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So the French are making their big offensive.

Here’s what Ernest May says in excerpts from “Strange Victory.”

In August 1939, General Gamelin had said that the French army was ready, but he had not said for what. That Spring, he had promised Poland’s war minister that were Germany to invade Poland, France would commence immediate air operations and, toward the third day after mobilization, “offensive actions with limited objectives.” If Germany concentrated its forces against Poland, he had said, “France would unleash an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of is forces, fifteen days after mobilization.”

Characteristically, General Gamelin had left “offensive action: undefined. Though the French army was given to detailed plans and instructions, Gamelin himself adhered to the principle laid out in the little book he had written before the Great War–that the commander should adapt to circumstances. This gave him a rationale for postponing decisions that required either confrontation with military colleagues or specificity in understandings with allies.

Aware that General Vuillemin, chief of the French air staff, would protest sacrificing aircraft in order to relieve Poland, Gamelin had said that the promised air operations would depend on “a plan established in advance.” Since no such plan existed when the war broke out, Gamelin was free to interpret Frances’s commitment as he saw fit.

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The first units of Georges’s armies began moving forward into German territory on September 7. Communiques made the most of what these units were doing. “Our troops have made contact everywhere on our frontier between the Rhine and the Moselle,” said one. Another boasted of capture of “the greater part of the Warndt Forest”; another of “furious fighting”in the vicinity of Lauterbourg, in the Saarland; yet another of a second offensive near the Luxembourg frontier and the repelling of a German counterattack. There were touches of truth in these bulletins, for French soldiers did run into mines and booby traps. One officer described part of the Warndt Forest as “a veritable volcano.” Casualties–mostly wounded rather than dead–eventually numbered well over a thousand. But in the end, French forces advanced only one to three miles into empty farmland. When the German army’s chief supply officer, General Wagner, remarked that the communiques were “unworthy of a great nation,” the comment was echoed in France, where the economist Charles Rist noted: “The news from the front and the tone of the communiques are exasperating to the officers. The feeling is that the current offensive is idiotic.”

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As we have already seen, the German army had in the West at the time only thirty to forty makeshift divisions, composed mostly of second- and third-line troops with relatively little training. These divisions had no tanks, no motor transport, not much artillery, and not even an adequate supply of wagons and dray horses. General Leeb, their commander, rated German defenses on the Belgian border pathetic, and those opposite Luxembourg worse. He had no reserves of supplies or ammunition–none. Neither he nor the general who had been in charge of building the Siegfried Line deemed it more than a facade. ... As the operations officers at General Georges’s headquarters said to Villelume, the Siegfried Line was in almost no place proof against attack from the artillery and tanks of France’s front-line units.

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...[H]ad a French offensive occurred, it would have succeeded. The point that needs to be underlined again is that French decision-makers acted as they did not because they thought French forces inferior to German forces or likely to lose if a grand battle unfolded. The optimism described by Minart was pervasive. We shall see it repeatedly, even well into the Battle of France in 1940. Nor did the French government miss a great opportunity in September 1939 because it overestimated German strength. Notes written by Gamelin on September 5 show that he had a quite accurate estimate of German forces actually in the field–twenty to twenty-nine infantry divisions in the West; fifty-five in the East, including all armored and motorized forces; reserves and Landwehr being called up. He noted that, for the moment, France had an advantage of between three and four to one. He decided to launch only a token offensive almost certainly because he had no doubt that France was eventually going to be victorious and had no reason to hurry decisive battles that events might render unnecessary. Paradoxically and ironically, the French government may have forgone a chance to win, not lose, the war of 1939-1940 not because of lack of confidence but because of overconfidence.