ABSTRACT
The invasion of Poland was the first strike in a total war. Hitler’s new army was now to be tested on the field of combat against the large and well-trained armed forces of the Polish state—the same nation that had famously stopped the Red Army before Warsaw in 1920. As it turned out, however, the poignant and tragic imagery of Polish cavalry fighting against, and hopelessly outclassed by, German armor would prove to be one of the most significant and defining images of the war. The years of training and exercises that the German army had engaged in since 1919 were now to be put into practice with devastating effect.
