Offensive Reconnaissance
ON THE FIRST DAY of the war, the RAF’s Bomber Command had carried out its first operation, when twenty-seven bombers had been sent to search for the German Fleet.
Among those heading out over the North Sea had been six Handley Page Hampdens of 83 Squadron, based at Scampton, just to the north of Lincoln. Among the pilots was Guy Gibson, a 21-year-old flying officer fresh back from leave on the last day of August. The squadron’s Hampdens were twin-engine bombers like those of the Luftwaffe. The Hampden was nimble, could carry a decent bomb-load and was faster than most bombers of the day, with a cruising speed of over 250 mph. Gibson, however, was not a great fan of the model and thought his own personal mount, C-Charlie, was ‘lousy’. ‘On take-off, she swung like hell to the right,’ he noted, ‘and flew in the air with her left wing low. Sometimes an engine died out, but that was nothing.’
Gibson had been told he would be flying soon after Chamberlain’s announcement, with take-off scheduled for 3.30 p.m. that same afternoon. He had been quite terrified at the prospect; just a few days earlier he had been sunbathing, carefree and having the time of his life. Now he was flying off to war, and, he was convinced, never to return. He had been so nervous, he had had to run to the toilet four times, and as he’d been about to take off had discovered his hands shaking like a leaf. One of the ground crew said to him, ‘Good luck, sir, give those bastards a real hiding.’ Gibson had given him a sickly smile.
He found, though, that once the engines were running and he was at last rumbling down the grass runway he became calmer, even though this was the first time he had ever flown C-Charlie with live bombs strapped underneath. As he got airborne and flew over Lincolnshire, he struggled to believe he could possibly be flying towards Germany in an act of war. He desperately wished he could turn back. Passing over Skegness in the sunshine he thought how just a couple of months ago he had gone there with some of the boys. It seemed surreal. And then he was out over the North Sea.
As they approached the north German coast, he remembered what he had read about the aces of the last war and began to constantly swivel his head, scanning the skies. He spotted a German Dornier seaplane but flew on until, as they were within forty miles or so of Wilhelmshaven, the cloud dramatically descended. Suddenly, they were flying through driving rain, and the sea below looked wild. They ploughed on until around ten miles from target they saw the faint flash of enemy guns. Far from being alarmed, Gibson now realized the anti-aircraft guns were providing a wonderful target marker, but, to his surprise, the formation leader banked away. Duly following, Gibson slowly realized they were, in fact, turning back. All would make it safely home again, but Bomber Command’s first operation had been something of a damp squib.
The following day, Bomber Command returned to Germany, and although most once again struggled to find the German Fleet, a handful of Blenheims did manage to hit the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the cruiser Emden; unfortunately for the attackers, however, the bombs failed to explode on the Scheer and caused only some damage, although more was caused by one of the Blenheim bombers crashing on to it. Four other Blenheims were shot down.
That was Bomber Command’s last aggressive operation for a while; for the next few months it carried out leaflet dropping only. How that was going to help the Poles was anyone’s guess.
When President Roosevelt had appealed to all belligerents on 1 September to refrain from unrestricted warfare, both France and Britain had agreed. Attacking the German Fleet was all right because warships were a purely military target; the same could not be said for land targets, where there were civilians and non-military buildings and infrastructure. From France’s perspective, there was considerable anxiety over possible retaliation on French cities, and, as far as Britain was concerned, there was good sense in conserving its bomber force and building strength for when it was really needed. Leaflet dropping, on the other hand, was still dangerous and potentially costly in terms of aircraft and lives, but achieved absolutely nothing. It is hard to think of a greater waste of resources than sending bombers to drop paper on one’s enemy.
Perhaps the air forces would have had a bit more gumption if there had been more determination on the ground. The onus for such a move was clearly on France, since the British Army was still very small and only just starting to arrive on the Continent. Back in May, Général Gamelin had assured the Poles that on the outbreak of hostilities with Germany, France would take the offensive, and that after fifteen days of mobilization at the latest would throw its full weight behind a campaign. This was another reason why the Poles had been prepared to dig their heels in with Germany.
Now that push came to shove, however, Gamelin was making comments about not wanting to begin the war with another Battle of Verdun and, far from putting the full weight of the Army into a decisive invasion of western Germany, ordered just nine divisions to make an ‘offensive reconnaissance’ along a sixteen-mile front into the Saar region.
