Monday, Aug. 28, 1989

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

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.