Can Taiwan fall as quickly as France did in 1940?

The persisting success of the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion since February 2022 was an unexpectedly positive surprise. A combination of the Ukrainian willingness to fight, the timely availability of Western anti-tank weapons, their ability to quickly integrate high-precision artillery and armor, and their entrepreneurial spirit in developing drones that could withstand Russian electronic warfare defenses, were crucial in this outcome. Of course, Kyiv, had eight years of warning from its fight in the Donetsk in 2014. However, it is far from clear that the anticipated Chinese invasion of Taiwan will yield the same optimistic results. Despite slight improvements to conscription, and the integration of high technology sensors and naval platforms primarily focused on deterring China before they seize control of a beachhead, Taipei has thus far demonstrated less urgency to prepare for a large war than Kyiv. It is therefore just as important that the Western allies of Taiwan at least formulate a theoretical framework to anticipate the possibility of a decidedly disastrous shock.

The single worst predictive failure of the Second World War was not the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the German defeat of France in six weeks between May and June of 1940. The political shock of France’s fall was felt most impactfully in U.S. policymaking circles and was a reason behind public support for U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s substantial increase in defense aid to Great Britian. It was also the principal impetus for the U.S. to break out of its isolationism, not simply to fight against the fascist regimes, but to formulate deliberate plans to supplant the old colonial powers as chief custodian of the world order. The overwhelming majority of commentators believed that the French Army, far more experienced than their German adversary, and protected by the Maginot Line, was more vulnerable to another long contest of attrition, like the First World War, than to a surprise attack. The most detailed articulation of this perspective was in the 1937 If War Comes, by historian Ernest Dupuy and U.S. intelligence analyst George Fielding Eliot. The reasoning that led to their gross miscalculation was that they expected the excellent French officer corps and the uninterrupted training of the French army, to defeat the German conscript army that had only begun training for armored war six years earlier. Dupuy and Eliot even discussed the value of exploiting the Ardennes in the First World War, but then wrote-off the possibility of doing so in the Second World War because of the difficulty of its terrain for tanks, which was precisely why the Germans selected it for their breakthrough.

German General and armored-warfare theorist and pioneer, Heinz Guderian, author of the seminal 1938 Achtung! Panzer, provided the most accurate anticipation of the operational effects of combined arms tank warfare in the Second World War. He was then able to demonstrate these results in France in 1940 and the USSR in 1941 as a commanding general. According to U.S. journalist William L. Shirer, Adolf Hitler followed the tank theorists closely in Germany, and therefore correctly understood that the new armored formations could conduct swift flanking offensives. Hitler accurately predicted that the 1939 Polish campaign would last between 5-to-7 weeks. However, his hopes in France were limited to the rapid seizure of the Channel Ports, whose shock would compel Paris to negotiate an armistice, but he did not anticipate the scale of success that led to Paris’ surrender. Politically, he expected continued British resistance in every circumstance, and thus the Netherlands were to be seized to provide bases for an air blockade of the British Isles.

Unique among pre-war authors, only Fritz Sternberg, in his 1938 Germany and a Lightning War (also the book to first mention Blitzkrieg), and Hungarian professor Ivan Lajos, in his 1939 Germany’s War Chances, deduced and explained the likelihood of a German knockout blow of France delivered by combined-arms tank force. Though both recognized that the French military had benefitted from decades more training, they believed that the high quality of the German soldier made possible the conduct of sophisticated and innovative operations. Of course, France’s defeat was equal parts failure of national morale caused by class warfare, which was largely responsible for Paris’ early surrender, sclerotic armored doctrine, and just bad luck.

