Warring sides

The road to war

The Second World War was fought between Britain, France, the USA, Poland, the Soviet Union and assorted smaller countries on one side, and Germany, Italy, Romania, and Hungary on the other. Matters are slightly complicated by the fact that the Soviet Union was allied to Germany from August 1939 until June 1941 when Germany attacked her. We will look here at Germany, France, Britain, and Poland, and make smaller mention of the other participants.

Germany

The German armed forces at the outbreak of the war were perhaps the best prepared for the ensuing conflict, although Germany did not possess the largest army in 1939. The Germans had worked out how best to utilize the various new technological developments in weaponry and harnessed them effectively to traditional German tactics as well as originating new tactical ideas.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the German military faced a sobering reappraisal of their position. Despite the many variations of the ‘stab in the back’ idea, that Germany had lost the war not because of military defeat but instead by the actions of left-wing elements at home, the German armed forces had been decisively defeated by 1918. Senior German officers were only too aware of where their shortcomings lay and set about addressing them.

The German armed forces responded to defeat with a thorough examination of the reasons that underpinned it, and set about providing practical military solutions to their problems. However, just as Germany had suffered extensive territorial loss as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, so too did she suffer considerable readjustment of the manning and equipment levels of her armed forces. In November 1918, at the time of the Armistice, the Imperial German army could field in the region of 4 million men. After the Versailles settlement she was restricted to a formation that numbered only 100,000 troops, of whom 4,000 were officers. While this number was comparatively small, the men of the ‘100,000’ Army would provide the nucleus of the enlarged army and their intensive training and proficiency would prove to be invaluable.

As well as these limitations on manpower, the German army was prohibited from possessing or developing tanks and the German air force was abolished altogether. The German navy, much of which had been scuttled at Scapa Flow as it was due to be handed over to the British, was confined to a few larger surface vessels from the pre-Dreadnought era, but was forbidden to have U-boats at all. These apparent disadvantages were overcome in a number of ways.

Under the enthusiastic and skillful leadership of Colonel-General Hans von Seeckt, many of the arrangements agreed upon at Versailles were sidestepped or negated. First, the German military spent a great deal of time thinking about the way in which their forces might be employed to face a larger enemy and also about why they had failed to win a victory between 1914 and 1918. While the Germans were denied access to new equipment, they considered how they might employ such equipment in the likely event of restrictions on Germany being lifted.

The Germans also went to considerable lengths to circumvent the restrictions on equipment. In 1922 a bilateral agreement was forged between Germany and Bolshevik Russia, the two pariah states of Europe, to cooperate on military matters. The Germans gained training areas away from the prying eyes of the Allies, while the Soviet Union received technical aid. The training of pilots was also carried out clandestinely, with many pilots learning the principles of flight through the new glider clubs that grew during the 1920s and 1930s. When Hitler came to power in January 1933, he brought with him a resolve and an ideology to make Germany a great power once again. His accession brought a new commitment to rearmament and a determination to reassert Germany’s international position.

When the new German army was unleashed on the Poles in 1939, and especially against the Anglo-French forces in 1940, it exhibited a flexible technique of command and control that proved the difference between the German soldiers and their opponents. This idea had its roots in the partially successful German spring offensive of 1918 and stressed the idea of Aufragstaktic or mission command. This focused on the need for all officers and NCOs to take decisions to achieve the goal of their mission, and encouraged initiative and freedom of action on the ground rather than waiting for orders from on high. This flexibility was aided by the development of wireless communications and the fact that all German tanks were equipped with radios.

In 1932 a Germany army captain named Bechtolsheim gave a lecture on German principles of war to the United States Artillery School. He stressed the following ideas:

The German Army has of course its principles as to what is to be done in war, but – please mark this well – no stereotyped rules as to how it is to be done. We believe that movement is the first element of war and only by mobile warfare can any decisive results be obtained … to do always what the enemy does not expect and to constantly [sic] change both the means and the methods and to do the most improbable things whenever the situation permits; it means to be free of all set rules and preconceived ideas. We believe that no leader who thinks or acts by stereotyped rules can ever do anything great, because he is bound by such rules. War is not normal. It cannot therefore be won by rules which apply in peacetime.

