Dreams from the Dark Years: Fool's Mate
- cepmurphywrites
- 8 hours ago
- 9 min read
By Paul Hynes.
The 2001 film The Pianist contains many disturbing scenes but there is one at the very beginning which sticks out for this series.
It involves the Jewish Szpilman family in Warsaw on the 3rd of September, 1939, three days into the German invasion of Poland. The family are debating whether to flee or remain in the Polish capital which is being bombed by the Luftwaffe. The argument ends with news from the radio that Great Britain is declaring war on Germany and that France will soon be making a similar declaration. The family greets the news with happiness and relief that they won’t have to leave their home after all. That night they have a celebratory dinner where they toast Poland’s allies with the father promising that “All would be well.”
What follows is more than five years of horror and oppression as the Szpilman family are thrown into the nightmarish Warsaw Jewish ghetto before being transported to the Treblinka death camp. Only Władysław, the titular pianist, survives and is forced to eke out an increasingly meagre existence until he is able to emerge from the ruins of Warsaw in January 1945. His liberators, when they eventually arrived, were Polish troops backed by the Soviet Red Army.
What had the British and French been doing in September 1939? Did Władysław’s father have reason to be so optimistic and if so, what went wrong?
This article will review French security guarantees to Poland prior to the war, what became of them when the war began and might have transpired had things gone differently. It is a dreary affair which is mired in accusations of Western Betrayal and laments over missed opportunities.
The Saar Controversy
The source of the controversy goes back to the 19th of May 1939 where the head of the French Army, General Maurice Gamelin, would pledge to the Polish Minister for War that should a German invasion of Poland take place, the French army would launch an offensive within fifteen days of mobilisation. A week earlier France had drafted a guarantee to Poland of “any and all assistance and support within their power” and Gamelin used similar language stating such an offensive would be bold and involve the bulk of French forces.
Gamelin’s military commitments were technically theoretical until the political guarantee was provided. French diplomats had remained keen on courting the Soviet Union as an ally against Germany and hesitated on giving the Poles carte blanche until it was clear what might be required to bring the Soviets onside. Nonetheless the German invasion of Poland led to the French declaring war on Germany on the 3rd of September with the guarantee of full French support to Poland being pledged.
On the 7th of September, the French offensive into Germany began. It was targeted on the Saarland, a small but heavily industrialised area with cast coal reserves. It had been a major focus of interwar diplomacy, having been occupied by the French and governed by the League of Nations for fifteen years following the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. In 1935 the populace had voted to rejoin Germany, but the French Second Army Group now moved in to restore the area to French control. The early days of the offensive were greeted with great excitement amongst the Allied nations. In the UK the Daily Express excitedly reported the “first big attack” had begun. Some Polish newspapers went further and announced the Germans had suffered a major defeat.
This was false hope. A lightning advance into Germany was completely contrary to actual French plans and the resulting offensive bore this out. Eleven French divisions of 70-80 already mobilised crept into the Saarland region of Germany. The German defenders were outnumbered and lacked heavy weapons, but the French advance was timid nonetheless. In one village French forces were held up for an entire day by a single German machine gun crew.
By the 12th of September the offensive came to a halt. The French advanced no more than seven kilometres, occupying some woods and a handful of villages the Germans had already evacuated. The main German defensive line, the West Wall (popularised as the Siegfried Line in the Anglosphere), hadn’t been tested and although French artillery was now in range of the fortifications only sporadic shelling was carried out. Gamelin privately admitted he intended for the offensive to ‘lean’ on the West Wall rather than attempt to breach it. In doing so he hoped to relieve pressure on the Poles and fulfil his commitment made in May without compromising his actual plans for defeating Germany.
On the 17th of September the Red Army invaded Polish-held territory from the east, arguing the Polish regime had collapsed and so they were entering Western Belarus and Ukraine to protect the local populace. It was clear the Polish battle was coming to an end and so Gamelin ordered a withdrawal back to the Maginot Line. This was despite the fact that a besieged Warsaw continued to resist and Polish soldiers would continue to fight for over a fortnight.
For the Poles who had been promised a major assault, this lacklustre effort resembled a sort of strategic Willy Wonka Experience. It would become a major example of the Western Betrayal narrative frequent in Polish historiography and diplomacy post-Cold War which asserts that any guarantee from Western European nations is likely to be hollow.
A missed opportunity?
The Saar Offensive isn’t widely remembered outside of Poland. When brought up at all it is often presented as a missed opportunity for the Allies to end the war in 1939. Following the war, General Siegfried Westphal would state that Germany had no tanks on the Western Front during their Polish campaign and could only have held out against a French attack for two weeks. Surely then this was a colossal missed opportunity? Not only did Gamelin betray Poland by not pressing the attack but by choosing not to, he also missed out on ending the war in 1939, saving countless lives and sparing his own country four years of occupation.
It is a tantalising What If but not without caveats. Germany did indeed suffer an armaments shortage following the Polish campaign. The German chief of staff, Franz Halder, noted in his diary during October that there was only enough ammunition left for fourteen days, in line with Westphal’s comments. However, he also estimates that production could provide a continuing supply after that fortnight. It was also true German forces facing the French had few tanks, however they could rely on the West Wall for protection.
