A World at Arms (14 page)

As already mentioned, the inclination to postpone mobilization was reinforced by advice to this effect from London and Paris. If such advice was heeded in Warsaw–to its own ultimate great cost–the political context in which Poland found herself was of the greatest importance. Only the firm support of Great Britain and France for Poland offered any real hope of either deterring Germany from attacking her at all or, alternatively, defeating Germany if the Third Reich did attack. Like Serbia or Belgium in World War I, a Poland battered and even largely occupied might recover her independence–and perhaps even enlarge her territories–with in a victorious Allied coalition; but only if, first, there was such a coalition, second, if it were clear to all that the attack on her was unprovoked, and third, if she had done whatever was possible with her limited means to contribute to the cause by fighting in her own defense.

It was, therefore, essential that Poland be seen as the victim of unprovoked aggression by the governments and public of Britain and France, and the diplomacy of Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck as well as the military posture of the Polish government have to be seen as designed to achieve such a situation. That meant restraint in the face of German provocation, a restraint which created the desired impression in London and Paris and which, as we now know, also greatly annoyed the Germans, who were desperate for politically plausible pretexts to inaugurate hostilities.
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At the same time, the Polish government would do what it could to defend against attack and contribute to the cause of an Allied victory over Germany. In July of 1939 the Polish code-breaking experts with the approval of their government turned over to the French and British duplicates of Polish reproductions of the German enigma machine used for encoding radio messages. By this step and related ones Poland made a major contribution to the whole Allied war effort, which has tended to be obscured by the excessive award of credit to themselves in French and British accounts of what came to be known as the “ultra” secret.
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The Polish armed forces would certainly fight as hard as they could, even in seemingly impossible situations.

There was some hope in Warsaw, more reasonable at the time than might appear in retrospect, that, with a French offensive in the West, which they had been promised in May 1939, forcing the Germans to divert substantial forces to their Western border, it would be possible for the Polish army to hold out in at least portions of the eastern parts of the country through the winter. Developments which will be reviewed subsequently dashed both hopes: the French did not attack in the West as they had promised, and the Soviet Union broke its non-aggression pact with Warsaw and invaded Poland from the east. Under these circumstances, Polish forces would be defeated in their home country, but many members escaped across the borders of Hungary and Romania and joined others already in the West to form new military units. Later augmented by men released from Soviet camps, these units participated in the war until Allied victory in 1945.

But these developments were shrouded in a distant and desperate future as German forces struck on September 1.
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In the first days of the campaign, the German air force swept the skies clear of what few modern planes the Polish air force could deploy and thereafter devoted all its strength to supporting the invasion by the German army. In the north, units of the German 4th Army quickly covered the fifty miles separating Pomerania from East Prussia. While the 3rd Army lunged southeastward from East Prussia to reach first the Narev and then the Bug river in order to cut behind Warsaw and the Polish forces defending the central portions of the country, larger German forces struck northeastwards from Silesia and through German-occupied sections of Slovakia as the German 8th, 10th, and 14th Armies cut their way through the defending Polish forces into the heart of the country.

The first week of fighting saw the German invaders ripping open the main Polish defenses; during the second week the major Polish forces were surrounded or pushed back as German units fought in the outskirts of Warsaw. Polish counter-attacks as well as the break-out attempts of surrounded or almost surrounded Polish units repeatedly caused local defeats or delays for the Germans, while some of the isolated Polish garrisons fought on bravely in the face of overwhelming odds. Polish units in and around Warsaw resisted fiercely and effectively, but the signs of defeat were all too obvious. The Polish government had to evacuate the capital and would eventually cross the border into Romania; but even before this final step, the mechanism of control over the armed forces of the state was in terrible disarray, a disarray not only due to the speed of the German advance and the evacuation of the capital but also to the bombing of the Polish transportation system with its few, often single-track, railways. At the time when Poland was supposed to receive
the relief of a French offensive in the West, which had been promised for the fifteenth day after French mobilization at the latest, she instead found herself invaded by the Soviet Union from the east.

