The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  That night, as a thunderstorm raged outside, Chamberlain and Halifax summoned the French ambassador, Charles Corbin, to Downing Street. They rang Paris to speak to Daladier and Bonnet. The French government still did not wish to be hurried, even though Daladier had received full support for war credits in the Chambre des Députés a few hours earlier. (The very word ‘war’ was still superstitiously avoided in French official circles. Instead, euphemisms such as the ‘obligations de la situation internationale’ had been used throughout the debate in the Palais Bourbon.) Since Chamberlain was now convinced that his government would be brought down the next morning if a precise ultimatum was not presented, Daladier finally accepted that France could not delay any longer. He promised that his country’s ultimatum would also be delivered the following day. Chamberlain then summoned the British Cabinet. Shortly before midnight a final ultimatum was drafted and agreed. It would be delivered at 09.00 hours the next day by Sir Nevile Henderson in Berlin and would expire two hours later.

  On the morning of Sunday, 3 September, Sir Nevile Henderson carried out his instructions to the letter. Hitler, who had been reassured constantly by Ribbentrop that the British would back down, was clearly stunned. After the text had been read out to him, there was a long silence. Finally, he turned angrily to Ribbentrop and demanded: ‘What now?’ Ribbentrop, an arrogant poseur whose own mother-in-law had described him as ‘an extremely dangerous fool’, had long assured Hitler that he knew exactly how the British would react. Now he was left without an answer. After Coulondre had delivered France’s ultimatum later, Göring said to Hitler’s interpreter, ‘If we lose this war, may heaven have mercy on us.’

  After the thunderstorm of the night before, the morning in London was clear and sunny. There was no reply from Berlin to the ultimatum by the time Big Ben rang eleven times. Henderson in Berlin confirmed in a telephone call that he had also heard nothing. In the Chancery, a third secretary on his staff stopped the clock at eleven and pasted a note to its glass front saying that it would not be restarted until Hitler had been defeated.

  At 11.15 hours, Chamberlain made his broadcast to the nation from the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street. All over the country, people stood up when the national anthem was played at the end. A number were in tears. The prime minister had spoken both simply and eloquently, but many remarked on how sad and tired he sounded. Just after his brief talk had finished, air-raid sirens began their howling. People trooped down into cellars and shelters expecting waves of black aircraft overhead. But it was a false alarm and the all-clear soon sounded. A widespread and very British reaction was to put on the kettle for a cup of tea. And yet the reaction was far from universally phlegmatic, as a report by the research organization Mass Observation showed. ‘Nearly every town of any importance was rumoured to have been bombed to ruins during the early days of the war,’ it stated. ‘Planes had been seen by hundreds of eye-witnesses falling in flames.’

  Troops in three-ton army trucks crossing the city were heard to be singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, which despite its jolly tune reminded people of the horrors of the First World War. London was putting on its war apparel. In Hyde Park opposite Knightsbridge barracks, steam shovels began digging truckloads of earth to be poured into the sandbags which would shield government buildings. The King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace had changed from bearskins and scarlet tunics. They now wore steel helmets and battledress with knife-edge creases. Silver barrage balloons floated over the city, completely changing the skyline. Red pillar boxes had yellow patches of detector paint sensitive to poison gas. Windows were criss-crossed with strips of sticky paper to reduce the threat of flying glass. The crowds changed too, with many more uniforms and civilians carrying their gas-masks in cardboard cartons. Railway stations were packed with evacuee children, a luggage label tied to their clothes indicating their names and addresses, clutching rag dolls and teddy bears. At night, with the blackout imposed, nothing was recognizable. Only a few drivers ventured forth very cautiously with their car headlights semi-masked. Many simply sat at home listening to the BBC on the wireless behind blackout blinds.

