Assuming Germany is not threatened on its eastern border, how would a German attack westwards go if it were launched in 1939 instead of 1940? Would it have been defeated on the border? Could the offensive have pushed deep into France, leading to a WWI-like stalemate for a time? Could France have actually been defeated? And how would the war in the air (including the hypothetical battle of Britain, if it had any chance of taking place) have proceeded?
German attack on France in 1939
- Thread starter Snaut
- Start date
There is a lot of reasons why the Germans don't attack in autumn 1939, lack of amunitions after the Poland campaign, reorganization of the Panzer divisions, mobilisation that continued, bad weather ? And the plan of the offensive didn't include the Ardennes / Sedan "sickle cut".
So yes, the offensive will be a repeat of the 1914 offensive and it was exactly what the Allies waited for.
I assume he means if Poland wasn't the first target. Of course a scenarion like that means a lot of change.
Like for example Germany won't be at war with France or UK when they would attack France in 1939.
Also the army they would have used against Poland is no available for France too. Assuming they have mobilized that to the Western front it would have been noticed by France, but not a lot of changes i think.
Then again, if they don't attack the Benelux as well like they did OTL and used Franz Halder's plan they would have to go through the maginot line and even though France it totally and utterly unprepared to fight a war, defense comes almost naturally for those forts.
If they take Benelux and do it Manstein's way its easier then OTL i think. If they do Halder's plan it would be a failure.
Like for example Germany won't be at war with France or UK when they would attack France in 1939.
Also the army they would have used against Poland is no available for France too. Assuming they have mobilized that to the Western front it would have been noticed by France, but not a lot of changes i think.
Then again, if they don't attack the Benelux as well like they did OTL and used Franz Halder's plan they would have to go through the maginot line and even though France it totally and utterly unprepared to fight a war, defense comes almost naturally for those forts.
If they take Benelux and do it Manstein's way its easier then OTL i think. If they do Halder's plan it would be a failure.
That's what I had in mind.
The simplest way would be for the USSR to distract Poland, making it unwilling to defy Germany as in OTL. Wether it becomes more worried by the USSR or the USSR is somewhat more threatening doesn't matter to me for the purpose of this particular discussion, as long as Germany is alone with Britain and France (and whichever additional countries, if any, in the region) for as long as possible.
Cook
Banned
Germany was not prepared for war with Britain and France in 1939. The time frame that Hitler had in mind for a major war against the French and the 'English' was 1943-45. The whole purpose of his treaty with Stalin was to deter the democracies from going to war in support of Poland. Had he intended to go into a major war he would have waited until he was stronger and could be confident of success. For one thing, he had intended to have a Luftwaffe that was five times larger.
Well actually the reason for Poland is very important. Has to be a pretty damn good reason for Germany to take away its armies from Poland's borders if it decides to attack France. Poland is after all an ally of France and will join the war against Germany if France is attacked, especially if the German army is nowhere to be found near their borders.
Their deal with the USSR to partition Poland between the 2 as part of he Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was also very important to take away the threat of the USSR from Germany for a while. Without that part of the pact Germany is threathened by USSR if they decide to move against Poland first.
If I understand well :
If Germany is not threatened on its eastern boder because Germany and the Soviet Union had sign a Molotov-Ribbentrop pact saying that in case of war against the Western Allies and Poland, the SU must attacked Poland, then it isn't a Non Aggression Pact but a Military Alliance and it is really ASB for the two countries in the internal and foreign policy.
For example, when signing the OTL MR pact, the SU was able to say, we are a country following a peace path, and the pact is an non agression pact. When invading Poland the 17th September 1939, the Red Army was able to say "we enter in Polish territories to protect eastern Poland population (bielorussians and ukrainians) from the germans troops" and they faced really very little opposition from Polish troops...
In the case of a military alliance, the SU is de facto in war with Germany against the Western Allies so, de facto subtmit to the same blocus as Germany...
And if Poland is attacked by the SU, per alliance, it is also in conflict with Rumania... And it will be fun to see the reactions of Hungary or Italy or even Spain... Hungary for example provided a military help for Poland during the Polish-Soviet War in 1919-1921...
Poland's foreign minister did not expect Soviet aggression in OTL, for example, which definitely influenced his judgement. Better intelligence, leading to more awareness of the danger, could in itself have been enough. Perhaps even something as minor as the discovery of a Soviet mole leaking false information concerning Soviet intentions could lead to such a reasessment. This could lead to the logical conclusion that any conflict with Germany would likely cause a Soviet stab in the back, so it would be better to accept Hitler's original terms (Danzig, the construction of an exterritorial route across the corridor and closer association with Germany) which would be preferable to risking disaster.
Theoretically yes, but the alliance was considered pretty much dead before a revival of sorts in 1939. Otherwise Hitler wouldn't have tried drawing Poland into the Axis, would he?
Unless Hitler believes that a neutral Poland and Romania are strong enough to hold the USSR back for the time needed to defeat France.
While breaking another nonaggression pact.
Of course there was little resistance, because 90% of Poland's army was in the process of being mauled by Germany and the Soviet invasion automatically made all farther resistance futile.
