France of secret but nonbinding military conversations with Britain and Belgium, intended to lead to full cooperation in the event of a German attack The French deployed several armored divisions, while hoping the British would provide more for a greatly needed Allied mobile force In the end, the British proved less interested in building up land forces than in expanding the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force (RAF) over the second half of the 1930s The widespread idea that a “Maginot Spirit” of defeatism infected the French military and nation in the interwar years is wrong It is true that France adopted a defensive posture in its military planning and that it pursued a diplomatic policy of appeasement of Italy and Germany But a defensive posture did not mean the French were unwilling to fight, while political appeasement was first and foremost the policy of France’s only important ally, Great Britain Without the British alongside, the French Army could hardly hope to prevail over the Germans in any future war Nevertheless, during the second half of the 1930s France doubled, then tripled, its defense spending It was the French Army that initiated General Staff talks with its British counterpart and proposed fairly aggressive plans for forward combat in the event of war It was the British Army that failed to develop a sufficiently mobile armored force to make such plans viable, or to put enough men in uniform in time to serve as a possible deterrent to war Britain’s lack of preparedness did not provide any additional incentive to those few senior officers in the Wehrmacht who considered killing Hitler in 1938, out of fear of war with the Western Allies It is true that there was near panic in governing circles in Paris in mid-September 1938, when London announced before the Munich Conference that it would fight Germany if necessary That reflected momentary internal divisions and awareness of lack of readiness more than lack of pluck Paris moved away from appeasement in tandem with London from January, and certainly by March 1939 When Hitler occupied the rump of the Czech state and began to threaten Poland, the Anglo-French front firmed in support of Poland Premier Édouard Daladier’s government was badly shaken by announcement of the Nazi–Soviet Pact on August 23, 1939, but most French leaders were by then already resigned to war Paris therefore reaffirmed its old alliance with Warsaw on August 25, reinforcing an announcement by Britain that it agreed to formal alliance with Poland When the final crisis broke a week later, France chose honor and decency and declared war on Nazi Germany at P.M on September 3, 1939, six hours after the British declaration After Germany and the Soviet Union together dismembered France’s only eastern ally, Poland, the Wehrmacht transferred the bulk of its forces west As the Germans planned more aggressive war, French Army discipline and morale deteriorated badly the next eight months of the Phoney War, or “drôle de guerre.” Until May 10, 1940, a large part of the French Army sat in clean, well-lighted subterranean bunkers along the Maginot Line A few divisions guarded the Alpine Frontier against Italy The best divisions waited for neutral Belgium to give permission to move through that country once it was attacked, to forward positions with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and Belgian Army along the Dyle Line A key problem was that prewar planning positioned the French Army to avoid defeat, 399