It was finally agreed, according to the British minute, though Bonnet does not mention this, that the British would deliver their ultimatum at 8 a.m. and the French theirs at noon. Bonnet’s parting shot to the British was similar to Daladier’s a few minutes before. “If the British bombers,” he said, “could be ready at once to reply to bombing attacks the position might be different.”
Chamberlain and Halifax in their telephone conversations with the French had not exaggerated the precarious position of the Tory government in the seething House of Commons. At 2 a.m. that night, Ambassador Corbin rang up Bonnet to warn him that the Chamberlain government risked being overthrown unless it could assure the Commons when it met at 10 a.m that the British ultimatum, with a time limit of a few hours, had already been delivered in Berlin. Corbin added that the British government had finally decided to deliver the ultimatum in Berlin at 9 a.m. with hostilities, so far as Britain was concerned, commencing at 11 a.m.
Corbin also asked if Paris could not “shorten the delay.” Bonnet recounts that he telephoned the Ministry of War to ask it and was answered:
Ask London if it can put the British Bomber Force at our disposition tomorrow morning. In that case the French General Staff can accept a reduction of the delay.
The message, says Bonnet, was relayed by Corbin to the British Foreign Office but the British General Staff Could not make a decision immediately. “Once again,” the Foreign Minister recounts, “we are halted by the insufficiency of our means of action.” One wonders why Daladier and Bonnet insisted on British bombers. Fighters, not bombers, would have been the “means” of halting a German air attack. And the French had enough fighters to turn back any bombers the Germans could spare from Poland.
William Shirer, “The Collapse of the Third Republic” p. 501-502.
This is a passage from the longer chapter about how the British were finally serious about going to war and stopping Hitler, and how the French had to be reluctantly dragged into it. The French military under Gamelin represented to the civilian government that the minute France went to war with Germany, fleets of German bombers would appear over every French city and slaughter civilians. Later in the chapter there is a plaintive plea from French Foreign Minister Bonnet to objecting to calling the diplomatic note to Berlin an “ultimatum” because it sounded to strong. Sheesh.....
French!