I doubt they even have tryed to do something that looks like an “attempt”.
I heard and read from many English and French sources that both sides did nothing. But what would have happened if the Allies had attacked? The trenches again, but this time inside Germany?
I think the French attack not later 15 september could finally break out the German offensive in the Poland.
And saved Poland from total defeat.
The war could be more bloody in september but… if Nazis have been stoped by the British-French troops in the 1939- it should prevent a Germans Crusade to the East , millions of lives and … soviet liberation of Europe.
But this is still a good question… did the Brits and Frenchs really wish to prevent the Eastern expantion of Nazy?
Or may be they wished of it?In aime to turn the Nazy to the East?
I remember hearing, from some source or another, that “Hitler was better than Stalin any day”, or something to that extent.
This is not surprise fro me that there a lot of people in the West looked at Hitler as for “ideal defender of Europe from Bolshevism”. Besides Nazy leaders actively PRed themself in this role.
If you look at Furthers “Main Kampf” , the main idea of it was "GErmans Living Space in the East " ( well except the anti-semitism 
of course)So from the Western prospect - there is nothing illegal:)
He did not write about “victorious war against Britain or France”, he just ideologically prepeared the GErmans people for the future war in the East.
The Chemberlian “policy of pacification of Germany” ( Munich 1938) was a great evidence that in the West was not against the Idea of GErman expantion to the East.The later attack of Poland and “Phony war” also proves it a much.
The allied inaction does seem very odd given how Britain and France behaved in 1914-1918. Millions of veterans of the Great War would still have been around in 1939/1940 and it seems odd that they would be so passive.
The allied collapse in 1940 also seems bizarre given how fiercely they resisted in 1914.
The Chemberlian “policy of pacification of Germany” ( Munich 1938) was a great evidence that in the West was not against the Idea of GErman expantion to the East.The later attack of Poland and “Phony war” also proves it a much.
Not right. Look down through European history, and the nations will always be very much against power growing strong enough to dominate the continent.
This is why the UK and France became allies, this is why they gave a guarantee to Poland, this is why they went to war against Germany.
German domination of all Eastern Europe would be intolerable to France and very scary for the British. They would NOT have it. This is how WWII came about.
The French did march a few miles into German soil, only to withdraw again soon after.
The British and French were very surprised with how quickly the Germans defeated Poland, didn´t know what to make of the new German-Soviet agreement and didn´t really seem to know how to handle it all.
This was not the kind of war the French had expected, they did not feel ready for a major offensive. They had their massive fortifications that made them feel ready for a defensive stance and the rearmament programme which might ready the armed forces for offensive operations some time in the future.
What did Britain and France plan for 1940??
I do not know, but I´ve been thinking about launching a thread about it for some time.
Perhaps they just felt that time was working for them and the longer it all dragged out the better (remember that the F/UK armaments industry was slowly cacthing up on the German lead, and the two countries had outstanding orders for combat aircraft with US companies for more than a year´s worth of German construction by May 1940).
F/UK thought they knew how the Germans would be coming at them, if the Germans chose to and planned for that.
It´s getting quite off topic, so to return to the “mistake” related:
It was a mistake not to keep an eye on the Ardennes. It was of course a neutral country, but it was a country they thought the Germans would be coming through anyway, just not a that location. (nowadays you´d have special forces camping in the woods…)
As it was, they took the German bait (thinking the Germans attacked in the fashion expected and acting against it as planned, it all fitted so well) and lost.
I think the idea of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement as a policy that was usurped by Churchill is largely mythical at this point. Churchill himself limited the scope of the War hoping to delay a full-blown conflict until the Allies were ready to deliver a killing blow to Germany. One which would take years to prepare for…
The truth is that the Allies were woefully unprepared to meet Germany in battle during 1939-1940. They did however have many strategic advantages and after isolating Germany, they were planning a grand offensive for sometime in late 1941. But for a variety of reasons, the French Army would be unable to defeat the Germans in a bloody war of attrition since they had exactly half of the German male birthrate (which was their main expectation as their methodical battle doctrine did not account for the potentialities of armored formations by-passing enemy strong points in the doctrines that the German’s would later call “schwerpunkt” [or Blitzkrieg] and the Soviets “deep battle.”). But the idea the somehow Chamberlain is merely an icon of the weak-minded, spineless giving into aggression is a bit callous and disingenuous methinks. In many ways it was a ruthless (to the Czechoslovakians) but cunning policy that delayed war and allowed the British to prepare. If they had not, then the Battle of Britain may have been fought without enough Hurricanes and NO Spitfires!