These ideas found their most effective expression in the employment of tanks and supporting arms acting in concert, and they were aided by the ideas of General Heinz Guderian, often called the ‘father of the Panzers’ (tanks). The sum total of German ideas of mission command and new technology would prove devastating in the early years of the Second World War and would introduce a new word to the military lexicon, Blitzkrieg.

Great Britain

At the end of the First World War, it was the British army that appeared to lead the world in terms of effective war fighting. The British skill in utilizing the all-arms concept (the interaction of artillery, tanks, infantry, and air power) had been very apparent at the end of 1918. By 1939, however, this effective lead had been lost. The reasons why this state of affairs developed are several.

Britain, like most of the major combatants in the First World War, was ‘war weary.’ In the late 1920s a rash of books was published detailing the experiences of British troops in the war. Almost all written by officers, these books played a significant role in defining or redefining the popular British perceptions of that conflict. Works such as Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (to name but three) meshed well with a general sense that the war was a tragedy, and rather eclipsed and replaced other modes of remembrance. Certainly at this time there were few books that celebrated the war as an unambiguous victory. In tandem with this literary response there came a wider, popular revulsion against war in the more general sense, underscored by the Peace Ballot. With this mood in the country and little money generally, it is hardly surprising that defense budgets were slashed.

In tandem with widespread anti-war sentiment, Britain also found herself in a precarious economic position. Having entered the war as the global economy’s principal creditor – the one to whom the most money was owed – she finished it as one of the largest debtor states. The cost of the war had been enormous, absorbing British reserves and also bringing about the loss of many of Britain’s overseas markets when production of consumer goods was switched to war materials. At the end of the war, British producers found that many of their prewar markets had been taken over by other countries, notably the USA. Indeed, it was the USA that emerged as the economic victor after 1918. Having capitalized on the absence of traditional European competition for trade and markets between 1914 and 1918, she also lent large amounts to the other Allied participants.

British strategy in the event of another war initially focused upon facing the imagined threat of air attack. The idea that ‘the bomber will always get through’ informed British defense thinking from 1934. To this end, priority was given to building up the Royal Air Force (RAF) and establishing the new ‘radar’ system to cover the British coast. The Royal Navy, although no longer the unchallenged master of the seas, was still a formidable force. The British army was the only fully mobile army in 1939 and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that was dispatched to France in 1939 was still a useful formation at 160,000 men. The interwar debate about the role of the tank in the British army had largely been resolved by 1939. The resolution had come in favor of those who believed that the tank should be the essential element of any formation, but acting alone, not as a component of a cohesive all-arms grouping.

France

In the interwar years, a great deal of security, real or imagined, was derived from the very existence of the French army. In March 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Winston Churchill made one of his customary and oft-quoted exclamations, declaring: ‘thank god for the French army!’ To such as Churchill, still a lone voice in the political wilderness in 1933, the French army was a significant bulwark against future German aggression. Few in Britain, however, agreed with him. Indeed there were many who saw the posturing of France with regard to Germany as the real threat to European stability and not Germany herself.

In many ways, France’s experience of the First World War was quite different from that of her British allies, and it certainly exercised a far greater influence on her subsequent military organization, doctrine, and tactics. While the British army fought in several different theaters and pioneered the employment of tanks and the adoption of all-arms techniques of fighting toward the end of the war, with great success, the French successes between 1914 and 1918 were grounded in determinedly holding a defensive line. This static mentality found both its most eloquent expression and a source of national grandeur in the heroic fighting at Verdun, where the French army had endured horrific casualties yet had prevailed. Despite French offensive success and their own positive experiences of all-arms conflict toward the end of the First World War, French losses had been so significant between 1914 and 1918 that few Frenchmen would willingly go to war in the future.

