The Poles were confident; they were overconfident; they were eager for battle, buoyed by Radio Warsaw, which played the national anthem, Chopin, and martial music, over and over. By the standards of 1920, when Poles had last seen action—against the Bolsheviks—they possessed a fine army: two million men under arms, with another million hurrying to the front. Twelve splendid brigades of horse cavalry were the pride of Poland. But they had only one armored brigade. Its tanks were obsolete. So were the air force’s warplanes. And the battle plan of Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly was a bad Polish joke. Since the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia had left the Poles with an immensely long frontier, it would have been prudent—it would have been sane—to assemble farther back. Instead, Rydz-Smigly decided to fight on the frontier, with no reserves behind his men and no defensive preparations. Their defense, he told incredulous military attachés from the Allied embassies, would be the counterattack.
Indulging his national pride, which his troops shared, over a third of his troops were concentrated in the Polish Corridor, exposed to Germans attacking from both east and west. Because of this stratagem, tracts more vital to Poland’s defense were left thinly manned. Perhaps the mind-set of the Polish military on the eve of battle is best illustrated by Rydz-Smigly’s high hopes for one unit, the crack Pomorska Cavalry Brigade. As the spearhead of Guderian’s First Panzer Division appeared in the valley below, white-gloved officers signaled trumpeters, who sounded the charge. Down the slope rode the Pomorskas, sabers gleaming, pennons waving, moving at a steady gallop, their lances at the ready. And then, as they were preparing for the final irresistible surge, the Germans squeezed their triggers. The limbs, viscera, and skin—of men and horses, inextricably tangled—spewed gorily for over a mile. The few Polish survivors were taken prisoner. They were seen rapping hard on the tanks’ armor. Somebody had told them German armor, like Guderian’s mock panzers of 1933, was cardboard, and someone had been wrong.
Elsewhere Poles heard an ominous hum and looked up to see squadron after squadron of bombers—nearly four thousand of them—headed for Warsaw, where, by midafternoon, they annihilated the Polish air force, such as it was, on the ground. Poland’s one million reservists never reached their units; the Luftwaffe blew up the railroad stations where they waited, or the trains they had already boarded. Then it bombed radio stations, bridges, factories, barracks, and public buildings. Before heading home to the Reich the bombers sowed incendiary and high-explosive bombs among the densest concentrations of civilians, including children’s playgrounds. Farmers who had never held a weapon larger than a shotgun saw rapid-firing, self-propelled guns rolling down the rutted dirt roads at forty miles an hour. What they did not see, and would not have believed if they saw it, was the intricate communications net—telegraph, telephone, and radio—which coordinated the huge juggernaut.
The Polish soldiers on the frontier, each standing in front of a single hastily strung strand of barbed wire, each assuming that the high-level, Warsaw-bound bombers had been the entire Luftwaffe, were in for a shock. It was half the Luftwaffe. Now came the rest of it, meant for them, led by the Junkers 87 dive-bombers—the Stukas. The Stuka was more than a bomber; it was also an instrument of fear. Many had sirens attached to their undercarriages, and as the plane dove vertically, the ear-splitting siren convinced every Pole that it, and its bomb load, was headed straight for him. The Ju 87s left. It was time for the invading army to launch its ground attack. Guderian’s panzers came in the first wave—motorcycles followed by armored cars, then tanks, then trucks bearing artillery and infantry. To the Poles’ bewilderment, these Germans were not seeking a fight. They deliberately avoided pitting strength against strength, preferring to probe for soft spots. Eventually, given Rydz-Smigly’s dispositions, they would find one, lunge through, and fan out, destroying communications, machine-gunning Poles who thought themselves safe behind the front, and—here tactics merged with strategy—splitting the Polish army into fragments, each out of touch with the others. When the marshal’s headquarters tried to maneuver the troops, either the lines were dead or troop movement was impossible because panicky Polish civilians had choked the roads. This frenzy was encouraged by Nazis who, simulating Polish news programs with German commentators fluent in Polish, told the people to flee down the very roads Rydz-Smigly most needed. The Germans had enlarged the compass of military science. They had discovered how to exploit the very people defending armies are supposed to protect—the young, the aged, the women trembling at the prospect of rape—by encouraging them to ensnarl the defenders’ rear.