The overall Allied strategy in many ways did make sense. France was unable to conduct a major offensive for many reasons and their air forces would be outnumbered in the face of a modern Luftwaffe. And their Army was largely a paper one as they French politicians favored a ‘peoples army’ approach heavily dependent on reserves and a small professional cadre. French defense spending had only recently begun to accelerate incorporating newer equipment that the French had yet to decide on doctrinally --this coupled with the French experience of WWI in which they suffered heavy casualties and defeats after attempting a direct attack over the Franco-German border and the knowledge that they, along with Britain, had the strategic advantage over Germany and were already attempting to isolate the Fatherland and strange her with blockade while simultaneously building her Army and Armée de l’Air to overwhelming advantage-- was what gave the appearance of inaction.
While appeasement was extremely distasteful, it is often mischaracterized and decontextualized --thwarting any real fair treatment of the subject.
Here are some related comments I made in another thread regarding the Saar Offensive and the disposition of the French Army:
http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3795&page=9
http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showpost.php?p=120776&postcount=136
The two are very closely related actually. Both developed new methods of warfare which the French called ‘methodical battle.’ But the conceptualization of command and control of battle was much, much slower than that of the Germans --who developed much of their “Blitzkrieg” tactics from their infiltration methods used in 1918. They, like the French and British had also adopted new methods for breaking the deadlock of trench warfare. But the Germans adapted it to the new technologies of the tank and air power…
The allied collapse in 1940 also seems bizarre given how fiercely they resisted in 1914.
The Poles fought fiercely, and so did much of the Red Army being swarmed in May of 1941. It was futile as they were cut off and by passed…
In May 1941:)
Nick do you again aduse of beer?
Agree
Especially if look through the history we should see that the behaviour of F/UK in that period was to direct the GErmany to the East…where they should face the USSR.
So in the best their interest was to push them both of their enemies ( Germany and USSR) off and benefited of it.
This was a best decision for them.
Even the Poland would not be a problem.They did nothing, nd hardly even plan to do sometnig.
Do you know for instance that the in august the 1939 during the F/UK military staff conference about possible war against Germany they have decided NOT to invite the “allies” Poles:)
Further dreamed about Easten Living space - let him to do it, and than break the Germany in the West.
But nobody did not even expect that Stalin was such dastard:)
But the idea the somehow Chamberlain is merely an icon of the weak-minded, spineless giving into aggression is a bit callous and disingenuous methinks.
Agree.
Taking the hard line against Germany and have nothing to back it would also have made Britain look like a loud-mouthed weakling as the Germans would have done as they pleased anyway. That would not have inspired an anti-German policy in eastern Europe.
In many ways it was a ruthless (to the Czechoslovakians) but cunning policy that delayed war and allowed the British to prepare.
One of the interesting if´s:
The German army leadership was quite ready to coup the Nazis if war broke out over Czechoslovakkia. They thought Hitler´s policies at this point foolhardy and way too dangerous.
The Munich agreement defused that danger to the regime completely; Hitler had pulled off one of his greatest tricks and the “unity” of army leadership dissent was no more.
Nick: I guess any plan for that allied 1941 offensive must have been pretty vague, but do you have any idea what they had in mind?
Chevan: Even the Poland would not be a problem.They did nothing, nd hardly even plan to do sometnig
The loss of a free Poland WAS A BIG PROBLEM to them: they started WWII because of it. Not having any plans was bad planning, not lack of interest!
Well, after pointing out years worth of your factual errors, you’ve finally got me on one.
May is when the Germans should have attacked, but of course they were not ready…
And I never abuse beer. I treat it gently and lovingly! :mad:
Perhaps you can comment on why Stalin ordered his Red Army commanders (via Zhukov) to stand down when it was painfully obvious the Wehrmacht was ready to launch a full attack…
It is impossible to abuse beer.
More is always better.
Well, I’ve started running again, so I have to be very careful not to spill any. 
JK - actually, I’ve quit for a couple weeks to get my road legs back…
Some of them resisted but I don’t see why the French and British would stand idle rather than attack. With regards to being bypassed why wouldent they simply chase the Germans that tried to bypass them down and kill them?
Found this on another site, but no collaborating evidence, so make of it what you will.
''Phase I. Clear the German border and secure the Saarland for a assembly area for the next phase. This is supposedly what the Sarr Offensive was all about.
Phase II. Late September - Oct. Close up to the main zone of the Siegfried line. Clear the German outer defenses, secure the Rhine river flank, reconnoiter & probe the main defense zone.
Phase III. Late October - November. Make deliberate assaults on the main defense zone using overwhelming artillery firepower to annihilate defending units. The infantry would be heavily reinforced with engineer and assault tank groups formed around the colossal B1 tanks. Airforce fighters would be concentrated over the battlefield.
