Winds of War (18 page)

For Chamberlain’s defiant move, like the weak pawing of a cornered rabbit, only spurred the Führer to greater boldness. Like lightning, down came the word to our staff to prepare an operation order for an attack on Poland in the fall. Working day and night, with Case Red as a basis, we prepared the plan. On April 5 it went to the Führer under a new code name:
Fall Weiss
– “Case White.”

Historic Ironies

Case White, the plan for smashing Poland, shaped itself on a few major and classic geographical facts.

Poland is a plain: a larger Belgium with few natural obstacles and no real boundaries. The Carpathian Mountains to the south are breached by the Jablunka pass, affording ready access from Czechoslovakia to Cracow and the Vistula. The rivers Vistula, Narew, and San present problems, but in the summer and early autumn the water levels are low and the rivers are in many places fordable by motor vehicles and horses.

Poland is itself a political freak, reflecting its formless geography. It has no permanent shape, no continuity of regime or national purpose. It has several times disappeared from the map of Europe, divided up as provinces of stronger and abler powers. Today it is again little more than a Russian province. At Yalta the Allied leaders moved the entire crude geographical parallelogram called “Poland” about two hundred kilometers to the west, to the Oder-Neisse Line. This was done at the expense of Germany, of course, giving to Poland cities, territories, and populations which had been German from time immemorial, and causing the tragic uprooting and resettling of millions of people. Such is war: to the victor, the spoils; to the defeated, the costs. The Second World War began over the question of Polish territorial integrity, but Poland has not recovered, and will never recover, its 1939 borders. It has lost that part of its territory which, through the deal between Hitler and Stalin, was absorbed into the Soviet Union. England went to war with us over the question of these borders, dragging in France and eventually the United States. At Yalta, England and the United States endorsed forever Hitler’s gift of Polish territory to the Soviets. Such are the ironies of history.

The Polish strategic situation in 1939 was poor. The entire land could be regarded as a weak salient into Germany and German-occupied territory, flanked by East Prussia to the north and Czechoslovakia to the south, and wholly flat and open to a thrust from Germany to the west. To the rear, in the east, the Soviet Union stood poised, newly linked to Germany through the nonaggression pact engineered by Ribbentrop.

The Fatal Pact

Insufficient attention is paid to the plain fact that this treaty, hailed at the time as a masterstroke, all but lost Germany the Second World War before a shot was fired. The alliance with Bolshevism (however temporary and tactical) was certainly a repudiation of the Dictator’s ideals, running counter to the German national spirit; but this might have been allowable had the tactical advantage proved real. In politics, as in war, only success matters. But the contrary was the case.

This pact handed Stalin the Baltic states and about half of Poland, allowing the Slav horde to march two hundred kilometers nearer Germany. Two years later we paid the price. In December 1941, the gigantic drive of our Army Group Center toward Moscow – the greatest armed march in world history – was halted forty kilometers from its goal, with advance patrols penetrating within sight of the Kremlin towers. Had the German forces jumped off from a line two hundred kilometers nearer Moscow, they would have engulfed the Russian capital, deposed Stalin, and won the campaign before the first flake of snow fell on the Smolensk road. England certainly would have made peace then, and we would have won the war.

Regarded as a triumph of daring diplomacy even by our enemies, this treaty contained between its lines the two words,
finis Germaniae
. Seldom in history has there been such a political
coup de théâtre
. Seldom has one so disastrously backfired. Yet we of the Staff who ventured to express doubts at the time, or merely to convey with our eyes our mutual dismay at the news, were very much in the minority.

No member of the armed forces, including Hitler’s own chief of staff, Keitel, and the chief of operations, Jodl, knew of the secret protocol yielding half of Poland to the Bolsheviks. It was only when Stalin angrily telephoned Ribbentrop in the third week of the campaign, bitterly complaining about the advance of our Fourteenth Army into the southeast oil area, that the Wehrmacht received its specific chop lines, and retreated before the Russians, who airily rolled in without shedding a drop of their own, or of Polish, blood.

It was I who received at Supreme Headquarters the staggering telephone call from our military attaché in Moscow around midnight of September 15, informing me that the Russians were marching into Poland in accordance with a secret agreement Hitler had made in August. I immediately telephoned General Jodl with the news that the Russians were on the move. His response, in a tremulous voice most uncharacteristic of Alfred Jodl, was “Against whom?” So completely was the army in the dark.

In the last few days of August, as Case White preparations speeded up, Hitler tried to cash in on Ribbentrop’s big political surprise with a comedy of peace negotiations. In the spring, in a calmer mood, he had stated with his usual prescience that the Western powers would not again permit a bloodless victory, that this time there would be battle. We had prepared Case White with feelings varying from misgivings to a sense of doom, because our combat readiness was much below par for a major conflict. We were so low on tanks, to cite just one key item, that even for Case White we had to deploy large numbers of Czech tanks of limited value; and the navy had only about fifty submarines ready for action. Worst of all, the Führer was far from ordering full wartime production, even then, for he knew it would be an unpopular move. All in all we were going out on very thin ice.

The staff placed no hope in the peace talks. Hitler, however, while going through his planned histrionics with Henderson, apparently got carried away by his own playacting and the constant assurances of Ribbentrop; he began to believe that England might be bluffed once more and might present us with another Munich. At Supreme Headquarters, in the first days of September, nobody could fail to notice that when the Western declarations of war came through, the Führer was surprised and shaken. But there was nothing to do at that point but execute Case White.