By Sunday, September 3, when England and France finally declared war on Germany, the fighting in Poland was in its third day, and the situation of the defenders was critical. The Poles now had no air force. The country’s railroad grid was in ruins. All bridges, except those which were useful to the Nazis, had been demolished. The Wehrmacht’s troops, healthy and strong, were led by some of the greatest generals in German history—Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian, Walter von Reichenau, Fedor von Bock, Paul von Kleist, Günther von Kluge, Georg von Küchler—all, indeed, except Erich von Manstein, who was planning the invasion of the Low Countries and France. Already the Polish frontier had been deeply penetrated by three great German drives, each advancing on Warsaw: eight divisions from East Prussia, twelve from Pomerania, and another seventeen—the main thrust, 886,000 men—heading straight for the capital from Silesia in the south. That Sunday, after the British declaration of hostilities but before France’s, Kluge’s 630,000 men had cut off the corridor and were advancing southeastward along both banks of the Vistula, toward the capital. All other commanders had reached their objectives and were engaged in complex envelopments, double envelopments, and encircling movements, incomprehensible to laymen in other countries, who nevertheless grasped their essence—that with the war less than seventy-two hours old, the defense of Poland was already disintegrating.
In London it was hot. Churchill could not recall a more pitiless heat wave. He wore a black alpaca jacket over a linen shirt and reflected that this was “indeed just the weather that Hitler wanted for his invasion of Poland. The great rivers on which the Poles had counted in their defensive plan were nearly everywhere fordable, and the ground was hard and firm for the movement of tanks and vehicles of all kinds.” The War Cabinet, he wrote, stood “around the Cabinet table,” witnessing the beginnings of “the swift and almost mechanical destruction of a weaker state according to Hitler’s method and long design.”62
It was hard to believe that the Poles actually had a quarter-million more men under arms than the invaders. “Each morning,” Churchill later recalled, “the CIGS, General Ironside, standing before the map, gave long reports and appreciations which very soon left no doubt in our minds that the resistance of Poland would speedily be crushed. Each day I reported to the Cabinet the Admiralty tale, which usually consisted of a list of British merchant ships sunk by the U-boats.” On Monday spearheads of Reichenau’s panzers—which had jumped off from Jablunkov Pass in the Carpathian Mountains only three days earlier—reached and crossed the Pilica, fifty miles behind the Polish frontier. On Tuesday, the day Dönitz’s submarines sank the Royal Sceptre and the Bosnia, Ironside told them that several panzer divisions had overrun the Poles’ defenses at Czestochowa—a breakthrough “that might result in Germany capturing Poland’s main industrial area” and the withdrawal of Rydz-Smigly’s army to the line of the Vistula. Even now, however, no one in the Cabinet Room envisaged the disappearance of organized Polish resistance. They were remembering how the great German offensive of 1914 had been stopped in the Battle of the Marne and wondering when and where the Poles would roll back the field gray tide. But this was not 1914, and the Vistula was not the Marne.63
London newspapers on September 4 reported another bombardment of Warsaw; civilian casualties were said to be heavy. Labour MPs, remembering Guernica, were calling for British action. So, within the government, was Churchill. That morning, at the second meeting of
the War Cabinet, he pointed out that the “main German effort” was against the Poles and proposed that “every means possible should be employed to relieve the pressure,” starting with an immediate attack on the Siegfried Line carried out by French infantry and the RAF. The rest of the War Cabinet agreed that such a move was “a vital necessity.”64
It was indeed. To do otherwise would be dishonorable; the world would conclude that pledges by His Majesty’s Government and the Third Republic were as worthless as Hitler’s. The first article of the Anglo-Polish treaty signed ten days earlier specified: “Should one of the contracting parties become engaged in hostilities with a European Power in consequence of aggression by the latter… the other contracting party will at once give the contracting party engaged in hostilities all the support and assistance in its power,” and the second paragraph stipulated that each country was committed to the use of force even in the absence of aggression, in the event of “any action… which clearly threatened, directly or indirectly, the independence of one of the contracting parties.”65
