The Other 'Phoney War': British Propaganda in Neutral Europe, September-December 1939

Abstract

The first four months of the European war, which began on 3 September 1939, were something of a let-down for anyone expecting action and lots of it. There was war at sea, but on the continent little happened except that Poland fell to the Germans on 5 October, and the Royal Air Force dropped propaganda leaflets over Germany. The British Cabinet recorded, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that German soldiers captured during an early, brief, French probe towards the Siegfried Line were surprised to learn that Germany was at war with Britain and France.1 The British press, also tongue-in-cheek, were soon calling this the 'phoney war'. Realistically, the Allies were not prepared to fight: Britain expected immediate massive aerial assaults on its poorly defended cities; there was no overall plan of battle, due in part to the unwillingness of Belgium and Holland to co-ordinate their forces with the Allies in anticipation of a German push westward; the British army, when it finally reached the continent, was small, and the larger French army preferred to stay put behind the Maginot Line; and neither Russia, which signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in August, nor Italy, allied with Germany in the Axis pact, could be depended upon to remain neutral or to side with the Allies in the event of an all-out war. Surprisingly, Germany stopped once Poland was defeated. There was no attack westward, on land or in the air. Hitler even enunciated a peace offer, though it was clearly unacceptable, in a Reichstag speech on 6 October. There followed an unexpected but very welcome breathing-space. Britain used the lull to search for an overall 'alignment of forces', as Professor Sir Llewellyan Woodward called it in the first volume of his British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, in order to confront Germany more effectively when it attacked and London never doubted that it would attack the west.