Phoney War
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The Phoney War (
The quiet of the Phoney War was punctuated by a few Allied actions. In the Saar Offensive in September, the French attacked Germany with the intention of assisting Poland, but it fizzled out within days and they withdrew. In November, the Soviets attacked Finland in the Winter War, resulting in much debate in France and Britain about an offensive to help Finland, but the forces finally assembled for this campaign were delayed until it ended in March. The Allied discussions about a Scandinavian campaign caused concern in Germany and resulted in the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in April, and the Allied troops previously assembled for Finland were redirected to Norway instead. Fighting there continued until June, when the Allies evacuated, ceding Norway to Germany in response to the German invasion of France.
On
Terminology
The initial term used by British people for this period was Bore War. While this was probably coined as a play on the
The Phoney War was also referred to as the "Twilight War" (by Winston Churchill) and as the Sitzkrieg[6] ("the sitting war": a word play on blitzkrieg created by the British press).[7][8][9] In French, it is referred to as the drôle de guerre ("funny" or "strange" war).[a]
The term "Phoney War" was probably coined by US Senator William Borah, who, commenting in September 1939 on the inactivity on the Western Front, said, "There is something phoney about this war."[4]
Inactivity
In March 1939, the UK and France formalized plans for how a war against Germany would be conducted. Knowing that likely enemies would be more prepared and have land and air superiority, the strategy was to defeat any enemy offensive, to allow time for economic and naval superiority to build up military resources.[10] To this end, the UK initially committed to two divisions being sent to France, and two more eleven months later.[11] However, the Polish Army general plan for defence, Plan West, assumed that the Allies' offensive on the Western front would provide significant relief to the Polish front in the East.[12]
While most of the
In the first few months of the war, Britain still hoped to persuade Germany to agree to peace. Although London hospitals prepared for 300,000 casualties in the first week, Germany unexpectedly did not immediately attack British cities by air, and German pilots that attacked Scottish naval bases said that they would have been court-martialled and executed for bombing civilians. Both sides found that attacks on military targets, such as a British attack on Kiel on the second night of the war, led to high losses of aircraft. They also feared retaliation for bombing civilians. (Britain and France did not realise that Germany used 90% of its frontline aircraft during the Polish invasion.)[14] Civilian attitudes in Britain towards their German foes were still not as intense as they were to become after the Blitz. On 30 April 1940, a German Heinkel He 111 bomber crashed at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, killing its crew and injuring 160 people on the ground. The crew were laid to rest in the local cemetery with support from the Royal Air Force. Wreaths with messages of sympathy were displayed on the coffins.[15][16] British pilots mapped the Siegfried Line while German troops waved at them.[14]
When
In their hurry to re-arm, Britain and France both bought large amounts of weapons from manufacturers in the US at the outbreak of hostilities, supplementing their own production. The non-belligerent US contributed to the Western Allies with discounted sales.[13]
Despite the relative calm on land, on the high seas, the war was very real. Within a few hours of the declaration of war, the British liner
At the Nuremberg trials, German military commander Alfred Jodl said that "if we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions."[20] General Siegfried Westphal stated that if the French had attacked in force in September 1939 the German army "could only have held out for one or two weeks".[21]
Saar Offensive
The Saar Offensive was a French attack into
The offensive in the Rhine river valley area started on 7 September, four days after France declared war on Germany. Since the Wehrmacht was occupied in the attack on Poland, the French soldiers enjoyed a decisive numerical advantage along their border with Germany. Eleven French divisions advanced along a 32 km (20 miles) line near Saarbrücken against weak German opposition. The attack did not result in the diversion of any German troops. The all-out assault was to have been carried out by roughly 40 divisions, including one armoured, three mechanised divisions, 78 artillery regiments and 40 tank battalions. The French Army had advanced to a depth of 8 km (5.0 miles) and captured about 20 villages evacuated by the German army, without any resistance. The half-hearted offensive was halted after France seized the Warndt Forest, 7.8 km2 (3.0 sq mi) of heavily mined German territory.
On 12 September, the Anglo-French Supreme War Council gathered for the first time at Abbeville. It was decided that all offensive actions were to be halted immediately as the French opted to fight a defensive war, forcing the Germans to come to them. General Maurice Gamelin ordered his troops to stop no closer than 1 km (0.62 miles) from the German positions along the Siegfried Line. Poland was not notified of this decision. Instead, Gamelin informed Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły that half of his divisions were in contact with the enemy and that French advances had forced the Wehrmacht to withdraw at least six divisions from Poland. The following day, the commander of the French Military Mission to Poland, General Louis Faury, informed the Polish Chief of Staff—General Wacław Stachiewicz—that the major offensive on the western front planned from 17 to 20 September had to be postponed. At the same time, French divisions were ordered to withdraw to their barracks along the Maginot Line, beginning the Phoney War.
Winter War
A notable event during the Phoney War was the Winter War, which started with the Soviet Union's assault on Finland on 30 November 1939. Public opinion, particularly in France and Britain, found it easy to side with Finland, and demanded from their governments effective action in support of "the brave Finns" against their much larger aggressor, the Soviet Union, particularly since the Finns' defence seemed so much more successful than that of the Poles during the September Campaign.[22] As a consequence of its attack, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations, and a proposed Franco-British expedition to northern Scandinavia was much debated.[23] British forces that began to be assembled to send to Finland's aid were not dispatched before the Winter War ended, but were sent instead to Norway's aid in the Norwegian campaign. On 20 March, after the Winter War had ended, Édouard Daladier resigned as Prime Minister of France, partially due to his failure to aid Finland's defence.
German invasion of Denmark and Norway
The open discussions on an Allied expedition to northern Scandinavia, also without the consent of the neutral Scandinavian countries, and the
Change of British government
The debacle of the
Actions
Most other major actions during the Phoney War were at sea, including the Second Battle of the Atlantic fought throughout the Phoney War. Other notable events among these were:
- A German submarine sank the ship SS Athenia on the first day of the war, killing 117 civilian passengers and crew.
- 4 September 1939, Royal Air Force daylight bombing raids on major Kriegsmarine warships in the Heligoland Bight proved a costly failure. Seven of the Bristol Blenheim and Vickers Wellington bombers were shot down without any ships being hit.[26] 4 September 1939, British bombs killed eleven German sailors from German cruiser Emden in port Wilhelmshaven.[27] Further ineffective anti-shipping raids in the same area on 14 and 18 December led to the loss of 17 Wellingtons and the abandonment of daylight operations by RAF heavy bombers.[28]
- 17 September 1939, the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous was sunk by U-29. She went down in 15 minutes with the loss of 519 of her crew, including her captain. She was the first British warship to be lost in the war.
- 14 October 1939, the British battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk in the main British fleet base at Scapa Flow, Orkney (north of mainland Scotland) by U-47. The death toll reached 833 men, including Rear-Admiral Henry Blagrove, commander of the 2nd Battleship Division.
- ace in a day" status by shooting down five Bf 109s; a feat accomplished by only 24 RAF pilots during the entire war.
- In December 1939, the German Altmark Incident.)
- On 19 February 1940, a Kriegsmarine destroyer flotilla embarked on Operation Wikinger, a sortie into the North Sea to disrupt British fishing and submarine activity around the Dogger Bank. En route, two destroyers were lost due to mines and friendly fire from the Luftwaffe; nearly 600 German sailors were killed and the mission was then aborted without ever encountering Allied forces.
British war planning had called for a "knockout blow" by strategic bombing of German industry with the RAF's substantial Bomber Command. However, there was considerable apprehension about German retaliation, and when President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed an agreement not to mount any bombing raids which might endanger civilians, Britain and France agreed immediately and Germany agreed two weeks later.[31] The RAF therefore conducted a large number of combined reconnaissance and propaganda leaflet flights over Germany.[32] These operations were jokingly termed "pamphlet raids" or "Confetti War" in the British press.[33]
On 10 May 1940, eight months after Britain and France had declared war on Germany, German troops marched into
Italy, hoping for territorial gains when France was defeated, entered the war on 10 June 1940, although the thirty-two Italian divisions which crossed the border with France enjoyed little success against five defending French divisions.[35]
See also
- Operation Pike
- Western betrayal
- Why Die for Danzig?
Notes
- ^ Perhaps because of mishearing or a mistranslation, French journalist Roland Dorgelès or other French sources read the English "phoney" as "funny." See fr:Drôle de guerre (in French).
