This is one of the common what-ifs of the early war. Several writers have asserted that the French had an overwhelming edge over the Germans on the Western front during the first week or so of the war, and that they could have taken advantage of that edge to launch a major offensive against the Germans while the Germans were occupied in Poland. Let’s see how that might have worked out.

The Point of Divergence would have had to have been several months prior to September 1939. The French didn’t have a serious plan for an offensive against Germany soon enough to have helped the Poles. The Point of Divergence would have probably had to have involved somehow getting the top French leadership of our time-line out of the picture. Prime Minister Daladier was not particularly evil or incompetent. He just wasn’t the man to take a bold initiative. French commander Gamelin would also need to go. He had worked the French political scene long enough that he was no longer a decisive enough commander to do what would have needed to have been done, though he was by no means a stupid man, and had once been a very good military commander. Let’s say Daladier has a mild stroke in May 1939. He is no longer capable of discharging his duties.

Historically Daladier was replaced by Reynaud some time after the war started. Reynaud wasn’t perfect, but he did take the war against Germany much more serious. He also intended to replace Gamelin, put was prevented from doing so by Daladier until after the disastrous first week of the German offensive in May 1940. At that point Gamelin was replaced by Weygand.

I’ll assume that Reynaud replaces Daladier in this time-line, though I do have some doubts about that happening. Reynaud reviews French plans in the event of a German smash-and-grab operation against key Polish border areas like Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor. He doesn’t realize how fast the Germans can move, and assumes that just seizing those border areas would take a week or two. He also realizes that the French have no response to such a move because mobilization and getting units in position for an attack would take a minimum of two weeks, with two-and-a-half weeks more likely.

French mobilization was a complicated affair with many pre-war divisions splitting into three divisions on mobilization and forming

• an active division with the bulk of the prewar manpower
• an “A”-series division with most of the rest of the pre-war manpower—filled out by reserves, and
• A series “B” division with just a small cadre of active duty officers and all of the rest of the manpower filled by reservists.

Mobilization meant moving millions of men around just to get them to their units. Once mobilization took place, those men still had to be equipped, organized, and then shipped to the appropriate place on the front, along with their equipment. Hundreds of thousands of French civilians had to be evacuated from areas too close to the front lines. It was a huge task, and not one that could be accomplished quickly even under the most effective leadership.

Reynaud quickly becomes contemptuous of Gamelin, as happened historically. He is especially appalled at the inefficiencies of the mobilization process. He pushes a large-scale mobilization and training exercise involving two active divisions and their associated “A” and “B” series divisions for early summer of 1939. The exercise is a disaster, as Reynaud had expected. Vital men are called up from key defense industries. Too many reservists and reserve officers prove to be incapable of doing their jobs. The mobilization and subsequent movement takes far longer than it should. Reynaud uses a secret but scathing report on the exercise to oust Gamelin in early June of 1939. In our time-line, Gamelin was replaced by Weygand after the early disasters in May 1940. I’ll assume that Weygand takes over in this time-line, though I’m not at all sure that would happen.

Weygand is given the mission of getting the French army ready to fight soon enough to help France’s eastern front allies. The goal is to be able to launch an attack within three days of a German move. Weygand doesn’t know exactly when the Germans are going to move against Poland, or even if the Germans are going to move, but he suspects that a showdown will probably be coming in the August to October time-frame. He realizes that a full mobilization starting from peacetime conditions won’t happen soon enough to prevent a German smash-and-grab operation on those key Polish border areas. At the same time, a full mobilization before Poland is attacked might precipitate a war unnecessarily and would certainly alienate the Chamberlain government in England.

Weygand’s solution is to call two large-scale mobilization/training exercises, each involving four active divisions and their associated “A” and “B” series divisions. The first of those exercises will take place in July and will run through mid-August. The second will begin in mid-August. If the military situation looks threatening, the first wave of divisions can remain mobilized as the second wave comes on line. In theory, this would give France 24 mobilized divisions in mid-August, the time of maximum danger. Of course only 8 of those divisions will be active ones, and even 24 divisions is not enough to really deter the Germans. Weygand wants each wave to consist of 6 active divisions, but can’t get that approved by Parliament. He is able to make sure most of the active divisions involved are motorized ones.

The French also expedite arms shipments to the Poles. Fifty desperately needed MS406 fighter planes are shipped to Poland, in spite of the fact that the French airforce is desperately in need of those planes. In our time-line the French air force had received 27 MS406’s by April 1, 1939, and only 572 by September of that year.

The mobilization exercises are a stop-gap, hopefully deterring the Germans until spring of 1940, by which time Weygand hopes to have a lot of the problems of French mobilization fixed. The French are already addressing the problem of how to keep key industrial workers at their jobs, but in the longer term the French Army will need to address the problem of inadequately trained reserves, poor reserve officers, and so on.

It isn’t given time to address those problems. The mobilization exercises make some German generals more cautious, but they don’t deter Hitler. He has to continue to bring in booty or the German economy will be in serious trouble. He prepares for war with Poland essentially on schedule.

