80 Years Ago, France Declared War To Hitler

September 3, 1939. Hitler had invaded Poland two days before, and had been served by an ultimatum from France and the UK:”Get out of Poland, or we declare war!” Yes, Great Britain declared war too. But the UK had just a few divisions, and France more than 104 divisions… on the north-east front, ALONE (2.25 million soldiers on that frontier)! France would engage 11 armored divisions in May 1940, one more than Germany… Britain would engage just one armored division; the absence of the Second Armored British division at Sedan, enabled the Nazi “Sickle Cut“… With its superior Matilda tanks, and highly trained professional soldiers, there is little doubt that the British Second Armored division could have held up the Nazi army long enough until the main French formations could have maneuvered to back it up… And crush the Nazi snakes.

In 1939, Germany mobilized some 7 % of her population, France 12.5 %. French public opinion was grim in 1939, but determined: one had to do away with Hitler. Both in Britain, and France, all believed that, because of their gigantic empires, the Franco-British victory was unavoidable, and would follow the same pattern as during 1914-1918: a successful blockade, and blocking, followed by revolution in Germany.

However, France had lost more than 1.4 million soldiers killed, fighting German fascists, just 20 years earlier…  And now, France was facing a conspiracy and alliance of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Even for the combative French. that was a bit much. And then there were snakes like Sweden, arming Hitler to the hilt, with the “Iron Road”…. We are still waiting for Swedish collective psychoanalysis.

I followed a documentary of WW2, to commemorate September 3, 1939, on the Franco-German channel Arte. The writers didn’t find anything better than extensively quoting Simone De Beauvoir, who, sure enough, claimed nobody knew why WW1 was fought… Well it was fought because the fascists attacked…. Now, for De Beauvoir the concept of “fascists attacking” doesn’t exist. By 1944, De Beauvoir would pursue a career of collaboration at Radio Vichy, tight with one of the worst collabo… who was executed by the Resistance in 1944 (De Beauvoir being smart, she was able to put the mask of a feminst and leftist later).  

Bombing of Warsaw, September 1939, Luftwaffe picture… Zentralbild
II. Weltkrieg 1939-45 Überfall der faschistischen deutschen Wehrmacht auf Polen am 1.9.1939.UBz: Flugzeugaufnahme des brennenden Warschaus, das am 27. September 1939 kapitulieren mußte.
3250-40

Hitler’s ally, Stalin, attacked Poland jointly with the Nazis, and then attacked Finland late in 1939 (with the idea of grabbing all of Finland; Stalin would end with smaller, yet crucial parts). The French government then outlawed the French Communist Party and stripped of French citizenship those who fled to the USSR. It was then decided to attack Hitler’s crucial ally, Sweden, to come to the rescue of Finland. France was really fighting over all fronts, including an internal one.

This outlawing of Communist Party is not an anecdote but the cause why many French fighter aircraft were armed too late in Spring 1940 (smart politicians were afraid of French communist workers seizing weapons). By 1940, the French government of PM Daladier was losing its smarts, often freaking out about the hundreds of thousands of German refugees in France (who were of course all anti-Nazis, but that the French government suspected nevertheless…)

Attacking Poland from west (Nazis) and east (Stalin) was no accident: German generals, now Nazis, had trained in the USSR, secretly, in violation of the Versailles Treaty, for years… Poland capitulated in 4 weeks. France would be attacked later, by tanks fueled with Soviet oil….

Bravely, the US, after first condemning and punishing France and the UK, finally instituted “cash and carry”. The grim determination of the French and British navies may have helped. Although out gunned (280 mm against 200 mm), the Royal Navy destroyed the battleship Graf Spee in Rio Della Plata…

The destruction of the Graf Spee clearly showed that France and Britain were going to strangle Germany.. as long as they could separate it from Stalin…

A major problem was that Belgium was “neutral”. It means that the French army entered Belgium only after Hitler invaded Belgium. Worse: it means that, when two-thirds of the entire German army entered Belgium… Belgium did NOT notice! The French High Command was not told. Had it been told, huge French forces, like the unstoppable Super Heavy Third French armored division, just north of Sedan, could have been fueled and move south and block, or, better cut from behind, the Nazi armor thrust. Also forces could have been moved from the Maginot Line and long range guns thereof got ready (they didn’t in the few hours they could have been effective).

9 April 1940, Hitler attacks Denmark, Norway:  they are neutral, but Hitler and the Nazis were aware of a secret alliance between Norway and France to produce heavy water, as part of the French nuclear weapon program (somehow the Nazis could tell when the heavy water was transported to France, and intercepted the aircraft… However, by then the French had substituted on the airfield the heavy water for granite; the heavy water made to France, and, later, Buckingham Palace’s deepest and most secure cellar… With the Corwon Jewels…).

