Britain and France invade Germany after Germany invades Poland
- Thread starter AMBOMB
- Start date
In theory they should be able to take the Ruhr and force the Germans to surrender as there's very little actually defending the west. In practice I doubt the French high command is up to the task. British involvement would be no more than a token effort as there simply weren't that many British troops in France at the right time.
The Allied would break their teeth on the Siegfried line. In the 1940 campaign the German were deployed in a vulnerable bridgehead at Abbeville and managed to defeat 3 Allied armoured divisions (2 French and 1 British) and 1 supposedly elite British infantry division (the 51st Highland division). The German division was a low grade reserve division. The British took no ground at all, while managing to expend most of their tanks in one day. Many of the French tanks proved invulnerable to German anti-tank guns, and managed to make a modest advance, but the French infantry proved incapable of consolidating the ground taken. General Alan Brooke had noted that in Norway, French troops had proved more effective the British, and in the First World War also, the French were much more effective than the British in carrying out offensives at all stages of the war. Even so, the Abbeville battle proved that they would struggle to take ground even against low grade German troop, even when operating at a huge numerical advantage.
Garrison
Donor
If you look at the OTL French advance it was lack of energy on the part of the High Command that stopped them pressing the advantage. the mindset was basically to sit on the defensive protected by the Maginot Line and grind down the Germans in a conservative war of attrition, which to be fair given the 1939 German battle plan for an attack of France would probably have worked.
During the campaign in Poland the Wehrmacht found some serious issues with their forces that had to be addressed before the attack on France. Find a French General with some real energy who can fire up the troops and maybe stretch his orders ala Manstein or Rommel and Germany is in serious trouble.
During the campaign in Poland the Wehrmacht found some serious issues with their forces that had to be addressed before the attack on France. Find a French General with some real energy who can fire up the troops and maybe stretch his orders ala Manstein or Rommel and Germany is in serious trouble.
Garrison
Donor
The 51st Highland Division was not with the BEF and certainly was not an elite formation. To quote the Wikipedia page for the Division(my bold}:
In short it was a Territorial formation that had only recently been reorganized to incorporate some regular army units and as with so many units in the British army it was short on training and equipment.
Also the idea that the French were better at conducting offensives than the British in 1918 seems 'counterfactual' to say the least.
Suppose in addition the RAF and French Air forces hit all Nazi airbases within a hundred miles. Possibly the ultimatum is at Midnight the very start of September 3rd and at Dawn the air attack start
well that's easier said than done, I'm not even sure what the French air force can put up in Sep 1939 in terms of operational aircraft (lots of planes in 1940 were delivered to the front without guns or even engines!). The RAF will have to go from UK bases as well, unless you wait for them to be deployed to the mainland.
Also If most of the LW are in the east all you will really do is damage airfields and they can quite quickly be repaired anyway.
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Yeah that would really be going from 0-60 pretty quick. Plus what's the actual British capability to do that in Sep1939?
See I worry all they'll do is set international opinion against them since at that point there would have been no air-raids on British civilian targets
There was a limited French offensive. That much more was possible before the collapse of Poland is doubtful, as Michele has endlessly pointed out both in soc.history.what-if and here. https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/france-and-britain-really-invade-germany-in-1939.254232/#post-6655192
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/france-and-britain-really-invade-germany-in-1939.254232/#post-6655269
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...y-invade-germany-in-1939.254232/#post-6655499
soc.history.what-if.narkive.com
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/france-and-britain-really-invade-germany-in-1939.254232/#post-6655269
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...y-invade-germany-in-1939.254232/#post-6655499
WI: France invades Germany in 1939
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In 1918, when the Hundred Days Offensive was launched, France had the best army in the world bar none. The one thing it lacked was infantry... which the Americans gracefully provided.
Also, it is worth pointing out that France didn't feel ready to go on the offensive before at least 1941.
