Moar WW2 Stuff (sorry): Could the Allies have saved Poland?

[CrazyZombie]

About USSR, taking part in all the fun and completely ruining so great plan: well, what do you expect after systematic ruining of Soviet attempts to stop Hitler before? My beloved part is Munich conspiracy, when British representatives tell Czech government that if they accept Soviet help and sign a two-side union, German aggression can take the character of anti-Bolshevik crusade in which Britain and France will be unlikely to stay aside.

And what about the fact that Poland more likely wouldn't accept Soviet help (well, let's imagine, it was offered) anyway?

 

[Klausewitz]

Sitting at the Rhine sounds like a decent strategy to me. That would mean a short defensible frontline and would cripple the German coal industry. Let them have a cold winter then unleash an armored attack in the summer of 1940.

It wouldn't be.
See, you would only sit at the Lower Rhine since to get at the upper part you would need to advance through this:

Very pictoresque but not terrain you want to march a conscript army through, especially not if they are faced by armed opposing forces familiar with the terrain and better small arms than yours while the trees neutralize most of your artillery.

See those orange-brownish swaths of landscape at the French and Luxembourg border:
That's the Eiffel and the Hunsrück. Those are places with (even today) poor infrastructure, bad roads, lots of trees and broken terrain.
Defender country.
And channelling all the French up the Rhine valley... sure, do that, but it won't be a picknick as long as the Germans are able to contest or even keep the hills on both sides.

 

[Klausewitz]

*snip*

Point one and two are basically exactly what happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saar_Offensive

 

[bz249]

See, you would only sit at the Lower Rhine since to get at the upper part you would need to advance through this:

The Lower Rhine needs approval from the Dutch, probably the Allied soldiers are allowed to go there as tourists without.
On the other hand the Frech could sit at the Alsatian part.

The only reasonable target within their reach was Baden (Karlsruhe mainly). Which means they have to attack through the Rhine, against the strongest German defenses and capture/block a city. In that case they could occupy a valuable railway/motorway junction.

 

[Klausewitz]

They would also attack into the Black Forest... not a very appetizing idea...

 

[bz249]

They would also attack into the Black Forest... not a very appetizing idea...

From Karslruhe they can threaten Stuttgart and Mannheim (if I understood correcly, the current A8 existed already between KA and Stutengarten). I mean let's assume the impossible that they could capture Karlsruhe. Then they have a reasonable base of operation and the Germans must react in force.
The other option is taking Saarbrücken and hope that the rotten house collapse. ;-)

But if we take one step back and concentrate a bit of the 500 Pound Gorilla in the room. So this is the French Army, which built the Maginot Line in the early 30s because they did not trust their ability to bring their troops fast enough to the frontline to prevent the 100.000 strong Reichswehr causing significant damage in case of a surprise attack.

 

[Klausewitz]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saar_Offensive

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

The other option is taking Saarbrücken and hope that the rotten house collapse. ;-)

The moment troops from the Polish Army declared war on Germany by attacking that radio station guarded by a detachment of Reinhard Heydrich's best troops; it would be interesting to see Hitler's reaction to actual opposition, rather than a continued stream of diplomatic moves.

In the best of all possible worlds . . .

A trained, organized, combined arms force would be sitting behind the Maginot Line. Advancing French Infantry backed by British armored reserves and covered with British air assets? At the very least the Allies would keep Germany on their side of the Rhine and convince the population it was a shooting war in both France and UK. Force mobilization in Belgium and Holland for self defense if nothing else.

However, you have two governments that are afraid of war, and allow themselves to be bullied and charmed by a diabolic genius until war was inevitable. Thus, you end up with a Phony War that fills this megalomaniac with a sense of his own invincibility and is allowed a free hand to pick up Denmark and Norway in bad weather waiting for the spring.

C'est la vie.

 

[Klausewitz]

Why would Belgium and Holland jump in?

 

[Henry IX]

If you assume French doctrine was more aggressive, based on say British doctrine of 1918, rather than a mass version of 'duck and cover', they could have pushed through the German defences in 1939, which amounted to little more than a screen. It would have been easy to put 10:1 force ratios against the German defences with even greater advantages in artillery and armour. Whilst a rapid 'blitzkrieg' attack was beyond the French army, a progressive methodical advance would have put massive pressure on the German leadership. The senior generals of the Wehrmacht were against the war, at least at the beginning, and Hitler was prone to panics. It seems probable to me that aggressive French actions might force the Wehrmacht to redeploy very significant forces, possible giving the Polish a chance to resist more effectively. If the Poles hold and the French are advancing it seems unlikely that Stalin will risk an invasion of Poland.

If the Poles are holding for even a limited period and the French are advancing the odds of the German General Staff staging a coup start to go up very fast.

If the Germans' nerve holds they could screen the Allies advance, finish Poland and then attempt a counter-attack and ultimately still defeat France, but I would put odds on a German collapse in 1939 with Hitler being used a scape goat in this scenario.

 

[Klausewitz]

'The aggressive stance' of the British got them about a kilometer each work day in the hundred days.
If we assume they can make the same time on small forest roads through hilly, broken, forested terrain in autumn and winter they might get to Cologne by mid 1940.
And again that is ignoring things like mines (which was basically what stopped the ill-fated Saar offensive), GPMGs, aircrafts, the (admittedly crummy) westwall, etc.

 

[Henry IX]

Hence why it is a test of nerve for the German high command - as long as they are prepared to risk the French not accelerating they can knock the Poles out and redeploy in time to counter the French (before anything important is actually lost), then they could still win.

