British Strategy and Politics During the Phony War: Before the Balloon Went Up (review)

The Phony War, Nick Smart argues, has not received its scholarly due. The brief period between the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 and the beginning of the Battle of France in May 1940 is most often viewed either as the sequel to the squalid era of appeasement or as a prelude to Germany's stunning military victories in the West. Smart's purpose is to render the Phony War its historical autonomy, to treat it as "a separate affair, possessing its own cause and course" (p. 8). His chosen method is an examination of British strategy and politics during this period.

Smart, the author of an earlier study of Britain's National Government during the 1930s, is at his best in describing the politics of the period. Adopting a "high politics" approach that focuses primarily on the ambitions and activities of a small group of prominent politicians, Smart sheds light on such subjects as Minister of War Hore-Belisha's downfall in January 1940, whose origins he traces to the political maneuvering of Anthony Eden, and on Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's defeat in May 1940. Regarding the latter event, Smart argues that the government appeared impregnable until the last moment, that Chamberlain's fall represented a political coup d'état, and that Foreign Secretary Halifax's renunciation of the prime ministership stemmed not from the belief that Churchill was a more appropriate wartime leader but from the hope of limiting the influence of Labour Ministers—something Halifax presumably could not accomplish from his seat in the House of Lords. Smart's account of British politics, which is based on the diaries and personal papers of many of the leading actors, is intriguing. At the same time, it worth mentioning that the high politics approach comes at the cost of important political trends that occurred partly or wholly outside of Parliament, most notably the internal evolution of Labour Party policy toward the government. Given the fact that it was Labour's refusal to serve under Chamberlain that paved the way for Churchill's appointment, Smart's relative neglect of Labour is unfortunate.

Smart's treatment of British strategy, which is based primarily on secondary sources, is less satisfying than his treatment of British politics. He rightly devotes considerable space to the origins of the Scandinavian campaign in early 1940 but fails to place the subject in the larger context of British and Anglo-French strategy. Why, with a massive German military build-up in Western Europe, did the British seek to divert scarce military resources to peripheral theaters? The answer lies not so much in the political and military preparations for the campaign as in the growing doubts about whether time was an ally—the underlying principle of Allied strategy. If time was not an ally, if time was working in Germany's favor, then something needed to be done quickly to change this situation. Since Germany's military strength in the West ruled out anything in this theater, the British (and the French) had to look elsewhere—to Scandinavia and perhaps further North to the Soviet Union. A second and related weakness of Smart's account of British strategy is the relative neglect of the French side. British strategy during this period has to be studied in the context of Anglo-French strategy, if only because its miniscule military contribution to the common cause rendered Britain dependent on France. Equally to the point, it was the French, more than the British, who during the Phony War came to believe that time was not an ally. This belief threw French strategy into crisis—a crisis to which the British could not remain indifferent.