Free The Second World War by John Keegan Page A

were armoured and ten mechanised, supported by 1300 modern combat aircraft. Although the Poles had begun to mobilise in July as war became imminent, they had not fully deployed all their men by 1 September. Together they formed forty divisions, of which none was armoured; the few Polish tanks were old, light models, sufficient to equip only a single brigade; and half the 935 aircraft of the air force were obsolete.
     
The campaign in Poland
    Hitler nevertheless still needed a pretext to attack. He was briefly deterred on 25 August by the news that Britain had entered into a formal alliance with Poland which guaranteed protection against aggression by a third party, and a few days of inconclusive diplomatic sparring followed. On 28 August, however, he formally abrogated the 1934 non-aggression pact with Poland, signed at a time when her army far outnumbered the Wehrmacht, and on the evening of 31 August received news of Polish aggression near the Silesian border town of Gleiwitz; the incident had in fact been carefully staged by his own SS. Next morning, at 4.45 am, his tanks began to cross the frontier. Since it was Hitler’s pretence that Germany had been attacked by Poland, he issued no declaration of war.
    By the end of 1 September the Polish air force had largely ceased to exist, many of its aircraft having been caught on the ground and destroyed by the Luftwaffe, which also bombed Polish headquarters, communications and cities. All the Wehrmacht ground forces made rapid progress. On 3 September the French and British governments delivered separate ultimatums demanding the withdrawal of German troops from Poland; both ultimatums expired that day and a state of war therefore existed between them and Germany. By that date, however, the Fourth Army advancing from Pomerania had made contact with the Third advancing from East Prussia and had cut off the ‘Polish Corridor’ to Danzig and Gdynia, Poland’s outlet to the sea. By 7 September, after a Polish attempt to stand on the line of the river Warta, west of Warsaw, had failed, the Tenth Army had advanced from the south to within thirty-six miles of the capital, while the Third Army, driving down from the north, was on the river Narew, twenty-five miles away. There was now a German change of plan. It had been expected that most of the Polish army would be entrapped west of the Vistula, on which Warsaw stands. By rapid disengagement, however, large numbers of troops got across the river and marched to concentrate on the capital to fight a defensive battle there. The German commanders therefore ordered a second and deeper envelopment, aimed at the line of the river Bug, a hundred miles east of Warsaw. While it was in progress, the one and only crisis for the Germans occurred. The Polish Poznan Army, one of those entrapped west of the Vistula, turned and attacked the German Eighth and Tenth Armies from the rear, inflicting heavy casualties on the surprised 30th Division in the first impact. A bitter encirclement battle ensued, ending with the capture of 100,000 Polish troops on 19 September.
    Warsaw had been encircled by 17 September; in an effort to reduce its garrison’s resistance by terror, it was heavily bombed until 27 September, when the defenders finally capitulated. All hopes of escaping eastward into the remote and difficult country bordering the Pripet Marshes were ended when the Red Army, after appeals for assistance from the Germans on 3 and 10 September, finally moved its White Russian and Ukrainian Fronts across the frontier on 17 September. Some 217,000 of the 910,000 Poles taken prisoner in the campaign fell into Russian hands. By 6 October all Polish resistance had ended. Some 100,000 Poles escaped into Lithuania, Hungary and Romania, whence many would make their way to France and later Britain, to form the Polish armed forces in exile and continue the struggle – as infantrymen in the Battle of France, as pilots in the Battle of Britain, and later on