Not even to secure his western border, and indeed the whole of Germany, against an eventual allied advance as his troops got on with the desired invasion of Russia?
If it was just some nice idea Hitler had, and it was what he wanted, rather than something he was… call it forced, call it provoked, call it whatever due to the state of war imposed on him by France and the UK, then why didn’t he go into France FIRST? Why would he have needed to wait for France and the UK to declare war on him, and give them months of advance notice to overcome the appeasers who still held sway prior to the invasion of Poland?
I just don’t see how you justify claiming that there was “no practical reason” to invade France when we both agree (I think) that the whole idea of invading Poland was to set up an invasion of Russia which, foolhardy or not, he really, really wanted to do because… y’know, Nazism.
And I in turn call bullshit on your bullshit. Halfhearted or not, I’ll-conceived or not, France absolutely was mobilizing and deploying troops against western Germany, to include (again, halfhearted) efforts to occupy portions of the frontier.
Good question. Why do it ? France didn’t increase its military power after the Anschluss or the invasion of Poland. But Germany’s military did. As I said, it was a question of timing and order of business. Hitler went after the softest targets first - because at first that’s all he was ever capable of. Hell, even as he attacked France/Belgium/the Netherlands he wasn’t really capable of doing that. He got insanely lucky on a number of fronts, and that was that much. As I wrote on another forum, had there been a single day of heavy rains (which isn’t entirely unheard of in NW Europe’s springs) or had France, England etc… got the notion to bomb Germany’s single, straightforward, linear logistics corridor through the Ardennes and managed to push that notion past the politics ; the German forces in France would have been thoroughly fucked.
It just never happened, because… stuff. Snafus. Happenstance. Luck. I swear to god, the closer you look into things, personalities, individual divisions ; the more “for want of a nail” it all becomes.
So why commit to such a bullshit, luck-predicated invasion ? When Germany’s military not only wasn’t ready for it but explicitly told Hitler it was a bad idea ? It’s not like the generals weren’t aware of the geopolitical situation. They just didn’t think Fall Gelb was a good idea, nor a needed idea. Which is probably because it wasn’t. And Hitler pushed Fall Gelb, not because he needed to, but because he wanted to. And because he was a narcissistic idiot who adamantly believed he knew better than them ball-less Prussian generals of course.
But it didn’t. I mean, it didn’t. Look up the numbers if you like. If pre-war France dreaded anything, it was increased conscription/troop numbers. Hell, it’s why we sunk so much money into the Maginot Line to begin with.
I don’t disagree at all that he intended to tussle with Russia. Because, y’know, Nazism. What I disagree with is the notion that Hitler attacked England & France as sort of collateral invasions in order to secure that tussle with Russia. The confrontations with England and France were just as implicit to the very core of Nazism as that with “Slavs”. Because, y’know, Nazism.
It did though. I’m unsure why you think they didn’t, or how you think that French (and British) forces were able to move into their jump off positions and into Belgium (to be out maneuvered by the Germans) if they did nothing. I’m unsure if you understand what it takes to prepare an army to execute a plan, but I can tell you that sitting around doing nothing isn’t it.
Where I think you are getting hung up on here is you are equating mobilization with increased troop strength, and that’s not always the case. The French didn’t NEED to increase troop strength…they had over 100 divisions by the time of the war. What they did have to do was to mobilize those forces and get them to their designated areas, be those fortifications or into jump off points for their plan to move into Belgium to occupy defensive positions there in anticipation of what they thought would be the main German attack. This involved a lot of troop movement, logistics build up and operational planning and execution. They weren’t just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts doing nothing the whole time. The thing was, France especially had very intricate plans for this that they had been developing from the 20’s, so they didn’t have to plan on the fly…they know what and where they wanted to fight. The problem was that they miscalculated.
Two main reasons have been why Nazi Germany would never have gone to war only with USSR
UK and France were compelled to nominally declare war on Germany when Germany invaded Poland, and attacking the USSR required going through Poland.
Hitler wanted a war against the West too.
The first has merit though not literally 100% true. Germany’s ally (by 1941) Romania shared a significant 1939 border with the USSR, aside from the fact that by June 1941 another portion of the initial front was Germany’s ally Hungary’s border with the part of Ukraine annexed by the USSR from Poland in 1939. But a German attack on the USSR without being able to use Polish territory would have been strategically constrained, no doubt.
