Читать книгу All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 8

While Adolf Hitler was determined to wage war, it was no more inevitable that his 1939 invasion of Poland precipitated global conflict than that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria did so in 1914. Britain and France lacked both the will and the means to take effective action towards fulfilment of security guarantees they had given earlier to the Poles. Their declarations of war on Germany were gestures which even some staunch anti-Nazis thought foolish, because futile. For every eventual belligerent save the Poles themselves, the struggle began slowly: only in its third year did global death and destruction attain the vastness sustained thereafter until 1945. Even Hitler’s Reich was at first ill-equipped to generate the intensity of violence demanded by a death grapple between the most powerful nations on earth.

During the summer of 1939 Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the old American South, enjoyed a surge of popularity in Poland. ‘Somehow, I considered it prophetic,’ wrote one of its Polish readers, Rula Langer. Few of her compatriots doubted that a conflict with Germany was imminent, because Hitler had made plain his commitment to conquest. Poland’s fiercely nationalistic people responded to the Nazi threat with the same spirit as the doomed young men of the Confederacy in 1861. ‘Like most of us, I believed in happy endings,’ a young fighter pilot recalled. ‘We wanted to fight, it excited us, and we wanted it to happen fast. We didn’t believe that something bad could really happen.’ When artillery lieutenant Jan Karski received his mobilisation order on 24 August, his sister warned him against burdening himself with too many clothes. ‘You aren’t going to Siberia,’ she said. ‘We’ll have you on our hands again within a month.’

The Poles paraded their propensity for fantasy. There was an exuberance in the café and bar chatter of Warsaw, a city whose baroque beauties and twenty-five theatres caused citizens to proclaim it ‘the Paris of eastern Europe’. A New York Times reporter wrote from the Polish capital: ‘To hear people talk, one might think that Poland, not Germany, was the great industrial colossus.’ Mussolini’s foreign minister, his son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano, warned the Polish ambassador in Rome that if his country resisted Hitler’s territorial demands, it would find itself fighting alone, and ‘would quickly be turned into a heap of ruins’. The ambassador did not dissent, but asserted vaguely that ‘some eventual success…might give Poland greater strength’. In Britain, Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers denounced as provocative Warsaw’s defiance in the face of Hitler’s threats.

The Polish nation of thirty million, including almost one million ethnic Germans, five million Ukrainians and three million Jews, had held borders established by the Treaty of Versailles for only twenty years. Between 1919 and 1921, Poland fought the Bolsheviks to assert its independence from longstanding Russian hegemony. By 1939 the country was ruled by a military junta, though the historian Norman Davies has argued, ‘If there was hardship and injustice in Poland, there was no mass starvation or mass killing as in Russia, no resort to the bestial methods of Fascism or Stalinism.’ The ugliest manifestation of Polish nationalism was anti-Semitism, exemplified by quotas for Jewish university entry.

In the eyes of both Berlin and Moscow, the Polish state owed its existence only to Allied force majeure in 1919, and had no legitimacy. In a secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet Pact signed on 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed Poland’s partition and dissolution. Though the Poles viewed Russia as their historic enemy, they were oblivious of immediate Soviet designs on them, and were bent instead upon frustrating those of Germany. They knew the ill-equipped Polish army could not defeat the Wehrmacht; all their hopes were pinned upon an Anglo-French offensive in the west, which would divide Germany’s forces. ‘In view of Poland’s hopeless military situation,’ wrote its London ambassador Count Edward Raczyski, ‘my main anxiety has been to ensure that we should not become involved in war with Germany without receiving immediate help from our allies.’

In March 1939, the British and French governments gave guarantees, formalised in subsequent treaties, that in the event of German aggression against Poland, they would fight. If the worst happened, France promised the military leadership in Warsaw that its army would attack Hitler’s Siegfried Line within thirteen days of mobilisation. Britain pledged an immediate bomber offensive against Germany. Both powers’ assurances reflected cynicism, for neither had the smallest intention of fulfilling them: the guarantees were designed to deter Hitler, rather than to provide credible military assistance to Poland. They were gestures without substance, yet the Poles chose to believe them.

