TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/082889/08288900.025

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                                                                          ╛««WORLD WAR II, Page 30

PART I: Blitzkrieg

September 1, 1939: a new kind of warfare engulfs Poland


    . . .As the clever hopes expire
    Of a low dishonest decade:
    Waves of anger and fear
    Circulate over the bright
    And darkened lands of the earth

    -- SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by W.H. AUDEN

    (c) 1940 by W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random
        House, Inc.


    Treachery, lies and murder -- those were the hallmarks of Adolf
Hitler's launching of World War II. The German Wehrmacht had its
orders to invade Poland at dawn of Sept. 1, 1939, but the first
killings actually occurred the night before near a border town
called Gleiwitz. There German SS troops took twelve prisoners from
the Oranienburg concentration camp outside Berlin, ordered them to
dress in Polish army uniforms, then injected them with poison and
shot them. The twelve "Polish casualties" were dumped in a forest
near the village of Hochlinde to be exhibited later to the foreign
press.

    The SS killers took along one more Oranienburg prisoner when
they burst in on the Gleiwitz radio station, knocking a Mozart
symphony off the air and firing pistols in all directions. The
intruders shouted in Polish over the open microphones that they and
their comrades were invading Germany. Then they ran off, leaving
the corpse of the prisoner as one more "Polish casualty."

    At 10 a.m. the next day in Berlin, in the ornate Kroll Opera,
where the Reichstag had met ever since a mysterious outbreak of
arson gutted its traditional headquarters in 1933, Chancellor
Hitler arrived wearing the "sacred coat" of the German infantryman
and used the crudely faked fracas in Gleiwitz to justify his
invasion of Poland. "For the first time Polish regular soldiers
fired on our own territory," he told the brown-shirted deputies.
"Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now on
bombs will be met with bombs."

    It was a grotesque misstatement of the ugly reality. Five
months earlier, the secret plan known as Operation White had
declared, "The task of the Wehrmacht is to destroy the Polish armed
forces. To this end, a surprise attack is to be aimed at and
prepared . . . any time from Sept. 1, 1939, onward." If anything
more was needed, it was the neutralization of Poland's other big
neighbor, Soviet Russia, and Hitler had achieved that just the
previous week by suddenly concluding a treaty of cooperation with
his supposed archenemy Joseph Stalin. And so, at the appointed hour
of 4:45 a.m. (Poland time), Hitler struck all along the 1,750-mile
Polish frontier. The catastrophic war of revenge that he alone
wanted was now his to command.

    Without the slightest warning, Germany's General Walther von
Brauchitsch sent the Fourth Army smashing through the disputed
Polish Corridor, isolating the Free City of Danzig; the Eighth and
Tenth Armies striking over the Vistula plain toward Warsaw; the
Fourteenth Army driving across Silesia toward Cracow -- 1.5 million
men in all, led by a fearsome new military force, the 2,700
fast-moving panzers (tanks) of the German armored divisions.

    Overhead, another new German weapon seized control of the
skies: the Junkers-87 Stuka dive bomber, which plunged down to
blast road junctions and railroad lines; it also had a device that
emitted screams to spread terror among its victims. And then there
were the heavy bombers. General Wladyslaw Anders, who would
eventually lead the Polish exile army through the battles of North
Africa and Italy, heard the ominous drone of Heinkel-111s overhead
and later remembered that "squadron after squadron of aircraft
could be seen flying in file, like cranes, to Warsaw." At 6 a.m.
those deadly cranes began raining bombs on the unprepared,
ill-defended city and its civilian inhabitants. In those same
surprise raids on that first gray morning, the German Luftwaffe
virtually wiped out the entire 500-plane Polish air force on the
ground. The dawn surprise, the rampaging panzers, the shrieking
dive bombers, all were elements in a new German invention that was
to change the nature of warfare: blitzkrieg.

