All Hell Let Loose

by Hastings, Max

  Pilot Franciszek Kornicki went to visit a wounded comrade in a Łód hospital: ‘It was a terrible place, full of wounded and dying men lying everywhere on beds and on the floor, in rooms and corridors, some moaning in agony, others lying silent with their eyes closed or wide open, waiting and hoping.’ Gen. Adrian Carton de Wiart, head of the British military mission in Poland, wrote bitterly: ‘I saw the very face of war change – its glory shorn, no longer the soldier setting forth into battle, but the women and children being buried under it.’

  On Sunday, 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany, in fulfilment of their guarantees to Poland. Stalin’s alliance with Hitler caused many European communists, compliant with Moscow, to distance themselves from their nations’ stand against the Nazis. Trades unionists’ denunciations of what they branded an ‘imperialist war’ influenced attitudes in many French and British factories, shipyards and coalmines. Street graffiti appeared: ‘Stop the War: The Worker Pays’, ‘No to Capitalist War’. Independent Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, a standard-bearer of the left, hedged his bets by calling for a struggle on two fronts: against Hitler and also against British capitalism.

  The secret protocols of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, delineating the parties’ territorial ambitions, were unknown in Western capitals until German archives were captured in 1945. But in September 1939, many citizens of the democracies perceived Russia and Germany alike as their foes. The novelist Evelyn Waugh’s fictional alter ego, Guy Crouchback, adopted a view shared by many European conservatives: Stalin’s deal with Hitler, ‘news that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities, brought deep peace to one English heart … The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ A few politicians aspired to separate Russia and Germany, to seek the support of Stalin to defeat the greater evil of Hitler. Until June 1941, however, such a prospect seemed remote: the two dictatorships were viewed as common enemies of the democracies.

  Hitler did not anticipate the British and French declarations of war. Their acquiescence in his 1938 seizure of Czechoslovakia, together with the impossibility of direct Anglo-French military succour for Poland, argued a lack of both will and means to challenge him. The Führer himself quickly recovered from his initial shock, but some of his acolytes were troubled. Goering, C-in-C of the Luftwaffe, his nerve badly shaken, raged down the telephone to Germany’s foreign minister, Ribbentrop: ‘Now you’ve got your fucking war! You alone are to blame!’ Hitler had striven to forge a German warrior society committed to martial glory, with notable success among the young. But older people displayed far less enthusiasm in 1939 than they had done in 1914, recalling the horrors of the previous conflict, and their own defeat. ‘This war has a ghostly unreality,’ wrote Count Helmuth von Moltke, an Abwehr intelligence officer but an implacable opponent of Hitler. ‘The people don’t support it … [They] are apathetic. It’s like a danse macabre performed on the stage by persons unknown.’

  American CBS correspondent William Shirer reported from Hitler’s capital on 3 September: ‘There is no excitement here … no hurrahs, no wild cheering, no throwing of flowers … It is a far grimmer German people that we see here tonight than we saw last night or the day before.’ As Alexander Stahlberg passed through Stettin with his army unit en route to the Polish border, he echoed Shirer’s view: ‘None of the brave mood of August 1914, no cheers, no flowers.’ The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig readily explained this: ‘They did not feel the same because the world in 1939 was not as childishly naïve and gullible as in 1914 … This almost religious faith in the honesty or at least the ability of your own government had disappeared throughout the whole of Europe.’

  But many Germans echoed the sentiments of Fritz Muehlebach, a Nazi Party official: ‘I regarded England’s and France’s interference … as nothing but a formality … As soon as they realised the utter hopelessness of Polish resistance and the vast superiority of German arms they would begin to see that we had always been in the right and it was quite senseless to meddle … It was only as a result of something that wasn’t their business that the war had ever started. If Poland had been alone she would certainly have given in quietly.’

  The Allied nations hoped that the mere gesture of declaring war would ‘call Hitler’s bluff’, precipitating his overthrow by his own people and a peace settlement without a catastrophic clash of arms in western Europe. Selfishness dominated the response of Britain and France to the unfolding Polish tragedy. France’s C-in-C, Gen. Maurice Gamelin, had told his British counterpart back in July: ‘We have every interest in the conflict beginning in the East and only generalising little by little. That way we shall enjoy the time we need to mobilise the totality of the Franco-British forces.’ Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam wrote petulantly in his diary on 2 September that the Poles ‘have only themselves to blame for what is coming to them now’.