The Soviet and French policies behind these developments deserve and will receive separate description; here they must first be seen in the role they played in the crushing of Polish resistance. From the German point of view, the most rapid possible defeat of Poland was seen as enormously important. Certainly concern over the deteriorating weather in the late fall was a major element in this, but this was by no means the only factor. From the military perspective, the quicker the victory, the less likely effective support of or supplies to Poland could be provided by anyone. The quicker the German victory the more likely a return to the original concept of separating the attack on Poland from the attacks in the West for which it was to provide a quiet Eastern Front. But even if speedy victory did not serve that purpose, it would in any case enable the German government to redeploy its forces to the Western Front in case of any dangerous developments there. This desire for speed not only influenced the German conduct of military operations, but must be seen as a major factor in German diplomatic maneuvers during the first days of the war. Berlin made a concerted effort to enlist as many allies as possible in the attack on Poland, hoping thereby to hasten the victory and perhaps isolate the campaign in the East by a new temporary settlement from the war in the West for which additional preparation would be useful.

The Germans not only used the territory of the puppet state of Slovakia
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as a base for attacking Poland from the south but urged the regime installed there to take a formal part in the war. The government of Joseph Tiso agreed to go beyond the use of its territories to an active role for its German-drilled soldiers in the attack on Poland, a policy rewarded by Germany with some 300 square miles of Poland, much of which had once been included in Czechoslovakia and were in the part of Poland allocated to Germany by the Nazi–Soviet Pact–a shrewd German move designed both to speed up the campaign and to give Slovakia a vested interest in whatever new arrangements Germany might wish to establish in the defeated country.
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The destruction of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 had not only brought German domination of Slovakia but had also assured Hungary a common border with Poland, when Budapest had been instructed by the government in Berlin to occupy the eastern extremity of Czechoslovakia, Ruthenia or the Carpatho-Ukraine.
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Here too the Germans tried hard in September 1939 to bring another ally into the war on Poland. They asked the Hungarian government to allow German troops and
supplies to move across Hungarian territory, dangling pieces of Poland in front of their eyes as bait.
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The government in Budapest had territorial claims on Romania, not Poland, and had long looked on Poland as a potential ally in the future, as Magyars and Poles had considered each other friends in the past. They were at this time also very much concerned that joining Germany would mean war with Britain and France as well as Poland. To the annoyance of Germany, Hungary remained neutral, and by permitting numerous Poles to escape across its territory hardly endeared itself to Berlin; but there was at the moment little the German government could do but growl.

Another potential but equally unwilling ally in the war on Poland was less fortunate. In the hope of making the Polish cause look utterly futile, the Germans tried hard to secure the participation of Lithuania in the conflict. Here they thought themselves in an especially good bargaining position. Although once joined by a personal union into one dynastically united state, Lithuania and Poland in the years of their new independence since 1918 had been anything but friends. The two countries both claimed the city of Vilna and the territory surrounding it; and since Vilna had long been the capital of Lithuania in prior centuries, its inclusion in Poland as well as the deliberate bullying of the smaller by the larger country, especially in 1938, seemed to open up the possibility of recruiting Lithuania as a German ally. Furthermore, in their secret pre-war negotiation with the Soviet Union, the Germans had not only secured Soviet agreement to the incorporation of Lithuania into the German sphere of influence but also to its expansion by Vilna (Vilnius) and adjacent territory out of the part of Poland otherwise scheduled for inclusion in the Soviet sphere. The government of Lithuania, however, refused to attack its neighbor, hoping to remain neutral and reluctant to join a Nazi Germany at war with Britain and France. The German government was extremely annoyed; and in this case, unlike that of Hungary, would soon find a way of punishing the Lithuanians for dragging their feet when Berlin sounded the trumpet. By the end of September, Lithuania had been traded to the Soviet Union for an added portion of Poland.
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From the very beginning, the ally most sought by Berlin in the attack on Poland was of course the Soviet Union. First Prussia and then the new Germany of 1871 had looked to Russia as a partner in the reduction, then the elimination and thereafter the suppression of any new independent Poland. Its revival at the end of World War I had altered the current details but not the fundamental perceptions of policy toward Poland in Berlin and Moscow. No substantial elements in either government ever recognized the possibility that a sovereign Poland, however
unpleasant that country’s revival might be, provided each with a measure of protection against the other while itself unable to threaten either, once both had recovered from the upheavals of the revolutionary period 1918–23. Hatred of Poland was a major factor in bringing Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union together.
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It influenced both the policies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia toward each other as well as their conduct in Poland once they had again divided it between themselves.

