Could the allies of 1939 beaten Germany if they took the threat seriously enough and avoided the phoney war?

Not if they only kick into gear come September 1st, 1939. If they had prepared far sooner? Nah.

>inb4 Saar offensive.

The Saar offensive never even engaged the main German line of fortifications in the area, and while the Germans only had 23 divisions at the start of it, they were raising new formations literally by the day. They would have been able to contain it pretty easily, and thinking that it's a question of will and that the French had the opportunity to just roll into Berlin unopposed is ridiculous.

If they had prepared far sooner? Maybe* I don't know why I wrote "nah" in there like that.

If they had listened to de Gaulle, yes.

He was among a handful of generals who understood back then that armor and aircraft demanded a very different set of tactics from WWI. Only the Germans adopted such tactics in 1940.

>Germany
>Threat

Britain chose to go to war and then refuse multiple offers of peace.

Simply adopting a set of tactics won't work without a wholesale restructuring of command and training methods. You could mass armor all you like, you could have a very offensive posture all the way De Gaulle wanted, but if you have that very top down artillery driven command structure, you'll never be quick and fluid enough to implement the tactics the Germans used, even if you thought of them.

True. They would have had to listen to de Gaulle a few years earlier, and restructure the army accordingly.

While I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on interwar French military thought, as far as I'm aware, De Gaulle never actually advocated for such a restructuring, he purely saw it in terms of tactics and operations, and thought it could be reconciled with the methodological battle with the role of implementing armored command the way you implemented artillery command.

From the French point of view, the phoney war made complete sense.

The important point was to concentrate armor, rather than have it scattered piecemeal as support for the infantry.

Use a speahead of concentrated tanks, with air support, followed by motorized infantry, to punch a hole and surround. Given that idea, reorganizing the army into different kinds of units would naturally follow.

>The important point was to concentrate armor, rather than have it scattered piecemeal as support for the infantry.
The French did concentrate their armor. The important part was to give it independence from the artillery arm, which the French did not do and meant that the tanks could never really use their mobility, becoming expensive, well protected assault guns.

>Use a speahead of concentrated tanks, with air support, followed by motorized infantry, to punch a hole and surround
That is not what the Germans did, user, and is a gross mis-statement of armored doctrine of 1940. What they did was to punch through with infantry and artillery, primarily; and then exploit the breakthrough with armor and motorized infantry, using air support to supplement/replace artillery that could not be taken in such a rapid exploitation role.

>The important point was to concentrate armor, rather than have it scattered piecemeal as support for the infantry.
Arguably the worst misconception to live about the French army of 1940. The French had four armored divisions, and if anything, how they were flawed is that they were never there to shoulder infantry, but rather directed to and fro across the map to root out other enemy tanks since the B1 had been designed in al sense of the word to fight panzers.

>Use a speahead of concentrated tanks, with air support, followed by motorized infantry, to punch a hole and surround.
That only happened once, and that was Sedan. How did this get memed as "le german modus operandi xD"?

I'm going to pose a better question. Do you respect Howard Stern's penis?

Not him, but

>That only happened once, and that was Sedan. How did this get memed as "le german modus operandi xD"?
Sedan was what the entire Manstein plan hinged upon, and it and its follow up pretty much destroyed the French army. It both won the war and was the plan for winning the war. How isn't it the modus operandi?