  In Britain on 3 September, the air-raid alarm which sounded within minutes of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast announcement of war aroused mixed emotions. ‘Mother was very flustered,’ wrote nineteen-year-old London student J.R. Frier. ‘Several women in the neighbourhood fainted, and many ran into the road immediately. Some remarks – “Don’t go into the shelter till you hear the guns fire” – “The balloons aren’t even up yet” – “The swine, he must have sent his planes over before the time limit was up.”’ After the all-clear, ‘within minutes everyone was at their doors, talking quickly to each other in nervous voices. More talk about Hitler and revolutions in Germany … Most peculiar thing experienced today was desire for something to happen – to see aeroplanes coming over, and defences in action. I don’t really want to see bombs dropping and people killed, but somehow, as we are at war, I want it to buck up and start. At this rate, it will carry on for God knows how long.’ Impatience about the likely duration of the struggle proved an abiding popular sentiment.

  In remote African colonies, some young men fled into the bush on hearing that a war had started: they feared that their British rulers would repeat First World War practice by conscripting them for compulsory labour service – as indeed later happened. A Kenyan named Josiah Mariuki recorded ‘an ominous rumour that Hitler was coming to kill us all, and many people went fearfully down to the rivers and dug holes in the bank to hide from the troops’. The leaders of Britain’s armed forces recognised their unpreparedness for battle, but some young professional soldiers were sufficiently naïve merely to welcome the prospect of action and promotion. ‘The effect was one of exhilaration and excitement,’ wrote John Lewis of the Cameronians. ‘Hitler was a ludicrous figure, and Pathé newsreels of goose-stepping German soldiers were a cause of hilarious merriment … They were pretty good at dive-bombing defenceless Spanish villages, but that was about all. Most of their tanks were dummies made of cardboard. We had beaten a much more powerful Germany twenty years before. We were the greatest empire in the world.’

  Few people were as clear-thinking as Lt. David Fraser of the Grenadier Guards, who observed harshly: ‘The mental approach of the British to hostilities was distinguished by their prime faults – slackness of mind and wishful thinking … The people of democracies need to believe that good is opposed to evil – hence the spirit of crusade. All this, with its attempted arousal of vigorous moral and ideological passions, tends to work against that cool concept of war as [an] extension of policy defined by Clausewitz, an exercise with finite, attainable objectives.’

  Many British airmen anticipated their own likely fate. Pilot Officer Donald Davis wrote: ‘It was a marvellous autumn day as I drove up past the Wittenham Clumps and Chiltern Hills I knew so well, and I remember thinking that I should be dead in three weeks. I stopped to view the scene and ponder for a few minutes. [I decided that] were I to be faced by the same decisions I should still have decided to fly and join the RAF if I could.’ To Davis’s generation around the world, the privilege of being granted access to the sky fulfilled a supreme romant
ic vision, for which many young men were content to make payment by risking their lives.

  At Westminster, with monumental condescension a government minister told the Polish ambassador, ‘How lucky you are! Who would have thought, six months ago, that you would have Britain on your side as an ally?’ In Poland, news of the British and French declarations of war prompted a surge of hope, boosted by the new allies’ extravagant rhetoric. Varsovians embraced in the street, danced, cried, hooted car horns. A crowd gathered outside the British Embassy on Aleje Ujadowskie, cheering, singing, stumbling through a version of ‘God Save the King’. The ambassador, Sir Howard Kennard, shouted from the balcony: ‘Long live Poland! We shall fight side by side against aggression and injustice!’

  These tumultuous scenes were repeated at the French Embassy, where a crowd sang the Marseillaise. In Warsaw that night, a government bulletin announced triumphantly: ‘Polish cavalry units have thrust through the armoured German lines and are now in East Prussia.’ Across Europe, some enemies of Nazism embraced brief delusions. Mihail Sebastian was a thirty-one-year-old Romanian writer, and a Jew. On 4 September, after hearing news of the British and French declarations of war, he was naïvely astonished that they did not immediately attack in the west. ‘Are they still waiting for something? Is it possible (as some say) that Hitler will immediately fall and be replaced by a military government, which will then settle for peace? Could there be radical changes in Italy? What will Russia do? What’s happening to the Axis, about which there is suddenly silence in both Rome and Berlin? A thousand questions that leave you gasping for breath.’ Amid his own mental turmoil, Sebastian sought relief first in reading Dostoevsky, then Thomas de Quincey in English.