In the early years of National Socialist rule in Germany the government had, at the personal insistence of Hitler and against the preference of his diplomatic and military advisors, put the anti-Polish line in abeyance while pursuing other aims. Precisely because Hitler’s long-term aims were so vastly greater than could be satisfied at the expense of Poland, he was more willing to make tactical concessions in German–Polish relations for a short time. During that time, a Germany which had no common border with the Soviet Union and had temporarily shelved the anti-Polish line could easily wave off the approaches for a rapprochement with Moscow which Stalin made periodically.
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Once the Poles had refused to subordinate themselves to Germany so that the latter could feel safe in attacking in the West, however, this situation changed. Now the Soviet Union was again a plausible ally against Poland, and the hints of a possible alignment emanating from Moscow had accordingly met with a very different reception in 1939.

The implications for the conduct of war of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939, with its secret provisions for dividing Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe between the two powers, require additional examination at this point. The German desire for speed in the operations against Poland meant that the earlier Soviet intervention into the fighting came, the better it would be. The original dividing line agreed upon on August 23 would bring the Red Army to the east bank of the Vistula in the suburbs of Warsaw, and since the
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Soviet forces would have to move to the demarcation line was greater than that which faced the Germans, an early Soviet start could only be welcomed in Berlin. While most Polish forces faced the Germans, the road and railway networks in the area to be occupied by the Soviet were worse, a transportation problem accentuated by the change of railway gage at the Polish-Soviet frontier.

Under these circumstances, the German government began urging the Soviet Union to move into Poland in the first days of hostilities and repeated this request ever more insistently thereafter. Berlin stressed the speed of the German advance and the rapid collapse of Polish resistance as well as the problems created by the retreat of Polish formations eastward. The Germans pointed out that they would either have to
pursue Polish forces further and further into the area allocated to the Soviet Union or see new regimes established there. Surely the Russian government would wish to move quickly into the territory it was scheduled to obtain.
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From the perspective of Moscow the situation did not look quite so simple. The evidence suggests that the Soviet government anticipated neither the rapid German initial advance nor the subsequent holding out of Polish forces in the Warsaw area; the former misjudgement led them to think they had more time to prepare than was actually the case, while the latter appears to have reinforced Stalin’s concern about any Polish survival in a rump state should one be created.

The Soviet leader’s initial inclination to delay an invasion of Poland from the east was reinforced by several considerations. In the first place, there was the need to mobilize Soviet armed forces for the attack; a process which would take some time, especially since some of the forces to be employed came from the interior portions of the U.S.S.R.
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and some had to be brought from the Far East.
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Secondly, Stalin appears to have placed considerable emphasis on so arranging the timing of the attack as to make it plausible domestically and externally as a measure for the recovery of lands in large part previously included in Russia at a time when the Polish state had effectively ceased to exist, rather than as an act of aggression imitating and joining the German one. Finally, the fighting between Soviet and Japanese troops on the border of their respective puppet states was still in progress, though a decisive Soviet victory there had come with an offensive on August 20. The Soviet government indicated to Tokyo that it wanted to settle the incident on August 22 (the day before von Ribbentrop’s arrival in Moscow).
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