The idea of the defense had a special poignancy for the French, as their losses in the First World War were taken on French soil and in defense of La République. It was no wonder, then, that future defensive arrangements should seek to learn from French successes and also to build on them to such an extent that the devastation of 1914–18 would not be repeated. The result was the creation of the enormous and costly Maginot Line, a vast system of interconnected fortresses, linked underground via railways, comprising barracks and hospitals, ammunition stores, and fuel and ventilation systems that would allow the forts to continue to function – and fight – even if surrounded by the enemy. At 7 billion French francs, the final cost of the line was far more than the original estimate.

The cost of construction and also the ongoing cost of maintenance inevitably meant that the funding available for other areas of the French armed forces was reduced greatly. Despite these considerations, however, there were few in France who would dispute the necessity of such an arrangement. Marshal Pétain summed up the French national faith in such defenses, referring to them as ‘lavish with steel, stingy with blood,’ and after the horrors of the trenches, few disagreed.

There was a weakness in the whole arrangement, in that the line did not extend the length of the Franco-Belgian frontier – the obvious route for an invading army – and in fact stretched only from Strasbourg as far as Montmédy. The reasons for this were partly practical and partly economic as well as a reluctance to exclude Belgium from an alliance with France. If Belgium were left out of the Maginot Line, in all likelihood she would once again revert to her previous neutrality – she had been neutral in 1914 – and thereby provide a conduit for German aggression. In the event, Belgium opted for neutrality anyway, effectively scuppering French plans to move into prepared positions on Belgian soil. Similarly, the Maginot Line did not cover the area opposite the Ardennes, a densely wooded forest area, as it was considered to be ‘impenetrable’ to modern armored columns.

The sum total of these many considerations – a misplaced optimism in the strength of the Maginot Line, worries about the political position of Belgium, financial concerns, and an unwillingness to conceive that offensive, maneuver-type operations might hold the upper hand in a future war – all led to the development of what would be termed the ‘Maginot mentality.’ This amounted to a belief in the superiority of the defensive arrangement of the Maginot Line and an unwillingness to believe or acknowledge that warfare might have moved on.

The Maginot Line was also tremendously important for the Germans. Almost unwittingly, it had imposed upon the French a strategic straitjacket. There was little chance that, having shackled herself so firmly (and expensively) to the defensive, France was likely to go onto the attack. In 1935 the French Minister of War, in a speech to the French Chamber of Deputies, asserted: ‘How can we still believe in the offensive when we have spent thousands of millions to establish a fortified barrier? Would we be mad enough to advance beyond this barrier upon goodness knows what adventure!’

Not only had the French national mentality become inextricably wedded to the defensive – a mindset both created and reinforced by the Maginot Line – but there were also other practical considerations. The Maginot Line had been the product of tremendous investment in defense budgets and manpower. With the Maginot Line receiving so much of the available moneys for defense, it severely restricted other areas of defense spending. Even had the French army not been so deficient in the means to adopt offensive operations, the means to fund new equipment to that end was absent. The knowledge of this would obviously aid Adolf Hitler, who was reasonably secure that, whatever action he might take in the east, it was highly unlikely that France would threaten seriously the western border of the Reich.

The French army in the 1930s suffered from a number of problems, many of them reflected in French life more widely. French troops were underpaid and undervalued, and the army was riven by many of the social and political divisions of the country at large. The French army continued to rely on telephone communication rather than radio. Similarly, the French failed to take on board the new potential of tanks. The French army of 1918 did not manage to enact the all-arms battle with any degree of conviction, generally reducing its tanks to the role of infantry support vehicles that were the means to the end of an infantry breakthrough. This was despite developing some excellent vehicles toward the end of the war. The French all-arms battle generally geared the speed of the other elements down to that of the slowest component, the infantry, rather than seeking to motorize the infantry and allow them to maintain the speed of the armored elements. Despite the protestations of a few French officers during the interwar period, notably those of Charles de Gaulle, French doctrine remained stubbornly behind the times.

