The Phoney War

On 27 September 1939, as the guns fell silent in Warsaw and the September Campaign in Poland was drawing to a close, shots were fired on the Western Front which contemporary chronologies of the war recorded as the first action of the German army in western Europe: guns on the Siegfried Line opened fire on villages lying behind the Maginot Line. This report comes from the press of the day and cannot be confirmed in military studies, which do not name the villages shelled. What is known is that during the Saar Offensive, from 7 September, both sides used artillery, if sparingly, and that at the end of September, as the French withdrew from the strip of German territory they had occupied and the Germans began moving troops from Poland to the west, the shelling grew heavier. The same day brought a far more important decision: Hitler summoned the commanders of the armed services to the Reich Chancellery and told them that he intended to strike in the west that very autumn. Between the declaration of war on 3 September and that blow, which did not fall until 10 May 1940, stretched a period that the French called the drôle de guerre, the British the Phoney War, and the Poles the “strange war” (dziwna wojna).

A war without fighting

The names given to this period expressed the bewilderment of contemporaries. Britain and France had declared war on Germany on 3 September and were thus formally at war, but on land they were hardly waging it. The French expression drôle de guerre – the “strange” or “funny” war – was claimed by the writer and war correspondent Roland Dorgelès, and the newspapers began using it in the winter of 1939–1940. The English “Phoney War”, a sham war, came from America: it is attributed to Senator William Borah, who said in September 1939 that there was something phoney about this war. At first the British spoke of the “Bore War”, a joking allusion to the Boer War, and the British press also coined the word Sitzkrieg, the “sitting war”, as the opposite of the German Blitzkrieg. Winston Churchill later called this time the Twilight War.

Large armies faced each other on both sides of the Franco-German border. France had mobilised some five million men, and in October the British Expeditionary Force took up positions along the Belgian border. Facing them stood the German Army Group C, which in September consisted mainly of reserve divisions. The only significant undertaking on land was the Saar Offensive, in which the French advanced a few kilometres into Germany, but on 12 September General Gamelin halted the attack, and at the end of September the troops began to pull back. After that the front went quiet. There were patrols, artillery bombardments and skirmishes in no man’s land, but not a single battle. The first soldier of the British Expeditionary Force to be killed died on patrol only on 9 December 1939.

A strategy of time

Inaction on land was not an accident but the result of a deliberate strategy. In the Anglo-French staff talks of the spring of 1939 both sides had concluded that at the start of a war Germany would be stronger on land and in the air. The Allies therefore intended to ride out the first phase on the defensive, behind the Maginot Line; to cut Germany off from raw materials by naval blockade (PL) and economic warfare; to build up their own armies and air forces; and to go over to a decisive offensive only when the balance had tipped in their favour, in 1941 at the earliest. The British government was planning for a war lasting at least three years. For Poland this meant that the promise of a great offensive in mid-September had from the outset been at odds with its allies’ plans. On 12 September, at the Abbeville conference, the prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier concluded that Poland could not be effectively helped.

To this strategy was added a fear of air power. The British and French expected the Luftwaffe to bomb their cities and did not want to give it a pretext. That is why in September RAF bombers attacked only warships, and over Germany, from the night of 3–4 September, dropped nothing but leaflets (the first RAF raids). According to the memoirs of the British MP Leo Amery, when he suggested to the Secretary of State for Air, Kingsley Wood, that incendiary bombs be used to set fire to the forests of the Black Forest, where ammunition dumps were hidden, the minister replied that this could not be done because it was private property. The anecdote became a symbol of the whole period. The French, for their part, feared that raids on the Ruhr would bring German retaliation on French armaments factories.

The real war was being fought at sea. From the sinking of the Athenia on 3 September German submarines attacked British shipping, the Admiralty introduced convoys, and on 17 September U-29 sank the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous. The Royal Navy enforced the blockade, stopping ships bound for Germany. But Germany had a new partner in reserve: after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the trade agreement of August 1939, the USSR could supply it with oil, grain and raw materials overland, beyond the reach of the British fleet. The blockade was therefore less watertight than its authors had assumed.

