ABSTRACT
Originally equipped by the French, Poland had a large army with a good fighting reputation earned in its war against the Soviets (1920-1). However, when the German forces went into action on 1 September the Poles lacked the necessary modern aircraft, tanks, anti-aircraft and anti-tank defences. Their communications and transport services were weak. German positions in East Prussia and in recently occupied Czechoslovakia gave the Wehrmacht a great strategic advantage. So that, although Poland had relatively large numbers of troops, its outlook was poor right from the start. By 8 September the Wehrmacht reached Warsaw. Any hope the Poles had of continuing open resistance ended on 17 September when Soviet forces crossed the frontier from the East. In these circumstances it is perhaps surprising that remnants of the
Polish forces were still resisting until well into October. Warsaw held out until 28 September when its garrison were forced to capitulate after repeated air attacks which had inflicted heavy civilian casualties and destroyed, among other things, the main waterworks. Poles who escaped created new units in Britain and later in the Soviet Union and fought with distinction on all fronts. Polish agents delivered to the British a German Enigma machine which enabled them to decode secret German radio traffic. Much of this story remains secret but the machine certainly helped the Allies win the war. Defeated Poland was then divided by Hitler and Stalin. The Soviets
advanced to roughly along the Curzon Line (so called because it had been drawn up at the end of the 1914-18 war by the British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon). They could claim that they were only taking back by force what had been taken by force by the Poles in 1920. The area was mainly populated by Ukrainians and White Russians. They further claimed, with some justification, that the Poles had ill-treated these minority peoples. However, neither in 1920 nor in 1939 were the luckless peoples of these areas given any say in what was to happen to them. Germany and the Soviet Union came to a new agreement, officially called the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty,
concluded on 28 September. The secret part of the Treaty assigned Lithuania to the Soviet sphere of influence and, by way of exchange, gave the Germans the provinces of Lublin and Eastern Warsaw. The partners further agreed not to tolerate ‘Polish agitation’ in their respective territories. This agreement destroyed any hope that a rump Polish state would be permitted to exist. In those early weeks of World War II Adolf Hitler was successful in
other directions. His navy, which had been considered the weak arm of the German armed forces, scored some striking successes. On 17 September a German submarine sunk the British aircraft carrier Courageous off the coast of Ireland and on 14 October the Royal Navy battleship Royal Oak went to the bottom while at anchor at Scapa Flow after a daring U-boat attack. Hitler’s wildest dreams seemed to be coming true. In the West where Anglo-French forces on one side, and German on the other, watched each other behind well-fortified positions the Sitzkrieg (sit-down or immobile war) contrasted greatly with the Blitzkrieg (lightning war) in Poland. The British called it the ‘phoney war’. In this situation, and with Hitler announcing a ‘peace offer’ in the Reichstag on 6 October, the German people must have thought that Der Fiihrer was once again delivering the goods and that there would be an early return to peace. In these circumstances, the bomb which exploded in the Munich Beer Cellar on 8 November just a few minutes after Hitler had finished making a speech to the old guard of the Nazi party, was without significance as a manifestation of opposition to the regime.
