Free The Second World War by John Keegan

and France issued a joint declaration guaranteeing the independence of Poland. Two weeks later, on 13 April, to demonstrate the general hardening of their attitude, they issued similar guarantees to Romania and Greece after Mussolini, in imitation of Hitler, annexed Albania.
    Poland, however, was the focus of the growing crisis, which France and Britain now hoped best to solve by drawing the Soviet Union into a protective agreement, even though they knew the Poles were reluctant to accept any help from their traditional enemy. The French and British were themselves mistrustful of the Soviets, besides harbouring a deep dislike of their political system, feelings which were exactly reciprocated. Without Polish resistance, however, an agreement might have been reached; but the Poles adamantly refused to contemplate the Red Army operating on their soil, since they rightly suspected that the Russians desired to annex large parts of Polish territory and might hold these under occupation as their reward for intervention. The British and French could offer Stalin no compensatory inducement to act with them in a hypothetical crisis; during the summer of 1939 the negotiations between the Western democracies and Stalin hung fire.
    Hitler, on the other hand, could offer powerfully tempting inducements. He too had been negotiating desultorily with Stalin during the spring and summer, encouraged by hints that Russia had no taste for risking war, even over the future of a country as important to the security of its western border as Poland. The discussions seemed to make no progress, since neither side would reveal its hand. Then in late July Hitler decided to gamble with a thinly veiled offer to let Stalin take a slice of eastern Poland if he agreed not to impede a German invasion of the country from the west. The Russians responded with keen interest and on 22 August the two Foreign Ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop, signed a nonaggression pact in Moscow. Its secret clauses effectively permitted the Soviet Union, in the event of a German-Polish war, to annex eastern Poland up to the line of the Vistula and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
    Poland was now doomed. On 15 June the German army staff, the
Oberkommando des Heeres
(OKH), had settled on a plan which provided for two army groups, North and South, to attack simultaneously with their objective as Warsaw. Because northern Poland was dominated by the German province of East Prussia, while southern Poland bordered on Czechoslovakia, now an extension of German territory (as the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia and the puppet state of Slovakia), Poland was deeply outflanked across the whole length of its two most vulnerable frontiers. Its fortified zone lay in the west, covering the industrial region of Lower Silesia, and since Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia time had not allowed for new fortifications to be built. The Polish government was naturally concerned to protect the richest and most populous region of the country; it remained ignorant of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and so of the Russian threat to its army’s rear; and it counted on the French, with British assistance, to attack Germany’s western border in order to draw off German divisions from the east as soon as the Wehrmacht marched.
    Hitler’s calculations were different. He believed, correctly as it turned out, that the French would not move against him in the west, which he left defended by only forty-four divisions – to oppose the nominal hundred of the French army – and that the British could do little to hurt Germany during the brief span of time he intended the Polish campaign to fill. He had the advantage of being mobilised, whereas the British and French were not. He had the even more important advantage of deploying superior numbers and immeasurably superior equipment against the Poles. The German Army Group North and South together numbered some sixty-two divisions, of which six