Gamelin told the British he didn't need any more soldiers.

Please, give me a link to prove me wrong.

Britain was perturbed by France s half-heartedness, the French would
have been thoroughly alarmed had they known the truth about
-Britain s war strength. Strictly speaking, it was non-existent. True, her



navy was one of the three largest in the world and her fine air force was
equipped, albeit inadequately, with excellent machines. But she had no
land forces whatever, apart from a small professional army scattered about
her Empire. True to her traditions Great Britain had never been willing to
introduce conscription at home; thus if she wished to levy divisions she
would have neither barracks to house them in, nor equipment to arm them
with, nor sufficient trained personnel to instruct them.

Ever since Germany s reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 the
French High Command had been eager to ascertain the size of Britain s
contribution should there be a war. Britain s leaders had constantly
evaded the question. They had never agreed to the principle of a joint
strategy, nor to the notion of their High Command s forfeiting the right
to take independent decisions. They had jibbed at any suggestion that they
should alter their view.

In any case, how could Britain s forces be made subordinate to the
French High Command when none existed? On September loth, 1938, at
the time of the Sudeten crisis, M. Georges Bonnet asked the British
government what forces it could place at France s disposal if there were a
war over Czechoslovakia.

The question was put several times without eliciting any response.
Finally, the British Cabinet announced that for the first six months of the
war all that it could send was a hundred and fifty aircraft and two un-
motorized divisions. It can only have been led to advance these laughable
figures by the fact that it genuinely had nothing further to offer. [b]

Why, then, had Britain embarked on the risky policy of lavishing pacts
and guarantees of independence on the threatened countries of Eastern
Europe, knowing full well that she had not the strength to enforce them?


Because she had counted on France to enforce them on her behalf. She
had trusted entirely to the French army, treating it as her secular arm.

[b]Some clear-sighted Britons had seen the defects in this reasoning. They
had pointed out that in the 1914-18 war France had withstood the
German onslaught only with British (and American) support; this time her
position would be infinitely more dangerous. For one thing, the force
that Britain could afford to send would be much smaller. For another,
France would have to face the combined strength of Germany and Italy
(population: 125,000,000) and keep careful watch on the Pyrenees all
this without the certain support of her African troops.

There had been the risk that if Britain continued to stand idle France
might tire of the policeman s role so generously allotted to her. In order to
prevent this, Britain had at last made up her mind to promulgate com
pulsory military service. The law had been passed on April 2yth, 1939 a
mere five months before the outbreak of war. Even then the House of
Commons had been reluctant. It had adopted conscription, not so much
to increase Britain s military potential as to reassure France and impress the
outside world. The law had been applied with extreme slowness. The men
had been unconscripted, undrilled, untrained.

Despite the reiterated appeals of the French High Command the War
Office remained as casual as ever. A single class of 200,000 men had
registered in June 1939. They were to be called up in waves. The first
wave, conscripted on July i5th, amounted to only 34,000. And that was a
mere six weeks before the outbreak of war !

Did the announcement of hostilities at least have the effect of rousing
Britain to action and urging the War Office to make up for lost time ? One
would like to be able to say so, but it did not. In France one man in eight
was called up. In Britain the proportion was one in forty-eight. Her initial
aid was very slight: first two, then four, divisions, and 240 planes. No
tanks. Even the respite afforded by the phoney war was not turned to
account. Between September 1939 and May 1940 she managed to equip
only six new divisions, as against forty raised by the Reich in the same
period.

On January i6th, 1940, Churchill wrote to the First Sea Lord, Sir
Dudley Pound:

Our army is puny as far as the fighting front is concerned; our air
force is hopelessly inferior to the Germans ... We maintain an attitude
of complete passivity, dispersing our forces ever more widely ... Do
you realize that perhaps we are heading for defeat?


Doubtless the reason for all this lay in the fact that Britain is first and
foremost a maritime power and that such powers have always had an
idiosyncratic conception of war. As Michel Dacier writes:

Thucydides has summarized the principles that activate them in the
speech that he ascribes to Pericles in the first book of his History of
the Peloponnesian War. To them time and space are of little conse
quence. This is due to the wide distribution of their sources of supply,
which their enemies can never exhaust. They are adept at striking from
a distance. The thraldom of fighting on land does not appeal to them.

Britain under George VI was no exception to this rule. She still ruled the
waves and her Home Fleet gave her a sense of security. She placed more
reliance upon the effectiveness of blockading and her ability to draw on
massive reserves of raw materials all over the world than upon the number
of her battalions. Convinced that time was on her side, she was calmly
organizing herself behind the French shield.

But that shield was to prove flimsier than she had imagined. At the
crucial moment British troops and planes were to be though not non
existent far too sparse to avert defeat. And France would have to per
form alone the harsh and bloody task of the land fighting.

ia310105.us.archive.org . . .

He was so sure he was going to win, he even let Poland get wiped out while he faced nothing but a dozen second-rate German divisions.

Quietly protected by the siegfried line. Add to this a 3 weeks mobilization and a lack of ammo of all kinds, especially for the heavy artillery, and you will explain us how to do a breakthrough into Germany.