Garrison
Donor
Errant nonsense, by 1918 the French army was crippled in the wake of the 1917 mutinies. it was still strong on the defensive but less effective in the attack. The USA most assuredly did not gracefully supply the French with infantry, they were in fact adamant about forming their own army in France with its own area of responsibility. Once formed the US 1st Army was enthusiastic but green, repeating many of the same mistakes the BEF did in 1914-15. The main weight of the fighting in the 100 days fell on the British and Imperial forces, though of course since there were no British troops in France in 1939 their performance in 1918 is academic. Oh and I did note that you chose not to respond to the fact that the 51st Highland Division was anything but an elite formation in 1940.
I wrote a blog post about this : https://hubpages.com/education/The-Saar-Offensive-The-Impossible-Dream
There are a lot of problems with the idea
1)The French army, after mobilization, with all of its divisions taken into account, can probably put around 80 divisions into the field - but some of these will have to be screening Italy, and many are low quality reserve divisions with insufficient equipment. French mobilization took weeks to complete, and so even with mobilization starting at the beginning of the fourth week of August, they still had a long time to finish mobilizing by the time the offensive started OTL on the 7/8th of September.
2)Many of the German divisions are low quality too, but they're fighting defensively and so they have a much less of a handicap
3)And the Germans have a lot of those divisions, people suggest only tiny numbers like 10 or 22, but the actual figures were 33, and the Germans had central reserves which they could easily send to bolster troop numbers.
4)These troops were dug in and defending fortified lines, and the Siegfried Line had evolved into being a good defensive line by 1939, after being mostly hypothetical in 1938 - some statistics suggest that the Germans spent more on it than the Maginot line.
5)The Siegfried line was heavily bolstered with anti-tank mines, and bouncing mines, both of which the French were ill-prepared to face due to insufficient integration of anti-mine warfare units with their combat formations and total ignorance of the bouncing mine, and both were dreadfully effective. This isn't that surprising since the French weren't going to be launching any major offensives at the beginning of the war in their conceptions.
6)The German Air Force actually had more aircraft in the theater than the Armée de l'Air. The RAF could even the odds somewhat, but the RAF has a very low combat value for this type of operation in 1939 - it has terrible coordination with ground forces for bombing, its strategic bomber arm is a flop, its command was convinced of the need to keep massive amounts of fighters back in Britain despite the clear difficulties that the Germans would have in striking Britain without having taken France and the Low Countries first, and trying to shift British fighters en masse to the continent is going to take a while.
7)British reinforcements don't count for much: The British can only send a few divisions to the continent, most troops which they deploy are poorly equipped and trained territorials, and their armored units are both broadly unsuitable for European operations (there is much polemics about the Abbeville operations, but it is very unambigious that the British tanks there performed absolutely horribly, defeated by small German anti-tank gun outposts before even reaching the main line, the low armor, poor organization, and lack of HE for British tanks means that it will take a long time for them to gestate anything worthwhile for a European battle) and small in numbers anyway.
8)The terrain is very difficult to attack in the Saar and in the Rhineland in general - lots of hills and forests, and the problem is that it gets narrower rather than fans out as you attack, so it presents a huge salient which is vulnerable to being attacked from the side, while the Rhine is an atrociously difficult river to get across due to being quite wide and quickly flowing. The French won't be able to generate any momentum and are going to keep attacking and attacking into prepared defensive lines, and while the French, with all of the heavy artillery they have, can probably blast their way through those, the casualties are going to be high for no meaningful results.
And even with all of this, Germany still defeats Poland, and the USSR is almost certainly still going to invade Poland, so the attack is not going to succeed in anything of note and just turn out to be a bloody check which harms French preparation for 1940 - and I don't even think they would gain much useful experience from it, since it would be the same attrition, low-speed, low-mobility warfare that they're already geared for, not the fast paced armored and mobile operations they need to learn how to do.
There are a lot of problems with the idea
1)The French army, after mobilization, with all of its divisions taken into account, can probably put around 80 divisions into the field - but some of these will have to be screening Italy, and many are low quality reserve divisions with insufficient equipment. French mobilization took weeks to complete, and so even with mobilization starting at the beginning of the fourth week of August, they still had a long time to finish mobilizing by the time the offensive started OTL on the 7/8th of September.
2)Many of the German divisions are low quality too, but they're fighting defensively and so they have a much less of a handicap
3)And the Germans have a lot of those divisions, people suggest only tiny numbers like 10 or 22, but the actual figures were 33, and the Germans had central reserves which they could easily send to bolster troop numbers.