The object would be to threaten the Ruhr, particularly the industry on the west bank of the Rhine, and close more of the Rhine river & its valley to industrial traffic. The river is critical to German industry for barge transportation and the parallel railroads were important as well.’’
Even though they weren’t ready for war at the time, and does away with the crazy ‘‘conspiracy’’ theories saying that Britain wanted Hitler to attack East. The Guarantee to Poland was probably more of a hopeful bluff, hoping that by drawing a line in the sand, along with France, would make Hitler pause, it was a reasonable assumption if you were dealing with a reasonable leader, but Hitler called their bluff and it hit the fan.
This is a little off topic, but does anyone have good figures on the French army pre war and during mobilization, especially leading up to the invasion of Poland?
What ive been able to gather is that the degree of mobilization would give Gamelin over 90 divs. but at the time of the French declaration of war the French army in the field was well short of this and French mobilization was slow.
There was about 10 French divs deployed against the Italians on the Alpine front and others in Africa, and there were just two Brit. Divs in the line by Oct 3rd, on 7 September Gamelin advanced about 9 Divs into the Saar.
And what was the German strength facing the French?
Were there originally 35 divs. reinforced with 9 divs. on 10th Sept?
Did the French inform the Poles on about the 12th Sep. that the main offensive would be changed from 17th to 20th Sep?
By then the Soviets had invaded Poland.
Think most expected the fighting to drag on longer then it did and were surprised at the rapid conclusion.
When Kietal and Jodl said when they were interrogated after the war that they were surprised that the French and British with over 100 divisions didn’t make an all out attack on German’s 25 divisions facing them, those figures may have been a quite a bit off.
Some more from Wiki, which actually has a pretty good article on the Battle of France:
[i]Allied strategy
In September 1939, Belgium and the Netherlands were still neutral. They tried to stay out of the war for as long as possible by adhering to a policy of strict neutrality. Though they made arrangements in secret with the Entente for future cooperation should the Germans invade their territory, they did not openly prepare for this. The Supreme Commander of the French Army, Maurice Gamelin, suggested during that month, that the Allies should take advantage of the fact that Germany was tied up in Poland by occupying the Low Countries before Germany could. This suggestion was not taken up by the French government however.
In September 1939, in the token Saar Offensive—only made to nominally fulfill the prewar guarantee to Poland to execute a relief attack from the West—French soldiers advanced 5 kilometres into the Saar before withdrawing in October. At this time, France had deployed 98 divisions (all but 28 reserve or fortress divisions) and 2,500 tanks against German forces consisting of 43 divisions (32 of them reserve divisions) and no tanks. According to the judgment of Wilhelm Keitel, then Chief OKW, the French army would easily have been able to penetrate the mere screen of German forces present.[15]
After October, it was decided not to take the initiative in 1940, though important parts of the French army in the 1930s had been designed to wage offensive warfare. The Allies believed that even without an Eastern Front the German government might be destabilised by a blockade, as it had been in the First World War. In the event the Nazi regime would not collapse, a possibility that seemed to grow ever more likely,[16] during 1940 a vast modernisation and enlargement programme for the Allied forces would be implemented, exploiting the existing advantages over Germany in war production to build up an overwhelming mechanised force, including about two dozen armoured divisions, to execute a decisive offensive in the summer of 1941. Should the Low Countries by that date still not have committed themselves to the Allied cause, the Entente firmly intended to violate their neutrality if necessary.[17]
Obviously the Germans might strike first, and a strategy would have to be prepared for this eventuality. Neither the French nor the British had anticipated such a rapid defeat in Poland, and the quick German victory was disturbing. Most French generals favoured a very cautious approach. They thought it wise not to presume that the German intentions could be correctly predicted. A large force should be held in reserve in a central position, north of Paris, to be prepared for any contingency. Should the Germans indeed take the obvious route of advance through Flanders, they should only be engaged in northern France, when their infantry would be exhausted and they had run out of supplies. If however they would try an attack on the centre of the Allied front, this Allied reserve would be ideally positioned to block it. If the Germans advanced through Switzerland, a large reserve would be the only means to deal with such a surprise.