References
- .
- ISBN 978-0-19-062180-3. Archivedfrom the original on 5 April 2024. Retrieved 1 October 2020.
- OCLC 761162164.
- ^ from the original on 17 March 2022. Retrieved 9 September 2015.
"There is something phoney about this war," [Senator William E. Borah (R. Idaho) in an interview] told questioners yesterday, explaining that he meant the comparative inactivity on the Western Front. "You would think," he continued, "that Britain and France would do what they are going to do now while Germany and Russia are still busy in the East, instead of waiting until they have cleaned up the eastern business." He did not expect an early end to hostilities.
- OCLC 761162164.
- ^ "The Phoney War". History Learning Site. Archived from the original on 2 April 2013. Retrieved 3 May 2008.
- OCLC 57638821.]
Accordingly, the Allies first devised Plan E whereby they would advance into Belgium as far as the Scheldt River, but after months of inactivity that the British press termed "sitzkrieg," a bolder Plan D emerged that called for an advance as far as the Dyle River, a few miles east of Brussels.
[permanent dead link - ISBN 978-0-7922-5911-4. Retrieved 10 September 2015.
The invasion of France brought France and Britain into the war. For more than six months, the two sides sat idle — the British press called it Sitzkrieg — as Germany sought to avoid war with Britain without ceding Poland. With war unavoidable, the Germans attacked France on May 10, 1940.
- OCLC 691744583. Retrieved 10 September 2015.
When, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, which Britain had pledged to defend, Britain declared war. But it did nothing to help Poland; for eight months, the conflict remained strictly the "Phoney War." In May 1940, in what the British press had taken to calling the "sitzkrieg" became a German blitzkrieg throughout Western Europe, Hitler-colluder-with-Chamberlain was replaced by Hitler-antagonist-of-Winston Churchill.
- ISBN 1845740564. Archivedfrom the original on 13 February 2022. Retrieved 27 March 2022.
- ISBN 1845740564. Archivedfrom the original on 13 February 2022. Retrieved 27 March 2022.
- )
- ^ a b "The Phoney War!". schools.yrdsb.ca. 8 October 1980. Archived from the original on 7 April 2022. Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- ^ a b Gunther, John (1940). Inside Europe. New York: Harper & Brothers. pp. xv–xvii.
- ^ Regan, pp. 198–199.
- ^ www.aircrewremembrancesociety.co.uk Archived 24 September 2017 at the Wayback Machine, see also british newsreel Archived 1 August 2019 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 1-84158-078-3.
- ISBN 0-85112-519-0
- ^ Denis Richards RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War (1995) chap. 3
- ^ "Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal" (PDF). Library of Congress. Nüremberg. 1948. p. 350. Archived (PDF) from the original on 18 July 2023. Retrieved 29 December 2017.
- Thames TV(1973).
- ^ "Russo-Finnish War". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 2016. Archived from the original on 2 June 2016. Retrieved 22 May 2016.
- ^ "USSR expelled from the League of Nations". History.com. A+E Networks Corp. 2016. Archived from the original on 27 May 2016. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
- ^ "The Baltic Sea at war 1939–1945". 20thcenturybattles.com. WorldPress.com. 2016. Archived from the original on 5 August 2016. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
- ^ "Winston Churchill". biography.com. A&E. Archived from the original on 7 June 2016. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-00-743313-1.
- ^ "Osteel - Ein ostfriesisches Dorf im Zweiten Weltkrieg" Lars Zimmermann, Tredition 2016, 4. Luftangriffe.
- ^ Bishop 2017, p. 120
- ^ "1939 – Into Action". The Spitfire – An Operational History. DeltaWeb International. Archived from the original on 16 July 2011. Retrieved 3 May 2007.
- ^ "Junkers Ju88 4D+EK". Peak District Air Accident Research. 3 August 2016. Archived from the original on 19 February 2012. Retrieved 9 April 2012.
- ^ Bishop 2017, p. 116
- ^ Bishop 2017, p. 121
- ISBN 978-0-304-35673-7.
- ^ Ray 2000, pp. 61–63
- ^ Ray 2000, pp. 75–77
Further reading
- Pierre Porthault, L'armée du sacrifice (1939–1940), Guy Victor, 1965
External links
- Media related to Phoney War at Wikimedia Commons