  On 7 September, ten French divisions moved cautiously into the German Saarland. After advancing five miles, they halted: this represented the sum of France’s armed demonstration in support of Poland. Gamelin was satisfied that the Poles could hold off Hitler’s Wehrmacht until the French rearmament programme was further advanced. Slowly, the Polish people began to understand that they were alone in their agony. Stefan Starzyski, a former soldier in Piłsudski’s Legion, had been Warsaw’s inspirational mayor since 1934, famous for making his city a riot of summer flowers. Now, Starzyski broadcast daily to his people, denouncing Nazi barbarism with passionate emotion. He recruited rescue squads, summoned thousands of volunteers to dig trenches, comforted victims of German bombs who were soon numbered in thousands. Many Varsovians fled east, the rich bartering cars for which they had no fuel to procure carts and bicycles. Sixteen-year-old Jew Ephrahim Bleichman watched long columns of refugees of his own race trudging wretchedly along the road from Warsaw. In his innocence, he did not grasp the special peril they faced: despite Poland’s notorious anti-Semitism, ‘I had never experienced anything more severe than name-calling.’

  Exhaustion among men and horses soon posed the main threat to the headlong German advance. Cavalryman Lance-Corporal Hornes found his mount Herzog repeatedly stumbling: ‘I called out to the section commander – “Herzog’s had as much as he can take!” I had scarcely got the words out when the poor beast fell to his knees. We’d gone 70km on the first day, then 60 on the second. And on top of that, we’d had the trek over the mountains with the advance patrol galloping … That meant we’d gone nearly 200km in three days without any proper rest! Night had long fallen, and we were still riding.’

  The horrors of blitzkrieg mounted: while Warsaw Radio played Chopin’s Military Polonaise, German bombing of the capital was now accompanied by the fire of a thousand guns, delivering 30,000 shells a day, which pounded its magnificent buildings into rubble. ‘The lovely Polish autumn [is] coming,’ fighter pilot Mirosław Feri wrote in his diary, recoiling from the irony. ‘Damn and blast its loveliness.’ A pall of grey smoke and dust settled over the capital. The royal castle, opera house, national theatre, cathedral and scores of public buildings, together with thousands of homes, were reduced to ruins. Unburied bodies and makeshift graves lay everywhere on the boulevards and in the parks; food supplies, water and electricity were cut off; with almost every window shattered, glass fragments carpeted pavements. By 7 September the city and its 120,000 defenders were surrounded, as the Polish army reeled back eastwards. Its chief of staff, Marshal Edward Rydz-migły, had fled Warsaw with the rest of the government on the second day of war. The army’s supply system and communications collapsed. Cracow fell almost without resistance on 6 September; Gdynia followed on the 13th, though its naval base held out for a further week.

  A counter-attack on 10 September by eight Polish divisions, across the Bzura river west of Warsaw, briefly disrupted the German offensive and took 1,500 prisoners. Kurt Meyer of the SS Liebstandarte acknowledged with mingled admiration and condescension: ‘The Poles attack with enormous tenacity, proving over and over again that they really know how to die.’ Contrary to legend, on only two occasions did Polish horsemen engage German tanks. One such episode took place on the night of 11 September, when a squadron hurled itself full gallop at the village of Kałuszyn, strongly held by the Germans. Out of eighty-five horsemen who attacked, only thirty-three afterwards rallied. The invaders used their own cavalry to provide reconnaissance and mobility, rather than for assaults. Lance-Corporal Hornes’s unit advanced in column, while two men rode ahead: ‘They would hurry at a gallop from one hill to the next, then wave the troop on. As another precaution, lone horsemen were sent out alongside us on the ridges of the hills. Suddenly, we saw new unfamiliar contours emerging from the thick dust-cloud: small, agile horses with bobbing heads, ridden by Polish Uhlans in their khaki uniforms, long lances held with one end in the stirrup leather and the other slung from the shoulder. Their shining tips bobbed up and down in time with the horses’ hooves. At the same moment, our machine-guns opened fire.’

