Phoney War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Phoney War lasted eight months, from September 1939 to May 1940, and it may be one of the strangest intervals in the history of modern warfare. Two of the world's great powers had declared war on Nazi Germany. Their armies sat fully mobilized on the French-German border. Yet almost nothing happened. British pilots flew over German territory and dropped leaflets. German soldiers waved up at British planes mapping their defences. At Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, when a German Heinkel bomber crashed and killed its crew on the 30th of April 1940, the RAF helped lay the German airmen to rest in the local cemetery. Wreaths with messages of sympathy rested on the coffins. How did a world war look so much like peace? And what was actually happening beneath the surface of the silence? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A War With Many Names

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  "There is something phoney about this war." That was U.S. Senator William Borah speaking in September 1939, commenting on the visible inactivity on the Western Front. His phrase would eventually travel across the Atlantic and become the standard term for the period. Credit for coining "Phoney War" is generally given to Borah, though the first known printed use appeared in a U.S. newspaper in September 1939, using the British spelling with an 'e'. The term first appeared in British print as late as January 1940.

  Before "Phoney War" took hold, the British had their own name for it: "Bore War," almost certainly a pun on the Boer War fought four decades earlier in South Africa. Winston Churchill preferred to call it the "Twilight War." The British press coined "Sitzkrieg," a play on blitzkrieg substituting sitting for lightning. The French called it the drole de guerre, meaning "funny" or "strange war." Each of these names captured a different shade of the same bewilderment.

• 3. A Strategy Built on Patience

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  In March 1939, Britain and France formalized a joint strategy for war against Nazi Germany. Both nations understood they faced an enemy with superior land and air forces. Their plan was to contest specific German moves while maintaining a fundamentally defensive posture. The idea was to buy time, build military capacity, and eventually achieve economic and naval dominance.

  Britain's initial commitment was modest: two divisions to France, with two more to follow eleven months later. The Polish Army's planners had assumed something very different. Poland's own defence plan, called Plan West, rested on the expectation that the Allies would quickly launch a major offensive in the West to draw German pressure away from the East. The Poles had been misinformed. Not only did the major offensive never come, but French general Maurice Gamelin secretly told Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly that half his divisions were in contact with the enemy, which was false. The following day, the commander of the French Military Mission to Poland informed Polish Chief of Staff General Waclaw Stachiewicz that the major offensive planned for 17 to the 20th of September had to be postponed. Poland was not officially told of the decision to halt all offensive actions taken at the Abbeville Conference on the 12th of September.

• 4. The Saar Offensive

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  France's only offensive action of the entire Phoney War period began on the 7th of September 1939. Eleven French divisions advanced along a 32-kilometre line near Saarbrucken, moving against weak German opposition while most German forces were busy in Poland. By the 12th of September, troops had pushed up to eight kilometres into German territory and occupied twelve German villages in the Saar region.

  The offensive was never meant to be decisive. Its purpose was to probe the Siegfried Line's defences. Hitler had ordered Wehrmacht troops of the German 1st Army not to resist significantly, as Germany wanted to avoid a two-front war. The assault stopped after France seized the Warndt Forest, 7.8 square kilometres of heavily mined German territory. General Gamelin then ordered the troops to withdraw to their starting positions on the Maginot Line. By the 17th of October, the last French soldiers had left German soil.

  Some French generals, among them Henri Giraud, saw the retreat as a missed opportunity. After the war, German 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. General Wilhelm Keitel expressed the same view, saying that a French attack would have encountered only a German military screen, not a real defence. The memory of ten million combined casualties in the First World War weighed heavily on British and French decision-making.

• 5. War at Sea

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  On the 3rd of September 1939, the same day Britain declared war, a German submarine torpedoed the British liner SS Athenia off the Hebrides, killing 117 civilian passengers and crew. It was the opening shot of what would become the lengthy Battle of the Atlantic. Four days before, on the 4th of September, the Allies announced a blockade of Germany to prevent the import of food and raw materials. Germany declared a counter-blockade immediately. The Soviet Union stepped in to help Germany circumvent the Allied measures.