The second argument I think is actually the stronger. Getting even with France was a big part of what Hitler/Naziism was about. And also unlike Aug 1914 or Sep 1939 it was not realistic in June 1941 to expect a very quick victory on one front while holding off a possible attack on the other with weak forces, unlike the situations in Aug 1914 and Sep 1939 where weaker German forces were tasked with delaying Russian and UK/French respectively attacks on the other side for a few weeks until the hoped for (1914) or actually achieved (1939) victory of the main German force. It was one thing to think the USSR could be defeated by Germany, perhaps not. It was another think it would be so quick that a small defending force could just hold things down v France for a few weeks (the Germans did not imagine nor should they have that the austere West Wall aka Siegfried Line manned by only a relatively small fraction of the German Army could keep out a determined French offensive permanently). France had to be neutralized first.
So, I think Nazi Germany would have had a chance to win or greatly extend anyway WWII if it had found a way to make peace with the UK after defeating France (and Norway, Denmark, Low Countries and driving UK forces off continent). Thus probably not eventually also facing the US as opponent, at which point German victory was basically impossible except for a ‘what if’ weapons technology breakthrough. But such a peace or even tense non-shooting accommodation with Britain wasn’t entirely up to Germany.
But assuming it could be done, you can’t say IMO Germany ‘couldn’t’ defeat the USSR just based on some numbers argument. Psychology also plays into war in a big way, and there’s just no way to say what the breaking point of Soviet morale and Stalin’s regime would have been if things went worse, in either the 1941 or 1942 campaigns. According to just numbers Russia couldn’t be knocked out of WWI by the Central Powers either, a war in which the Russians were often successful v the Austrians even early on. Or maybe Germany could have lost WWII to just the USSR with Britain having become a neutral and US staying one. One just can’t say for sure IMO.
Another thing was that German conquests on the Continent were not necessarily even a net drag at all on their war effort much before 1944. Resistance was generally minor before that, very minor in 1940-2. The Germans did a fairly poor job of integrating occupied Europe’s industrial capacity into their war effort in that period…then again did a pretty poor job of fully mobilizing their own economy for war in that period too. But German ground units needed somewhere to rest and refit between deployments in the East. Having some in the occupied West wasn’t a big deal itself. Actually having to plan to face an Allied amphibious invasion became an increasingly serious drag on the effort in the East later in the real war.
It didn’t, though :). Allied military plans where wholly focused on reacting to any German offensive, with good reason - but there was never any plan to invade Germany or otherwise attack in in any way, pre-emptive or otherwise. If you can find evidence for such plans, do disclose - you might be sitting on the big academic bucks
And yeah, I agree with you, there are many avenues of thought, many possibilities, many “what if” alternate history scenarii by which Germany winds up on top. The thing is, they all pretty much hinge on Nazism not being Nazism.
Kobal2 I’ll try to answer your posts in Toto, rather than quote individual ones. First of, it’s not says me, it’s says Adolf Hitler. From Mein Kampf all the way through to comments made to Nazi officials in the early 40’s , he separates England and France.
While he shows clear enmity to France, he sees England as “natural brothers” for example. He stated multiple times that in the new world order, Germany would not take advantage of England’s weakness to rearrange its colonies.
Further, in his speeches, writings and conversations, his goals are clear. Clean up Germany, and Lebensraum in Osten. Not im Westen.
He did not want to fight a combined England and France. Even while he was fighting them both, he’s clearly looking for a separate peace with England: see his Reichstag speech of July 29, 1940. Translated here:Hitler offers Britain 'peace or destruction' - UPI Archives
Given the weight of writings and speeches about the east vs the west, I have to believe the East was more important by far. In part because the East was about conquest- taking possession. In the west, it was about getting even. And the West wasn’t about not England and France by Hitlers preference, and it wasn’t very much about colonial Africa (place in the sun). They had a department in charge of future colonial efforts, which for most of its existence had no budget.
As to why Hitler invaded France? He was at war with them. Not by his choice, but at war. And Hitler was a strong proponent of attack over defense. And Hitler would have attacked in France’s place (if I recall, France did in fact attack, for like a week, in fall 1939), so he wanted to beat them to it.
All in all, where I disagree with you is that I don’t think Hitler was going to attack England no matter what, and I don’t think the motivation would have been colonial Africa. While I agree that France would in the end would have seen a German attack, I think it was at the bottom of the priority list. And again, colonialism wasn’t a strong motivator: Transferring colonies from Vichy France to Germany was clearly not a priority.
If a magic Nazi fairy had given Adolf Hitler the option of a war against Russia, without ever being able to touch France, I think he would’ve taken the deal. And if England and France had not declared war, I believe Germany would not have invaded the west.