Any French strategy for victory would be the same as the Allied one which ultimately did work, breaching the West Wall, then crossing the Rhine and seizing the industrial Ruhr where most of Germany’s iron and steel was produced. Taking the Ruhr would effectively end the German war effort but the Rhine would have to be crossed first, and the West Wall would have to be breached. The German defensive barrier wasn’t as elaborate as the Maginot Line, nor was it fully complete, but was nonetheless a dense network of fortifications which also made use of the often marshy and wooded terrain surrounding it. The fortifications in the Saar region were some of the most formidable already constructed.
Between September 1944 and February 1945 a much larger and better equipped Allied coalition would struggle to reach the Rhine in similar terrain, enduring heavy casualties in the process. This was despite them possessing advantages the French in 1939 could only dream of such as fully mechanised armies and overwhelming air superiority. The Saar region itself was not overrun by American forces until the end of February by which point the German economic and military situation was approaching complete collapse, and Soviet troops were less than fifty miles from Berlin.
It can be argued the Americans would have taken the Saarland sooner if they hadn’t been dealing with such a broad front. In early January the American Third Army under General Patton had moved most of their forces from the area in order to counter the surprise German offensive through the Ardennes, what is commonly known as the Battle of the Bulge. A dedicated British and French effort wouldn’t have had this issue, at least initially. Both Gamelin and his British counterpart General Edmund Ironside had dismissed the notion of their coalition being the first to violate the neutrality of the Low Countries and given issues with terrain alongside the rest of the Franco-German border, the Saarland was their most logical target for an offensive into Germany.
The Germans in both cases had the majority of their forces on their eastern front but bringing much of them to bear in the west would have been an easier feat in 1939. In September the Germans had around sixty divisions in the east and thirty in the west, although only eight of these could be considered first rate. The French in this period had around sixty divisions within metropolitan France of which thirty-seven could be considered first rate. Further forces were spread throughout the French empire, guarding against Italian and Japanese threats and any local ambitions for autonomy.
Naturally not all of these could be thrown at the Germans and it would take longer to prepare a larger offensive. It is doubtful how much help the British could have provided initially. Whilst the British Expeditionary Force had begun to arrive in France by early September there were significant issues with equipment and logistics. The British were borrowing vans from local greengrocers in order to transport their troops.
Like the Allies in May 1940 the Polish forces, for all their tenacity, had effectively been defeated in the first fortnight of the invasion. The Germans had advanced deep into Poland and what remained of the Polish army was encircled or attempting to retreat to a final redoubt on the Polish-Romanian border, the so-called Romanian Bridgehead. Thus, many of the German divisions in Poland could potentially have begun heading west without any serious impediment to their operations in the east.
Hitler had expressed his confidence that the French wouldn’t attack in strength for some time, giving Germany a free hand to invade Poland. In a scenario where he had been proven wrong he might have ordered a pause to operations in the east, allowing the Poles some breathing space; however having already committed to the gamble and with the early days of the Polish campaign proving successful, he likely would have committed to seeing it through, such was his obsession with short, decisive, knockout blows.
The French may have had a few weeks to call his bluff. The British and French had certain advantages the Allies didn’t in 1945, namely the ability for France to use its homegrown armaments industry and intact Channel ports to better supply British forces. It’s difficult to see whether this would be an equal trade-off to the Allied advantages in 1944/45. At the very least it can be considered unlikely they would have achieved a decisive war ending breakthrough. A bloody stalemate similar to the one the Allies would ultimately face appears more likely. Perhaps a larger French offensive causes Hitler to panic and ask for terms or prompts the reluctant German military leadership to remove him from power. Perhaps with the bulk of the French armies stuck in the Rhineland in the Spring of 1940, the German offensive through the Ardennes heads south rather than to the coast and traps the French armies within German territory.
The French did have a strategic commitment to their Polish ally to launch such an offensive and arguably it would have shortened the war in the long run but it’s unlikely the war would be brought to an end in 1939. Poland might have been some breathing space but given Poland’s rapid collapse it’s difficult to see what that could achieve. A more determined French offensive against Germany might have paused the Soviet entry into Poland but with the Poles lacking significant forces to man their planned redoubt and with Romania remaining neutral at this stage, the French really would need to come quickly.
Impasse
It is understandable why the notion of the French pressing the Saar Offensive is so often lamented as a missed opportunity and makes for a great What If. It is also the case that this strategy would have had little popularity within the French military leadership due to its likely outcome, a bloody stalemate. The appeal of such a move comes largely with the benefit of hindsight where knowing the catastrophe which unfolded means any alternative can seem tempting. In 1939, it was far more tempting for the French to save lives by waiting, secure in the belief that time was on their side.
Furthermore, Gamelin was initially correct in believing the Germans would focus on Belgium. At least until January 1940.
The next article will examine what the French expected to happen and whether a victory could be found in the strategies they did pursue or in those which the Germans did not.
Paul Hynes is the author of the Decisive Darkness series and the Red Fuhrer series.