phoney war

phoney war, US newspaper description of that period of military inactivity which followed the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany on 3 September 1939. To the British it was also the Bore War— Churchill called it the Twilight War—while the French described it as la drôle de guerre and the Germans as the Sitzkrieg.

France and the UK honoured their obligations to Poland (see Poland, guarantee of) by declaring war, but neither did anything significant to support the Poles militarily. Indeed, they did little to distract Hitler during the five weeks his forces took to complete their Polish campaign. The French C-in-C, Gamelin, like the whole French Army, was in a defensive frame of mind. No attempt was made to shell the industrialized Saar, well within the range of French heavy artillery, and Gamelin did little more than probe the German West Wall around Saarbrücken (see Map 87) where it was reported that captured German soldiers were unaware that France and the UK were at war with their country. This inactivity had a bad effect on the morale of the French Army which was to become only too evident when the fighting started in earnest in the spring.

British policy was equally timid. Retaliatory air raids on British cities were feared, and many politicians were still so dominated by peacetime attitudes that when, on 5 September 1939, Leo Amery asked Kingsley Wood, the secretary of state for air, why an attempt should not be made to set the Black Forest alight (vetoed on the grounds that it conflicted with the spirit of the Hague Convention) he was told that ‘there was no question of our bombing even the munition works at Essen, which were private property’ ( L. Amery, My Political Life, Vol. 3, London, 1955, p. 330). British aircraft were sent to attack German shipping at Wilhelmshaven, but no bombs were dropped on German territory while Chamberlain was prime minister, and on land the British Expeditionary Force confined its offensive operations to patrolling. Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty at the time, wanted to float air-dropped fluvial mines down the Rhine, but when the matter was discussed in the Supreme War Council the French were adamant that this operation (ROYAL MARINE) should not proceed. The French prime minister, Daladier, told Churchill that the ‘President of the Republic himself had intervened, and that no aggressive action must be taken which might only draw reprisals upon France’ ( W. S. Churchill, The Second World War: The Gathering Storm, London, 1948, p. 518). The idea of not irritating the enemy, wrote Churchill after the war, ‘did not commend itself to me’ (ibid.), but the operation took place only after the Germans had launched their offensive in the west in May 1940 (see FALL GELB).

Only on the open ocean did hostilities immediately become apparent: the liner Athenia was torpedoed within hours of war being declared; the British battleship Royal Oak was sunk in October 1939; the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled in December 1939 after the River Plate battle; and the German auxiliary cruisers soon made their presence known on the high seas. These events brought home to the British public the intensity of the war at sea, but they had no direct effect on the civilian population, whose mood of determination to meet an immediate attack soon changed to boredom, bewilderment, and resentment at the disruption of the blackout, rationing, and the evacuation of children, all of which had been imposed on them for no apparent reason. To increase their irritation more emergency laws were passed in the first two weeks of the war than had been passed in the first year of the First World War.

Of course the phoney war was not created by the Allies alone. It was encouraged by the Germans, too. The first bombs to be dropped on the UK fell on the Shetland Islands on 13 November 1939, but it was not until December 1939 that the British suffered their first service fatality in France. By contrast 50,000 British servicemen had been lost during the first three months of the First World War. And it was not until 16 March 1940 that the first British civilian was killed, during an air raid on Scapa Flow. Initially, it gave Hitler time to finish the Polish campaign undisturbed and though he then wanted to attack westwards before the end of 1939, the German High Command, which included several conspirators against him (see Schwarze Kapelle), lacked any such enthusiasm. Like many in France and the UK, General Jodl, the head of operations at Hitler's Armed Forces High Command, thought that the war would die a natural death if the Germans kept quiet in the west. But it was mainly bad weather, not the Führer's opponents, which allowed the phoney war to continue through the first winter of the war, and the Sitzkrieg did not end until Hitler launched his Norwegian campaign on 9 April 1940. Even then, according to Leo Amery, RAF aircraft were initially ordered not to bomb German-held airfields, only to machine-gun them.

Bibliography

Turner, E. , The Phoney War (London, 1961).