  Australia and New Zealand also declared war on Germany in the course of the day. The British-controlled government of India did likewise, but without consulting any Indian political leaders. South Africa declared war three days later after a change of government, and Canada officially entered the war the following week. That night the British liner Athenia was sunk by the German submarine U-30. Out of the 112 lives lost, 28 were North Americans. Overlooked that day was Chamberlain’s less than enthusiastic decision to bring his greatest critic into the government. Churchill’s return to the Admiralty, over which he had presided at the start of the last war, prompted the First Sea Lord to signal all ships in the Royal Navy: ‘Winston is back!’

  There was little celebration in Berlin when the news of Britain’s declaration of war was announced. Most Germans were dazed and dejected by the news. They had counted on Hitler’s run of brazen luck, believing that it would give him victory over Poland without a European conflict. Then, despite all of Bonnet’s attempts to prevaricate, the French ultimatum (whose text still avoided the dreaded word ‘war’) expired at 17.00 hours. Although the prevailing attitude in France was the resigned shrug of il faut en finir–‘it must be got over with’–the anti-militarist left seemed to agree with defeatists on the right that they did not want ‘to die for Danzig’. Even more alarmingly, some senior French officers began to convince themselves that the British had pushed them into the war. ‘It’s to present us with a fait accompli,’ wrote General Paul de Villelume, the chief liaison officer with the government, ‘because the English fear we might go soft.’ Nine months later he was to bring a strongly defeatist influence to bear on the next prime minister, Paul Reynaud.

  News of the double declaration of war nevertheless produced scenes of fierce joy in Warsaw. Unaware of French doubts, cheering Poles gathered in front of the two embassies. The national anthems of the three Allies were played on the wireless. A wild optimism convinced many Poles that the promised French offensive would rapidly turn the course of the war in their favour.

  There were, however, uglier scenes in other areas. Some Poles turned on ethnic German neighbours to exact revenge for the invasion. In the fear, anger and chaos caused by the sudden war, ethnic Germans were attacked in a number of places. On 3 September at Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), random firing against Poles in the streets led to a massacre in which 223 ethnic Germans died, although the official German history puts the figure at 1,000. Estimates of the total number of ethnic Germans killed throughout Poland vary from 2,000 to 13,000, but the most likely figure is around 6,000. Goebbels later inflated the total to 58,000 in an attempt to justify the German programme of ethnic cleansing against the Poles.

  On that first day of European war, the German Fourth Army attacking from Pomerania finally secured the Danzig Corridor at its broadest point. East Prussia was physically rejoined with the rest of the Reich. Leading elements of the Fourth Army also seized a bridgehead across the lower Vistula.

  The Third Army attacking from East Prussia pushed south-east towards the River Narew in its move to outflank Modlin and Warsaw. Army Group South, meanwhile, forced back the Łód and Kraków armies, inflicting heavy casualties. The Luftwaffe, having eliminated the bulk of the Polish air force, now concentrated on flying in close support to the Wehrmacht ground forces and smashing cities behind the Polish lines to block communications.

  German soldiers soon expressed a horror and contempt for the state of the poor Polish villages they passed through. Many seemed empty of Poles, but full of Jews. Soldiers described the villages as ‘appallingly dirty and very backward’. The reactions of German soldiers were even more intense when they saw ‘eastern Jews’ with beards and kaftans. Their physical appearance, their ‘evasive eyes’ and their ‘ingratiatingly friendly’ manner as they ‘respectfully took off their hats’ seemed to correspond much more closely to the caric
atures of Nazi propaganda in the viciously anti-semitic newspaper Der Stürmer than the integrated Jewish neighbours they had come across back in the Reich. ‘Every person’, wrote a Gefreiter (lance corporal), ‘who was not already a ruthless enemy of the Jews, must become one here.’ Ordinary German soldiers, not just members of the SS, took to maltreating Jews with gusto by beatings, cutting off the beards of elders, humiliating and even raping young women (despite the Nuremberg Laws against miscegenation) and setting fire to synagogues.