If Stalin was not Hitler’s co-belligerent, Moscow’s deal with Berlin made him the co-beneficiary of Nazi aggression. From 23 August onwards, the world saw Germany and the Soviet Union acting in concert, twin faces of totalitarianism. Because of the manner in which the global struggle ended in 1945, with Russia in the Allied camp, some historians have accepted the post-war Soviet Union’s classification of itself as a neutral power until 1941. This is mistaken. Though Stalin feared Hitler and expected eventually to have to fight him, in 1939 he made a historic decision to acquiesce in German aggression, in return for Nazi support for Moscow’s own programme of territorial aggrandisement. Whatever excuses the Soviet leader later offered, and although his armies never fought in partnership with the Wehrmacht, the Nazi–Soviet Pact established a collaboration which persisted until Hitler revealed his true purposes in Operation Barbarossa.

The Moscow non-aggression agreement, together with the subsequent 28 September Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation, committed the world’s two principal tyrants to endorse each other’s ambitions and forswear mutual hostilities in favour of aggrandisement elsewhere. Stalin indulged Hitler’s expansionist policies in the west, and gave Germany important material aid – oil, corn and mineral products. The Nazis, however insincerely, conceded a free hand in the east to the Soviets, whose objectives included eastern Finland and the Baltic states in addition to a large share of Poland’s carcass.

Hitler intended the Second World War to start on 26 August, only three days after the Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed. On the 25th, however, while ordering mobilisation to continue, he postponed the invasion of Poland: he was shocked to discover both that Mussolini was unwilling immediately to fight beside him, and that diplomatic communications suggested Britain and France were serious about honouring their guarantees to Warsaw. Three million men, 400,000 horses and 200,000 vehicles, and 5,000 trains advanced towards the Polish frontier while a last flurry of futile exchanges took place between Berlin, London and Paris. At last, on 30 August, Hitler gave the attack order. At 2000 next evening, the curtain rose on the first, appropriately sordid, act of the conflict. Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks of the German Sicherheitsdienst (security service) led a party dressed in Polish uniforms, and including a dozen convicted criminals dismissively codenamed ‘Konserwen’ – ‘tin cans’ – in a mock assault on the German radio station at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. Shots were fired; Polish patriotic slogans were broadcast across the airwaves; then the ‘attackers’ withdrew. SS machine-gunners killed the ‘tin cans’, whose bloodstained corpses were arranged for display to foreign correspondents as evidence of Polish aggression.

At 0200 on 1 September, the Wehrmacht’s 1st Mounted Regiment was among scores roused in its bivouacs by a bugle call – some German units as well as many Polish ones rode horses to battle. The squadrons saddled, mounted, and began to move towards their start line alongside clattering columns of armour, trucks and guns. The order was given: ‘Muzzle caps off! Load! Safety catches on!’ At 0440, the big guns of the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, anchored in Danzig harbour for a ‘goodwill visit’, opened fire on the Polish fort at Westerplatte. An hour later, German soldiers tore down crossing poles on the western frontier, opening the way for leading elements of the invasion force to pour forward into Poland. One of its commanders, Gen. Heinz Guderian, soon found himself passing his family’s ancestral estate at Chelmno, where he had been born when it formed part of pre-Versailles Germany. Among his soldiers, twenty-three-year-old Lt. Wilhelm Pruller expressed the euphoria that suffused the army: ‘It’s a wonderful feeling now, to be a German…We’ve crossed the border. Deutschland, Deutschland über alles! The German Wehrmacht is marching! If we look back, or in front of us, or left or right, everywhere the motorised Wehrmacht!’

The Western Allies, heartened by knowledge that Poland boasted the fourth largest army in Europe, anticipated a struggle lasting some months. The defenders deployed 1.3 million men against 1.5 million Germans, with thirty-seven divisions on each side. But the Wehrmacht was far better equipped, having 3,600 armoured vehicles against 750 Polish, 1,929 modern planes against nine hundred obsolete ones. The Polish army had been progressively deploying since March, but had held back from full mobilisation in response to Anglo-French pleas to avoid provoking Hitler. Thus, on 1 September, the defenders were surprised. A Polish diplomat wrote of his people’s attitude: ‘They were united in the will to resist, but without any clear idea about the kind of resistance to be offered, apart from a lot of loose talk about volunteering as “human torpedoes”.’