Officially, the Soviet invasion of Poland was for "humanitarian" reasons, and probably some of the Poles thought that the Germans and the Soviets will fight...
The 17th September, the Polish Army was still fighting and Poles still have plans to retreat to the South-East near the Rumanian border... The battle of Bzura was still going and without the news of the invasion of the Red Army, some polish units will continued to fight and not surrender and try to break out of the encirclement.
Your idea is very interressing but the political POD is the main problem.
If Staline was really a master of intrigue, the MR pact could be a military alliance in secret and officialy a simple non-aggression pact.
And if Hitler (very stupid in this situation) really believe in the soviet alliance, he could make the fatal error to organize an offensive in the west believing Poles fighting the Soviets.
The Germans will be unable reorganize their armies in the west without being noticed by the Western Allies, so France had the time to man the Maginot Line and the line cannot be crossed without many casualties, so the Germans are condemned to attack at least Belgium and Luxemburg and repeat the 1914 situation.
So in the west, they faced the French not surprised, the Belgians (surprised as in OTL) and the British still in Great Britain... The Mainstein Plan is still not invented...
Even if the Germans had the Sickle plan, the French, without the BEF, will not be confident to send their best troops in Belgium and even to the Netherlands, so the French adopted a more defensive organisation and the Sickle Plan don't work as in OTL...
In the east, the Soviet Union massed some troops on its western border but the Poles had still the alliance with Roumania and can still engaged Germany in limited offensives in Silesia (economic value) and Eastern Prussia (symbolic value), so the Germans must at least keep between 20 to 30 divisions on the polish front... The Poles had 30-31 first rate troops and around 15 reserves divisions and around 10-12 cavalry brigades...
I remember reading a few years ago a book based on the idea that the Poles were falsely encouraged by the British to stand up against Hitler. The idea was that Britain knew all along that there wasn't much they could do to assist the Poles and that the polish government took a stronger stand than they would have if they knew how little support the British and French could give them in the short term.
Does anyone else remember reading anything along these lines?
Does anyone else remember reading anything along these lines?
The Soviets' official pretext was that the Polish state had disintegrated when the government leadership had fled to Romania, so the territory was up for grabs, and the Soviets had an interest in occupying the territory for humanitarian reasons (restoring order, etc) and to prevent Germany from advancing to the former Polish-Soviet border. It's a pretty flimsy pretext, but allowed France and Britain a face-saving way to overlook their treaty obligations to Poland that would have required them to declare war on the Soviet Union as well as Germany.
IIRC Poland saw the USSR as more of threat to their sovereignity then Germany. With that Germany tried to get Poland to join the axis. But if Germany were to attack France out of nowhere and the UK would declare war, they will be forced to join the allies to prevent the USSR making the best of the opportunity. For if they would not declare war and give in to Germany's demands, it would mean the end of the country and the Sviet Unino will move in. However if they manage to keep their original borders with Germany and ally with the UK, the USSR might back off. At least untill the result of the German conflict was clear. Poland was in no position to be stubborn to all 3 sides, it had to join one of them.
katchen
Banned
Oh Tannenbaum, Oh Tannenbaum...
It's interesting that Hitler was thinking in terms of attacking the Western Allies in 1943. I take it the Germans thought they would be done with Barbarossa by then?
The Germans would not have to go through the Maginot Line if they executed Operation Tannenbaum immediately prior to invading France and gone around the Maginot Line to the south via the Swiss Jura. And the Swiss would at most only delay the Germans by a week or two at the most, according to the accounts of Tannenbaum I've seen on this list. The Germans would then be in a position to encircle French forces on the Maginot and not only proceed on to Paris from the Southeast but south down the Rhone to Marseilles and west and southwest along the Loire and to Gascony via Poitou as well, hitting the French "where they ain't". The French would have no place to move the government from Paris (except perhaps Rennes or Brest) and be facing surrender, probably before the British can land enough forces to do any good. In 1939, that is the winning strategy.
It's interesting that Hitler was thinking in terms of attacking the Western Allies in 1943. I take it the Germans thought they would be done with Barbarossa by then?
Cook
Banned
The Polish stance was taken well before the unilateral guarantee from the British, five months before in fact. The Poles were going to fight even if they were doing so entirely alone; it was this determination, combined with the mistaken belief that the Poles could hold out unaided for at least six months, that inspired the British guarantee and the subsequent alliance.
And right up to the final days of August 1939, the British were urging the Poles to consider some negotiations with the Germans to avoid conflict; it was because of this pressure not to inflame an already tense situation that the Poles had not commence mobilisation earlier and were not fully mobilised when the Germans attacked on the 1st of September.
You can find all the diplomatic correspondence leading up to the war in the British War Bluebook:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/blbkmenu.asp
Operation Tannenbaum hadn't even been thought up before the invasion of France. So how would they incoporate it to the Invasion?
Also, a small portion of the Maginot line ran against Swiss borders. They would have to go around it more then you might think.
Also, Switzerland was in Italy's sphere of influence and no way the Italians would join the war this early. That would have been a loss on its own. The Italian might not join at all this way.