Even more worrisome for Hitler, France and Britain were getting ready to attack Sweden, Hitler’s ally (yeah, I know, the Swedes claimed, claim, to be neutral… they were not. Not at all. Sweden enabled Hitler in a crucial way, with the 88mm gun, and all that high quality iron ore to make hundreds of thousands of tanks and planes with…) 

Even before invading Poland, Hitler had given a (very) secret discourse to his top commanders, explaining that speed and brutality would win the war in Poland. Hitler explained that the “SS units with death heads” would kill all the Jews and Poles to enable the Germans to acquire the “Lebensraum” (life space, vital space) they needed. Accordingly, Hitler displaced 600,000 Germans of German ancestry, to settle them into West Poland. There they created the Warthegau, nicknamed, the “Blonde Province” (Himmler:”I am going to create here a blonde province!” … funny neither he, nor Hitler or Goebels were blonde… And lots of Poles were blonde… such blonde kids were taken from their parents, and “germanized”. We know of 30,000 such cases. There were more.) 

When the Nazis killed the Poles, they killed some secretly, but they also killed dozens of thousands, very publicly… To scare the rest. 

10,000 assassinated in the first few weeks in the Warthegau alone, for all to see, 10,000 leading Poles, typically intellectuals, doctors, etc…

Between 12 November 1939 (first attempted attack, stopped by weather), Hitler gave 20 orders of attack of France. However his generals were not keen… and resisted The generals knew that they were going to be defeated. But then they had no choice: time was working against them. The Manstein plan finally selected had a low probability of success. But, at least, it had some. The other plans (dully anticipated by the French) had none. The Prince of Wales, Inspector General of the British army, helped, telling his friend Adolf where to strike. Gott mit Uns did the rest…

Finally, the USA relented a bit, and established the “Cash and Carry” program, enabling France and Britain, and only them to use the USA to help arm themselves (as the Nazis were locked out of the Atlantic, by the French and British navies, they couldn’t carry anything…), to buy weapons in the USA (one such weapon ordered by Brits and French was what became the famous “Mustang” fighter aircraft, later the main long range superiority fighter of the US Air Force!)

The Nazis expelled the Jews from Germany, threw them in Poland, and in ghettos, but then those became unmanageable. Then a propaganda operation over Germany claimed the Germans had build lots of western Poland, just to see it invaded, starting in the 17 century by eastern ethnicities (the Jews).

The US Americans finally clicked morally in a correct way later in the war (after Hitler declared war to the US, Dec 11, 1941). By then they reacted similarly to the French in 1939, 1940…

Detailed Nazi plans had anticipated to kill all the Jews, and then march to death, towards the Urals, 50 million Slavs. Then German colonization could proceed, in axes of cities, towards Leningrad, Crimea…

Why the USA didn’t move immediately to help its parents, France and Britain, against Nazism, stays a mystery as US intelligentsia refuses to consider the subject [1]. Ah, you may say, there is not such a thing,as a US intelligentsia… Yes, but then loom at French intelligentsia: De Beauvoir, the collabo, is a towering figure there, so low have the expectations sunk…

Madness of the crowds need to be analyzed… So that, for example, one can steer better as in crises such as Hong Kong, Brexit, or biosphere collapse. That is why the US American attitude astoundingly inhuman at the beginning of WW2 will have to be answered… Only by effecting such analyses will things turn out for the best (often, they don’t, but now we have no choice)

Anyway, that was just a little memorandum, a community service… Remembering that France and Britain did the right thing on September 3, 1939. Not only they end up losing their empires, replace by the US empire, but, together, they suffered more than three million killed… The French empire alone suffered nearly three million killed (worst estimates) most of these losses in French Indochina… Such losses are hard to understand to Anglo-Saxons: the UK (451 K) and the US (419 K) suffered together around as many killed as metropolitan France.

World War Two end up killing 85 millions (at least; latest evaluations, 2019; for political reasons, massive underestimates were long presented)… That’s 3% of world population… Killed, by the Second World War. If the USA had come to the help of its parents, France and Britain, in 1939 or 1940, it would have kept losses at a fraction of that. No Jewish holocaust…

Had the US intervened in the first half of 1940, there would have been an anti-Nazi coup… German fanatical support for Hitler paradoxically augmented later in the war, not really because it was nice to see German cities burn, like the Jews, but because too many military personnel and authorities, let alone simple Germans, had helped the Nazis with their crimes…

Weirdly, the Allies were kind with many of the top Nazis. For example Field Marshall Erich Von Manstein was capable of exerting his evil Nazi influence on the German army in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond. Never mind that he ordered all Jews to be killed at some point: he couldn’t quite recall… Manstein became militärische Kult- und Leitfigur… who made sure that those who organized the coup against Hitler were NOT honored (German policy has changed since Von Manstein died in 1973… Weeks before the last Nazi Feldmarshall, another condemned war criminal).

To learn to analyze madness of the crowds, one needs to study particular cases. All the more, as much worse is potentially around the corner…

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] My well known position is that the US Deep State and US plutocracy had empire envy, and felt Hitler was a good enough tool to grab the European empires. So US media and Plutos and Deep State all collaborated with their C in C, FDR…

Tags: 1939, September 3, war, War Declaration France Britain Against Hitler