The Reynaud government is much more serious about fighting a war if necessary than the Daladier government was in our time-line. At the same time, the French need the British on board. That keeps France from doing a full mobilization as early as they would like to, but they do keep the first wave of troops mobilized “in light of the international situation”, and bring a few other key units up to strength, including two DLMs, France’s light armored divisions, and two heavy armored brigades. They also quietly give Poland the green light to do a full mobilization, though publicly deploring that decision for British consumption.

Weygand has been preparing for two possible situations. If Italy declares war, the French will launch an attack on Italy, and hopefully knock it out of the war before Germany can do major damage to Poland. If the Italians don’t declare war, the major offensive will be against Germany, with a move into Belgium in the unlikely event that the political situation allows that.

The Germans attack Poland in early September 1939, just as they did historically. The mobilized French divisions don’t force the Germans to deploy significantly larger forces to the western front. They have to win quickly against Poland to have any chance of winning the war anyway.

The French army begins full mobilization as soon as the German attack begins. The already mobilized active French divisions and four of the Series A divisions begin an attack on the German border as soon as they can get into position to do so—September 3. The attack is rather tentative. By French standards this is a hasty attack, and French training and doctrine emphasize the dangers of poorly prepared attacks. The attack is also not powerful enough to do much damage. Twelve French divisions are attacking nearly twice that many German ones, and though the German divisions are mostly poorly equipped reservists, they are in reasonably good defensive positions. By September 7, six newly mobilized French divisions join the attack, along with a heavy armored brigade, and the attack becomes reasonably serious, methodically pushing the Germans back toward the West Wall defenses.

The Germans are not doing quite as well in Poland as they did in our time-line. Significantly more of the Polish army is mobilized, armed, and in place than was the case in our time-line. That means that there are fewer weak spots to exploit, and the Germans have to fight significantly harder in the early going. The 50-odd French MS406 fighters in Poland are nowhere near enough to stop the Luftwaffe, or even match it technologically, but unlike the obsolete Polish fighters they can fly faster than most Luftwaffe bombers. That lets them do serious damage to unescorted bombers, and forces the Luftwaffe to provide escort fighters for their bombers, which gives the Poles some relief from German fighter sweeps that would otherwise have been wreaking havoc on Polish transportation and communications.

Overall, the Poles would probably have as much as twice the manpower mobilized, equipped and in position to fight as they did in our time-line. How much difference would that make? That’s hard to say. Let’s say that it takes the Germans roughly twice as long to reach a given objective as it did in our time-line. That would mean that the Poles would not be in a totally hopeless position until roughly September 20, assuming that the Soviets don’t intervene before then, which they probably wouldn’t. Historically the Soviets intervened before they were ready to because of the unexpectedly fast German advance.

The French continue to attack with increasing power as newly mobilized troops get organized and into position. The front on which they can attack is rather narrow because the French are unwilling to violate Belgium or Luxemburg’s neutrality. At the same time, the French have a lot more firepower than their German opponents on the West Front, and continue to push those forces back until the French come up against the German West Wall fortifications by September 12. By this time, the Germans are suffering from an ammunition shortage on the Western Front, and are forced to divert small arms and artillery ammunition from the Polish front on an emergency basis.

That ammunition is about the only thing that the French have diverted from the Polish campaign so far. The French airforce has quite a few reasonably modern fighters, but essentially no modern bombers. Reynaud wants the French airforce to force the Germans to divert planes to the Western Front by launching a bombing campaign. The French airforce resists that vigorously. It is short of pilots and modern aircraft, and desperately needs time to make up for those deficiencies.

When they reach the West Wall defenses, the French army pauses briefly to reorganize. They begin preliminary attacks on the West Wall on September 14. By September 17, they are pushing a reasonably serious attack on the German defenses, though without a great deal of success. Poor training, especially of the reservists, is showing up and causing unnecessarily high casualties, as well as extremely slow and tentative reactions to any German counter-offensive. On September 20, the Germans launch a small armor-led counter-offensive that pushes the French back a little. The French retake the lost ground but not much more by September 24. By that time, the Polish position is hopeless, and the Soviets are about to intervene to take their slice of Poland. The French begin encountering more and more front-line German equipment and manpower. Weygand reluctantly tells Reynaud that the opportunity to help the Poles has passed and that he needs to go onto the defensive in order to redeploy the active French divisions to counter an expected German attack through Belgium.

The French don’t withdraw from the sliver of Germany they have conquered. They swap reserve divisions for the active ones that have borne the brunt of the fighting so far, and start to dig in. The Germans don’t like the fact that even a sliver of Germany is in French hands, and in mid-November they launch a fairly large-scale attack to retake the area.

