Saar Offensive

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Saar Offensive begins with a number that tells you almost everything: 110. That was the count of French and British divisions stationed along Germany's western border in September 1939, while the Polish cities burned. Against them stood just 23 German divisions. By any military calculus, France held an overwhelming hand. And yet, when it mattered most, those 110 divisions barely moved.

  What followed between the 7th of September and the 16th of October 1939 was a French invasion of the German region of Saarland that historians have called half-hearted at best. One historian, Roger Moorhouse, described it plainly as a "sham offensive on the Saar." It was planned to be one of the largest coordinated assaults of the early war. It became something far smaller and far more consequential for the Poles who were counting on it.

  Why did 40 planned divisions shrink to 11 on the ground? Why did French forces stop advancing just before they reached the Siegfried Line? And what did France's commander actually tell Poland's army about how the offensive was going, compared to what was really happening? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Treaty That Bound France

  ›

  In 1921, France and Poland formalised a mutual obligation through a military convention, pledging to defend each other against German aggression. When Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939, that convention activated a precise timetable. The French Army was required to begin preparations for a major offensive just three days after mobilisation started.

  The plan set hard deadlines. French forces were to take control of the ground between the French border and the Siegfried Line, probe German defences, and on the 15th day of mobilisation, meaning the 16th of September, launch a full-scale assault. France had pre-emptively begun mobilising on the 26th of August. Full mobilisation was declared on the 1st of September, the same day as the German invasion.

  France and Britain formally declared war on Germany two days later, on the 3rd of September. The clock was running, and the convention demanded action. But the army preparing to honour that obligation carried a significant burden: its doctrine, its equipment philosophy, and its institutional instincts were still shaped by the First World War. French command remained committed to stationary artillery tactics, which took considerable time to transport and position. Many artillery pieces had to be retrieved from storage before any advance was possible, adding delays before a single soldier crossed into Germany.

• 3. What France Did Not Know

  ›

  On the 7th of September, eleven French divisions, part of the Second Army Group, advanced along a 32-kilometre stretch near Saarbrücken. The German opposition was thin, and French forces pushed up to 8 kilometres into German territory in some areas. They captured roughly twelve towns and villages without meaningful resistance, including Gersheim, Medelsheim, Ihn, Bliesmengen, Ludweiler, and Kleinblittersdorf, among others.

  What made the restraint that followed so striking was that France did not yet know the scale of its own advantage. The French and British command feared large German air attacks on their cities and acted accordingly. They did not know that 90 percent of German frontline aircraft were committed to the campaign in Poland. Nor did they know that the German units holding the western front had been stripped of real fighting capability, pared down so thoroughly that France unknowingly held a 3-to-1 advantage over the defenders they faced.

  The Wehrmacht was fully occupied in the east. French forces had a genuine window. The German 1st Army, assigned to defend the sector, had almost nothing in reserve. Four Renault R35 tanks were destroyed by mines north of Bliesbrück, one of the few setbacks in an advance that otherwise met almost no organised resistance. By the 9th of September, French forces had occupied most of the Warndt Forest, a patch of terrain roughly 7 square kilometres that the Germans had heavily mined.

• 4. Halted at the Line

  ›

  On the 10th of September, a minor German counterattack briefly retook the village of Apach, but French forces reversed the loss within hours. The French 32nd Infantry Regiment pressed further on the 12th of September, capturing the German town of Brenschelbach at the cost of one captain, one sergeant, and seven privates. Near the triple border of France, Germany, and Luxembourg, the Schengen bridge was destroyed.

  That same day, the Anglo-French Supreme War Council met for the first time, gathering at Abbeville in France. The decision reached there would shape everything that followed: all offensive actions were to stop immediately. General Maurice Gamelin ordered his troops to advance no closer than one kilometre from German positions along the Siegfried Line. Poland was not told.

  Instead, Gamelin sent word to Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly 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. Neither claim was accurate. The following day, the commander of the French Military Mission to Poland, General Louis Faury, informed Polish chief of staff General Waclaw Stachiewicz that the planned major assault on the western front would be postponed from the 17th to the 20th of September.

  On the 21st of September, with Poland's collapse already under way, Gamelin ordered all French units to begin withdrawing to their starting positions on the Maginot Line. Some French generals objected. Henri Giraud was among those who saw the withdrawal as a wasted opportunity and said so directly.

• 5. Withdrawal and Its Reckoning

  ›

  As the withdrawal proceeded, a German counterattack unfolded on the 28th of September. The German 18th Infantry Regiment, drawn from the newly formed 52nd Division, struck in the area between Bischmisheim and Ommersheim. French forces repelled it. By the 16th and the 17th of October, German troops, now reinforced with veterans returning from the Polish campaign, conducted a broader counteroffensive and retook the remaining French-held territory.

  German records acknowledged 196 soldiers killed, 114 missing, and 356 wounded during the engagement. They reported eleven aircraft shot down through the 17th of October. French casualties across the Saar Offensive reached approximately 2,000, killed, wounded, or sick combined.

  The 40-division assault that Poland's defensive plan, known as Plan West, had counted on to relieve pressure from the east never came. Plan West had explicitly assumed that an Allied offensive on the Western Front would draw German forces away from Poland. That diversion never happened.

  At the Nuremberg Trials years later, German military commander Alfred Jodl stated directly that Germany's survival in 1939 was possible "only" because those approximately 110 French and British divisions in the west remained completely inactive against 23 German divisions. General Siegfried Westphal went further, saying that if France had attacked in full force in September 1939, the German army could have held out for just one or two weeks. With the last French soldiers back behind the Maginot Line and no shots fired in meaningful anger, what began as a potential turning point settled into the long, quiet period the press would name the Phoney War.