Strategy
The plan called for simultaneous flank attacks from the north and the south, aimed to cut off the Corridor and proceed to Warsaw. The Poles elected to stand all along their indefensible border, thus inviting quick fragmenting, encirclement, and reduction. They should have prepared their main defenses along the lines Vistula- Narew-Bug. This would have prolonged hostilities, and encouraged the British and French to attack our weak holding force in the west. This could have been devastating. Adventurous authoritarian leadership had exposed the German people to a bad risk. However, the gods smiled on us at the time, the Poles proved as inept in their strategic dispositions as they were brave in the field, and the French sat in their camps and fortresses, scarcely firing a shot.
Nowadays German commentators write of the “miracle” of the French static defense in September 1939, which made the Polish blitzkrieg possible. It is hard to see where the “miracle” lay. French military thinking was defensive and positional, because such thinking had triumphed in 1918. They had an obsession with the theoretical ten-to-one advantage of the defense in mechanized warfare. There is no doubt that in September France could have sent millions of well-trained soldiers, with more armored divisions that the Wehrmacht had in Poland, crashing out of the Maginot fortresses, or via the northern plain through Belgium and Holland, into our paper-thin western formations, and rolled to Berlin. But the will was not there. Adolf Hitler’s political and military gamble on this vital point proved brilliant. Of all his opponents, he throughout best understood and anticipated the French.
Victory
The Polish breakthrough phase took approximately four days. Complete tactical surprise was achieved because the hypocritical Polish politicians, though wholly aware of the danger, kept giving their people false assurances. The Polish air force of almost a thousand planes was destroyed on the ground. Thereafter the Luftwaffe freely roamed the skies. Polish ground resistance was moderate to heavy, and our commanders in the field had to admire the bold cavalry dashes against tank formations. Perhaps the legend is true that the Polish horsemen were told by their government that our tanks were papier-mache dummies! In that case, they were soon sadly disabused. The contrast between the possibilities of mechanized warfare and classic military tactics was never more strikingly demonstrated than in these ineffectual charges of the Polish horsemen against iron tanks.
Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht too was operating with but a think knife-edge of fully motorized armored divisions. Our important ground advances were made by infantry masses on foot, exploiting the breakdown of communications, the panic, and the disarray of battle lines created by the narrow panzer thrusts. And while the Luftwaffe played a strong support role, it was the horse-drawn artillery massed outside Warsaw, and not the air bombardment, that in the end knocked out the city’s capacity to resist and brought the eventual surrender. This heavy reliance on horses betrayed our serious lack of combat readiness for world war.
By September 21 the city was ringed by Wehrmacht forces; and the news from the outside was of Polish soldiers being taken prisoner in the hundreds of thousands, of one pocket after another being liquidated, of a total collapse of the front, of a national government pusillanimously fleeing to Rumania. Yet it was not until September 27 that the city, under a round-the-clock rain of shells and bombs, without food, water, or light, with many of its buildings in ruins, with disease spreading, finally gave up its vain hopes of last-minute deliverance from the West, and surrendered.
Observations
From first to last, the Fuhrer and his propagandists played down the Polish campaign as a local police action, a “special task” of the Wehrmacht. Hitler personally cancelled many sections of Case White dealing with rationing, troop mobilization, and transport, with one aim in mind: to soften the impact on the German people. This political meddling represented a considerable setback to operations, and precious months passed before the damage was righted. I may say here, that due to similar Party and Fuhrer interference, which never ceased, the war effort was never, by professional standards, organized fully or properly.
The shabby force enacted at our radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border on the night of August 31 — the pretense that Polish soldiers had crossed over to attack the station and been repulsed, the dressing of condemned political prisoners in Polish uniforms and the scattering of the bullet-riddled bodies near the station, as an excuse for starting the invasion — none of this trivial humbug was known to the Wehrmacht. We were irrevocably on the march toward Poland seventy-two hours earlier. I myself did not learn of the incident until the Nuremberg trials; I was too busy at the time with more serious matters.* (*The veracity of this statement is questionable. — V.H.) Himmler was probably responsible.
Poland in 1939 was a backward and ill-informed dictatorship of reactionary colonels and politicians with fantastic territorial aims, a government extremely brutal to minorities (especially the Ukrainians and the Jews) and unjust and mendacious to its own people; a government that pounced like a hyena on Czechoslovakia at the Munich crisis and tore a province from that country in its hardest hour; a government that clumsily played a double game with Germany and the Soviet Union for twenty years; and to the last tried to talk and act like a major military power when it was in fact as weak as a kitten. It was to support this reactionary, bluffing bigoted dictatorship that the democracies embarked on the Second World War. That government quickly and ignominiously fell to pieces and disappeared forever. But the war went on, and its starting point was soon all but forgotten. Someday, however, sober historians must again give the proper emphasis to these absurd paradoxes that governed the provoking of the world’s biggest war.
The final absurdity of this inept start to a terrible global struggle was that Czechoslovakia, betrayed by England in 1938, did not fight, and in the whole war period lost less than one hundred thousand people. Poland, supported by England in 1939, fought and lost almost six million dead (though about half of these were Jews). Both countries ended up as Communist puppets under the heel of the Soviet Union. Which government then was the wiser, and which people the more fortunate? When great powers fall out, small powers do well to bow to the storm wind, in whichever direction it blows strongest. That was what the Poles forgot.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The reader will have to grow used to the German habit of blaming other countries for getting themselves invaded by Germans. This note recurs throughout General von Roon’s book, as through most of their military literature. Officers raised under the General Staff system apparently lost the power to think in other terms. Roon’s discussion of the Polish government and the British guarantee are the telling passages in his preliminary sketch of Case White. — V.H.
Chapter 10
The