The rub was that Britain, an island, shared no border with Germany. It had the Royal Navy and the RAF, but the Poles had not been challenged at sea, and the limited range of aircraft then ruled out intervention by Britain-based warplanes in the skies over Poland. Poland needed an army, and England didn’t have one. On land, writes Telford Taylor, Britain was “still almost in the position of a nineteenth-century Asiatic state challenging with the traditional arms of the past a European power armed with modern artillery and machine guns.” In 1914 Churchill, as first lord, had ferried seven superbly trained British divisions across the Channel. He was preparing to repeat this feat, but it was impossible now; the men weren’t there; Britain’s standing army was so small as to be embarrassing. All the War Office could send now was four divisions. Winston noted that at best this could be called “a symbolic contribution.” He had been appalled to find that although England had been “the cradle of the tank in all its variants,” the “awful gap” in this symbolic contingent was “the absence of even one armoured division in the British Expeditionary Force.”66
The War Cabinet’s Land Forces Committee met September 7, on what Winston called a “sweltering afternoon,” at the Home Office with Hoare in the chair, and decided, after hearing the views of the army’s high command, to “forthwith begin the creation of a fifty-five division army,” hoping that “by the eighteenth month, two-thirds of this… would either already have been sent to France or be fit to take the field.” The Air Ministry protested; it planned to build an enormous air force in two or three years, and “the full army programme could not be realized in the time limits of two years without serious interference with the air programme.” That took a moment to sink in. The protester—a veteran civil servant who had been permanent under secretary to the Air Ministry when Winston was its minister between 1919 and 1920—was objecting to army expansion before 1942. Now, in 1939, it was too late to save Poland, but a gesture should be made. To leave the French army standing alone was unthinkable. London was blacked out; Britain could not tell when her turn would come, but expected a massive Luftwaffe raid at any time, and here were the service bureaucracies talking of three-year plans, five-year plans, unaware that by 1942 all London might be reduced to an unrecognizable, uninhabited scene of desolation. In a meeting of the full War Cabinet, Kingsley Wood repeated the Air Ministry argument: the RAF insisted upon priority; the army would have to wait. Churchill vigorously replied to this position and set down his thoughts in a secret memorandum: “I cannot think that less than twenty divisions by March 1, 1940, would be fair to the French army…. We must take our place in the Line if we are to hold the Alliance together and win the war.”67
It was a sensible point, but Chamberlain’s men had developed a habit of attributing the lowest motives to him. In his diary Hoare noted that one man had whispered to him, “He is writing his new memoirs,” and Oliver Stanley, president of the Board of Trade—in a reference to The World Crisis, Churchill’s history of the last war—said bitingly, “Why did he not bring his World War?” Chamberlain hesitated; he finally endorsed the recommendations of the Land Forces Committee, but the committee’s report contained some disquieting predictions. The French army, it said, would probably “require assistance” in equipping its men “after the first four months of the war.” And yet, the report went on to say that perhaps France could help in remedying certain of Britain’s deficiencies. Clementine Churchill, reading the War Office’s shopping list later, commented: “It shews the interminable distance we had to travel before we could fight.”68
Before England could fight she needed, not only troops and arms but also a government of fighting ministers, men prepared—as soldiers must be—to sacrifice everything, including their lives, toward a great objective, the destruction of Nazi Germany. Churchill was such a man. Despite his membership in the cabinet, however, he was virtually alone. The rest of the government was schizoid. Their faith had failed; they were like simple folk who have been told yesterday that the world would end today and have found the prophecy a fraud. Nevertheless, they remained evangelists. The appeasers were still devout, still hopeful that the shopworn messiah at No. 10 would be vindicated. But now England was at war, a war she could lose—would certainly lose if their advice prevailed.
