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World War 2:
War in Poland
Approach to Conflict
German War Plan
Polish Defense Plan
Polish Campaign
Soviet Intervention
Partition
Approach to Conflict
On March 25, 1939, 10 days after he had completely dismembered
Czechoslovakia, Adolf Hitler told the chief of the High Command of the
Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW ), Col. Gen. (later
Field Marshal) Wilhelm Keitel, and the commander in chief of the army,
Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Walther von Brauchitsch, that the time
had come to consider solving the Polish problem by military means. A
week later, on April 3, Part 2 of the annual directive for the German
armed forces, drafted by Hitler himself, set forth a strategic outline
for an attack on Poland to be prepared by Sept. 1, 1939. On April 28,
in his first open move, Hitler abrogated the Polish-German non-aggression
treaty of 1934 and declared that the issue of Danzig ( Gdansk) must
be settled. Hitler's turning against Poland surprised no one. On March
31, the British government, attempting to forestall the German dictator,
had given a unilateral guarantee of Poland's territorial integrity.
(France had a military alliance with Poland dating back to 1921.)
Without hesitating, Hitler pressed forward. At a staff
conference held on May 23, he stated that a repetition of the Czech
affair was not to be expected. Further successes and the expansion of
German Lebensraum ( space for living) could not be achieved without
bloodshed. There would be war. Observers had noted after the Munich
Conference (q.v.) of 1938 that the negotiated settlement had angered
Hitler. He had wanted a chance to test the new Wehrmacht in action,
and he was now determined to have it against Poland. This was the new
element in the crisis which Hitler carefully nurtured through the spring
and summer of 1939. He did not wish another Munich, but he did wish
to cajole, frighten, or simply confuse the British and French sufficiently
to keep them from intervening in the neat, small war that he intended
to have with hisneighbor on the east.
Poland, not a great power, with a population of 35,000,000
was also not a minor nation. In maintaining its national existence against
foreign threats, it labored under several handicaps: approximately 10,000,000
of its people were nonPolish, its industrial base was weak, and it included
in its boundaries on the north (Polish Corridor, q.v.) and on the east
territory to which Germany and the Soviet Union could lay strong claims
on ethnic and historical grounds. Polish policy as conducted by President
Ignacy Moscicki and Foreign Minister Jozef Beck was to stand firm against
all of Hitler's demands. The Polish government drew encouragement from
the French alliance, the British guarantee, and, apparently,from an
underestimate of German strength and an overestimate of its own capabilities.
In the game Hitler started, the Soviet Union could;
if it wished, play the last trump. Fear of a two!front war haunted the
German military, and even Hitler would not at this time have risked
fighting both the Western powers and the Soviet Union. In mid-April
1939, the USSR began negotiations with both sides. The British and French
courted the Russians, but Joseph Stalin was not eager for trouble with
Germany. The Russians made the overtures to Germany, first suggesting
that the ideological conflict between nazism and communism need not
be a bar to a general agreement, and then hinting that the Soviet Union
would consider another partition of Poland. Hitler was cool toward these
proposals until he realized that the Russians were not merely trying
to make use of Germany to raise the price they could extract from the
British and the French. His bargaining position was strong: the Soviet
Union might have to fight for the Western powers, but all it needed
to do for Hitler was to remain neutral and gather in the spoils. How
well the Russians appraised the situation was demonstrated on May 3,
when Maksim M. Litvinov, a Jew and a long-time advocate of international
measures to restrain aggression, was suddenly dismissed as commissar
of foreign affairs and replaced by Vyacheslav M. Molotov.
In July 1939; under the guise of conducting summer maneuvers,
strong German forces moved into assembly areas on the Polish border.
Others were sent to East Prussia on the pretext that they were to take
part in celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg
(now Stcbark). In the first three weeks of August, German-inspired civil
disorders broke out in Danzig and the Polish Corridor, and the remaining
units scheduled to participate in the attack moved up to the border.
On August 22, Hitler assembled the generals who would command the larger
units and told them that the time was ripe to resolve the differences
with Poland by war and to test the new German military machine. He predicted
that Great Britain and France would not intervene. He intended to begin
the attack on August 26.
In Moscow on the night of August 23, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop
agreed to the final wording of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Treaty,
later known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact. A secret protocol placed Finland,
Estonia, and Latvia in the Soviet sphere of interest and Lithuania in
the German. The border of the Soviet and German spheres in Poland was
established on the Narew (Narev), Vistula (Visla), and San rivers. Because
time was pressing for Germany, the treaty was to go into effect as soon
as it had been signed.
