In this months Harper's, they printed a piece written by Vernon Bartlett, a British journalist and anti-appeasement MP, in summer 1944 following the Normandy Invasion. This sentence caught my attention most of all:
Nevertheless D-day has come. Yesterday I was told flatly and firmly by an elderly and querulous ex-official from one of the remoter British colonies that there would be no invasion of Europe. He was indignant when I reminded him that this view was shared by many of the Communists. Another "phony war" legend has been destroyed.
I suppose it should come as no shock that truther-style conspiracy theorists have always popped up during times of distress, but I'd never heard about this idea of a "phony" Second World War. I find it interesting too that it was a line of thinking associated with the left.
Can anyone shed some more light on this? How common was the theory? What, precisely, did believers think was happening and why? Are there any other interesting conspiracies from the time?
The full article itself is quite interesting, though it is paywalled. Perhaps someone else is able to find a public version.
In the UK the 'Phoney War' refers to the period between the declaration of war in Sep '39 and the Battle of France in May 1940.
During this period nothing much happened militarily. After all the build-up and mobilisation, the lack of activity led to a widespread sense of anti-climax, and questions about whether the war was really necessary or avoidable.
'Appeasement' still had significant support in the British government, until Churchill became PM in May '40. I think Vernon Bartlett in that article was re-visiting appeasement/anti-appeasement political arguments from previous years, and retrospectively vindicating his own stance, rather than providing a historical analysis.
The use of the term ‘legend’ is his way of dismissing as fanciful or ignorant the arguments of ‘appeasers’. (He was a politician, need I say more?)
‘Phoney War’ wasn’t only perceived in the UK. From Wikipedia:
‘……….. the period of the Phoney War had also been referred to as the "Twilight War" (by Winston Churchill), the Sitzkrieg[ ("the sitting war": a play on blitzkrieg) and the "Bore War" (a play on the Boer Wars). In Polish, it is referred to as the Dziwna Wojna ("strange war"), and in French, as the drôle de guerre or "strange war". The term "Phoney War" was possibly coined by US Senator William Borah who stated, in September 1939: "There is something phoney about this war."’