A World at Arms (13 page)

It was precisely because Hitler understood that his aims could be realized only by war that he plunged forward. Because he was always peculiarly conscious of his own mortality, and because he recognized that the limited material resources of the -Germany he controlled in peacetime would assure him a headstart in armaments for only a few years before other nations caught up, he was in a hurry to start the first of his wars at the earliest possible moment according to his assessment of the diplomatic and military situation. Given the strides beginning to be made by the rearmament England and France had initiated in response to the new menace from Germany, one must concede a certain mad logic to his belief that time was running against his cherished goals.

Because of his preference for war, Hitler conducted policy in 1939 under the personal trauma of Munich. He had shrunk from war then–and thereafter attributed such cowardice to everyone else around him–and he would not be cheated once again of the war he had always intended. Just as his anger at having been deprived of war in 1938 made him all the more determined to have it in 1939, so his postponement of the attack on Poland on August 25 left him all the firmer in an almost hysterical fixation to attack a few days later. He would not back off again; his tirade to the would-be Swedish intermediary Birger Dahlerus on September 1, in which he declared himself ready to fight England for ten years if necessary,
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reflects the views of a dictator who had once balked before the great risk, had then tried to minimize its scope, and was now under no circumstances willing to pull back a second time. Without war, his
whole program and his whole life made no sense to him. The war he started would destroy both.

There is a grim irony in the fact that most of the precautions Hitler took to make certain that there would be no diplomatic settlement of the 1939 crisis, no new Munich, were quite unnecessary. Not having agreed to the Munich treaty in good faith, he could never understand how anybody else could have; and hence, although he recognized how deeply the Western Powers were chagrined by his destruction of that settlement, he never comprehended that their policies were now based on different assumptions. When French Prime Minister Daladier declined Mussolini’s suggestion of a conference, he stated that he would rather resign than attend a second “Munich.”
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Chamberlain was similarly determined that there would be no new Munich; and even had he wanted one, the British Parliament would never have allowed it after the German seizure of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Certainly no one in London was interested in exploring a new grab-bag of promises of future good behavior from a German dictator who had broken most of his earlier ones, was in the process of breaking some more of them, and was now offering to protect the British empire against his Italian ally, his Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact partner, and against his newly found Soviet friend.

The Poles were certain to fight for their independence. If the relatively conciliatory Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck, the architect on the Polish side of the earlier rapprochement with Germany, was unwilling to accept subordination to Berlin, other Polish leaders were even less likely to consider submission a serious alternative for their country. The tragi–comedy of midnight, August 30-31, was entirely unnecessary, however revealing for participants and historians; the possibility of having his ostensible demands granted, to which Hitler had succumbed in 1938, simply did not exist in 1939. Had von Ribbentrop handed the demands to Henderson officially, Hitler would still have had his war.

Similarly, the great propaganda operations were hardly any more effective or necessary than the last-minute diplomatic moves. It was not necessary to persuade the German public of the need to fight Poland, and it was practically impossible to persuade them of the need to fight England and France. As for the outside world, all the reports of atrocities and incidents dreamed up by the fertile imagination of Germany’s propaganda minister or secret police chief were unlikely to convince anyone who had lived through German use of similar tactics a year earlier. Perhaps all this noise was necessary for Hitler’s self-induced excitement over the situation on Germany’s eastern border, steeling him against doubts that might otherwise have assailed a man who on occasion shifted
tactics and procedures. Few others were affected; but the great tragedy of 1939 was that no one else needed to be affected. Hitler alone made the key decision, though those who had contributed toward the creation of that situation in so important and powerful a country as Germany, as well as those who carried it out without hesitation, have their share of the responsibility for that decision and its terrible results for the world.

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Such a reversal of events close in time even by those who lived through them is not as uncommon as one might think. An example from American history would be the frequently expressed belief that at the Yalta Conference of February 1945 areas had been turned over to the Soviet Union, when in fact those areas had been liberated or occupied by the Red Army in the preceding months.

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The Russians changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar after the revolutions of 1917. By the calendar in effect in Russia at the time, the first revolution took place in February and the second in October; the adoption of the new calendar meant that the first would fall into March and the second into November.

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it is the former status of German Southwest Africa as a C-Class mandate of the then Union of South Africa which made what is now known as Namibia an issue of international concern (with the United States’ role due to Germany’s cession of sovereignty over her colonies to the victors to be assigned by them to mandatory powers).

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Recent work on reparations by such scholars as Sally Marks, Stephen Schuker, and Mark Trachtenberg has begun to displace the traditional picture.

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This generalization does not preclude either technical advances in design and engineering

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It is indicative of the extent to which memory of World War I dominated Hitler’s thinking about plans for the future that at one stage his plans for the annexation of Austria included a German-arranged assassination of either the German ambassador or the military attaché in that country, and that similarly, the German-arranged assassination of the German Minister to Czechoslovakia was thought of as an appropriate pretext for the attack on Czechoslovakia – both concepts obviously inspired by the role of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in precipitating World War I. In both instances other projects replaced these first thoughts.