You are looking at things in hindsight, knowing how everything plays out with perfect information. Even if you are correct (and you aren’t…there were various plans for an allied offensives at some point. Just a quick google shows this one for instance which would have been a hasty invasion to support Poland in the early stages, before that become moot. This wasn’t the only plan. I don’t have time to look up every war plan made, but here is an article that talks about allied plans to expand into the Netherlands and also into Scandinavia) , Germany couldn’t know that. Also, Germany DID know that the French and Brits planned to invade, essentially, Belgium and fight them there. They knew this because the French and British were staging forces to do just that, and in fact it was part of their own later modified plan to catch the allies off balance and cut them off.
But even if there were zero plans by the allies to ever take the offensive (which begs the question of how they intended to win or force Germany to surrender…or really do anything at all except be on the defensive), again Germany couldn’t know that was the case. If Germany does nothing they don’t know that France and Britain would just sit there waiting as that would be crazy from any perspective.
Basically, you are looking at things from the perspective of how it played out, as if it was obvious that this was the only thing that could happen. You are also in possession of much more data than the Germans would have or could have had at this stage. You are also, IMHO, injecting your own worldview on everything that transpired since you, rightfully, know the Germans were the bad guys and would be doing heinous things down the line (hell, had already started doing them). You are also, IIRC, French, so you have some bias there as well. You know that in the real world, France and Britain were planning to sit on the defensive, mostly, except for a thrust into Belgium to meet the Germans at pre-planned defensive points there and were thinking they would fight a similar series of battles to how the first world war played out. But that’s because you also know that the French, especially, were fixated on the lessons learned in the first world war, and hadn’t kept up with how fundamentally things had changed since them. But the Germans didn’t know that the French were thinking that way, or what their plans were, or what their strategy or tactics would be. They were also looking at the fact that France had more tanks and better tanks than the Germans did, they had more planes, more artillery, and more troops. They also had a much stronger surface navy. And this doesn’t even count the Brits and what they had.
Just to recap, the allies were certainly content to go on the defensive (in Belgium) and fight a repeat of the first world war, but that doesn’t mean they planned to do nothing else, ever, and just sit on the defensive the whole time and wait for the Germans to wear themselves out. Certainly the Germans couldn’t assume that was the case once France and the Brits declared war after the Polish invasion.
As a historical footnote, there was, from 1920 to 1936, an Accord between France and Belgium, which the Belgians withdrew from out of precisely such a fear (that they would be the battle ground for the next major war too) and they were really, really hoping the Germans would respect their neutrality the next time.
Ah well, there’s always WWIII to hope for. Maybe the next guys to try and conquer Europe will finally keep off the grass.
France was flying missions dropping propaganda leaflets with totally obsolete bombers, like the Amiot 143 and other flying greenhouses.:eek: Of which you could say: “Yes, their defensive armament was total crap, but they sure were slow!”
I agree with Kobal on this one. I don’t think Britain or France were seriously planning on launching a major offensive into Germany in the foreseeable future. I think their strategy was to essentially fight a better version of WWI. They would have settled in along a defensive line (this time with better preparations to minimize casualties) and then fought a slow war of economic attrition via naval blockade (maybe with some aerial bombing added in as a new factor). I think the Germans could have likewise assumed a defensive strategy along the border without fear of an attack for two, three, or four years.
But while the Germans could have done that, I don’t think Hitler could have. It was against his nature to sit still even when holding a position of advantage. He had a psychological need to make things happen.
And I don’t think he would have projected his drive to attack on to the French or British. Hitler saw himself as unique; he didn’t think other people had the vision and willpower he had. So he would have had no problem believing that the British and French would not attack him even as he was planning on attacking them.
Well, yeah. He obviously was trying to drive a wedge between them, for relatively obvious reasons. Why take him at his word, though ? France & the UK certainly didn’t - hence the treaties promising not to seek individual peace with Germany.
And yet he stabbed west. Again, why take him at his (public) words ?
Granted, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t want to fight England OR France. Just not both at the same time.
Sure. So ? Is “getting even” not a legit *casus belli *or something ?
Yes, as you say - for like a week. And then the French government stomped on all that, even though if France/Britain had really wanted to curb German military adventures, really the smart thing to do would have been to kick the door in while the German army was busy in Poland.
But they didn’t, because they wanted out of having to do a war at all (and besides, many people in France & England thought that Hitler, while kind of creepy, was at least better than the Communists and could be relied on to be a useful proxy bulwark against the Reds)
I admit that I probably overstated the colonies’ thing - that was more Kaiser Wilhelm’s hat. The Nazis cared less about those specifically. But they still figured on their long “this is UNFAIR” list of geopolitical grievances.