Among those taking part was Capitaine Daniel Barlone, another reserve officer recently called up and sent to take command of the 92nd/20th Horse Transport Company of the headquarters of 2nd North African Division. Having been in a civilian job in Paris just the week before, he was armed with a hefty copy of Journal de Mobilisation, which outlined what he was expected to do and what stores he should draw. After a long journey east, they had been based at the tiny village of Pillon, north-west of Metz and not far from Verdun. 2nd North African Division was a mobile division, but Barlone was surprised to find it so short of weapons, munitions and vehicles, and yet the situation was much improved since the previous year, when he’d last been on exercise. ‘How should we come off if we had to start the fray now?’ he wondered in his diary. ‘We should manage somehow, I suppose.’
A few days later, they were on the march, after dark for fear of German planes. It took a long time: a long column of horses and wagons, plodding forward in the dark and what seemed like incessant rain. After several days they were south of Luxembourg and south of the Saar, and then reached the Maginot Line. ‘We skirt some huge earthworks,’ wrote Barlone, ‘but I am amazed to see that nothing, absolutely nothing, has been prepared in depth.’ The Maginot Line, he discovered, was a single thread 100–150 yards wide with webs of wire. He wondered what would happen if any part of it were breached. How would the men behind the line be able to stem the flood which would pour through and outflank the forts? He was later assured that a more elastic system of defence did exist. ‘Not in this sector at any rate!’ he noted.
Eventually, the division headquarters reached the village of Holling, which, like all other border villages, had been evacuated. For several days they remained where they were; Barlone had established his company headquarters in a now-empty café. The German border was just two and a half miles away, and each night Barlone could hear unending streams of artillery, equipment and supplies heading up to the border. Everyone was keenly aware that an attack was about to be launched; news from the front filtered back that the Germans had abandoned their border villages too but had left them riddled with booby traps – a combination of artillery and engineers was now clearing them. ‘The attack is on the point of being launched,’ Barlone scribbled, ‘that is as clear as day. The Polish front will be eased.’
In fact, it was a bit late in the day for easing the Polish front. The Poles had already lost their freedom of action after just a few days, and by 11 September, German forces were sweeping in a wide swathe across a third of the country. Warsaw looked set to fall within a matter of days. As it stood, the result was no longer in doubt, although if the French attacked as wholeheartedly as Gamelin had promised back in May, there was a golden opportunity to drive straight on to Berlin without much to stop them. And that would have been a major game-changer.
Barlone and his men certainly felt ready and prepared. ‘We are all burning with desire,’ he noted, ‘and jumping for joy at the idea of entering the fray.’ He was especially confident in French firepower; having served in the last war, he knew their artillery had been something to be reckoned with back then and was even more so now.
But a further week passed and still the attack had not been ordered. Then, on 18 September, Barlone heard whispers from division HQ that it would be launched the following morning. By this time, Barlone was wondering whether it was now going to be too late – news had arrived that Warsaw was surrounded. Still, his men remained confident and raring to go, but then, the following day arrived and still there was no order to attack. Instead, news reached them that the Russians had invaded Poland from the east. Barlone was dumbstruck by this devastating piece of news, as were most people in the West. ‘Poland is done for,’ he admitted in his diary. ‘Since yesterday activity has slowed down, no more artillery, no fresh troops. The Staff give me to understand that the offensive will not take place. What a pity that nearly a fortnight has been wasted before being able to attack.’
In fact, there had been an offensive – albeit a very limited one. The French had pushed just five miles, reached the outposts of the extremely thinly held Siegfried Line, and then gone no further. Casualties had been extremely light and were mostly caused by mines. As one regiment diary noted, ‘X Platoon tried to continue its advance; it was halted by the fire of an automatic weapon.’ A generation earlier, French poilus had advanced over ground torn up by shellfire into withering storms of machine-gun and rifle fire; now entire advances were being held up by a single weapon.
Along the Maginot Line, René de Chambrun and his regiment had disappeared into the depths of the Fort of Rotherberg, from where no enemy could be seen at all. As if to show solidarity in the effort, the Hochwald Bastion further along the line fired the odd shell, although its 75mm gun, the only artillery piece that could actually reach Germany, fired only a few shots and then jammed.
At Army headquarters in Paris, André Beaufre was bristling with shame. ‘The Germans did not react,’ he noted. ‘Gamelin decided to pull back. So much for our help to Poland.’ Before the war, Gamelin had calculated that Poland would be able to hold out until the spring. In fact, the Poles, despite showing unquestioned bravery and determination to fight, had been overwhelmed by a two-pronged assault from west and east and capitulated after just twenty days. It was slightly worrying for the Allies that Gamelin and his generals seemed to be operating on a much slower timescale than the Germans in this war.