    Blitzkrieg and deception. In disputed Danzig, the once German
port administered by the League of Nations since the end of World
War I, the attack had begun half an hour before the invasion, when
local Nazi Storm Troopers seized several key buildings and
intersections. From the harbor, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein,
which had arrived a few days earlier on a "courtesy visit," began
emptying its 11-in. guns at the Westerplatte peninsula, where the
Poles were authorized to station 88 soldiers. The only real
resistance came from the Polish Post Office on Heveliusplatz, where
51 postal workers barricaded the doors. When the Storm Troopers
blasted open part of the building, the Poles retreated to the
cellar; the Nazis sprayed them with gasoline and set them afire.
By nightfall, Danzig had, said its local Nazi leader, "returned to
the Great German Reich."

    The Poles were amazed at the speed of the German successes --
even the Germans were surprised -- but the defenders counted on two
allies to save them. One was General Mud, who traditionally emerged
from the September rains that regularly converted the Vistula River
into an impassable barrier and the vulnerable fields of central
Poland into a morass. The other ally was the Anglo-French
partnership, which bound the two great powers of the West to defend
Poland by armed force.

    For both the rulers and the peoples of Britain and France, this
was an agonizing time. Again and again they had gone through
brink-of-war crises over Hitler's insatiable and megalomaniacal
demands, over his rearming of the Rhineland in 1936, his annexation
of Austria in the spring of 1938, his claims on the Czech
Sudetenland in the fall of 1938, his seizure of Bohemia and Moravia
in the spring of 1939. In each crisis, the threat of war had
reawakened the nightmarish memories of World War I, when tens of
thousands of men had been slaughtered in meaningless offensives
over a few miles of trenches and barbed wire; and each time the
threat of a new war had ended with another few months of nervous
peace, bought at the price of another diplomatic victory for
Hitler. Yet even now, with the Fuhrer's armies invading a nation
that Britain and France were pledged to defend, it seemed hard to
believe war was really at hand. Virginia Woolf's husband Leonard
recalled that he was planting irises under an apple tree. "Suddenly
I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room
window: `Hitler is making a speech.' I shouted back: `I shan't
come. I'm planting iris, and they will be flowering long after he
is dead.'"

    Though Hitler had made no pretense of declaring war on Poland
-- with which he had signed a ten-year nonaggression pact in 1934
-- the British and French response to his attack was glacial in its
formality. Not until 10 a.m. did the British Foreign Secretary,
Lord Halifax, summon the German charge d'affaires to ask if he had
any explanation for this "very serious situation." The charge
admitted only that the Germans were defending themselves against
a Polish attack.

    At this point, even with fighting under way all along the
Polish frontier, it was still conceivable that Hitler might once
again achieve his goal without a major war. Italy's Benito
Mussolini, who had promised to join Hitler's side in case of war,
telephoned Berlin to say that he wished to remain neutral;
Mussolini had been telling the British and French all that week
that if they would agree to a new four-power conference (much like
the one at Munich that had carved up Czechoslovakia the previous
year), he might be able to arrange some kind of compromise based
on the return of Danzig to Germany. Just before noon on the day of
the invasion, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, a devoted
believer in the appeasement of Hitler, telephoned Rome to say that
France would welcome such a conference. He did not even mention any
need for the Germans first to withdraw from Poland.

    The British insisted on that, however, and so, after several
anxious telephone calls between London and Paris, the two Allies'
ambassadors in Berlin finally requested an interview at 7:15 p.m.
with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. They told him
that unless Germany immediately stopped its invasion, they would
"without hesitation fulfill their obligations to Poland."

    All the next day, Saturday, Sept. 2, while the German tanks
kept pressing forward, Hitler made no response. The British Cabinet
met in the afternoon and decided that Hitler was stalling and that
Britain and France should deliver an ultimatum to Berlin at
midnight, to expire at 6 a.m. the following day. When Halifax
proposed this to Paris, however, Bonnet said the French military
commanders needed another 48 hours to mobilize.