I wasn’t talking about military plans - idle militaries draft up plans for any and all contingencies, it’s just what they do. The US notoriously has a plan for the invasion of Canada, but I don’t think you can jump from there to the notion the Pentagon is going to go for that SOON :).
When I talked about plans, I was thinking about a real political will, any drive to actually Do The Thing or actual talks and cables towards that purpose.
Sooo you think that “let’s start an actual shooting war because we don’t know if and when those guys will start a shooting war we don’t want” makes sense ? It’s a shame this forum doesn’t do images, because that’d be a choice opportunity for a Galaxy Brain meme :).
Besides that, as I wrote earlier, if the Allies had *really *wanted to do something about Germany, they shoulda coulda woulda done it while Germany’s military was busy elsewhere. The troops were already in Belgium. The war had been declared. What stopped them, in your opinion ?
Um, yeah, no. Being French and having read quite a bit on the period, I can tell you for absolutely sure that the one thing French military minds (or the voting public) DIDN’T want was a repeat of WW1. The whole of French military planning, technology, strategy was about not doing WW1 again. Because WW1 had been sort of a light ordeal where France was concerned, you see ?
BTW, this comment goes for Little Nemo as well, in that lovable spirit of “you agree with me ? Well fuck you, I don’t agree with *you *!” which has earned me so many friends over the years :). France didn’t want attrition warfare. It dreaded that more than anything in the world. We’d been there, done that and fucking hated that t-shirt. The whole idea was that, in the event of war, zee Germans would either try to break through the Maginot Line (which would have held them at least until it could be reinforced by a hurried conscription and would have fared well even if manned by 16 year olds who didn’t know a grenade from a potato - while the REAL army would have sprung from Belgium, into the Ruhr, cutting German logistics and war’s over before Christmas) OR try to go through Belgium like last time, in which case the modern, all tank’d up army would have done the whole mobile warfare, schwerpunkt thing and tried to pocket the German army, cut it off from logistics, push into the Ruhr, war’s over before Christmas.
Static, defensive warfare was really not the plan. Defensive warfare sucks. That’s the lesson everybody learned from WW1. The French did too.
You’ll note, however, that either plan hinges on Germany making the first move. Because that’s what was expected the whole time.
(oh, and because attacking a defensive Germany would have meant trying to smash through the Siegfried line and they would have had good defensive positions and it would have been WW1 all over again and that’s the thing we were trying to avoid at any cost. Which further goes towards the “the Allies would have never made an aggressive move” point.)
The French didn’t want to suffer attrition. But they wanted to win the war by Germany suffering attrition.
France and Britain may have thought WWI was terrible, which is why they did all they could to avoid another war. But they both felt that if a war occurred anyway, it would be like WWI. So their plans were based on the premise of fighting another war like WWI but this time being prepared for it and not making the same mistakes.
That meant staying inside their own defensive line and fighting a defensive war. The big casualties happened when you tried an offensive. So their plan was to defend themselves. If the Germans attacked, fine - they’d shoot them and weaken Germany. If the Germans followed their example and also stayed on the defensive, they could outwait them. Germany eventually lost the economic war in World War I and would lost it again.
The idea that Germany might launch an offensive and that offensive might succeed was what Britain and France hadn’t planned on. That caught them by surprise and they hadn’t made any contingency plan for it.
Right, this was the premise of my OP. With the sales pitch of his lifetime, Hitler may have been able to persuade the French, “It REALLY isn’t worth it to you to endure another WW1 ordeal just because I’m attacking Poland. I have no plans to go west, so just chill.”
I really don’t know where you’re getting this from. They really, really, really didn’t want another war of attrition, period. France had lost an entire generation in WW1 - those who didn’t end up scattered over a large area came back broken, insane or both. The population hadn’t recovered by the time WW2 started looming on the horizon. And I’m not sure how you can even conceive a war of attrition where only one side is getting attrited, but they certainly didn’t. They did everything they could think of to **not **do the whole trenches thing again. They developed weapons and strategies and drafted battle plans specifically to win rapidly, decisively and through manoeuver warfare - much like the Germans did. Because everybody had learned from WW1 that doing a WW1 was a bit of a shitshow - even when you end up winning it.
Yer wot ? You think the possibility of a German invasion completely skipped past Franco-British military minds ?! When that’s literally how the previous two wars had kicked off ?
I literally don’t know how to respond to this. Especially after I’ve laid out the basic gist of the Allied pre-war strategy. Germany attacking France didn’t take France by bloody surprise - they were at war. And while they hoped their posture was intimidating enough, and were relatively confident that they’d win when Germany attacked, they still were quite clear on the notion that it was a “when”, not an “if”, and that appeasement had failed.