Strategy

The plan called for simultaneous flank attacks from the north and the south, aimed to cut off the Corridor and proceed to Warsaw. The Poles elected to stand all along their indefensible border, thus inviting quick fragmenting, encirclement, and reduction. They should have prepared their main defenses along the lines Vistula-Narew-Bug. This would have prolonged hostilities, and encouraged the British and French to attack our weak holding force in the west. This could have been devastating. Adventurous authoritarian leadership had exposed the German people to a bad risk. However, the gods smiled on us at the time, the Poles proved as inept in their strategic dispositions as they were brave in the field, and the French sat in their camps and fortresses, scarcely firing a shot.

Nowadays German commentators write of the “miracle” of the French static defense in September 1939, which made the Polish blitzkrieg possible. It is hard to see where the “miracle” lay. French military thinking was defensive and positional, because such thinking had triumphed in 1918. They had an obsession with the theoretical ten-to-one advantage of the defense in mechanized warfare. There is no doubt that in September France could have sent millions of well-trained soldiers, with more armored divisions that the Wehrmacht had in Poland, crashing out of the Maginot fortresses, or via the northern plain through Belgium and Holland, into our paper-thin western formations, and rolled to Berlin. But the will was not there. Adolf Hitler’s political and military gamble on this vital point proved brilliant. Of all his opponents, he throughout best understood and anticipated the French.

Victory

The Polish breakthrough phase took approximately four days. Complete tactical surprise was achieved because the hypocritical Polish politicians, though wholly aware of the danger, kept giving their people false assurances. The Polish air force of almost a thousand planes was destroyed on the ground. Thereafter the Luftwaffe freely roamed the skies. Polish ground resistance was moderate to heavy, and our commanders in the field had to admire the bold cavalry dashes against tank formations. Perhaps the legend is true that the Polish horsemen were told by their government that our tanks were papier-mâché dummies! In that case, they were soon sadly disabused. The contrast between the possibilities of mechanized warfare and classic military tactics was never more strikingly demonstrated than in these ineffectual charges of the Polish horsemen against iron tanks.

Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht too was operating with but a think knife-edge of fully motorized armored divisions. Our important ground advances were made by infantry masses on foot, exploiting the breakdown of communications, the panic, and the disarray of battle lines created by the narrow panzer thrusts. And while the Luftwaffe played a strong support role, it was the horse-drawn artillery massed outside Warsaw, and not the air bombardment, that in the end knocked out the city’s capacity to resist and brought the eventual surrender. This heavy reliance on horses betrayed our serious lack of combat readiness for world war.

By September 21 the city was ringed by Wehrmacht forces; and the news from the outside was of Polish soldiers being taken prisoner in the hundreds of thousands, of one pocket after another being liquidated, of a total collapse of the front, of a national government pusillanimously fleeing to Rumania. Yet it was not until September 27 that the city, under a round-the-clock rain of shells and bombs, without food, water, or light, with many of its buildings in ruins, with disease spreading, finally gave up its vain hopes of last-minute deliverance from the West, and surrendered.

Observations

From first to last, the Führer and his propagandists played down the Polish campaign as a local police action, a “special task” of the Wehrmacht. Hitler personally cancelled many sections of Case White dealing with rationing, troop mobilization, and transport, with one aim in mind: to soften the impact on the German people. This political meddling represented a considerable setback to operations, and precious months passed before the damage was righted. I may say here, that due to similar Party and Führer interference, which never ceased, the war effort was never, by professional standards, organized fully or properly.

The shabby force enacted at our radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border on the night of August 31 – the pretense that Polish soldiers had crossed over to attack the station and been repulsed, the dressing of condemned political prisoners in Polish uniforms and the scattering of the bullet-riddled bodies near the station, as an excuse for starting the invasion – none of this trivial humbug was known to the Wehrmacht. We were irrevocably on the march toward Poland seventy-two hours earlier. I myself did not learn of the incident until the Nuremberg trials; I was too busy at the time with more serious matters.* (*
The veracity of this statement is questionable. – V.H
.) Himmler was probably responsible.

Poland in 1939 was a backward and ill-informed dictatorship of reactionary colonels and politicians with fantastic territorial aims, a government extremely brutal to minorities (especially the Ukrainians and the Jews) and unjust and mendacious to its own people; a government that pounced like a hyena on Czechoslovakia at the Munich crisis and tore a province from that country in its hardest hour; a government that clumsily played a double game with Germany and the Soviet Union for twenty years; and to the last tried to talk and act like a major military power when it was in fact as weak as a kitten. It was to support this reactionary, bluffing bigoted dictatorship that the democracies embarked on the Second World War. That government quickly and ignominiously fell to pieces and disappeared forever. But the war went on, and its starting point was soon all but forgotten. Someday, however, sober historians must again give the proper emphasis to these absurd paradoxes that governed the provoking of the world’s biggest war.

The final absurdity of this inept start to a terrible global struggle was that Czechoslovakia, betrayed by England in 1938, did not fight, and in the whole war period lost less than one hundred thousand people. Poland, supported by England in 1939, fought and lost almost six million dead (though about half of these were Jews). Both countries ended up as Communist puppets under the heel of the Soviet Union. Which government then was the wiser, and which people the more fortunate? When great powers fall out, small powers do well to bow to the storm wind, in whichever direction it blows strongest. That was what the Poles forgot.

____________

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
: The reader will have to grow used to the German habit of blaming other countries for getting themselves invaded by Germans. This note recurs throughout General von Roon’s book, as through most of their military literature. Officers raised under the General Staff system apparently lost the power to think in other terms. Roon’s discussion of the Polish government and the British guarantee are the telling passages in his preliminary sketch of Case White. –V.H.