Dyle Plan
Gamelin rejected this line of thought, for several reasons. The first was that it was politically unthinkable to abandon the Low Countries to their fate, however prudent it might be from an operational point of view. Certainly the British government insisted that the Flemish coast remain under Allied control. The second reason was that the 1941 offensive had no chance of being decisive if it had to be launched from the north of France against German forces entrenched in central Belgium. The German offensive had to be contained as far east as possible. The last and for him personally most cogent argument was that Gamelin did not consider the French army capable of winning a mobile battle with the German army. The French infantry divisions as yet were insufficiently motorised. The events in Poland helped confirm his opinion. Such a confrontation had to be avoided at all cost, and Gamelin intended to send the best units of the French army along with the British Expeditionary Force north to halt the Germans at the KW-line, a defensive line that followed the river Dyle, east of Brussels, in a coherent tightly packed continuous front uniting the British, Belgian, and French armies. This plan thus presumed that the Germans planned to concentrate their forces where they could be well supplied by the better road network of northern Belgium.
Gamelin however did not have the personal influence to simply impose his will. The first step he took was to propose the “Escaut” variant as an option for Plan D — the codename for an advance into the Low Countries. It was named after the river in Flanders. This was a shrewd move: protecting the Flemish coast seemed the least one could do; on the other hand it created an enormous salient, showing that it made more sense to defend along the shorter Dyle line, which was precisely the content of Gamelin’s next proposal. This however was too transparent. His second “Dyle Plan” met with strong opposition, not growing any less when the 10 January crash confirmed that the German plans conformed to Gamelin’s expectations. Also Lord Gort, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, was beginning to expect that whatever the Germans came up with instead would not be what he had initially predicted. The main objection was that the manoeuvre was very risky. The Allied forces had to complete their advance and entrenchment before the Germans reached the line, for which there seemed to be too little time. When entrenched they would have trouble reacting to German strategic surprises, also because their fuel supplies would have to be replenished. The next problem was that this line was very vulnerable to the German main strength, their large tactical bomber force. Nothing seemed to prevent them from breaking the line by a massive bombardment, forcing the French Army to an encounter battle after all.
…
During the first months of 1940 the size and readiness of the French army steadily grew, and Gamelin began to feel confident enough to propose a somewhat more ambitious strategy. He had no intention of frontally attacking the German fortification zone, the Westwall, in 1941, planning instead to outflank it from the north, just as four years later Bernard Montgomery intended in Operation Market Garden. To achieve this, it would be most convenient if he already had a foothold on the north bank of the Rhine, so he changed his plans to the effect that a French army should maintain a connection north of Antwerp with the Dutch National Redoubt, “Fortress Holland”. He assigned his sole strategic reserve, the elite 7th Army, to this task. His only reserves now consisted of individual divisions. Again there was much opposition to this “Dyle-Breda-Plan” within the French army, but Gamelin was strongly supported by the British government, because Holland proper was an ideal base for a German air campaign against England.[/i]
What should also be noted before punishing the French for not conducting the Saar Offensive more forcefully was that general mobilization of the French Army had yet to be completed. The French, who had a reserve dependent “peoples’” Army, had only started calling up reserves right before the start of the German aggression in Poland and were not due full mobilization until the end of October or November at the earliest…
French intelligence was poor, and had little idea of the lack of German armor in part because of a pretty good deception program on the part of Abwehr and because of their own timidity. Also, basic French strategy called for the Germans to attack and to suffer high casualties before the French would prosecute a counterattack into the Ruhr. The French Army was also apparently unaware that landmines could now be made to kill people and not just vehicles…
Thirdly, by the time the Saar Offensive (actually it was little more than a probe), Poland had already lost the ability to defend itself as its main line of resistance had fallen and they were in a state of collapse. And oh yes, the Soviets had invaded from the east…
Incidentally, the Saar region was a bad place to launch an offensive. It’s a large bowl, geographically speaking, that only serves to bog down fast moving mechanized forces…
Could the failure to come to grips with modern tank warfare be classified as a major blunder?
The Brits invented the tank, and forward thinking visionaries like Liddel Hart, Fuller and Hobart wrote the manuals on combined arms tank tactics, which were put into field practise in the late 20’s at Salisbury Plain.
But by 1935, the proponents of using the tank purely as infantry support won the day and it was left to the German commanders like Guderian that put into practice the tank tactics and theories that the British were experimenting with.
Other countries were in the same boat as Britain, in France, General Paul Andre Mais, and Colonel Doumemc and De Gaulle, were advocating combined tank operations, but like the Brits they were butting their heads against the brick walls of conservative army high commands. In Russia, Tukhachevsky held very advanced ideas on military strategy, particularly on the use of tanks and aircraft. But he and his concepts came to an abrupt end when he was shot during the purges of '37/'38 to the great detriment of the Red Army and as Erickson said, the men that followed Tukashevski lacked that insight into the probable forms of modern mobile warfare.
[ Among Liddel Harts mementos is a tribute to him before the war, Guderian sent an inscribed photo of himself with the words … ‘‘To captain Liddel Hart, from one of his disciples in tank warfare and the creator of modern tank strategy.’’]