What *did *take them by surprise was the bold/suicidally insane decision of the German military to cut a single, linear path through the Ardennes as their way in. It took them by surprise because it was an insane plan. The fact that the plan ended up working doesn’t change the fact that, from a military standpoint, it was completely bonkers and any number of things happening would have stranded over half the German army in France with no fuel, no ammunition and no line of retreat. And I’m not even talking about “enemy action” things - as I said earlier, a couple days of heavy rains washing out the hastily built pathway & disrupting German air support ahead of the spearhead would have done it, or just given the Allied forces racing back from Belgium time to regroup and reorganize.
And, in a weird way, the insane plan working could be considered something of a good thing, since it emboldened Hitler to keep launching more insaner plans without ever considering any “but what if…” or listening to any doubt voiced by saner military planners. Y’know, like invading Russia without bothering to pack any winter gear whatsoever.
I do think that would have worked, yes. But then again that also hinges on Hitler not being Hitler-like, and on Nazism not being in large part built on industrial-grade revanchism. The whole thing was fundamentally based on “we should have won WW1, WOULD have won if not for Them Jews/democracy/soshulists/peaceniks/race traitors/Junkers/defeatists/insert scapegoat here. We’ll do it RIGHT this time around !”
I think that idea needs more back up from sources, books would be OK, French language OK, doesn’t have to be quick-Google. But that’s not my read on the French military concept ca. 1939-40.
As was said extremely costly failed offensives through deep defensive zones on dense flankless fronts* was what really sucked in WWI. Defensive warfare was a lot more tolerable. WWI could be viewed as having been won basically by the naval blockade of the Central Powers to which useless waste of manpower in doomed offensives in the West was largely irrelevant until Germany had been weakened enough by that blockade, by 1918.
Also the French concept of 1914 was definitely the offensive, the offensive above all. IOW one thing WWI taught was that you can revere the offensive all you like, but it might just not work with huge mass conscription armies big enough to form a continuous robust line of field fortifications over the whole length of German-French plus German-Benelux border. The German concept of concentrated armored forces overcame that in 1940, but the French armor concept in 1940 was not that similar, and in 1944 once the Allied forces lost their momentum due to logistical limits ca. late August 1944, they also struggled to regain it even when the logistical situation improved, took really till ca. Feb 1945. Nor as mentioned was it at all obvious the Germans would have the success they did in May 1940. It wasn’t easy to fight other than a war of attrition with big forces on that narrow front with WW’s technology. I think that was if anything clearer in winter of 1939-40 than now, when many very casual students of WWII assume the frightfully costly offensives on dense static fronts in some places in WWI were done away with by tanks everywhere in WWII. But that’s not really so, they also happened in WWII after 1940, and the German 1940 attack could easily have failed.
Also one of the Anglo-French problems in the Phony War period was just a general lack of clear idea what they intended to do to win the war on the ground, or at least a firm consensus on that among military leaders matched by absolute determination of political leaders to back it at all cost. IOW there’s some truth IMO to the pop history idea that the French (the British were a fairly minor though not trivial factor on the ground in 1940 in France) were just not prepared mentally to fight another all out war in 1939 which was a German advantage, because they were.
All that said, I don’t think Hitler would have ‘turned his back’ on France to fight a war against the USSR maybe not even without a French declaration of Phony War, definitely not with one. Once at war with France, Germany had to neutralize France before turning on the USSR. And it was difficult (not impossible, via Romanian border, negotiation with Poland conceivably to use their territory) to attack the USSR without conquering Poland. Plus getting even with France for the German defeat in WWI was as much a pillar of Nazi/Hitler thought as anti-Communism or racial theories about Slavs.
But nor did Germany in any way exhaust itself by defeating France in 1940. If anything that campaign tuned up the German Army for the Russian campaign, though it expanded further before the attack on USSR. The German problem with a war against USSR after having defeated France was how to end the war with Britain, an enemy the Nazi’s didn’t particularly seek in terms of their racial/ethnic theories. It would not IMO have been impossible for Germany to beat the USSR if Hitler had found a way to bring Britain to terms both could accept ca. June 1940, also avoiding eventually adding the US to UK and USSR as major opponents, which made victory basically impossible save a deus ex machina weapons development. Though German success in a straight up Russo-German war was not guaranteed either IMO.
*it’s not as if the offensive never worked at reasonable cost in WWI, it just worked a lot better in various campaigns on lower manpower per mile of fronts in the East, and Mideast, rather than higher density ones like the West and northeast Italy.