All French troops were back behind the Maginot Line by 4 October, and Gamelin, for one, was only too relieved that the pledge of honour to the Poles had been, to his mind, satisfied. Now, the Allies could do what they had always planned to do: sit and wait and build up strength, and hope that Germany would not attack them before they were ready to meet the challenge.
Unquestionably, fear of military inferiority played a large part in French thinking. On one level, this was misplaced, because the French were pretty well equipped for war with Germany. There were already the best part of a million men before mobilization, and that figure grew rapidly: over six million men were mobilized in September. The Army was also equipped with the most heavily armed and heavily armoured tanks in the world and had good numbers too. The Somuas were well protected and had 47mm guns, while the Char Bs mounted both 75mm and 47mm guns. The only German tank – or panzer as they were known – to mount a 75mm gun was the Panzer Mk IV, the tank model of fewest numbers. The French were very well equipped with artillery pieces, and their small arms – such as rifles and machine guns – were perfectly good. The Châtellerault light machine gun, to give just one example, was solid and reliable, had a rate of fire of some 500–600 rounds per minute, and its muzzle velocity was more powerful than any other model in the world.
In the air, the French had some 1,735 front-line aircraft and a further 1,600 reserves, and when these were combined with the RAF’s, the Allied total actually exceeded the number of aircraft available to the Luftwaffe. The Farman 222, while not the fastest, could carry more bombs than any aircraft flying at that time – more than four tons. Its fighter aircraft, though not as fast as the Messerschmitt 109, were not far off the pace; the Dewoitine D520, for example, was also well-armed, with machine guns and a 20mm cannon, and had exceptional range for a fighter. And then there was the French Navy, which was the second largest in Europe, behind Britain’s.
There were also signs of a resurgent economy, which helped the huge rearmament drive. France in the 1930s had been riven by political factions, failing governments and even civil unrest. Édouard Daladier had been Prime Minister twice earlier in the decade – and once for only a few days – but, after the failure of Léon Blum’s Popular Front, had taken the premiership again the previous year, in April 1938, and eighteen months on was still there. He had brought a grim authoritarianism, running the country almost entirely without Parliament and hurriedly increasing rearmament. The speed of French mobilization was impressive and backing it up were factories that were outproducing Germany in terms of tanks, guns and aircraft.
After long years of depression and political fractiousness in France, the message now was one of unity – of the nation pulling together in this hour of need as, once again, they faced a resurgent enemy. In a speech on national radio on 10 September, the Minister of Finance, Paul Reynaud, had made a rallying call to arms. Housewives, even the elderly, were called upon to do their bit. Anyone capable of helping the production effort but evading this duty deserved, he said, to be called deserters. France was also better off, he told them, than it had been in 1914. ‘We shall prevail,’ he said, as he finished, ‘because we are stronger.’
A former lawyer from Verdun, Reynaud was a month shy of sixty-one, and small and dark, with narrow eyes and a trim moustache. Known as something of a maverick, he had none the less proved a hugely successful Finance Minister, going against the wishes of many of his political colleagues and implementing a tough austerity programme combined with large amounts of deregulation – such as scrapping the forty-hour working week. It was these reforms as much as anything that were responsible for the economic recovery in France, which saw a rise in the nation’s coffers from 37 billion francs at the time of Munich to 48 billion by the outbreak of war. It was this that was funding France’s massive rearmament programme.
Despite all this, there remained, however, a curious degree of both complacency and military insecurity at the heart of France’s military leadership, most of whom had not only served in the last war, but had worn the burden of higher command. Général Gamelin, for example, had been a divisional commander, while Général Georges had served on the General Staff at Army headquarters. And the previous war pervaded the thinking of this crop of senior French commanders, who believed any fighting against Nazi Germany would follow a similar pattern to that of the last war: it would be long-drawn-out, attritional and, above all, largely static. Speed of manoeuvre did not really come into it.
Compounding French thinking was a systematic belief that no matter how many guns or tanks or forts were built, the Germans had more, and German propaganda about their incredible military might was swallowed hook, line and sinker. A classic piece of German cunning had been to invite Général Vuillemin, the head of the Armée de l’Air, to some Luftwaffe manoeuvres. The Germans switched aircraft from one base to another, changing registration numbers as they did so and thus giving the impression they had many more aircraft than was the reality. When Vuillemin returned to France, he told Daladier that when it came to war, the French Air Force would be annihilated in a matter of days.
