, a rapid breakthrough of the Siegfried Line was impossible.

Place in the war

Five days later, on 17 September, the Red Army entered Poland, and for Gamelin the question of help for Poland was closed. On 21 September he ordered the troops withdrawn from the strip of German territory they had taken to their starting positions on the Maginot Line. At the beginning of October the main forces returned across the border, and on 16 October the Germans, reinforced by divisions transferred from Poland, counter-attacked and by 17 October had recovered the rest of the ground. Counting killed, wounded, missing and sick, the French lost some 2,000 men in the whole operation.

In the west the Phoney War set in: months of inactivity behind fortifications, during which the Allies counted on the naval blockade and time to weaken Germany, and on their own rearmament to let them go over to the offensive in 1941. Hitler had no intention of waiting. The campaign in Poland ended at the beginning of October, and on 10 May 1940 the Wehrmacht struck at France. Within a few days it broke through the front on the Meuse, and on 19 May Gamelin was dismissed. The strategy in whose name Poland had been left to its fate on 12 September 1939 did not save France.