    Addressing the House of Commons that evening, Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain tried to equivocate. He said that if the
Germans did not stop their invasion, Britain would "be bound to
take action." The House was furious at Chamberlain's delays, and
when Arthur Greenwood rose to reply for Labour, Tory backbencher
Robert Boothby called out, "You speak for Britain." Said Greenwood:
"I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate at a time when
Britain and all that Britain stands for, and human civilization,
are in peril."

    A worried Chamberlain telephoned French Premier Edouard
Daladier and said Britain could not wait 48 hours; Daladier said
it must. Halifax called Bonnet and proposed that an ultimatum be
delivered at 8 a.m. Sunday, to expire at noon. Bonnet insisted on
no ultimatum before noon. Halifax said the House was meeting at
noon, and any further delay would mean the downfall of the
government. He said that if necessary, Britain would "act on its
own." When the Cabinet asked Chamberlain to pledge no further
compromises, he said, "Right, gentlemen. This means war." As he
spoke, one witness recalled, "there was the most enormous clap of
thunder, and the whole Cabinet room was lit up by a blinding flash
of lightning."

    Halifax cabled Ambassador Nevile Henderson in Berlin and told
him to deliver an ultimatum to Ribbentrop at 9 a.m. on Sunday,
Sept. 3. Ribbentrop scornfully let it be known that he would not
be "available" but that Henderson could deliver his message to the
departmental interpreter, Paul Schmidt. As it happened, Schmidt
overslept that morning, arrived by taxi to see Henderson already
climbing the steps of the Foreign Ministry, and slipped in a side
door just in time to receive him at 9. Henderson stood and read
aloud his message, declaring that unless Britain were assured of
an end to the Polish invasion within two hours, "a state of war
will exist between the two countries."

    Schmidt dutifully took the British ultimatum to Hitler's
Chancellery, where he found the Fuhrer at his desk and the
"unavailable" Ribbentrop standing at a nearby window. Schmidt
translated the ultimatum aloud. "When I finished, there was
complete silence," he recalled. "Hitler sat immobile, gazing before
him. After an interval that seemed an age, he turned to Ribbentrop,
who had remained standing by the window. `What now?' asked Hitler
with a savage look."

    And at noon on Sept. 3, Chamberlain rose in the Commons --
newly outfitted with blackout curtains -- and announced that his
years of effort to appease Hitler had ended in failure. "This is
a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me," he
said. "Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have
believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins. There is
only one thing left for me to do: that is to devote what strength
and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which
we have to sacrifice so much."

    That very night, Britons learned of the first such sacrifice:
200 miles west of Scotland in the North Atlantic, the unarmed
British liner Athenia, carrying 1,400 passengers from Liverpool to
Montreal, was hit and sunk by a torpedo from the German submarine
U-30; 112 passengers, including 28 Americans, died.

    Adolf Hitler left Berlin that same night to survey his armies'
progress in Poland, and what he saw pleased him mightily. General
Heinz Guderian, the tank commander who had already swept across the
50-mile-wide Polish Corridor, the once German area linking Poland
to the Baltic Sea, took the Fuhrer on a tour of the newly conquered
territory. Hitler was amazed at the low number of German
casualties, only 150 killed and 700 wounded among four divisions;
his own regiment had suffered 2,000 casualties during its first day
of combat in World War I. And he was impressed when Guderian showed
him the shattered remains of a Polish artillery regiment. "Our dive
bombers did that?" he asked. "No, our panzers," Guderian proudly
answered.

    Many of the Poles had fought gallantly, though, and it was here
in the battle for the corridor that there spread the legend of the
Polish cavalry charging German armor, like medieval knights lost
in a time warp. "The Polish Pomorska Cavalry Brigade, in ignorance
of the nature of our tanks, charged them with swords and lances,"
Guderian recalled with some wonder, "and suffered tremendous
losses." Actually, the Polish cavalry was organized to combat
infantry charges, and it had proved its value when the Poles
defeated the Soviets in 1920. But by the time it confronted the
German tanks, the cavalry was already surrounded, and its legendary
charges were primarily a desperate effort to escape capture and
destruction.