Ephrahim Bleichman, a sixteen-year-old Jew living in Kamionka, was among thousands of local inhabitants summoned into the town square to be addressed by the mayor: ‘We sang a Polish hymn declaring that Poland was not yet lost, and another promising that no German would spit in our faces.’ Piotr Tarczyski, a twenty-six-year-old factory clerk, had been ill for some weeks before he was mobilised. But when he informed the commanding officer of his artillery battery that he was ailing, the colonel responded with a brisk patriotic speech, ‘and told me he was sure that once I found myself in the saddle I would feel much better’. Equipment was so short that the regiment could not issue Tarczyski with a personal weapon; he did, however, receive a regulation charger, a big horse named ‘Wojak’ – ‘Warrior’.

An air force instructor, Witold Urbanowitz, was conducting a mock dogfight with a pupil in the sky over Dblin when he was bewildered to see holes appearing in his plane’s wings. Landing hastily, he was met by a fellow officer who ran across the field towards him, exclaiming, ‘You’re alive, Witold? You’re not hit?’ Urbanowitz demanded, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ His comrade said, ‘You should go to church and light a candle. You were just attacked by a Messerschmitt!’ The nakedness of Poland’s defences was everywhere apparent. Fighter pilot Franciszek Kornicki was scrambled twice on 1 and 2 September. On the first occasion he pursued a German plane which easily outpaced him. On the second, when his guns jammed he tried to clear them, roll and renew his attack. As the plane banked steeply, the harness buckles holding him in his open cockpit came undone; he fell into the sky, and found himself making an embarrassed parachute descent.

At 1700 near the village of Krojanty, Polish Uhlan cavalrymen received an order to counterattack, to cover the retreat of neighbouring infantry. As they formed line and drew sabres, the adjutant Captain Godlewski suggested that they should advance on foot. ‘Young man,’ the regimental commander, Colonel Mastalerz, responded testily, ‘I’m quite aware what it is like to carry out an impossible order.’ Bent low over the necks of their horses, 250 men charged across an open field. German infantrymen fled from their path, but beyond them stood armoured cars, whose machine-guns ravaged the Uhlans. Scores of horses crashed to the earth, while others raced away riderless. Within minutes half the attackers were dead, including Colonel Mastalerz. The survivors fell back in confusion, flotsam of an earlier age.

France’s high command had urged the Poles to concentrate their forces behind the three big rivers in the centre of their country, but the Warsaw government deemed it essential instead to defend its entire nine-hundred-mile frontier with Germany, not least because most Polish industry lay in the west; some divisions thus became responsible for fronts of eighteen miles, when their strengths – around 15,000 men – scarcely sufficed for three or four. The three-pronged German assault, from north, south and west, drove deep into the country in the face of ineffectual resistance, leaving pockets of defenders isolated. Luftwaffe aircraft gave close support to the panzers, and also launched devastating air raids on Warsaw, Łód, Dblin and Sandomierz.

Polish troops and civilians were strafed and bombed with ruthless impartiality, though some victims took time to recognise the gravity of the threat. After the first wave of attacks Virgilia, American-born wife of Polish nobleman Prince Paul Sapieha, told her household reassuringly: ‘You see: these bombs aren’t so bad. Their bark is worse than their bite.’ When two bombs fell in the park of the Smorczewski family’s stately home at Tarnogóra on the night of 1 September, the young sons of the house, Ralph and Mark, were hastily dragged from their beds by their mother and rushed outside to hide in a wood with other young refugees. ‘After recovering from the initial shock,’ Ralph wrote later, ‘we looked at each other and fell into a fit of unrestrained giggles. What a strange sight we were: a motley collection of youths, some in pyjamas, others with coats thrown over their underwear, standing aimlessly under the trees, playing with gas masks. We decided to go home.’

Soon, however, there was no more giggling: the people of Poland were obliged to recognise the devastating power of the Luftwaffe. ‘I was awakened by the wail of sirens and sound of explosions,’ wrote diplomat Adam Kruczkiewicz in Warsaw. ‘Outside I saw German planes flying at incredibly low level and throwing bombs at their ease. There was some desultory machine-gun fire from the tops of a few buildings, but no Polish fliers…The city was stunned by the almost complete lack of air defence. They felt bitterly disappointed.’ The town of Łuck belied its name: early one morning a dozen German bombs fell on it, killing scores of people, most of them children walking to school. Impotent victims called the cloudless skies of those September days ‘the curse of Poland’. Pilot B.J. Solak wrote: ‘The stench of burning and a brown veil of smoke filled all the air around our town.’ After hiding his unarmed plane beneath some trees, Solak was driving home when he met a peasant on the road, ‘leading a horse whose hip was a blanket of congealed blood. Its head was touching the dust with its nostrils, each step causing it to shudder with pain.’ The young airman asked the peasant where he was taking the stricken animal, victim of a Stuka dive-bomber. ‘To the veterinary clinic in town.’ ‘But that’s four miles more!’ A shrug: ‘I have only one horse.’

A thousand larger tragedies unfolded. As Lt. Piotr Tarczyski’s artillery battery clattered forward towards the battlefield, Stukas fell on it; every man sprang from his saddle and threw himself to the earth. A few bombs dropped, some men and horses fell. Then the planes were gone, the battery remounted and resumed its march. ‘We saw two women, one middle-aged and one only a girl, carrying a short ladder. On it was stretched a wounded man, still alive and clutching his abdomen. As they passed us, I could see his intestines trailing on the ground.’ Władysław Anders had fought with the Russians in World War I, under the exotically named Tsarist general the Khan of Nakhitchevan. Now, commanding a Polish cavalry brigade, Anders saw a teacher leading a group of her pupils to the shelter of woods. ‘Suddenly, there was the roar of an aeroplane. The pilot circled, descending to a height of fifty metres. As he dropped his bombs and fired his machine-guns, the children scattered like sparrows. The aeroplane disappeared as quickly as it had come, but on the field some crumpled and lifeless bundles of bright clothing remained. The nature of the new war was already clear.’

Thirteen-year-old George lzak was on a train with a party of children travelling home to Łód from summer camp. Suddenly there were explosions, screams, and the train lurched to a stop. The group leader shouted at the boys to get out fast and run for a nearby forest. Shocked and terrified, they lay prostrate for half an hour until the bombing stopped. On emerging, a few hundred yards up the track they saw a blazing troop train which had been the Germans’ target. Some boys burst into tears at the sight of bleeding men; their first attempt to reboard their own train was frustrated by the return of the Luftwaffe, machine-gunning. At last, they resumed their journey in coaches riddled with bullet holes. George reached home to find his mother sobbing by the family radio set: it had reported Germans approaching.

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 romantic 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 shouted ‘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.

Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, told the Polish ambassador in Moscow that, since the Polish republic no longer existed, the Red Army was intervening to ‘protect Russian citizens in western Belorussia and western Ukraine’. Although Hitler had agreed Stalin’s annexation of eastern Poland, the Germans were taken by surprise when the Soviet intervention came. So, too, were the Poles. Once the Red Army struck in their rear, wrote Marshal Rydz-migły bitterly, resistance could become only ‘an armed demonstration against a new partition of Poland’. The Wehrmacht high command, anxious to avoid accidental clashes with the Russians, declared a boundary on the San, Vistula and Narew rivers; wherever its forces had advanced beyond that line, they now withdrew.

Hitler hoped that Stalin’s intervention would provoke the Allies to declare war on the Russians, and in London there was indeed a brief flurry of debate about whether Britain’s commitment to Poland demanded engagement of a new enemy. In the War Cabinet, only Churchill and war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha urged preparations for such an eventuality. Britain’s Moscow ambassador Sir William Seeds cabled: ‘I do not see what advantage war with the Soviet Union would be to us although it would please me personally to declare it on Molotov.’ Much to the relief of prime minister Neville Chamberlain, the Foreign Office advised that the government’s guarantee to Poland covered only German aggression. Bitter British rhetoric was unleashed against Stalin, but no further consideration was given to fighting him; the French likewise confined themselves to expressions of disgust. Within days, at a cost of only 4,000 casualties, the Russians overran 77,000 square miles of territory including the cities of Lwów and Wilno. Stalin gained suzerainty over five million Poles, 4.5 million ethnic Ukrainians, one million Belorussians and one million Jews.

In Warsaw, starving people still clung to hopes of aid from the west. An air-raid warden confided to an acquaintance: ‘You know the British. They are slow in making up their minds, but now they are definitely coming.’ Millions of Poles were at first bewildered, then increasingly outraged, by the passivity of these supposed friends. A cavalry officer wrote: ‘What was happening in the west, we wondered, and when would the French and British start their offensive? We could not understand why our allies were so slow in coming to our assistance.’ On 20 September, Poland’s London ambassador broadcast to his people at home: ‘Fellow countrymen! Know that your sacrifice is not in vain, and that its meaning and eloquence are felt to the utmost here…Already the hosts of our allies are assembling…The day will come when the victorious standards…shall return from foreign lands to Poland.’ Yet even as he spoke, Count Raczyski was conscious, as he wrote later, that his words were ‘little more than a poetic fiction. Where were the Allied hosts?’

In Paris, Polish ambassador Juliusz Łukasiewicz exchanged bitter words with French foreign minister Georges Bonnet. ‘It isn’t right! You know it isn’t right!’ he said. ‘A treaty is a treaty and must be respected! Do you realise that every hour you delay the attack on Germany means…death to thousands of Polish men, women and children?’ Bonnet shrugged: ‘Do you then want the women and children of Paris to be massacred?’ American correspondent Janet Flanner wrote from Paris: ‘It would seem, indeed, as if efforts are still being made to hold the war up, prevent its starting in earnest – efforts made, perhaps self-consciously, by government leaders reluctant to go down in history as having ordered the first inflaming shots, or efforts made as a general reflection of the various populations’ courageous but confused states of mind. Certainly this must be the first war that millions of people on both sides continued to think could be avoided even after it had officially been declared.’

The Polish Campaign

The French were wholly unwilling to launch a major offensive against the Siegfried Line, as Winston Churchill urged, far less to invite German retaliation by bombing Germany. The British government similarly declined to order the RAF to attack German land targets. Tory MP Leo Amery wrote contemptuously of prime minister Neville Chamberlain: ‘Loathing war passionately, he was determined to wage as little of it as possible.’ The Times editorialised in a fashion which seemed to Polish readers to mock their plight: ‘In the agony of their martyred land, the Poles will perhaps in some degree be consoled by the knowledge that they have the sympathy, and indeed the reverence, not only of their allies in western Europe but of all civilized people throughout the globe.’

It is sometimes argued that in mid-September 1939, with the bulk of the German army committed in Poland, the Allies had an ideal opportunity to launch an offensive on the Western Front. But France was even less prepared psychologically than militarily for such an initiative; and Britain’s small expeditionary force, still in transit to the Continent, could contribute little. The Germans could probably have repelled any assault without much disrupting their operations in the east, and the inertia of the French and British governments reflected the will of their peoples. A Glasgow secretary named Pam Ashford wrote in her diary on 7 September: ‘Practically everyone thinks the war will be over in three months…Many hold that when Poland is smashed up there won’t be much point in continuing.’

The Poles should have anticipated the passivity of their allies, but its cynicism was breathtaking. A modern historian, Andrzej Suchcitz, has written: ‘The Polish government and military authorities had been double-crossed and betrayed by their western allies. There was no intention of giving Poland any effective military support.’ As Warsaw faced its doom, Stefan Starzyski declared in a broadcast: ‘Destiny has committed to us the duty of defending Poland’s honour.’ A Polish poet later celebrated the mayor’s defiance in characteristically emotional terms:

And he, when the city was just a raw, red mass

Said: ‘I do not surrender.’ Let the houses burn!

Let my proud achievements be bombed into dust.

So what, if a graveyard grows from my dreams?

For you, who may come here, some day recall

That some things are dearer than the finest city wall.

By the end of the campaign’s third week, Polish resistance was broken. The capital remained unoccupied only because the Germans wished to destroy it before claiming the ruins; hour after hour and day after day, merciless bombardment continued. A nurse, Jadwiga Sosnkowska, described scenes at her hospital outside Warsaw on 25 September:

The procession of wounded from the city was an unending march of death. The lights went out, and all of us, doctors and nurses, had to move about with candles in our hands. As both the operating theatres and the dressing stations were destroyed the work was done in the lecture rooms on ordinary deal tables, and owing to the lack of water the instruments could not be sterilised, but had to be cleansed with alcohol…As human wreckage was laid on the table the surgeon vainly attempted to save the lives that were slipping through his hands…Tragedy followed tragedy. At one time the victim was a girl of sixteen. She had a glorious mop of golden hair, her face was delicate as a flower, and her lovely sapphire-blue eyes were full of tears. Both her legs, up to the knees, were a mass of bleeding pulp, in which it was impossible to distinguish bone from flesh; both had to be amputated above the knee. Before the surgeon began I bent over this innocent child to kiss her pallid brow, to lay my helpless hand on her golden head. She died quietly in the course of the morning, like a flower plucked by a merciless hand.

Professional soldiers can seldom afford to indulge in emotionalism about the horrors of war, but posterity must recoil from the complacency of Germany’s generals about both the character of their national leader, and the murderous adventure in which they had become his accomplices. Gen. Erich von Manstein is widely regarded as the finest German general of the war; afterwards, he took pride in pretensions to have done his part as an officer and gentleman. However, his writings during the Polish campaign, as well as later, reveal the insensitivity characteristic of his caste. He was delighted by the invasion: ‘It’s a grand decision of the Führer in view of the attitude of the Western Powers up till now. His offer to solve the Polish question was so obliging that England and France – if they really wanted peace – should have pushed Poland into accepting.’ Soon after the campaign began, Manstein visited a formation which he himself had recently commanded: ‘It was touching to see the staff so pleased when I suddenly appeared…Cranz [his successor] told me it was a pleasure to command such a well-trained division in war.’

In a letter to his wife, Manstein described his personal routine during the campaign, in which he served as von Rundstedt’s chief of staff at Army Group South: ‘I get up at 6.30, plunge into the water [for a swim], into the office by 7.00. Morning reports, coffee, then work or trips with R[undstedt]. Midday, field kitchens here. Then half an hour break. In the evening after supper, which we eat together with the general staff officers as at lunch, the evening reports come in. And so it goes on to 11.30.’ The contrast is stark, between the serenity of army headquarters and the vast human tragedy its operations had precipitated. Manstein signed an order for the German forces encircling Warsaw to fire upon any refugees who attempted to leave: it was deemed easier to force a swift outcome of the campaign, and to avoid a battle in the streets, if the inhabitants were unable to escape the capital’s bombardment. Yet he was a man of such personal fastidiousness that he sometimes quit rooms in which von Rundstedt was speaking, because he recoiled from his chief’s obscene language. On 25 September, he basked in a congratulatory visit from Hitler, writing to his wife: ‘It was nice to see how the soldiers rejoiced everywhere as the Führer drove past.’ In 1939, the officer corps of the Wehrmacht already displayed the moral bankruptcy that would characterise its conduct until 1945.

A Polish cavalry officer, Klemens Rudnicki, described the plight of his regiment and its beloved mounts in Warsaw on 27 September, the last night before the city fell: ‘Red, glittering flames illuminated our horses, standing quiet and motionless along the walls of the Łazienki Park, resembling saddled skeletons. A few were dead; some were bleeding, exposing huge, gaping wounds. Kowalski’s horse Cenzor was still alive, but lay with his bowels ripped out. Not long ago he had won the Army’s Challenge Cup at Tarnopol. He had been our pride. A shot in the ear ended his sufferings. Next day, probably, somebody needing to assuage his hunger would cut a joint from his loins.’

Warsaw capitulated on 28 September. Little Captain Krysk of Rudnicki’s 3rd squadron declared emotionally that he rejected the order: ‘Tomorrow morning we shall charge the Germans to preserve the regimental tradition that the 9th Lancers never surrender.’ Rudnicki dissuaded him; together, the regiment’s officers secreted their colours in the church of St Anthony on Senatorska Street, the only building still intact amid acres of rubble. Rudnicki reflected ruefully that the Polish army should have deployed in depth for a protracted defensive action, instead of manning a weak forward line that was certain to be broken. This, however, would have been ‘at variance with our natural aspiration – and with our military traditions and hopes of becoming a great Power’.

On 29 September the Modlin army north of Warsaw surrendered to the Germans, who took 30,000 prisoners. Organised resistance petered out, the Hel peninsula falling on 1 October; the last recorded engagement took place at Kock, north of Lublin, on the 5th. Hundreds of thousands of men fell into German hands, while many more struggled to flee. Young flier B.J. Solak was moved to encounter an air force colonel sitting beneath a tree, tears pouring down his face. Feliks Lachman was one of many Poles whose thoughts reverted to their recent reading of Gone with the Wind. Fleeing his home, he mused: ‘Desolate as was the Tara estate, Scarlett O’Hara was going through fire and water to the place where she knew she belonged. We had left, once and forever, men and things that formed the social, intellectual and emotional environment of our life. We were moving in a vacuum, aimlessly.’ After an air raid on the city of Krzemieniec, Adam Kruczkiewicz saw in the street a hysterical old Jew, ‘standing over the corpse of his wife…uttering a string of curses and blasphemies, shouting “There is no God! Hitler and the bombs are the only gods! There is no grace and pity in the world!”’

A few Polish cavalry units made good their escape into Hungary, where they surrendered their arms. At the barracks of the 3rd Hungarian Hussar Regiment, exhausted fugitives were moved to find themselves greeted by the unit’s officers, led by the elderly Colonel von Pongratsch, drawn up in full ceremonial uniform. A few days later, when the Poles left to face internment, the bewhiskered veteran embraced each one before bidding them farewell. Such old-world courtesies were welcome, because they had been banished from the pitiless universe of which most Poles now found themselves inhabitants.

Gen. Władysław Anders led his exhausted and depleted unit eastwards to escape the Germans. The men sang as they urged on their emaciated horses amid a throng of refugees and military stragglers. Then they met the Red Army, and Anders sent a liaison officer to the local Soviet headquarters to beg safe passage to the Hungarian border. The Pole was stripped of all he had, and threatened with execution. Russian guns began to shell the Polish positions. Anders ordered his men to split into small groups and find their own way into Hungary. He himself, badly wounded, was captured along with many others. A Russian officer told him complacently: ‘We are now good friends of the Germans. Together we will fight international capitalism. Poland was the tool of England, and she had to perish for that.’

Regina Lempicka was one of hundreds of thousands of Poles arbitrarily arrested by the Russians during the months that followed, then shipped to Kazakhstan. Her grandmother and baby niece died of starvation during their exile, while her soldier brother was shot. The family experience in Russian hands, she wrote later, became ‘a ghastly dream’. As one group of Polish soldiers was marched over a border bridge by Red Army guards, a prisoner said bleakly: ‘We enter Russia. We shall never return.’ Tadeusz ukowski wrote: ‘From this instant the whole world seemed to change: different sky, soil and people. A weird feeling, as if something cracked inside you had burst open, as if life left you and you suddenly dropped into a dark cave, a pitch-dark underground passage.’ A woman said contemptuously to a Polish prisoner on his way to the gulag, ‘You Polish, fascist lords! Here in Russia you will learn how to work. Here you will be strong enough to work but too weak to oppress the poor!’

Around 1.5 million Poles, mostly civilians evicted from their homes in the forfeited east of their country during the months that followed, began an ordeal of captivity and starvation in Soviet hands, which cost the lives of some 350,000. Many such families were without menfolk, because these had been summarily dispatched. On 5 March 1940, the Soviet Union’s security chief Lavrenti Beria sent a four-page memorandum to Stalin, proposing the elimination of Polish senior officers and others defined as leaders of their society. Those held in Soviet camps, urged Beria, should be subjected to ‘the use of the highest means of punishment – death by shooting’. Stalin and other members of the Politburo formally approved the recommendation to decapitate Poland. During the weeks that followed, at least 25,000 Poles were murdered by NKVD executioners at various Soviet prisons, each receiving a single bullet in the back of the head. The bodies were then buried in mass graves in the forests around Katyn west of Smolensk, at Minsk and other sites, the largest of which was discovered by the gleeful Nazis in 1943.

Later allegations that the post-1945 Allied war crimes trials represented ‘victors’ justice’ were powerfully reinforced by the fact that no Russian was ever indicted for Katyn. In October 1939 a Pole under interrogation by NKVD officers demanded bitterly: ‘How is it possible for the USSR, a progressive and democratic state, to be on friendly terms with a reactionary Nazi Germany?’ His inquisitor replied coldly: ‘You are wrong. Our policy is at present to be neutral during the struggle between England and Germany. Let them bleed – our power will increase. When they are utterly exhausted, we shall come out as the strong and fresh party, decisive during the last stage of the war.’ This seems a just representation of Stalin’s aspirations.

Hitler, visiting Warsaw on 5 October, gestured to the ruins and addressed accompanying foreign correspondents: ‘Gentlemen, you have seen for yourselves what criminal folly it was to try to defend this city…I only wish that certain statesmen in other countries who seem to want to turn all of Europe into a second Warsaw could have the opportunity to see, as you have, the real meaning of war.’ Warsaw’s Mayor Starzyski was removed to Dachau, where he was murdered four years later. The Polish army had lost 70,000 men killed and 140,000 wounded, together with uncounted thousands of civilian dead. The German army’s casualties amounted to 16,000 killed and 30,000 wounded. Some 700,000 Polish soldiers became Hitler’s prisoners. An unelected Polish exile government was established in London.