4)These troops were dug in and defending fortified lines, and the Siegfried Line had evolved into being a good defensive line by 1939, after being mostly hypothetical in 1938 - some statistics suggest that the Germans spent more on it than the Maginot line.
5)The Siegfried line was heavily bolstered with anti-tank mines, and bouncing mines, both of which the French were ill-prepared to face due to insufficient integration of anti-mine warfare units with their combat formations and total ignorance of the bouncing mine, and both were dreadfully effective. This isn't that surprising since the French weren't going to be launching any major offensives at the beginning of the war in their conceptions.
6)The German Air Force actually had more aircraft in the theater than the Armée de l'Air. The RAF could even the odds somewhat, but the RAF has a very low combat value for this type of operation in 1939 - it has terrible coordination with ground forces for bombing, its strategic bomber arm is a flop, its command was convinced of the need to keep massive amounts of fighters back in Britain despite the clear difficulties that the Germans would have in striking Britain without having taken France and the Low Countries first, and trying to shift British fighters en masse to the continent is going to take a while.
7)British reinforcements don't count for much: The British can only send a few divisions to the continent, most troops which they deploy are poorly equipped and trained territorials, and their armored units are both broadly unsuitable for European operations (there is much polemics about the Abbeville operations, but it is very unambigious that the British tanks there performed absolutely horribly, defeated by small German anti-tank gun outposts before even reaching the main line, the low armor, poor organization, and lack of HE for British tanks means that it will take a long time for them to gestate anything worthwhile for a European battle) and small in numbers anyway.
8)The terrain is very difficult to attack in the Saar and in the Rhineland in general - lots of hills and forests, and the problem is that it gets narrower rather than fans out as you attack, so it presents a huge salient which is vulnerable to being attacked from the side, while the Rhine is an atrociously difficult river to get across due to being quite wide and quickly flowing. The French won't be able to generate any momentum and are going to keep attacking and attacking into prepared defensive lines, and while the French, with all of the heavy artillery they have, can probably blast their way through those, the casualties are going to be high for no meaningful results.
And even with all of this, Germany still defeats Poland, and the USSR is almost certainly still going to invade Poland, so the attack is not going to succeed in anything of note and just turn out to be a bloody check which harms French preparation for 1940 - and I don't even think they would gain much useful experience from it, since it would be the same attrition, low-speed, low-mobility warfare that they're already geared for, not the fast paced armored and mobile operations they need to learn how to do.
The French participated very heavily in the Hundred's Days Offensive as well and were very important in the victory, they clearly weren't crippled and took their share of the fighting on.
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Deleted member 1487
Not so sure about that, the British have a serious claim to that title by the Hundred Days. Assuming the ANZACs and Canadians are included as part of the British Army.
You makes a number of excellent points. I'll just go further with this one: the AdlA was even less prepared for heavy combat in 1939 than it was in 1940 and we know how badly they preformed that year. Plus, despite the problems the Luftwaffe would have after having just completed the Polish campaign, would only get stronger as 1939 went on, while the French replacement system meant it would wear out quickly and leave the French army at the mercy of the Luftwaffe. Given the already historically poor relationship between the French air force and army that might happen anyway even before combat losses attrit the AdlA.
Very much so, but they were quite brittle even in that battle and they worked heavily with the US for a reason, who made up for the lack of infantry in the quite small French divisions, which despite their enormous firepower still weren't capable of sustaining significant losses and maintaining combat effectiveness. This too despite leaning increasingly on colonial manpower to make up for manpower deficits.
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BlackDragon98
Banned
Canadians did all the hard work in the 100 days, as they were the breakthrough units. German troops feared Canadians in particular. Hard to believe that that was once the reputation of the Canadian military.
Armee d'Air do have the honor of being the first to bomb Berlin (or at least try to) I believe.
Deleted member 1487
???
I thought throughout the 20th century up to the current day that was the reputation of the Canadians?
Bomb or distribute leaflets? I think they avoided bombing German targets to avoid retaliation since they knew how weak they were in the air.