    Despite a few convulsive counterattacks, the Germans swept
forward all along the front. Blessed by dry weather, the armored
spearheads advanced as much as 30 miles a day. As early as Sept.
5, Germany's Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his journal: "As
of today, the enemy is practically beaten." The next day, the
Wehrmacht captured Cracow, Poland's second city. Two days later,
the first tanks of the 4th Panzer Division reached the suburbs of
Warsaw, where they encountered sniper fire from apartment windows
and found major streets blocked by overturned buses. While the
tanks paused for reinforcements, the Luftwaffe kept up its bombing
of the battered capital.

    A Rome journalist named Enrico Altavilla provided this
description: "Our objective was the great new bridge of nine spans
over the (Vistula) river. We flew over it at 600 meters. It was
crowded with autos, armored cars, trucks and private vehicles. In
their panic they had created a jam, and none could go forward or
backward. The first bombs missed their objective by a hair's
breadth. We turned and could see the bridge already full of smoke.
One of the other bombers was more accurate than ours. My pilot bit
his lip. The bridge was still standing, but this time our bombs
were better aimed. I saw a truck full of soldiers tossed into the
air and an armored car fall into the river. The arches of the
bridge were precipitated into the river one after another, forcing
up high columns of water. Some soldiers floundered in the ruins.
Others succeeded in reaching the bank. Some inanimate figures
floated in the current. Such is war."

    Warsaw Mayor Stefan Starzynski struggled valiantly to rally
the city's defenders, leading volunteers in digging trenches,
taking to the radio to broadcast instructions. And crowds gathered
outside the British and French embassies to greet their declaration
of war by singing God Save the King and La Marseillaise. The
crowds' hopes of rescue were doomed, however, for the British
military effort during these first days consisted mainly of
dropping propaganda leaflets on German military installations
(among the cautious Britons' other preparations for war: killing
all poisonous snakes in the London zoo). The French attempted only
one feeble probe against Germany's ill-defended western frontier.
And the Poles' own political and military leaders, perhaps
considering discretion the better part of valor, were already
abandoning Warsaw to its fate.

    They were not the best of leaders even under the best of
circumstances. Partitioned three times by its hostile neighbors
during the 18th century, Poland had re-emerged into independence
only in 1920, thanks to the Versailles Treaty, and its rulers were
a rather inept junta of colonels, political heirs to the late
founding father, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. Not only was the
government something less than a democracy, but also its fiercely
anti-Soviet policy led it to a pro-German stance as late as 1938,
when it joined with Hitler in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.

    As early as Sept. 4, the Polish government began evacuating
Warsaw. The Bank of Poland sent its gold reserves south, to a haven
near the Rumanian border. On Sept. 7 the Foreign Ministry told all
diplomats that President Ignacy Moscicki, Premier Felicjan
Slawoj-Skladkowski and their Cabinet ministers were leaving
immediately by truck convoy for Naleczow, a resort 85 miles
southeast of Warsaw. Finding no telephone lines working and almost
no electricity, the ministers and diplomats trekked onward the next
day to Krzemieniec, some 200 miles farther southeast. Throughout
this flight, they were repeatedly attacked by German planes, for
the Germans had long since broken all Polish communications codes.
U.S. Ambassador Anthony J. Drexel Biddle reported being bombed 15
times and strafed four times. Bombed again in Krzemieniec, the
officials moved yet an additional 100 miles to Zaleszczyki, on the
Rumanian frontier, where they were bombed once again.

    Nearby, equally cut off from everything, was Poland's military
high command. If the Poles had adopted a more cautious strategy in
the first place, pulling back to form a defensible perimeter, they
might have lasted longer. But the Poles refused to abandon an inch
of their land, and the Germans' surprise attack across the
unfortified frontier threw the defenders into confusion. Military
units got separated and cut off; refugees jammed the highways;
communications systems broke down; the Germans not only knew Polish
codes but also broadcast false information on Polish radio
frequencies.