Belgium

The small Belgian army had played as active a role as it could during the First World War and in the aftermath made serious efforts to preserve its security. The Belgians signed defensive agreements with both Britain and France and endeavored to maintain a large standing army, courtesy of conscription. However, by 1926 this commitment to a reasonably strong standing army had largely been abandoned and a reliance on the inevitability of British and French support in the event of war informed Belgium’s defense posture. The advent of Hitler in 1933 prompted a renewal of Belgian military spending and by the time of the Anglo-French declaration of war, the Belgian army stood at nearly 600,000 men. The Belgian army, despite a number of modern and effective weapons, planned to fight a defensive war in the event of her neutrality, reaffirmed with the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany being breached.

Poland

The Poles were to have the dubious distinction of being Hitler’s first military victims. The performance of the Polish army in the early battles of the Second World War has attracted considerable attention, if only for the apparent futility of its desperate efforts to repel the German invaders. The history of the Polish army is an interesting one. Poland, as an independent political entity, had effectively been off the map for the 123 years before 1918. Successive ‘partitions’ of Poland between Prussia, Imperial Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to an end in 1918 when Poland was restored by the Treaty of Versailles, at the territorial expense of those same states.

Large numbers of Poles fought in the First World War, serving, ironically, in the armies of Germany, Russia, and also Austria-Hungry. It was the formations of Polish Legions raised by the Austro-Hungarians that were to have the largest and most disproportionate impact on the new army of independent Poland. A fledgling Polish army was soon established in the new Poland under the command of Jozef Pilsudski, the former commander of the Polish Legions in the Austrian army. Despite the unpromising origins of this essentially disparate, ‘rag-tag’ grouping, the Polish army was to score a notable success. The Poles were bolstered by a number of additional Polish formations, most notably the ‘Haller’ army, a formation of 25,000 Polish-American volunteers.

In the aftermath of the First World War and with the large empires of east and central Europe collapsing, there followed a general free-for-all as many states struggled to seize territory and incorporate ethnic kin within the boundaries of the new states. The Poles, emboldened by a number of local victories against the new masters of Russia, the Bolsheviks, joined with Ukrainian nationalist forces to invade the Ukraine and fight the Red Army. After the Poles enjoyed initial successes, the Red Army forced them all the way back to the gates of Warsaw. Then Pilsudski achieved an enormous reversal of Polish fortunes and defeated the Red Army so decisively that the Bolsheviks were obliged to conclude a humiliating peace settlement, something that rankled through the 1920s and 1930s and certainly contributed to Stalin’s willingness to dismember the country in 1939.

Poland’s strategic position was unpromising. Sandwiched between two powerful enemies, the Soviet Union to the east and Germany to the west, the nightmare scenario for Poland was, of course, a two-front war. Poland’s strategic predicament was the source of considerable concern to Polish planners. In 1921 they managed to secure a defensive alliance with France. This obliged the French to assist the Poles in the event of Germany entering into a conflict that was already in progress between the Poles and Russia. If this criterion were fulfilled, France would attack Germany. This treaty had obvious benefits for the French, whose diplomatic maneuvering in the interwar years was directed toward containing and restricting Germany. The Poles also secured a treaty with the Romanians that promised help against Russia rather than Germany.

The Treaty of Locarno, signed in 1925 between Britain, France and Weimar Germany, appeared to be a source of future trouble for Poland, guaranteeing as it did the frontiers of western Europe. The obvious problem lay in the fact that Germany, with her western borders secure from her most vehement enemy, France, might take the opportunity to redress some of her many territorial grievances in the east. In a masterstroke of diplomatic collusion, Hitler agreed a nonaggression pact between Germany and Poland.

Despite the judgement of history on the Polish army in the war with Germany, that it was fighting a thoroughly modern opponent with nineteenth-century tactics and equipment, the Polish army was in fact wedded to a doctrine of maneuver. These tactics were born of the successes and experiences of the fast-moving Russo-Polish War, but unfortunately while the ideas were modern, the means by which they were to be realized were most definitely from a bygone era. While the German ideas of maneuver utilized tanks, armored infantry, and self-propelled artillery, the Poles still placed their faith in cavalry and infantry marching on foot. The resulting clash could have only one winner.