And yet when, in October, Edward Spears as the new Chairman of the Anglo-French Committee brought a delegation of British politicians over to France, he was once again reassured by the good spirits of those he saw. At a meeting with Daladier, Spears was told about a visit to the front. After talking to some troops, a soldier had said to the Prime Minister, ‘We are glad to observe that the morale of Monsieur le Président du Conseil is good.’ Daladier had laughed as he recounted this to Spears. ‘There was I investigating the morale of the troops and it was they who were looking into mine!’
En route to the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean was the British destroyer HMS Delight, making its long way back from the China Station. For the ship’s First Lieutenant, Vere Wight-Boycott, it was all rather frustrating as they were not sure whether they were to be joining the Mediterranean Fleet or heading on back to Britain. The news had been patchy to say the least, and what they heard had been learned via the captain’s private wireless set, and that had been decidedly intermittent. ‘We have heard of the sinking of the Donaldson ship with Americans,’ he wrote to his mother on 19 September, ‘the Kiel air raid, the dropping of leaflets, and the fact that British troops are in France, but that is as far as we have got.’
Wight-Boycott was more up to date than he had imagined, not least in that more and more troops of the British Expeditionary Force were being shipped to France. One of those escorting the soldiers was Lieutenant-Commander Donald Macintyre, skipper of the ageing destroyer HMS Venomous. Now thirty-five and a career officer in the Royal Navy, Macintyre was a ruddy, round-faced man with a twinkle in his eye and a phlegmatic determination that had served him well. Having joined as a midshipman back in 1922, he had been commissioned three years later and served in the Mediterranean before transferring to the Fleet Air Arm and learning to fly. He served on the aircraft carriers Hermes on the China Station and Courageous with the Home Fleet and loved every minute, although frustrated by the Navy’s perceived reluctance to see the real potential of air power. As Macintyre saw it, the time and money spent on improving and building further battleships would have been better spent on larger aircraft carriers. He may well have had a point . . .
His flying came to an end when he became seriously ill in 1935 and, although he recovered, was declared unfit for further flying. He was not unfit, however, for service back on sea, and his disappointment at ending his flying career was largely made up for by his delight at being promoted and given command of his first ship. This was a new kind of anti-submarine vessel, the Kingfisher, and it was during this time that he began to take an overriding interest in submarine hunting, not least because his ship became the experimental vessel at the Anti-Submarine School in Portland and so was trialling every new gadget and piece of equipment that was devised.
After a further stint commanding a destroyer back out in the Far East, he returned home in the spring of 1939 and, when the Reserve Fleet began to be mobilized in the summer, was given command of Venomous. Laid down back in May 1918, it was one of a number of old vessels that had been given a quick once-over and brought back into service. His new crew was largely drawn from the various reserves now hastily being called up. First among them were the Royal Fleet Reserves – men who had served their time but were being brought out of retirement. Then there were the Royal Naval Reserves – officers and seamen drawn from the merchant navy and fishing fleet and with a fair amount of seafaring behind them. Finally, there were the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves – or RNVR – who were mostly weekend amateurs: keen sailors but with little military training or experience. They were eager, but still had a lot to learn.
Macintyre had been disappointed to have been given Venomous, and regarded her as something of a dubious proposition. Her 4-inch guns were obsolete and she had none of the latest anti-shipping equipment he had so enjoyed testing down at Portland; he had imagined that no sooner had war been declared than he would have been off on the hunt for U-boats, but for the time being at any rate it was not to be. There were other forces to deal with the paltry U-boat presence; Macintyre’s job was to escort the ships carrying the renamed British Expeditionary Force across the Channel to France.
Almost nightly, at around midnight, and along with two or three other escorts, Venomous would rendezvous at the mouth of Portsmouth Harbour and then lead the cross-Channel packets requisitioned for the task across to Cherbourg or Le Havre. They would have an hour or two in the French port while the packets unloaded, and then would steam back again. Sometimes they could get ashore and buy French scent for their wives and girlfriends and also wine. ‘The former,’ noted Macintyre, ‘made us very popular ashore on our return and the latter soon gave Venomous a remarkably fine cellar for a modest price.’
Among those British troops being ferried over to France was Lieutenant Norman Field of the Royal Fusiliers, aged twenty-two and hastily married on the outbreak of war. It was quite irregular for anyone in the regiment to be wed so young; the rules were that officers had to be at least twenty-six before taking the plunge, but he and another friend in the battalion, Harley Archer, had both married on the same day. If he was honest, it hadn’t really occurred to Field to get married quite so swiftly, but, as he was discovering, unexpected things happen in a time of war.