    On Sept. 6, Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, the supposed strongman
who had insisted on Poland's forward strategy, evacuated his
military headquarters from Warsaw and kept retreating until he
crossed into Rumania. After Sept. 16, no further general orders
went out from either the marshal or his headquarters. Local units
maintaining pockets of resistance throughout Poland -- about
250,000 men in all -- were simply left on their own, to fight on
as best they could.

    On Sept. 17 came the final step in the disaster: the Soviet
army invaded eastern Poland and proceeded to grab whatever had not
yet been grabbed by the Germans. Actually, this had all been
preordained in several secret protocols of the previous month's
Nazi-Soviet treaty. Only the date of the Soviet invasion had been
left uncertain. Stalin had a little difficulty in thinking up an
excuse to attack, but he finally declared that he was acting "to
restore peace and order in Poland, which has been destroyed by the
disintegration of the Polish State."

    So it was all over, except for the fact that besieged Warsaw
still stood unconquered. German panzers and infantry had surrounded
the capital since Sept. 14, but every time they tried to smash into
it, they were blocked by overturned trolley cars, heaps of rubble,
sniper fire, homemade gasoline bombs. Luftwaffe bombers swept over
the city almost continually. Civilian casualties numbered in the
thousands, many of them buried inside collapsed buildings. Food and
medicine began to run out. "Everywhere corpses," one survivor later
recalled, "wounded humans, killed horses." As soon as a horse fell,
said another, "people cut off pieces of flesh, leaving only a
skeleton." Throughout the battle, Warsaw Radio broadcast a Chopin
polonaise over and over, showing that the surrounded city was still
fighting.

    A German officer entered Warsaw under a flag of truce on Sept.
16 and delivered an ultimatum: surrender in 24 hours or artillery
would begin shelling the entire city. The Polish commandant refused
to receive the message. German planes dropped leaflets with the
same warning. Then the shelling came.

    "One of the first great fires, which later raged throughout
all Warsaw, was in the Jewish quarter," cabled photographer Julien
Bryan, who worked for Time Inc. and the Chicago Daily News, the
only American correspondent in the city. "I saw able-bodied men
working in pitiful bucket brigades along with stooped, old,
long-bearded men in long black coats and skullcaps. Apartment
houses whose sides had been ripped out earlier in the day were now
ravaged by flames. An old woman stood in front of the ruins of her
home, a teakettle steaming on her stove but fire coming from the
burning building. There was a skeleton on an iron bedstead nearby.
She was dazed and poking in the hot ashes. Nearby a little boy was
playing with a football -- all he had saved. The bodies of 14
horses were smoking and smelling in the street. Twenty feet from
them were the bodies of ten people who had sought refuge in a
dugout -- a direct hit."

    Finally, on Sept. 27, with 12,000 citizens dead, one-quarter
of the city destroyed and much of the rest in flames, with food
stocks gone, the water system wrecked, Warsaw gave in. The Chopin
had died away; the radio station had gone off the air. And there
descended on Poland a great curtain of silence. Hitler had told his
commanders in August that he planned to send SS units to Poland "to
kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish
race or language." That was an exaggeration, but not by much. In
town after town, Einsatzgruppen (special units) began roaming from
house to house, systematically murdering local officials, teachers,
doctors, aristocrats, Jews, clergymen, anyone who might oppose the
New Order. SS officials in Berlin boasted of 200 shootings a day,
but behind that curtain of silence, in obscure villages with names
like Treblinka and Auschwitz, the killing over the next few years
would increase to a level beyond anything civilized minds could
imagine.

    In the West, the month-old war seemed virtually over before it
had even begun, and there began a period of mysterious inertia on
both sides. The British called it the phony war, the French drole
de guerre, the Germans Sitzkrieg. But the war was not over. It had
barely started.