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 Yalto 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 theetre.
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 attache in Moscow around midnight of September 16, 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 numhad only about fifty subbers of Czech tanks of limited value; and the navy marines ready for action. Worst of all, the Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer 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 A well-trained soldiers, with More armored divisions than 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 roomed 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-mache 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 thin knife-edge of fully motorized armored divisions. Our important ground advances were made by
infantry masses on foot, exploiting the breakdown of communication" 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 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 foflaisttsmbiun buildings in ruins, with disease spreading, finally gave up its vain hopes of deliverance from the West, and surrendered.
Observations
From first to last, the Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer interference, which never ceased, the war effort was never, by professional standards, organized fully or properly.
The shabby farce 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 their 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 serious matters.* 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. Some day, 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.
The veracity of this statement is questionable.-V.H.
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.
GERMAN ARMY ATTACKS POLAND; CITIES BOMBED, PORT BLOCKADED; DANZIG IS ACCEPTED INTO THE REICH The New York Times, raising its voice to suit the occasion in its Teight-column once-in-a-generation italic headlines, topped the sprawl of newspapers on the desk under Hugh Cleveland's stocking feet. The other papers had headlines far larger and blacker than the Times's genteel bellow. Tilted back in his shirt-sleeves in a swivel chair, a telephone cradled between his head and left shoulder, Cleveland was making quick red crayon marks on a sheaf of yellow typing paper and sipping coffee as he talked. Eight years in the broadcasting business had made him deft at such juggling.
Though he looked the picture of busy contentment, his voice was angry.
His morning show, called Who's in Town, featured interviews with celebrities passing through New York. The war crisis, suddenly roaring into the Columbia Broadcasting System, had snatched off Cleveland's secretary to the newsroom for emergency service, and he was protesting to the personnel office, or trying to. He still could not get through to the manager.
A short girl in a flat black straw hat appeared in the open doorway.
Behind her, in the big central offices of CBS News, the hubbub over the war news was still rising. Secretaries were rattling at typewriters or scampering with papers, messenger boys ran with coffee and sandwiches, knots of men in shirt-sleeves gathered at the chattering teletypes, and everybody appeared to be either shouting, or smoking, or both.
"Mr. Cleveland?" The girl's voice was sweet but shaky. Her awed round eyes made her look about sixteen.
Cleveland put his hand on the mouthpiece of his telephone. "Yes?"
"The personnel office sent me up to you."
"You? How old are you?"
"Twenty."
Cleveland appeared skeptical, but he hung up the telephone.
"What's your name?"
'Madeline Henry."
Cleveland sighed. "Well, okay, Madeline. If you're in the pool, you must know the ropes. So take off that cartwheel and get started, okay?
First get me another cup of coffee and a chicken sandwich, please.
Then there's tomorrow's script"-he rattled the yellow sheets-"to be typed over."
Madeline could bluff no further. She was in New York to buy clothes.
The outbreak of the war had prompted her to walk into CBS to see if extra girls were needed. In the employment office a harried woman wearing yellow paper cuffs had thrust a slip at her, after a few questions about her schooling, and sent her up to Cleveland. "Talk to him. If he likes you, we may take you on. He's screaming for a girl and we've got nobody to spare." Stepping just inside the door and planting her legs apart, taking off her hat and clutching it, Madeline confessed that nobody had hired her yet; that she was visiting New York, lived in Washington, had to go back to school, detested the thought of it, feared her father too much to do anything else, and had just walked into CBS on an impulse. He listened, smiling and surveying her with eyes half-closed. She wore a sleeveless red cotton frock and she had excellent color from a sailing weekend.
"Well, Madeline, what does it add up to? Do you want the job or not?"
"I was thinking-could I come back in a week or so?" Hi pleasant look faded. He picked up the telephone. "Get me Personnel again.
Yes, you come back sometime, Madeline."
She said, "I'll fetch you your coffee and sandwich right now. I can do that. I'll type your script today, too. Couldn't I work for you for three weeks? I don't have to go back to school until the twenty-second. My father will kill me when he finds out, but I don't care."
"Where's your father? In Washington?"
"He's in Berlin. He's the naval attache there."
"What?" Hugh Cleveland hung up the telephone and took his feet off the desk. "
Your father is our naval attache in Nazi Germany?"
'that's right." 'Imagine that. So! You're a Navy junior." He threw a five-dollar bill on the desk. "All right. Get me the sandwich, Madeline, please. White meat, lettuce, pepper, mayonnaise. Black coffee. Then we'll talk some more.
Buy yourself a sandwich too."
"Yes, Mr. Cleveland."
Holding the bill, Madeline rushed into the outer hall and stood there dazed. Having heard the Who's in Tourn program a few times, she had at once recognized Cleveland's peculiarly warm rich voice; a real broadcaster, with his own program, and all at once she was working for him.
That was wartime for you! A girl swishing by with a bag of food told her where to buy sandwiches. But twenty chattering girls swarmed at the takeout counter of the luncheonette off the lobby. She went out on Madison Avenue and stood blinking in the warm sunshine. The New York scene was normal. Crowds marched on the sidewalks; cars and buses ed both ways in a stench of fumes; people carried packages into and stream out of stores and looked in windows. The only novelty was that the news vendors with fresh stacks of afternoon papers were crying war.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 15