Britain’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Gen. Sir Edmund Ironside, met Adrian Carlton de Wiart on that officer’s return from Warsaw and snapped dismissively, ‘Well, your Poles haven’t done much.’ This assertion reflected the frustration of British and French hopes that the Polish army would inflict sufficient injury upon the Wehrmacht to alleviate the Western Allies’ need to do so. Carlton de Wiart replied, ‘Let us see what others will do, sir.’ A remarkable number of Poles made the decision to accept exile, separation from everything they knew and loved, in order to continue the fight against Hitler. Some 150,000 made their way westwards, often after memorable odysseys. This was by far the largest voluntary exodus from any of the nations eventually overrun by Germany, and reflected the Poles’ passion to sustain their struggle. Exiles fleeing west were astonished by the warm reception they received in fascist Italy, where a host of people called to them, ‘Bravo Polonia!’

Before quitting his home airfield, fighter instructor Witold Urbanowicz gave a radio and his silk shirts to the woman cleaner of his quarters, his formal evening dress to the porter, then set off by bus with his cadets, down the road to Romania; almost a year later, at the controls of a Hurricane, he became one of the RAF’s foremost aces. Some 30,000 Poles, one-third of them air force pilots and ground crew, reached Britain in 1940, and more came later. One man clutched a wooden propeller, a symbol to which he had clung doggedly through a journey of 3,000 miles. Many others joined the British Army in the Middle East, after their belated release from Stalinist captivity. These men would make a far more notable contribution to the Allied war effort than had Britain to their own.

Poland became the only nation occupied by Hitler in which there was no collaboration between the conquerors and the conquered. The Nazis henceforth classified Poles as slaves, and received in return implacable hatred. As Princess Paul Sapieha crossed the frontier to precarious safety amid a throng of refugees, her small daughter asked, ‘Will there be bombs in Romania?’ The princess answered, ‘No more bombs now. There’s no war here. We’re going where it will be sunny and where children can play wherever they please.’ The child persisted: ‘But when are we going home to Papa?’ Her mother could not answer. Soon, there would be scarcely a corner of Europe that offered safe haven to either children or adults.

Hitler had committed himself to conquer Poland, but as so often, he had no clear plan for what should follow. Only when it became plain that Stalin welcomed the country’s extinction did Germany’s ruler decide to annex western Poland. Before the war, Nazis liked to dismiss Poland as a ‘Saisonstaat’ – a temporary state. Now, it would cease to be any state at all: Hitler became master of lands containing fifteen million Poles, two million Jews, one million ethnic Germans and two million other minorities. Among his foremost characteristics was a reflexive hatred of all those who opposed his will. This soon manifested itself against the Poles – and especially, of course, against their Jews. One day in Łód soon after the occupation began, Szmulek Goldberg was returning from work when ‘I encountered chaos in the streets. People were running wildly in every direction. Somebody stopped and grabbed my sleeve. “Hide! Hide!” he shrieked. “The Germans are capturing Jews at gunpoint and taking them away on trucks.”’ He watched trucks drive past, loaded with captives, a first earnest of Hitler’s designs upon his race. Within weeks of Poland’s conquest, the first few thousand of its Jewish citizens had been murdered.

In Britain, a mother named Tilly Rice who had been evacuated with her children from London to a fishing port in north Cornwall, wrote on 7 October after the end of the Polish campaign: ‘In the household in which I live the whole thing has been received in bewildered silence…War is still going on, but as something distant with just occasional repercussions on the general lives of the community…My own reactions to the whole situation are growing more and more indifferent every day.’ Britain and France had declared war on Germany to save Poland. Poland was now gone, and Polish representatives were expelled from the Allied Supreme War Council, where they were deemed redundant. Many British and French politicians and citizens demanded: to what end was the war being sustained? How could it be effectively waged? US ambassador in London Joseph Kennedy shrugged to his Polish counterpart: ‘Where on earth can the Allies fight the Germans and beat them?’ Though Kennedy was a shameless anglophobe, appeaser and defeatist, his question was valid, and the Allied governments had no good answer to it. After the fall of Poland, the world waited in bewilderment to discover what might follow. Since France and Britain lacked stomach to seize the initiative, the further course of the war waited upon the pleasure of Adolf Hitler.