  The losses at sea mounted quickly. On the 17th of September 1939, a British aircraft carrier was sunk in fifteen minutes with the loss of 519 crew members, including the captain. On the 14th of October, a German submarine penetrated the British fleet base at Scapa Flow in Orkney and sank the battleship there. A total of 833 men were lost, among them Rear-Admiral Henry Blagrove, commander of the 2nd Battleship Division.

  In December 1939, the German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee was attacked by Royal Navy cruisers in the Battle of the River Plate. Graf Spee fled to the neutral port of Montevideo for repairs. Her captain ultimately scuttled the ship rather than face what he believed, incorrectly, was a large British fleet waiting outside. In February 1940, Graf Spee's support tanker was captured by the Royal Navy in southern Norway, in what became known as the Altmark Incident.

• 6. The Air War Takes Shape

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  On the 4th of September 1939, RAF bombers struck the port of Wilhelmshaven. The Luftwaffe shot down 12 of the 22 Vickers Wellington bombers sent on the mission, in what became known as the Battle of the Heligoland Bight. The losses were severe, and they reflected a pattern that shaped the rest of the air campaign: both sides found that attacking well-defended military targets led to unacceptable losses.

  On the 16th of October 1939, the Luftwaffe launched air raids on British warships at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth. Spitfires from 602 and 603 Squadrons shot down two Junkers Ju 88s and a Heinkel He 111 over the firth. A raid on Scapa Flow the following day brought down another Ju 88 on the island of Hoy. The first Luftwaffe aircraft to crash on the British mainland was a Heinkel He 111 at Haddington in East Lothian on the 28th of October 1939. Pilot Archie McKellar of 602 Squadron was credited with a principal role in both that kill and the earlier one over water. McKellar later went on to be credited with 20 kills during the Battle of Britain, and achieved ace-in-a-day status by shooting down five Bf 109s, a feat accomplished by only 24 RAF pilots during the entire war. He was killed in action on the 1st of November 1940.

  Rather than continue daylight bombing with heavy losses, the RAF conducted what the British press called "pamphlet raids" or the "Confetti War," dropping propaganda leaflets across Germany. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had proposed a ban on bombing raids endangering civilians; Britain and France agreed at once, and Germany agreed two weeks later.

• 7. Finland and Scandinavia

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  On the 30th of November 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland, beginning the Winter War. Public opinion in France and Britain quickly rallied behind what people called "the brave Finns." Both governments faced pressure to act. The belief was that helping Finland was more achievable than the failed effort to assist Poland.

  The Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations as a consequence of its attack. A Franco-British expedition to northern Scandinavia was debated, and eventually plans were assembled. But the forces were not dispatched before the Winter War ended with the Moscow Peace Treaty. On the 20th of March 1940, shortly after peace was concluded, French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier resigned, in part because of his government's failure to come to Finland's defence.

  The Allied discussions about a Scandinavian campaign had already alarmed Germany. In February 1940, Norway had become a focus when the Altmark Incident drew attention to the Norwegian coast. The German invasion of Denmark and Norway, codenamed Operation Weserubung, commenced on the 9th of April 1940. Allied troops landed in Norway from the 14th of April, but by the end of the month southern Norway was in German hands. Fighting continued in the north until early June. Norwegian forces in mainland Norway laid down their arms at midnight on the 9th of June. The Allied failure in Norway then forced a reckoning in the House of Commons.

• 8. The End of the Phoney War

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  The Norway campaign forced a parliamentary crisis. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain faced sustained attack in the House of Commons. His government won a nominal vote of confidence by 281 to 200, but many of his own supporters had voted against him while others abstained. Chamberlain found it impossible to continue leading a National Government or to form a new coalition. On the 10th of May 1940, he resigned the premiership while retaining leadership of the Conservative Party.

  Winston Churchill, who had been a consistent opponent of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, became his successor on that same day. Churchill formed a coalition government drawing from the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Party, as well as several ministers from outside politics.

  Also on the 10th of May, German troops marched into Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Eight months after the war began, the Phoney War was over. The Dunkirk evacuation began sixteen days later, on the 26th of May. Fascist Italy entered the European war on the 10th of June 1940, though its thirty-two divisions crossing into France achieved little against five defending French divisions. What had seemed like a pause was in fact a period of accumulation, manoeuvre, and miscalculation on all sides. The politician who had called it phoney, Senator William Borah, died in January 1940, months before the real fighting began.