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. 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.2 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 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.
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—within 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 Joseph 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.
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.5 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 i.6 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, loth, and i4th 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.
UNICEF the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund
