‘Poland’, wrote Rousseau in 1771, on the eve of the first partition of Poland, ‘is a great state surrounded by even greater ones that, with their despotism and military discipline, possess formidable offensive strength. . . . Notwithstanding Polish valour, she lies exposed to all their outrages.’1 The sage of the enlightenment could not have begun to envisage the twentieth century horrors that his words uncannily foretold.

On 1 September 1939 five German armies, comprising sixty divisions, invaded Poland. Their objective was to knock out the Poles swiftly before the Allies could mount an offensive in the west. Recalling their victory over the Red Army in 1921, the Poles flattered themselves that they were a significant military power but they found themselves hopelessly outnumbered and out-manoeuvred by the Germans. The Polish Commander-in- Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, decided to mount his chief defensive effort near the frontier. The reasons were partly political (reluctance to yield the formerly German western border regions without a fight), partly economic (the presence, especially in Silesia, of important industrial resources), and partly strategic (the hope of buying time to complete mobilization of his vaunted fifty-four divisions). But the odds were against the defenders. They could deploy only 313 tanks, most of them distributed piecemeal to infantry units, against the Germans’ 2,600, and only 388 warplanes, most of them obsolete, against the Germans’ 1,900. Polish mechanized forces comprised only two brigades whereas the Germans fielded fourteen mechanized or partly mechanized divisions. The popular conception of the Polish army flinging horse cavalry, with drawn swords and lances, against tanks is overdrawn. Nevertheless, as the British strategic thinker Basil Liddell Hart later put it, ‘the campaign in Poland was the first demonstration, and proof, in war of the theory of mobile warfare by armoured and air forces in combination’.2 Heinz Guderian, architect of the German armoured corps, had gained Hitler’s approval for a war of movement in which large concentrations of tanks, backed up by motorized support units, and enjoying close air support, would replace infantry as the decisive force on the battlefield. ‘Blitzkrieg’, as the strategy came to be known, lent the Germans an aura of invincibility that struck terror into Europe. By mid-September they had complete command of the air and Polish forces had been driven back to defence lines around Warsaw and behind the River San in the south.

The Poles’ only hope was a diversionary attack by the French and British on Germany’s western frontier. But this was not forthcoming. Britain and France had gone to war over Poland, not for Poland. Their guarantee notwithstanding, they sent no forces to aid the Poles. They did not even have contingency plans for doing so. Allied strategy was based on the expectation of ‘la guerre de longue durée’. A defensive posture would be maintained in the west while Allied resources were gradually built up. French military thinking remained mired in static defensive concepts drawn from the experience of the previous war. Apart from minor pinpricks, therefore, the Allies did not take the obvious military opportunity to attack Germany in the west while the bulk of German forces were engaged in the east. As for Britain, her army and air force were woefully inadequate to defend herself and her empire, let alone fulfill the European guarantees that Chamberlain had (in the end) distributed so freely. It would be a matter of years, not months, before Britain could contemplate a land campaign against a major military power. In default of any tangible aid, the head of the British military mission in Poland, General Adrian Carton de Wiart, was instructed that his primary task was ‘inspiring confidence’.3

On 17 September the Soviet army moved into eastern Poland, advancing towards the line previously agreed between Ribbentrop and Molotov. The Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, General Ironside, put the most optimistic interpretation possible on the news when he told the Cabinet that ‘the presence of large Russian forces on the German borders might compel the Germans to maintain a very considerable garrison on the Eastern frontier’.4 Caught between two giant pincers, the Poles put up a spirited but hopeless resistance. The government and general staff, headed by Rydz- Śmigły, fled the country the next day, proceeding first to Romania, later to France, and finally to Britain. They were followed by some eighty thousand Polish troops, most of whom eventually joined the Allied war effort in the west or North Africa. But a million Polish soldiers fell into either German or Soviet captivity. Warsaw surrendered on 27 September.

Hitler’s victory over Poland did not come cheap. His armed forces lost eleven thousand dead and thirty thousand wounded. Three hundred German armoured vehicles and 560 aircraft were put out of action. Altogether, the Poles knocked out the equivalent of nine months of German war production—though some of the losses were made up by captured Polish matériel. Calculating that time would work against Germany, as British and French production would grow fast, Hitler told his generals to prepare for an early attack in the west. He nevertheless issued a ‘peace offer’ to his enemies, more as propaganda than in earnest. If they would only recognize his latest acquisition, he would seek no further quarrel with them. But neither Chamberlain nor Daladier would yield; nor, in spite of some defeatist chatter, would the majority of public opinion in either country have countenanced a further such humiliation. Hitler was correct in thinking that Poland, ‘this ridiculous state’,5 was not the main obstacle. That was now Hitler himself. The Polish guarantee thus turned out to be merely the precipitant of the larger war, not its fundamental issue. This was why the various attempts between the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1940 to arrange a compromise peace collapsed.

Molotov justified the Soviet move into Poland by declaring that the Polish state had ceased to exist and that ‘the Soviet Government deems it its sacred duty to extend a helping hand to our Brother Ukrainians and Brother White Russians who live in Poland’.6 In a meeting with Dimitrov, Molotov, and Andrei Zhdanov on 7 September, Stalin articulated the Soviet position: ‘We see nothing wrong in them [Hitler and the Allies] having a good hard fight and weakening each other.’7 The Nazi–Soviet pact had called for the Soviets to occupy the whole of eastern Poland up to the Vistula. In the event, Stalin baulked at taking the entire area.

On a second visit to Moscow, during which he was greeted by a Soviet band playing the Nazi ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied ’, Ribbentrop revised the original agreement by a new treaty, dated 28 September. The demarcation line between the Soviet and German spheres in Poland was adjusted eastwards from the Vistula to the Bug. This left all those regions in which Poles were a majority in German hands. Russia reclaimed the Ukrainian and Belorussian territories she had lost in 1921. Most of Lithuania was assigned to the Russians to do with as they pleased. All three Baltic States were compelled to sign mutual assistance agreements with the USSR, whereby the Soviet army gained the right to station naval, military, and air bases on their territories. Vilna, which had been occupied by Poland since 1920, was presented by Stalin to Lithuania—‘a condemned man’s breakfast’.8 But the transfer was effected only after the Red Army had occupied the city for forty days and stripped it of food, manufactured goods, and machinery. A report in the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star) on 18 September summarized the reaction of the population to the Soviet takeover: ‘The workers of the Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia, thanks to the fraternal assistance of the Soviet people and its Red Army, were forever liberated from the class and national oppression of the Polish bourgeois. They acquired a new homeland for themselves—the land of happiness—the Soviet Union. . . . Warmed by the sunrays of Stalin’s constitution, people are joyfully building a new life.’9

After elections in which more than 91 per cent of the votes were recorded as having been cast for official candidates, a ‘People’s Assembly’ of the western Ukraine convened at Lwów on 26 October and requested incorporation of the area in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which petition was granted a few days later. A similar assembly in Białystok led to the annexation of western Belorussia into the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The apparatus of the Soviet state was extended to the annexed regions. A social revolution was launched with the object of eliminating all feudal, i.e. mainly Polish, and bourgeois, i.e. mainly Jewish, socio-economic elements. Banks, mines, factories, and railways were nationalized. Land belonging to large proprietors and churches was expropriated and a start was made to the collectivization of agriculture. In December the rouble suddenly replaced the złoty, which became virtually worthless: many lost their life savings.

Notes:

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Conside´rations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (written 1771, first published Geneva, 1782, ch. 3).

2. B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War, London, 1970, 27.

3. G. D. Sheffield, ‘Carton de Wiart and Spears’ in John Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals, London, 1991, 328.

4. Paul W. Doerr, ‘ ‘‘Frigid but Unprovocative’’: British Policy Towards the USSR from the Nazi-Soviet Pact to the Winter War, 1939’, JCH 36: 3 (2001), 423–39.

5. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. edn., Harmondsworth, 1962, 556.

6. David J. Dallin, Soviet Russia’s Foreign Policy, 1939–1942,NewHaven, 1942, 70–1.

7. Ivo Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, New Haven, 2003, 115.

8. Adam Ulam, Stalin: The Man and his Era, New York, 1973, 519.

9. Translated transcript in Keith Sword, ed., The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–41, Basingstoke, 1991, 295–300.