  Above all, soldiers remembered the warnings they had received about the dangers of sabotage and being shot in the back by francs-tireurs. If an isolated shot was heard, suspicion often fell on any Jews around, even though partisan attacks were far more likely to have come from Poles. A number of massacres appear to have been carried out after a nervous sentry opened fire, and everyone else joined in, with German troops sometimes shooting at each other. Officers were appalled by the lack of fire discipline, but seemed powerless to stop what they called this Freischärlerpsychose, an obsessive fear of being shot at by armed civilians. (They sometimes called it a Heckenschützenpsychose–literally an obsession with being shot at from hedgerows.) But few officers did much to stop the blind revenge exacted afterwards. Grenades would be lobbed into cellars, which was where families, rather than partisans, sheltered. Soldiers regarded this as legitimate self-defence, not a war crime.

  The German army’s long-standing obsession with francs-tireurs produced a pattern of summary executions and burned-down villages. Very few units bothered to waste time with legal procedures. In their view, Poles and Jews simply did not deserve such niceties. Some formations murdered civilians more than others. The SS division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, from which the Führer’s bodyguard came, appears to have been the worst. Much of the killing, however, was carried out behind the lines by the SS Einsatzgruppen, the Security Police and the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz militia (Ethnic German Self-Defence), who longed for revenge.

  German sources state that more than 16,000 civilians were executed during the five-week campaign. The true figure may be much higher, as it came close to 65,000 by the end of the year. Some 10,000 Poles and Jews were massacred in gravel pits near Mniszek by ethnic German militia, and another 8,000 in a wood near Karlshof. Houses and occasionally entire villages would also be torched as collective reprisals. Altogether over 500 villages and towns were burned to the ground. In some places, the line of German advance was marked at night by the red glow on the horizon from blazing villages and farms.

  Soon Jews as well as Poles hid themselves when German troops arrived. This made the soldiers even more nervous, since they became convinced not only that they were being watched from cellar windows and skylights, but that unseen weapons were pointed at them. At times it almost seems as if many soldiers longed to destroy what they saw as these insalubrious and hostile villages so that the infection they represented in their minds could not spread to neighbouring Germany. This did not, however, stop them from looting at every opportunity–money, clothes, jewellery, food and bedding. In yet another confusion of cause and effect, the hatred they encountered during their invasion somehow seemed to justify the invasion itself.

  The Polish army, although fighting often with desperate bravery, was severely handicapped not just by its obsolete weaponry, but above all by its lack of radios. The withdrawal of one formation could not be communicated to those on its flanks, with disastrous results. Marshal migy-Rydz, the commander-in-chief, was already convinced that the war was lost. Even if the French were to launch their promised offensive, it would come too late. On 4 September, an increasingly confident Hitler told Goebbels that he did not fear an attack from the west. He foresaw a Kartoffelkrieg there–a stationary ‘potato war’.

  The ancient university city of Kraków was taken on 6 September by the Fourteenth Army, and the advance of Rundstedt’s Army Group South continued apace as the Polish defenders stumbled in retreat. But three days later the army high command–the OKH or Oberkommando des Heeres–became concerned that the Polish armies might be evading the planned encirclement west of the Vistula. Two corps from Army Group North were therefore ordered to push further east, if necessary to the line of the River Bug and beyond to trap them on a second line.

  Near Danzig, the heroic Polish defenders of the Westerplatte positions, having run out of ammunition, were finally battered into submission on 7 September by Stukas and the heavy guns of the Schleswig-Holstein. The old battleship then turned north to help in the attack on the port of Gdynia, which held out until 19 September.

  In central Poland resistance had hardened as the Germans came closer to the capital. A column from the 4th Panzer Division reached the edges of the city on 10 September, but was forced to make a rapid retreat. The Poles’ determination to fight for Warsaw was shown by the concentration of their artillery on the east bank of the Vistula ready to fire into their own city. On 11 September, the Soviet Union withdrew its ambassador and diplomatic personnel from Warsaw, but the Poles still had little idea of the stab-in-the-back being prepared from the east.