It had come about because the battalion had been posted to Grand Shaft Barracks in Dover. His then girlfriend was great friends with Harley Archer’s girlfriend, but they now lived a long way away in Gloucestershire, so together he and Archer had arranged for the two girls to move down to Kent to be near them. Just after the news that Germany had invaded Poland, their company had been on a route march when the girls had pulled up in a car and told them they had been to the Archbishop’s office in Canterbury and got special marriage licences; soon their boyfriends would be off to war and the girls wanted to be married right away. That meant that very afternoon.
But how to get permission from the new commanding officer? It was noon by the time they were back at the barracks and, knowing the colonel was partial to some port, Field and Archer stayed behind after lunch, pushed a bottle in his direction and then asked him whether he might possibly agree to them getting married later that day.
Much to their surprise, the CO said, ‘Of course. What can I do about it?’
And so they were married at five o’clock that same afternoon, Friday, 1 September. ‘Someone found a crate of champagne,’ says Field, ‘and we were allowed out of barracks that night, but we were back on duty the following morning.’
A week later they left, their new brides waving them off. Field couldn’t tell his wife where they were headed – he had no idea in any case – but the train took them to Southampton, where they boarded a boat to Cherbourg and from there went on to a village just outside Le Mans. Field was sorry to say goodbye to his new wife, but, at the same time, heading overseas to France seemed like something of an adventure.
Norman Field was a Regular soldier, having joined after leaving school four years earlier. Sent straight to the Royal Military College Sandhurst for officer training, he only joined the 2nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, after he was commissioned. The Regular British Army had been small then, at just 192,325 in 1936, a figure that actually fell slightly the following year. In addition, there were 141,000 members of the Territorial Army, for whom there was occasional weekend training and an annual two-week camp, and a further 57,500 British troops in the Indian Army. All of these men were, like Norman Field, volunteers.
By 1936, when Field joined the Army, there had been much discussion in Britain about rearmament and strategic military policy, but this did not mean there was not already a considerable armaments industry in Britain – because there most certainly was. It was true that the Army had been much reduced since the end of the First World War, but in terms of building warships, aeroplanes, guns and even tanks, Britain was leading the way. Firms like Vickers Armstrong and its subsidiary, Vickers Aviation, Hawker Siddeley, Rolls-Royce and de Havilland employed thousands and invested huge sums in research and development.
Neville Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1935, had been a leading advocate of rearmament and particularly of further development of the Air Force. It was in no small part thanks to him that the RAF now had two modern fighter planes in the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire. As Prime Minister, he had continued to oversee Britain’s further investment in the arms industry; just because he had favoured appeasement at Munich the previous year, it should not be assumed he was in any way slow to build up Britain’s military strength. The scale of aircraft construction, of the Royal Navy’s latest warship-building programme, and of the construction of new ordnance factories was immense, and most areas of military production were, by the outbreak of war, greater than those of Germany.
History, however, has all too often suggested otherwise, not least because of the size of the Army. It has to be remembered, though, that Britain was in a very different position to either France or Germany or even Italy. Britain was an island at the heart of a huge global trading empire. Its military strategy was not an aggressive land-grabbing one – it was, in the first instance, to defend the nation’s sovereignty, regardless of its commitment to Poland. To do this, a powerful navy and a strong Air Force were more important than troops on the ground, something that Chamberlain never failed to argue throughout the rearmament discussions right up to the outbreak of war.
Moreover, there were important logistical considerations militating against a large army. If Germany or France needed to move their armies, they simply walked or put them on to trains or into vehicles. If Britain wanted to do the same, the Army had to get into a vast armada of ships. Gradually transporting the ten divisions of the BEF to France was one thing; moving a force of millions in quick order was quite another. What’s more, once overseas, a large army needed ever-larger amounts of material support. Maintaining such a force in peacetime was clearly nonsensical, and should it come to war and a larger army be required, then it could be built up rather as it had been in the last war. The hope, however, was that such a force would not be necessary – not with France as an ally and with greater emphasis on sea and air power.
Furthermore, history had repeatedly shown that nations with strong navies tended to come out on top, and this was a theory that had certainly worked for Britain. A series of successful wars and the world’s largest empire, with an invincible navy at its core, were testimony to that. While books such as the American Captain Alfred Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History had become standard reading across the board, air power was a less well-known quantity. An Italian general, Giulio Douhet, had written about it and been widely read, but in truth no one was quite sure how air power would manifest itself in the next war, despite its use in recent conflicts such as the civil war in Spain; air power and aeroplane technology were changing fast, and twenty years on from the last great war machines were very different. However, it was a safe bet that air power would prove very important; clearly, whoever controlled air space would have a crucial advantage.