  The Wehrmacht was vastly better armed and armoured than its enemies. Poland was a poor country, with only a few thousand military and civilian trucks; its national budget was smaller than that of the city of Berlin. Given the poor quality and small number of Polish planes compared with those of the Luftwaffe, it is remarkable that the campaign cost Germany 560 aircraft. Lt. Piotr Tarczyski’s artillery battery came under intense shellfire a mile from the river Warta. Himself a forward observer, he found his telephones dead; linesmen sent to investigate never returned. Without having summoned a single salvo, he was surrounded by German infantrymen who took him prisoner. Like many men in his predicament, he sought to ingratiate himself with his captors: ‘I can only compare my situation with that of someone finding himself unexpectedly faced by influential strangers upon whom he is completely dependent. I know I ought to have been ashamed of myself.’ As he was marched away to captivity, he passed several dead Polish soldiers; instinctively, he raised his hand to salute each one.

  Amid popular rage against the invaders of their homeland, there were scenes of mob violence which conferred no honour upon Poland’s cause. Mass arrests of ethnic Germans – supposed or potential fifth columnists – took place throughout early September. At Bydgoszcz on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 3 September, a thousand German civilians were massacred after allegations that they had fired on Polish troops. Some modern German historians claim that up to 13,000 ethnic Germans were killed during the campaign, most of them innocents. The true figure is almost certainly much lower, but such deaths provided a pretext for appalling and systemic Nazi atrocities towards Poles, and especially Polish Jews, which began within days of the invasion. Hitler told his generals at Obersalzberg: ‘Genghis Khan had millions of women and men killed by his own will and with a light heart. History sees him only as a great state-builder … I have sent my Death’s Head units to the east with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way shall we win the Lebensraum that we need.’

  When the Wehrmacht entered Łód, thirteen-year-old George lzak was bewildered by seeing women throw flowers at the soldiers, and offer them sweets and cigarettes. Children shoute
d ‘Heil Hitler!’ lzak wrote wonderingly: ‘Boys I was at school with waved swastika flags.’ Though these welcoming civilians were Polish citizens, they were of German ancestry and now flaunted their heritage. Goebbels launched a strident propaganda campaign to convince his people of the justice of their cause. On 2 September the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter announced the invasion in a double-deck headline: ‘The Führer proclaims the fight for Germany’s rights and security’. On 6 September Lokal-Anzeiger asserted: ‘Terrible bestiality of the Poles – German fliers shot – Red Cross columns mowed down – nurses murdered’. A few days later, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung carried the startling heading ‘Poles Bombard Warsaw’. The story stated: ‘Polish artillery of every calibre opened fire from the eastern part of Warsaw against our troops in the western part of the city.’ The German news agency denounced Polish resistance as ‘senseless and insane’.

  Most young Germans, graduates of the Nazi educational system, unhesitatingly accepted the version of events offered by their leaders. ‘The advance of the armies has become an irresistible march to victory,’ wrote a twenty-year-old Luftwaffe flight trainee. ‘Scenes of deep emotion occur with the liberations of the terrorised German residents of the Polish Corridor. Dreadful atrocities, crimes against all the laws of humanity, are brought to light by our armies. Near Bromberg and Thorn they discover mass graves containing the bodies of thousands of Germans who have been massacred by the Polish Communists.’

  On 17 September, the date on which Poles expected the French to begin their promised offensive on the Western Front, instead the Soviet Union launched its own vicious thrust, designed to secure Stalin’s share of Hitler’s booty. Stefan Kurylak was a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian Pole, living in a quiet village near the Russian border. Retreating Polish troops began to trickle down its dusty main street on foot and on horseback, some crying out urgently, ‘Run – run for your lives, good people! Hide anywhere you can, for they are showing no mercy. Hurry. The Russians are coming!’ Soon afterwards, the teenager watched a Soviet tank column clatter through the village: a child who lingered in its path, frightened and confused, was casually shot down. Kurylak took refuge in his family’s potato pit.