  Elsewhere, German encirclements of Polish troops using their mechanized forces had already started to produce large numbers of prisoners. On 16 September, the Germans began a massive encirclement battle eighty kilometres east of Warsaw, having trapped two Polish armies in the fork of the Rivers Bzura and Vistula. Polish resistance was finally broken by massive Luftwaffe strikes on troop concentrations. Altogether around 120,000 prisoners were taken. The brave Polish air force, with just 159 old-fashioned fighters did not stand a chance against the sleek Messerschmitts.

  Any remaining Polish illusions of being saved by an Allied offensive in the west were soon dashed. General Gamelin, with the support of the French prime minister Daladier, refused to consider any move until the British Expeditionary Force had deployed and all his reservists were mobilized. He also argued that France needed to purchase military equipment from the United States. In any case French army doctrine was fundamentally defensive. Gamelin, despite his promise to Poland, shied away from any idea of a major offensive, believing that the Rhine Valley and the Germans’ Westwall line of defence could not be breached. The British were scarcely more aggressive. They called the Westwall ‘the Siegfried Line’: the one on which, according to their cheerful Phoney War song, they wanted to hang out their washing. The British felt that time was on their side, with the curious logic that a blockade of Germany was their best strategy, despite the obvious flaw that the Soviet Union could help Hitler procure whatever his war industries needed.

  Many British people felt ashamed at the lack of aggression shown to help the Poles. The RAF began flying over Germany, dropping propaganda leaflets, which led to jokes about ‘Mein Pamph’ and the ‘confetti war’. A bombing raid on the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven on 4 September had proved humiliatingly ineffective. Advance parties of the British Expeditionary Force landed in France the same day, and over the next five weeks a total of 158,000 men crossed the Channel. But there were no clashes with German forces until December.

  The French did little more than advance a few kilometres on to German territory near Saarbrücken. At first the Germans feared a major attack. Hitler was particularly concerned, with the bulk of his army in Poland, but the very limited nature of the offensive showed that this was no more than a token gesture. The armed forces high command–the OKW or Oberkommando der Wehrmacht–soon relaxed again. No troops had to be transferred. The French and British had failed in their obligations shamefully, especially since the Poles in July had already handed over to Britain and France their reconstructions of the German Enigma enciphering machine.

  On 17 September, Poland’s martyrdom was sealed when Soviet forces crossed its long eastern frontier in line with the secret protocol signed in Moscow less than a month before. The Germans were surprised that they had not moved before, but Stalin had calculated that if he attacked too soon the western Allies might feel obliged to declare war on the Soviet Un
ion as well. The Soviets claimed, with perhaps predictable cynicism, that Polish provocations had forced them to intervene to protect ethnic Belorussians and Ukrainians. In addition, the Kremlin argued that the Soviet Union was no longer bound by its non-aggression treaty with Poland because the Warsaw government had ceased to exist. The Polish government had indeed left Warsaw that very morning, but purely to escape before it was trapped by Soviet forces. Its ministers had to race for the Romanian frontier before their route was cut by Red Army units advancing from Kamenets-Podolsk in south-western Ukraine.

  The traffic jams of military vehicles and civilian motorcars backed up from the border posts were immense, but eventually the defeated Poles were allowed through that night. Almost all had taken a handful of earth or a stone from the Polish side before they left. Many were in tears. Several committed suicide. The ordinary Romanian people were kind to the exiles, but the government was under pressure from Germany to hand the Poles back. Bribery saved the majority from arrest and internment, unless the officer in charge was a supporter of the fascist Iron Guard. Some Poles escaped in small groups. Larger parties organized by the Polish authorities in Bucharest shipped out of Constanza and other Black Sea ports to make their way to France. Others escaped through Hungary, Yugoslavia and Greece, while a smaller number, who faced greater problems, made their way north into the Baltic states and then across to Sweden.