One of the least well-explained projections in Dupuy and Eliot’s 1937 If War Comes, drew on evidence that there was little prospect of a Japanese carrier threat to the U.S. This was argued not only because of the common belief that aviation was not thought capable of carrying a bomb large enough to disable a battleship, but because the Japanese had demonstrated by their war in China that they were poor quality pilots. Prejudices aside, it is conceivable that mainland Chinese soldiers may actually outperform their conscripted Taiwanese counterparts on the battlefield, and thus open up the possibility of exploiting additional technical advantages. It is not clear, man for man, that the Russian volunteer fights worse than their conscripted Ukrainian adversary. Allan Stam and Dan Reiter’s 2002 Democracies at War did not find any evidence that soldiers from autocracies fight worse than those of democracies.

Consider the speculative combat effects of five tactical-technical innovations that may accelerate a Chinese defeat of Taiwan. First, the Chinese invaders may come to rely entirely on mainland-based tube and rocket artillery, thereby significantly reducing the logistical burden of having to support cannons deployed out of beach. Forward observation may be maintained by laser communications or hastily deployed cross-strait fiber optics. Of course, that exchange may be reciprocated by Taiwan. Second, the small size of Taiwan makes the ease of resupplying independent platoon and company teams possible, thereby facilitating a much larger scale and survivably-dispersed helicopter-borne vertical envelopment operations. This means that the mountainous defenses around Taipei and the protective ridge before Taizhong will be easily bypassed.

Third, drones may come to be used as a terror weapon, targeting individual civilians as the Russians have been doing with Kherson, termed “human safaris.” This will cripple the important role non-combatants play in sustaining resistance by providing economic support to the military. Fourth, the Russian seizure and surrogate near-bombardment of the Zaporizhzhia reactor in the Ukraine War demonstrates the psychological value of threatening a nuclear accident. In higher density Taiwan, the one remaining on-line energy reactor is located on the southern tip at Ma-anshan, may be seized or struck to compel a local surrender. Finally, China, with its much larger manufacturing base than Russia, will have the capacity for developing and mass producing a much wider variety of sub-surface,  floating, amphibious and tracked drones that would replace and act as a hybrid forces of tanks and infantry.

Of course, all modern warfare is conducted under the shadow of nuclear weapons. The psychological effect of the threat to use the most powerful weapon of any historical period is the political paralysis of decision-makers in their preparations to fight. For example, the politically consuming British fear of a surprise German gas-bombing attack, weakened the steadfastness of its diplomacy at the critical time of the rearmament of Nazi Germany. Churchill, in a 1933 speech, in response to widespread fear of hundreds of thousands of deaths from a German chemical weapons bombing of London, correctly predicted that any rational aerial bombardment would be primarily directed against military rather than civilian targets. In a 1934 speech, he accurately estimated that a ten-day bombing campaign of London would only result in 30-40,000 casualties, with three to four million evacuees and refugees, but that with deterrence, there would instead be widespread use of incendiaries but not gas. The British did thereby retain more fighters to protect Great Britain from bombing and deploy fewer to assist in the defense of France.

While Russia and China can easily begin the manufacture of chemical warfare agents, and may threaten or actually use tactical or a limited number of theatre nuclear weapons, deterrence will push decision-makers towards restraint, as it did with even the most politically revolutionary new nuclear powers during the Cold War. Hitler did not use chemical bombardment for fear of the social dislocation in Germany from Allied retaliation. It is therefore conceivable that Russia may fight NATO, and China may fight over Taiwan, with no or only tactical and theatre nuclear weapons being used, just as the Second World War only had two nuclear attacks on cities. However, the political effect could be to delay and weaken any U.S. conventional intervention on behalf of Taiwan, accelerating Taipei’s defeat and surrender.

The caution against making confident predictions about the impact of technology has its origins in the dramatic failure of the short war doctrine at the outset of the First World War. However, Taiwan’s water barrier with China is not a trivial obstacle for any technology, and so we would expect a tactical-technical surprise to have its biggest impact once Chinese troops begin moving inland from their beachheads. The solution for Taiwan, though not without cost, is open-ended wargaming with military, political and especially scientific-industrial participants, and large-scale exercises without institutional interference. In virtually every surprise defeat, there was some hard to discern evidence prior to the event that could have been noticed.

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11.

SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!