In our time-line the French quickly withdrew when the Germans attacked the small area that they won from the Germans in early September. In this time-line, that isn’t politically possible. The territory has been won at too high of a price—nearly 5000 French dead, or over 10 times what the French mini-offensive in our time-line cost them. The territory gained is also somewhat more significant in a strategic sense, in that it gives the French the potential for offensive action if the Germans commit themselves too heavily to an offensive through Belgium. Weygand decides to make the Germans fight for the area, though he is not willing to commit too large of a French contingent.

The November fighting is a major fiasco for the French. They get their first taste of blitzkrieg, and don’t like it a bit. It takes the Germans two days to push the French reserve divisions out of roughly two-thirds of the territory captured with such effort, and the French hold onto the rest only because they pour in reinforcements from the active divisions—a major gamble from the French point of view because Weygand expects the Germans to sweep down through Belgium at any time, and those active divisions will be needed to blunt that German drive.

Fortunately for the French, the Germans aren’t capable of the sweep through Belgium yet. They are geared for a series of short wars, and they have to rebuild their ammunition stockpiles before they can launch a really serious offensive against France, as opposed to the local one they just fought.

For morale reasons the French launch a series of token offensives that take back tiny slivers of the lost territory, but the French high command’s confidence is shaken by the ease with which the Germans recovered the lost territory, and especially by reports of panic and desertions among the French reservists. There are bitter debates within the French command over why the French airforce seemed incapable of intervening, and why French anti-aircraft defenses proved so inadequate. Reynaud pushes Weygand to find causes for the defeat and fix them. The French army trains as hard as the high command can make them over the cold winter of 1939/40.

The defeat also makes Weygand cautious. He has no particular desire to send French troops very deep into Belgium, and none at all to send French mobile forces to help the Netherlands. As a result, the French are nowhere near as vulnerable to an attack to cut off their forces in Belgium as they were historically.

So where would this go from here? Would the French army have learned enough by May 1940 or whenever the Germans attacked to be able to stop the German attack? Would they at least hold out a little better even if they didn’t stop the attack? Certainly the November 1939 battles would have made the notion of a “phony war” more difficult to sustain, which might have helped French morale considerably.

But what about…possible problems with this scenario.

Would the French under Reynaud and Weygand really have been that much more aggressive? To be honest, that’s somewhat unlikely. Reynaud was genuinely a fighter and he would have wanted to be more aggressive. Weygand was somewhat more of a question mark. He played a major role in pushing the French government toward an armistice in June 1940, but that was in a situation where he took command after the Battle of France had already been lost. He did try to preserve some measure of French independence in North Africa after the armistice, and even promoted some clandestine rearmament. Given a political directive to give France the option to quickly attack Germany, he would have probably worked hard and reasonably effectively to give France that option. He would not have had time to overthrow France’s cautious doctrines of war fighting, and there is no evidence that he would have wanted to. Any French offensive would have been a cautious, methodical affair, because that was what the French army was trained for and what it was capable of.

Is that really the best that the French would have been capable of under these circumstances? I think so. This might even be considerably too optimistic. The French army was a reservist army. It wasn’t particularly well trained, and was not at all well-trained for fast moving offensives. It also wasn’t equipped for such operations. For example, the Germans initially expected great things from the large stocks of captured French tanks, especially the Somua S35. They quickly discovered that the French tanks, while certainly powerful, were simply not capable of functioning as part of panzer divisions. French tanks’ ranges between refueling were too short, the internal arrangement didn’t work well for fast moving battles, vision from inside the tank was often inadequate, and it was difficult to fit a radio inside of most of them.

But what about those huge ratios of forces that I’ve read about? Didn’t the French have an overwhelming advantage over the Germans while Germany was fighting Poland? Well, in theory the French had a numeric advantage in just about every category of manpower and weapon for the approximately ten to twelve days that it historically took for the Germans to eliminate the Poles as a serious military force. Unfortunately, that theoretical advantage really couldn’t be translated into much real leverage. The French army was a reserve army. Almost every French division had to absorb reservists before it was ready to fight.

The French had to move millions of men from civilian life to the appropriate military bases, get them in uniform, organize them, issue them weapons, and then move the resulting units and their equipment to the appropriate spot, all within a very short time. Many reservists had been out of the military for ten years or more, and many of them had never operated the newer equipment that they had been issued. It took time to turn those large numbers of divisions into an effective fighting force. Two weeks, or even a month was not long enough.

To make matters worse, any French offensive had to come on a very narrow front—the French/German border between Switzerland and Belgium/Luxemburg. The French didn’t have the option of taking the geographically more favorable route through Belgium. There was no way for the French to quickly translate that theoretical imbalance of power into a real world way to make Germany pull forces away from Poland.

Is this headed toward another France beats the Germans scenario?  Maybe, but I doubt it. It would take very special circumstances for the French of 1940 to beat the Germans. However, it may head toward the French attempting to hold out in North Africa, which is certainly possible in a scenario like this where they are more strongly engaged in the war and have performed somewhat more honorably in it—genuinely if ineffectively attempting to honor their commitments to Poland, and so on.