'The aggressive stance' of the British got them about a kilometer each work day in the hundred days.
If we assume they can make the same time on small forest roads through hilly, broken, forested terrain in autumn and winter they might get to Cologne by mid 1940.

I don't think 1km per day is an outrageously fast speed even in appalling terrain so I think we can assume that. Far more dangerous for the Germans is the possibility of the collapse of the poorly trained and equipped near-militia manning the Westwall once they are forced out their bunkers (the forces allocated to this part of the front were overall of a poor quality in 1939 - the massive amount of training they received during the Phoney War rectified this by 1940). A collapse of a section of front would be a real problem as there were no significant reserves. Even at an anaemic rate of advance the Germans could lose significant amounts of territory in this scenario.

 

[bz249]

'The aggressive stance' of the British got them about a kilometer each work day in the hundred days.
If we assume they can make the same time on small forest roads through hilly, broken, forested terrain in autumn and winter they might get to Cologne by mid 1940.
And again that is ignoring things like mines (which was basically what stopped the ill-fated Saar offensive), GPMGs, aircrafts, the (admittedly crummy) westwall, etc.

But why Cologne? If the French consider to attack Germany seriously they have to take Southern Route. Which is the Karlsruhe-Stuttgart axis.
The mere fact that they chose Saarbrücken shows that it was unserious. Because that direction could at most put Saarland under French occupation and that's it.

 

[keynes2.0]

Very pictoresque but not terrain you want to march a conscript army through, especially not if they are faced by armed opposing forces familiar with the terrain and better small arms than yours while the trees neutralize most of your artillery.

I believe we were talking about what if the French had been able to finish their offensive preparations before Poland fell. So it wouldn't be an opposition with better small arms, it would be an opposition with little more then rifles. And they wouldn't know the area, they would be training divisions with troops from all over Germany.

The problem was not that the area was well defended, the problem was that France didn't have the forces ready to invade. For instance their light mechanized divisions would be the obvious leaders of an invasion but the third DLM wasn't organized until February 1940.

Because that direction could at most put Saarland under French occupation and that's it.

That region was crucial for German coal supplies. If the French had occupied it and then sat there through the winter, Germany would have had to cut back on steel production even after making their population suffer through a cold winter.

 

[JodelDiplom]

Sitting at the Rhine sounds like a decent strategy to me. That would mean a short defensible frontline and would cripple the German coal industry. Let them have a cold winter then unleash an armored attack in the summer of 1940.

The coal mines are mostly on the right side of the Rhine though.

And the Rhine is way longer than the French and Belgian borders with Germany combined.

 

[keynes2.0]

The coal mines are mostly on the right side of the Rhine though.

And the Rhine is way longer than the French and Belgian borders with Germany combined.

The Saarland itself is a major coal area and that's right on the border. And just having the frontline anywhere vaguely close to the Ruhr coal (the Moselle river for example) will significantly impact supply (as it did with Saar). Germany was already scraping the barrel for steel in 1939 because they were scraping the barrel for iron ore and coal. Cutting a major source of both of those would significantly reduce steel output and there was nothing left to take from the civilian economy. So that means either they stop exporting steel (which means no imports of food and oil) or they need to make a sharp reduction in armaments production.

 

[JodelDiplom]

The Saarland itself is a major coal area and that's right on the border. And just having the frontline anywhere vaguely close to the Ruhr coal (the Moselle river for example) will significantly impact supply (as it did with Saar). Germany was already scraping the barrel for steel in 1939 because they were scraping the barrel for iron ore and coal. Cutting a major source of both of those would significantly reduce steel output and there was nothing left to take from the civilian economy. So that means either they stop exporting steel (which means no imports of food and oil) or they need to make a sharp reduction in armaments production.

It still wouldn't "cripple the German steel industry"

 

[bz249]

That region was crucial for German coal supplies. If the French had occupied it and then sat there through the winter, Germany would have had to cut back on steel production even after making their population suffer through a cold winter.

So in short, there is no immediate need to shift the troops from Poland. They have to take back in the end, but can wait.

 

[DukeDayve]

The problem with any offensive that doesn't go through Belgium (and even then the river is still there) is that the Rhine runs straight across your line of advance. The Rhine river valley in the border area between France and Germany is extremely hilly and an assault crossing across that kind of river with the kind of equipment they had (no amphibious vehicles to speak of and the river's huge so bridging it would be a nightmare) would be bloody and more than likely end in failure. You would be left with this awkward situation of advancing about half a dozen miles (if that, France and Germany's border is half on the Rhine itself as it is) into Germany and then stopping at the Rhine and launching doomed attacks across the river or just sitting there whilst Poland is overrun. You'd have to rely on rapid maneuver to *maybe* get a bridgehead (a la the bridge at Remagen) but even then that's a fraught endeavour and we all know what allied maneuver capabilities were like in this period.

Well, with hindsight, I would tell the French and British:

"Here's the situation fellas - you either advance into Germany as best you can, despite the rhine and the poor roads and the the forests where some of your soldiers will undoubtedly endure the same hardships that the Romans did in that area 2,000 years ago... or France gets conquered in 6 weeks and both you and your British allies suffer military humiliation the like of which the world has never seen (except in Poland, where the world is seeing it right nao).

Point one and two are basically exactly what happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saar_Offensive

Yeah I've read about that before... sounds like a half hearted attempt that pulled out the moment it encountered any difficulty whatsoever. Did the generals think their soldiers wouldn't be able to stand enemy fire or something? That's the impression I get. Which is bizarre because for the rest of the war British and free French soldiers fought well in even the harshest of conditions.

 

[pithorr]

Well, to be honest last summer I advanced from France to Baden-Wirtenberg and further northward along Rhein with my motorized unit and I didn't see so much obstacles