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Sometimes the secret British–German contacts of 1939 are cited as a parallel to the German–Soviet negotiations. When compared, they reveal a fundamental and characteristic difference. The British specified that any Anglo-German agreement was possible only if Germany first demonstrated her good faith by taking a step back from her breach of the Munich agreement, that is, by freeing Czechoslovakia, and second, if she refrained from attacking Poland. The Soviets, on the other hand, specified that agreement would come if Germany agreed for the Soviet Union to secure large parts of Poland, all of Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, as well as a large part of Romania. The Soviet Union alone outside the Axis accepted the disappearance of Czechoslovakia and anticipated the disappearance of other countries; the British hoped to reverse the whole process of making independent countries disappear.

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Hitler’s temporary rapprochement with Poland had certainly not been popular in German government circles where an anti-Polish line was always preferred–and with great fervor.

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It must be recalled that one important factor that had restrained Italy in 1938 was no longer present. In the preceding year, the still continuing Spanish civil war opened up the possibility that a general war in Europe would lead to French and British intervention in Spain with dire effects for the substantial Italian contingent fighting with the Nationalists. The victory of Franco’s nationalists in the spring of 1939 had ended this assignment; from the perspective of Rome, there was no longer an expeditionary force hostage to the situation in Spain.

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The restoration of Czechoslovakia, if it had come to war in 1938, like that of Poland in 1939, was always discussed in London-in terms of the World War I fate of Serbia: overrun by Germany during the fighting, it had been restored as a result of military victory by the Allies on other fronts.

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FROM THE GERMAN AND SOVIET INVASIONS OF POLAND TO THE GERMAN ATTACK IN THE WEST:

September 1, 1939 to May 10, 1940

THE WAR AGAINST POLAND

The German plan for the invasion of Poland had been developed since the spring of 1939 and was greatly assisted by the very favorable geographical position Germany had always had, a position further improved by the territorial changes of early 1939. It was the intention of the Germans to combine surprise coups to seize special objectives at, or even before, the moment of attack with a sudden overwhelming attack on two fronts carried forward by the mass of the German army supported by most of the German air force.
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As Hitler had emphasized to his military leaders on August 22, it was Poland as a people that was to be destroyed; and therefore from the beginning it was assumed that massive slaughter of Poles and particularly the extermination of their political and cultural elite would both accompany and follow the campaign designed to destroy Poland’s regained independence. The possibility of some kind of subordinate puppet government in a portion of occupied Poland was temporarily left open, but any such concept would be dropped quickly: German policy made collaboration impossible for self-respecting Poles and any individuals still so inclined were turned away by the Germans in any case.

The planned surprise coups for the most part failed; even the peacetime sending of a warship with a landing party into Danzig could not force the quick surrender of the minute Polish garrison there, and the attempted seizure of the strategically important railway bridge over the Vistula at Tszew (Dirschau) was thwarted as Polish engineers blew up the great span.
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A portion of Poland’s navy succeeded in escaping the German effort to destroy it, but the major land offensives were crushingly effective.

The Polish government had faced four problems in contemplation of any German attacks, and all were probably insoluble under the circumstances. In the first place, until 1939 the assumption had been that the
1934 agreement with Germany made it safe to confine military planning to the contingency of a renewal of the conflict with the Soviet Union, a conflict ended by the Peace Treaty of Riga of 1921, which had left to Poland substantial territory that had belonged to her before the partitions of the eighteenth century, but that the Soviet government was likely to want to recover. As German demands on Poland in the winter of 1938–39 made it increasingly evident that the more immediate danger was from the West, not the East, Polish military planning had to prepare for a new threat, but in this it was affected by three other great difficulties.

First, there was the absence of modern military equipment, with no prospect of Poland either producing it herself or obtaining it by purchase. Germany’s headstart in rearmament made it impossible for Poland to buy–even had she had the necessary cash or credits–modern weapons elsewhere, while her own industries were not yet up to the production of the planes, tanks and artillery that would be needed to hold off a German attack. A second great difficulty lay in the puzzle of precisely what to defend against any German invasion. A concentration of Polish forces would expose most portions of the country to quick occupation; any attempt to defend the major industrial and population centers, on the other hand, practically guaranteed defeat at whichever points the Germans chose to attack with what would be overwhelming local superiority. The Polish general staff opted, on the whole, for the latter, broader defense strategy, with precisely the results that could be anticipated.

The final element in the Polish dilemma was that of timing: if Poland mobilized her forces as the danger in 1939 appeared more urgent, she would both damage her own fragile economy by the withdrawal of skilled labor from industry and simultaneously provide the Germans with propaganda opportunities for blaming Poland as responsible for the increase in tensions and the outbreak of any war that occurred. Alternatively, the government in Warsaw could postpone mobilization until the last moment, thereby keeping the economy functioning normally and warding off any blame for war, but the country would risk being caught by a German attack when not yet fully mobilized and prepared.

The Polish government opted for the latter alternative, and this option also would have the effect that could be anticipated. It meant that militarily the armed forces of the country were caught in the middle of mobilization and could be defeated all the more quickly; but the choice must be seen in its political and historical context. The years since 1914 had seen a vast public debate and an enormous controversial literature about the causes of the Great War and the responsibility for its outbreak. We have already seen how Hitler had concluded that the way to deal with this question was to pick the time for an attack, fake an incident at the
appropriate moment, and concoct a reasonable sounding set of demands to release to the public after war had started in order to consolidate the German home front and place the blame on the others. The Polish government, in part still hoping to avoid war altogether, in part at the urging of the Western Allies, took the opposite course of trying to avoid incidents and postponing mobilization, the sequence of mobilizations in 1914 having been a major element in the debate about the outbreak of that conflict.
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