Friday morning, September 8, the war was five days old, and in his briefing Ironside told the War Cabinet that the Poles were “fighting well and had not been broken.” Another War Office summary added that although the Poles were “not demoralized,” their movements were “much impeded by the overwhelming German superiority in the air and in armoured vehicles.” They wanted to know what their allies in the West were doing. The Air Ministry had already received a message from the Polish air attaché in London asking for the “immediate” bombardment of German industries and airports within reach of the RAF. He received no satisfactory reply. That same day Leo Amery approached Kingsley Wood and asked if the government was going to help Poland. Amery suggested dropping incendiary bombs on the Black Forest. “Oh, you can’t do that,” the air minister said, “that’s private property. You’ll be asking me to bomb the Ruhr next.” Essen’s Gusstahlfabrik, the flagship of the Krupp munitions works, should have been leveled already, Amery said, but Kingsley Wood told him that should he do so, “American opinion” would be alienated. In his memoirs Amery wrote that he “went away very angry.” Hugh Dalton raised the same question; Kingsley Wood replied that such a mission would be a violation of the Hague Convention, that the RAF must concentrate on “military objectives.”69
It was still His Majesty’s Government’s policy to avoid offending Germany; although Great Britain and the Third Reich were at war, Reith’s BBC was uncomfortable with criticism of the enemy regime. Reith, now minister of information, denied air time to eminent Englishmen on the ground that they were too critical of Germany. As a cabinet minister Hore-Belisha could not be denied BBC time, and in October he delivered a superb speech on British war aims. They were not fighting to reconstitute Czechoslovakia or Poland, he said: “We are concerned with the frontiers of the human spirit…. Only the defeat of Nazi Germany can lighten the darkness which now shrouds our cities, and lighten the horizon for all Europe and the world.” Hore-Belisha’s days were numbered. Next to Churchill he was the ablest member of the War Cabinet, advocating vigorous prosecution of the war; nevertheless, in January 1940 the prime minister asked for his resignation. Chamberlain wanted to offer him the Ministry of Information, but Halifax objected to the appointment; it would have a “bad effect among the neutrals,” he said, “because HB [is] a Jew.” Being a Jew was worse in Germany, of course, but under His Majesty’s Government at the time it was no character reference.70
On Wednesday, September 6, His Majesty’s Government assured the House of Commons that the Luftwaffe was bombing “only Polish military objectives.” Yet three days earlier the Warsaw government had informed HMG that twenty-seven towns had been bombed by Na
zi planes and over a thousand civilians killed. Edward Spears decided to raise in the House “the question of the lack of support we are giving the Poles,” but changed his mind when Kingsley Wood told him the reply would involve “questions of strategy” and to discuss them in public would be “most dangerous.” On Saturday, Beck cabled Raczyński, instructing him to raise the issue in Whitehall. On Monday, the Polish ambassador told Cadogan: “This is very unfair to us. The least that we can ask is, what are you prepared to do?” Cadogan promised him an answer by the end of the day. But Raczyński never heard from Cadogan, then or later.71
Chamberlain saw the growing anger in the House. He believed he fathomed it. “The Amerys, Duff Coopers, and their lot,” he wrote, “are consciously swayed by a sense of frustration because they can only look on.” He added: “The personal dislike of Simon and Hoare has reached a pitch which I find difficult to understand.” There was a great deal he did not understand; he was neither the first nor the last leader to lose his touch, his feeling for the temper of his people. Once war has been declared, the slate is wiped clean. A leader’s peacetime policies are forgotten, even those which led the country into a war it did not want, unless, of course, he is so unwise as to bring them up. Even after the fall of Poland, after Fleet Street had printed evidence of Nazi crimes in Poland—the random murders, then mass executions; the tortures and the seizure of Poles to work in German munitions factories—the prime minister seriously considered a negotiated peace with a Reich purged of the more extreme Nazis. He had a “hunch,” he wrote, that the war would end in the spring of 1940. “It won’t be by defeat in the field,” he wrote, “but by German realization that they can’t win and that it isn’t worth their while to go on getting thinner and poorer when they might have instant relief.” If negotiations were successful the Germans might “not have to give up anything they really care about.” One pictures Neville Chamberlain in hell, sitting at one end of a table with Satan at the other, each checking off items on his agenda, and a slow, awful expression of comprehension crossing the late P.M.’s face as he realizes that he has just traded his soul for a promise of future negotiations.72
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