Eighty years ago, while crowds were enjoying a late summer dip in Coney Island and rooting for Babe Ruth, German tanks overran the Polish countryside—whining, low-flying German Stuka planes strafed columns of refugees on the roads as Warsaw was in flames. World War II had begun. Hitler’s intimidation that had gotten him Czechoslovakia and Austria without a shot being fired now turned into armed conflict. Poland was the victim.
The Holocaust was inseparable from the war on the battlefields of Poland, Russia and Holland.
Now with the invasion of Poland millions of Polish Jews would be swept into the Nazi death trap as the Holocaust shifted into high gear. It would be a long time before the ghettos and death camps would be established, with Poland becoming the epicenter of the Holocaust, but the writing was on the wall. Sporadic atrocities were perpetrated the first day of the war. Tens of thousands of Jews and hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Poles would be killed during the five-week “Polish campaign.” Jewish neighborhoods in Warsaw and other cities were targeted by the Luftwaffe.
Two generations later, people still ask why Poland was the first country that Hitler invaded. Why did Stalin sign a nonaggression treaty with his mortal enemy, allowing the Germans to invade? Why did Poland’s Western friends not come to her aid?
Major Richard Anderson, professor at the U.S. Army War College, has shared some of his insight from years of researching and teaching this very subject. Why Poland? Why not England or Norway, which had more strategic value? Anderson says Hitler had a bone to pick with Poland. Germany had grievances against Poland for centuries. The immediate grievance was the Danzig Corridor, a strip of Germany that was given to the newly formed Polish state, splitting off part of Germany. Hitler saw the Danzig Corridor as part of the greater German Reich. He tried to intimidate the Poles but the proud Poles would not give up their independence and become a vassal state of Germany like Austria or the Sudetenland. Hitler’s strategy was to pick off small, weak countries without provoking an international reaction. Had he invaded France, the whole world would have been against him
Hitler saw communism as the great Satan. Poland would be a launching pad against the Soviet Union in the inevitable clash between Stalin and Hitler. How could Stalin agree to sign a treaty with his mortal enemy, Nazi Germany, just a few weeks before the invasion? Cadets born a half century after the war cannot grasp it. Anderson tries to explain the complexity for the nonaggression pact. Anderson says that as a result of Stalin’s purges during the 1930s, when many of the officer corps were executed, the Russian army lacked leadership, unity and experience. It simply was not ready to take on the Germans. Stalin wanted to buy time. He thought that the nonaggression treaty would last much longer than it did, but it was shattered by the German invasion of Russia in June 1941.
Eighty years is a long time, and as they say a lot of water has flown down the river. There is not one person at West Point who was alive during the outbreak of WWII. What new can be taught to cadets born a half century after the fact?
Anderson said some aspects of the military campaign were unprecedented. The German “blitzkrieg” (lightning war) involved unprecedented cooperation between arms, including infantry, artillery, and the air force. For that purpose the Germans were the first to make extensive use of radio communication. The invasion of Poland was probably the first battle (with the possible exception of the Spanish Civil War) in which the air force was decisive. The Luftwaffe destroyed Polish pockets of resistance, destroyed cities like Warsaw from the air, and engaged in terror bombing in which columns of refugees were bombed on the roads.
Anderson says that politically, there is new insight into the invasion of Poland. Scholars in the field now say that war was not a result of failure of diplomacy (read intimidation) but that Hitler wanted war from the beginning and preferred it over “diplomacy.” Why? Because Hitler saw it as an all-or-nothing struggle. Diplomacy gave him a slice of the cake, as in Sudetenland, but war enabled him to grab the whole cake and seize the whole country in one fell swoop.
As for the much-touted blitzkrieg, Anderson says “lightning war’ was not a novel development but was the classical Prussian doctrine going back centuries. Prussian strategists like Carl von Clausewitz stressed a “bewegungskrieg” or war of motion rather than a static war or “sitzkrieg” (literally a sitting war). The name blitzkrieg was not coined by the Germans but by an American reporter. Blitzkrieg was the strategy from the beginning. World War I, with its static trench warfare, was the aberration. WWII was a return to the traditional blitzkrieg.
Most of Europe, from Holland to Denmark to Belgium, was overrun by blitzkrieg. Could the Poles or French or Dutch have defended against blitzkrieg? Anderson says the only defense against blitzkrieg is counter-blitzkrieg, using mobile defense forces to engage the advancing German thrusts, a military “fighting fire with fire. “The problem is the Poles and others lacked the mobility that the Germans enjoyed.”
On paper the French army was as strong as the German army (depending on the ranking) but France and the allies simply lacked the mobility, cooperation, communications systems and initiative that the Germans enjoyed. No one except for Britain was prepared for a new world war. Allied armies were using old-school tactics. They fought WWII using outdated WWI tactics.
Why did the Western allies not come to Poland’s rescue?
The Polish command could not hope to defeat the vastly more powerful German army. The Polish plan was to buy time, to hold the Germans off until the United Kingdom and France could intervene. The UK and France committed themselves by treaty to defend Poland if it were attacked. Anderson cites the military doctrine of the “tyranny of logistics”—the further away the fighting was, the harder it was to transport troops and supplies. The Royal Air Force could defend the home country but did not have many long-range bombers capable of reaching Poland. The United States, the great “Arsenal of Democracy,” was fiercely isolationist and did not want to enter the war. The 340,00-strong American army was on par with that of Uruguay and even weaker than Poland’s small army.
Under impossible circumstances, the Poles actually fought courageously and acquitted themselves well. They held out longer than most countries in Europe. Holland, Belgium and Denmark fell in mere days. Many countries, such as Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Italy, fell without a fight. The country that held out the longest was Norway, which fought for two months before being defeated. In their short, hopeless fight, the Poles inflicted significant casualties on the German invaders, destroying hundreds of German planes and tanks and causing around 50,000 casualties among German troops.
The popular image is that of Polish cavalry attacking German tanks. That is a myth—at no point did the Polish cavalry charge tanks; the Polish horses charged between the German tanks. Only 105 of the Polish units consisted of cavalry. At the time most armies, including the German army, relied heavily on horses for transport. Another myth is that the Germans destroyed the Polish air force on the ground the first day of the war. Not so. Not one Polish plane was destroyed on the ground.
