ABSTRACT
Before September 1939, the Red Army General Staff ’s chief concern in Europe was Poland. That changed somewhat after 1933 but mostly in the sense that Hitler’s advent converted Poland to a 650-mile-wide buffer in the west. The demarcation line agreed to during the 1939 war wiped out Poland, eliminated the buffer, and shifted the German boundary some 300 miles eastward. Subsequently, in their tinkering with the demarcation line, Stalin and Hitler established the basic strategic preconditions for a German-Soviet war. Stalin insisted on having the scene of the First Cavalry Army’s outstanding exploit in the Polish war, Lvov and the district west of the Bug River in which it was located; and Hitler, as a quid pro quo, annexed the Suwalki Strip, a 25-by-50-mile piece of Lithuanian territory on the eastern boundary of East Prussia. The Soviet military occupation of Lithuania in the summer of 1940 gave the German-Soviet border a pronounced serpentine appearance. Two westward-oriented bulges, each about 100 miles wide at the base and 80 miles deep, one, in the north, west of Bialystok, the other in the south, west of Lvov, became from the military operational point of view two Soviet salients. Together they threatened the main German rail and road junctions in the occupied territory, Krakow and Warsaw, in the farther extension, also Breslau and Berlin; but on their flanks, eastward-oriented German salients by which they were halfencircled had developed.
