Saarland 1939

©Final Sword Productions LLC 2010

One of the great jokes of WW2 history including the run-up to the war 1936-39 is that everyone worried about / hoped for a lightning French offensive in a crisis. France made repeated diplomatic promises based on doing such attacks but as was usual in France in this period the diplomatic service worked in isolation from the army whose mobilization plans made such attacks essentially impossible. The French active army was in fact a set of training formations for the class of conscripts. France only went back to two years conscription fairly late. So for most years the conscript spent a year with a division learning a few basics and was shuffled into the reserves. On mobilization he would be assigned to a unit he had never seen without regard to his prior branch training. He was a warm body filling a slot.

So on mobilization each active division was split to provide semi-trained cadre for two additional reserve divisions [an A and a B, the difference being the B got older reservists, no regular officers below regimental command and even less equipment]. For 15 days the entire French army [other than the Maginot line garrisons and the ‘interval forces’ that manned the spaces between the forts] was shuffled around France to form these units which in turn were then shipped off to the frontiers. On arrival there one had a mass of men and equipment that would then need a full training cycle to function as units.

Needless to say the Czechs in 1938 or the Poles in 1939 could not be expected to last for the 4-6 months this would take. The need was for an active army able to take the field immediately. De Gaulle got himself in hot water for proposing a professional force of one hundred thousand men to do this. Part of the objection was budgetary. France was spending a fortune on rearmament and simply did not have the additional funds to buy what amounted to a panzer army. The army was buying more tanks, trucks etc. but it was also redesigning them and did not want to force production of obsolescent designs. It was also unsure of what a proper mechanized force should look like [most armies in the period had the same problems – the tech was changing rapidly and the combat proof of the various design and operational theories was both sparse and ambiguous]. More important, the army simply had other equipment needs such as AAA guns, which had higher priorities.

However in 1939 some half million Spanish Republican troops had taken refuge on French soil. In fact a mix of French politics and French army delaying tactics resulted in virtually no use being made of these human resources. Let us presume that the French army was a tad less dysfunctional on this issue. France was stuck feeding and housing these refugees anyway. Surely it was better to get some use out of them. So the equipment sets for three armored divisions, three motorized divisions and four infantry divisions are given to a full time army of these Republican refugees. The senior commands remain French. The more obvious Stalinists are excluded from the combat units. In addition the equipment sets of three corps and an army are added to this under a suitably reactionary commander [Weygand comes to mind if he would have taken the demotion]. Hitler’s occupation of what is now the Czech Republic could have gotten 10-15 thousand Czech and Jewish officers and NCO’s familiar with French doctrine had travel papers been provided quickly.