Britain and France responded to Hitler's invasion of Poland by declarations of war against Germany; yet with the width of the Reich and the submarine and mine-infested Baltic between them and the conflict, it might as well have taken place on the planet Mars. The French could have surged out to assail the Siegfried Line (“I could go through it in four days,” the French Chief of Staff General Maurice Gamelin had asserted) but they stayed warily behind the Maginot ramparts they had erected against a German attack. With his blitzkrieg of tanks and airplanes, Hitler completed the conquest of the Polish republic in a few weeks. He was assisted by the Russians who began to occupy the eastern section of the country on September 17. On the 29th the two victors partitioned the prostrate nation between them.

Only U-boat attacks on British merchant vessels and preparations for future hostilities reminded the English that a state of war existed. Both they and the French worked to improve their armed potential. The English were developing their fighter and bomber aircraft and bringing radar to a practicable status; the French too were seeking to improve their air force, but the two nations groped to war preparedness with the slowness of sleepwalkers.

Dagenham moved toward war footing with a pace that Chamberlain's government never achieved. Soon after the outbreak of hostilities the Ford Investment Company had been transferred to London from Guernsey, which the Germans soon occupied.