Leaflets, loudspeakers and radio

Since no one was shooting at the front, propaganda did the fighting. Both sides dropped leaflets and set up loudspeakers in no man’s land. German propaganda companies broadcast music and speeches to French soldiers, and according to numerous accounts banners were hung on German positions with slogans along the lines of “Don’t shoot, and we won’t shoot either”. German propaganda struck at the alliance’s most sensitive spot: it told the French that they were fighting for England, which, as one slogan put it, “provides the machines, while France provides the chests” of soldiers. Radio Stuttgart broadcast programmes in French featuring Paul Ferdonnet, a journalist who had fled to Germany and was known in France as “the traitor of Stuttgart”. These broadcasts were listened to in the trenches and at home.

French propaganda was directed by the writer Jean Giraudoux, appointed Commissioner General for Information in July 1939. Posters bearing the slogan of the finance minister Paul Reynaud, “We shall win because we are the stronger”, showed on a world map the British and French empires, beside which Germany looked small. The slogan appealed to reason, but not to soldiers who did not know why they were standing on the border.

Morale

By the spring of 1940 the French army’s most dangerous enemy had become boredom. Millions of reservists spent the autumn and the bitterly cold winter of 1939–1940 in barracks, shelters and billets in villages, far from their families and work, without training and without sight of the enemy. Discipline slackened, drunkenness spread, and the property of evacuated inhabitants disappeared from the abandoned villages of Alsace and Lorraine. The government and the high command tried to rescue morale: theatrical performances were organised for the troops, footballs and sports equipment were handed out, wine rations were increased and leave was extended. The writer Jean-Paul Sartre, then a soldier in a meteorological unit in Alsace, described in his war diaries of the Phoney War how his comrades listened to the propaganda with growing indifference and asked what the war was for. The historian Marc Bloch, a staff officer, wrote after the defeat of 1940, in Strange Defeat, of the sluggishness and routine of the high command.

The political unity of 2 September soon fell apart. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact the French communists, obedient to the Comintern, declared the war “imperialist”. On 26 September Daladier’s government dissolved the French Communist Party, and its leader Maurice Thorez deserted from the army at the beginning of October. In Britain inaction at the front encouraged the illusion that the war could be ended without great sacrifices. Children evacuated from the big cities in September began returning home as early as the autumn, because the expected bombing had not come.

Germany prepares to strike

For Germany the Phoney War was a pause forced upon it, not one it had chosen. The Wehrmacht needed time to transfer divisions from Poland to the west, replenish ammunition and repair equipment, and Hitler hoped that after the fall of Poland the western powers would agree to peace. Yet as early as 27 September he told his commanders that he would attack in the west before the Allies grew stronger. The French troops completed their withdrawal from the Saar in mid-October, and on 16 October the German 1st Army went over to a counter-attack and recovered the rest of the lost ground.

On 6 October Hitler delivered a speech in the Reichstag containing a peace offer based on recognition of the conquest of Poland. Daladier rejected it on 10 October, Chamberlain on 12 October. Already on 9 October Hitler had issued Directive No. 6, ordering preparations for an offensive through Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The generals, led by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, and the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, believed that the army was not ready and delayed the preparations. The date of the attack was set and postponed many times during the autumn and winter – by German reckoning, several dozen times. The deciding factors were the weather, the state of the troops and, finally, the Mechelen incident in January 1940, when documents containing the plan of attack fell into Belgian hands. The plan was then changed to the concept of General Erich von Manstein, with the main thrust through the Ardennes.

Its place in the war

For the Allies the Phoney War was time wasted. In eight months the French army did not change its doctrine, did not create strong armoured formations in time and did not prepare for a war of manoeuvre. In the winter of 1939–1940 the attention of London and Paris shifted to Scandinavia: first to aid for Finland in the Winter War, then to plans for cutting off supplies of Swedish iron ore. On 20 March 1940, after the conclusion of the Finnish–Soviet peace, Daladier resigned and Reynaud became prime minister. On 9 April Germany attacked Denmark and Norway.

For Poland the Phoney War meant that in its hour of trial it had been left alone. The Germans were able to fight the September Campaign with almost all their forces, without fear of an attack in the west, and once it was over to move their army to the Rhine. The Phoney War ended on 10 May 1940, when the Wehrmacht struck at the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and through the Ardennes at France. After six weeks France capitulated, and the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. The conviction that time was on the Allies’ side proved to be the costliest illusion of the first year of the war.