Besides, if they would considder violating a country's neutrality they better do it with the benelux countries then Switzerland. Which they did in OTL of course.
Switzerland would be much harder to control and strategically unimportant besides flanking the maginot line while the benelux was easy to control because of the flat terrain and had plenty of big ports to use and airfields close to England.
Cook
Banned
Barbarossa was a war expedient undertaken because of Hitler's mistaken belief that the only reason the British refused to make peace in July 1940 'despite her hopeless situation' was in the hope that the Russians would betray Germany and enter the war. Prior to War Directive No. 18, issued on 31 July 1940, Hitler did not have any serious discussions about an invasion of the Soviet Union from the time he assumed power in 1933, through until the war commenced. In the Hossbach Memorandum, the record of the 5 November 1937 Fuhrer Conference where Hitler spelled out his plans for the coming years, Russia is mentioned in only a single sentence, and that is only to say that their involvement can be deterred by the swiftness of German actions elsewhere and by the threat from Japan. Hitler was partially correct; the British were fully aware that there was no way militarily that they could defeat Germany on their own, and that even to have a hope of surviving they needed help - but they were hoping for American help, not Russian. (See the War Cabinet report: British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality, 25 May 1940)
In fact, only the month before he issued Directive No. 18, Hitler fully believed that the British would negotiate and that therefore the war was over; consequentially he issued orders for the demobilisation of 30 divisions, the first stage to returning Germany to a peacetime footing. On 24 June 1940, Hitler told his inner circle that:
"The war in the West is over. France has been defeated and with England I shall reach an understanding very shortly. There will remain our settling of our accounts with the East. But that is a task that opens global problems, such as the relationship with Japan and the balance of power in the Pacific, problems that we may not be able to tackle perhaps before ten years; perhaps I shall have to leave that to my successor. Now we'll have our hands full, for years, to digest and consolidate what we have achieved in Europe."
Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union was prompted by the report that Churchill had sent a personally written letter to Stalin hoping to open discussions between the two nations*. Hitler concluded from that letter that Britain was only holding out in the hope that the Russians would come into the war. He told the Wehrmacht commanders that:
"In the event that invasion does not take place, our efforts must be directed to the elimination of all factors that let England hope for a change in the situation. Britain's hopes lie in Russia and the United States. If Russia drops out of the picture, America too is lost for Britain, because the elimination of Russia would greatly increase Japan's power in the Far East... Russia's destruction must therefore be made part of this struggle."
Hitler's earlier order to demobilise 30 divisions as a consequence had to be reversed, but Hitler was not yet fully settled on the idea of invading Russia; although he never had high hopes of success with the direct attack on Britain, he allowed preparations for Sea Lion to continue just in case it yielded results and the British broke, or failing that, at least asked to negotiate. He also allowed Ribbentrop to continue negotiations with the Soviets to bring them into a direct anti-British alliance (which would have eliminated British hopes in Russia completely), these continued through until November 1940.
*Ironically enough, the report had come from Stalin himself. He'd had no interest in betraying the Germans and ignored Churchill's letter, but he thought that if Hitler somehow got word that Churchill had written a letter without Stalin informing him of it, that would have raised the Fuhrer's suspicions. So Stalin told the Germans about the contents of Churchill's letter, thus setting in motion the chain of events that would lead to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
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Originally posted by Intosh
It is not ASB. It is OTL. That is exactly what happened. Officially M-R was a non-agression pact. But there was a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe, includung Poland, into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The border between those spheres was to be on Vistula river, effectively dividing Poland in half. After the Polish campaign the Soviets agreed to pull east a little, placing their border on Bu River, in exchange for free hand in Lithuania.
And that it is exactly what it was. The pact was reinforced by commercial agreements accoding to which Germany exchanged their technology for food, fuel and many raw materials.
It is not ASB. It is OTL. That is exactly what happened. Officially M-R was a non-agression pact. But there was a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe, includung Poland, into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The border between those spheres was to be on Vistula river, effectively dividing Poland in half. After the Polish campaign the Soviets agreed to pull east a little, placing their border on Bu River, in exchange for free hand in Lithuania.
And that it is exactly what it was. The pact was reinforced by commercial agreements accoding to which Germany exchanged their technology for food, fuel and many raw materials.
Do you realise that the Germans will be really stupid to move against Switzerland ?
Do you have seen maps of these regions ? Do you know if at anytime, some countries were able to put a major force in this region and move against the French by these part of France ? No because, geography is against it.
You have around 20 km wide between the french border and the swiss Jura and you want the entire German army to move here ???
If they take Basel, you are still in the region of Mulhouse and the southern part of Maginot Line and to move south-west, by my road map, you have only one big road between two ridges of the Jura, so you want to move an entire army in just one valley ???
The Germans need to move against by Zurich and Bern and then the Swiss and French armies will put their defense line on the Swiss Jura and to cross it today, the Swiss have build majors tunnels for both railroads and car roads (see Brugg, Olt and Grenchen), the Swiss Jura is an mountain range with cliffs at 1500 m.