With this in mind, no matter how hard the Army chiefs argued the point, the Prime Minister was determined that Britain should forget about a million-man army and stick with just five Regular home divisions, while focusing on air power and naval dominance instead.
There was, however, another reason for this stance. Britain may have been a warfare state in the late 1930s, but it was not a militaristic state like Germany. It was also a democracy, and it was inconceivable that British society would have accepted conscription – and that would have been the only way to raise an army of the size that could compete with the likes of France, Germany and Italy. In any case, the kind of colonial police work that dominated much of Britain’s military operations on the ground – such as in Palestine and along the Northwest Frontier – was far better suited to Regular troops than conscripts. Should war become increasingly likely, then Britain could think again, but, until that point, it made more sense to Chamberlain and others to build up Britain’s strength through mechanization and technology rather than manpower. And there was unquestionably a sound logic to this, because in these areas Britain was second only to the USA. This is not to say that Britain and France had been necessarily right to adopt a policy of appeasement the previous autumn, no matter how compelling the reasons seemed at the time; but appeasement did not mean in any way that Britain was delaying rearming. It was not.
Chamberlain’s stance on the size of the Army changed following the German march into Czechoslovakia that March, although the Chiefs of Staff, Britain’s senior service chiefs, had received intelligence of a supposed German invasion of Holland in January, which had focused their minds on possible war. There had been no joint staff talks with the French since 1936 and none at all during the Munich Crisis the previous autumn, so finally an approach for such discussions had been made, to which the French agreed. These took place at the end of March. First, though, the Chiefs of Staff drew up their own ‘European Appreciation, 1939–40’, which, although in some ways it became outdated almost immediately, set Britain on the strategic course that it would take in the forthcoming war with Germany.
Among the assumptions were that Britain would have the support of its Dominions – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa – but also the Republic of Ireland. The USA would be friendly, but unlikely to intervene. Portugal would remain neutral, and Egypt would fulfil its treaty obligations of allowing British troops to maintain a sizeable presence.
A lack of resources was considered the major Achilles heel of both Germany and Italy. For Germany, most of its industrial capacity was concentrated in the Ruhr, while for Italy – as far as it went – it was in the north, around Turin, Milan and Genoa. The other threat was from Imperial Japan, but Britain and France together had greater economic resources than their three potential enemies combined.
While Britain and France’s naval forces were greatly superior, it was recognized that these would be considerably stretched should it come to war. Initially, the combined armies of both countries would be smaller than Germany’s, but not for long. The Luftwaffe was known to be superior, and while British aircraft production was increasing greatly, France’s was not doing so at the same pace.
With these factors in mind, the policy was to play for time as long as possible and then initially to go on to the defensive. The Axis economic limitations suggested they would opt for a rapid and decisive victory within a matter of months. British staff conclusions were that Britain and France must withstand this initial Axis strike, then continue the build-up of military strength and then, when this had been achieved, strike back. No timescale was put on this, but it was considered that when Britain had achieved the full fighting strength of the Empire it could confront the war from a position of some strength and, thanks to its naval power, strike at a place of its choosing.
In the subsequent talks, France had broadly agreed with this appreciation, although if Italy entered the war, there was agreement that it was both militarily and economically weak and should be dealt with decisively. Should it come to war with Germany, the RAF would be expected to make a major commitment, as would the Royal Navy, but the French also demanded more effort from Britain in terms of men on the ground; even Chamberlain was finally having to give way on this. In January, he had already called for more volunteers to join the armed services and finally, in April, with the Cabinet confident public opinion had sufficiently shifted, limited conscription was announced. And, as the government had hoped, the announcement had been accepted by the British public.
The result of British conscription, French mobilization and continued and increased rearmament in all areas was that by the autumn of 1939 Britain and France together had more men in uniform than Germany, considerably greater naval power, and air forces that were only fractionally weaker in numbers.
Man-for-man, Britain and France looked stronger, not weaker, than Germany. Furthermore, they would be initially on the defensive, and, as the Germans were well aware, accepted military thinking was that any attacker needed at least a 3:1 advantage in manpower to achieve a decisive breakthrough. On paper, at least, the Allies could face the German threat with confidence.