In a last attempt to intimidate Hitler, Great Britain
announced on August 25 that she had entered into a full-fledged alliance
with Poland. On the same day, Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini informed
him that Italy would not be able to take part militarily in any forthcoming
war. These two reverses were not significant enough to deter Hitler,
but they did cause him to hesitate. He canceled the August 26 starting
date for the attack. For the next six days all of his moves were directed
toward two objectives: the division of Poland and the West by various
schemes and proposals for negotiations which he knew the Poles would
not accept; and the undermining of French and British confidence by
means of the recent agreement with the Soviet Union.
On August 31, Hitler signed Directive No. 1 for the
Conduct of the War. During the night, SS units staged "incidents"
along the border, of which the most notorious was an alleged raid on
the radio station at Gleiwitz (now Gliwice) in Silesia. Before sunrise
on the next morning, Sept. 1, 1939, the war began as the German armies
marched into Poland. Two days later, when Great Britain and France declared
war, Hitler said to Ribbentrop, "…it does not mean they will
fight."
German War Plan
The fundamental concept of the German plan was to fight
a short war that would be over before the British or French armies could
get into action-over, in fact, before the Western powers could even
make up their minds to fight. The plan was given its final form in an
operation order issued by the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres
or OKH) on June 15. The order provided for two groups of armies, Army
Group North commanded by Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Fedor von Bock
and Army Group South under Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Gerd von
Rundstedt.
Army Group North was to strike eastward from Pomerania
(Pomorze) into the Polish Corridor with one of its two armies, the Fourth
Army. The other, the Third Army, would strike westward from East Prussia
into the corridor and southward toward Warsaw (Warszawa). When the armies
had made contact in the corridor, they would both turn their full strength
toward the capital. Army Group South, with the Eighth, Tenth, and Fourteenth
armies, was to advance to the northeast from Silesia and Slovakia. The
Tenth Army, the strongest of the three, would strike directly toward
Warsaw, while the Eighth and Fourteenth armies covered its left and
right flanks, respectively. The junction of the Tenth Army with elements
of Army Group North at Warsaw would complete the encirclement of any
forces in western Poland that had not been destroyed before then. This
presumably would end the war. Bock proposed extending the arms of the
encirclement east of Warsaw to prevent Polish troops' escaping into
the Pripet (Pripyat) Marshes, but nothing was done about this suggestion
until after the campaign had begun.
The strength of Army Group North was 630,000 men; that
of Army Group South, 886,000. Army Group North was supported by the
First Air Force, which controlled 500 bombers, 180 dive bombers (Stukas
), and 120 fighters. The Fourth Air Force supported Army Group South
with 310 bombers, 160 dive bombers, and 120 fighters. The Air Force
High Command (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe or OKL) held in reserve 250
Ju-52 transports for paratroop operations. The navy intended to use
the World War I battleship Schleswig-Holstein, 3 cruisers, and two flotillas
of destroyers to bombard shore installations at Gdynia and Hel (Hela)
.
Polish Defense Plan
The one chance that Poland might have had to counter
the German invasion successfully was to fight a delaying action back
to the Narew-Vistula-San line and to hold there until the Western powers
could bring their forces to bear. This strategy would, however, have
sacrificed the country's industrial base and so carried with it the
seeds of eventual defeat. The Polish General Staff chose instead to
defend all of its frontiers with seven armies and several smaller groupings
in territorial deployment. It thereby eliminated at the outset the possibility
of concentrating its strength at the most gravely threatened points.
The planners apparently believed that the war, following older patterns,
would begin with border skirmishes that would only gradually evolve
into full-scale battles.
The Polish commander in chief was Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz,
inspector general of the armed forces. The army's full potential strength
was about 1,800,000 men. Mobilization began in July, and apparently
more than 1,000,000 men were called up, about 800,000 of them west of
the German-Soviet demarcation line. Most of the weapons in the army's
stocks dated from World War I, and its armor, except for a few light
tanks, consisted of some companies of armored scout cars. The air units
had 9,35 aircraft, less than half of which were modern. The navy consisted
of 4 destroyers, 5 submarines, and some smaller craft.
Polish Campaign
On the morning of September 1, the Luftwaffe struck
at the Polish airfields, destroying nearly all of the planes before
they could get off the ground. It then set about systematically disrupting
the railroads and lines of communications. Before the clay ended, the
Polish leadership was helpless. Mobilization could not be completed,
and large-scale troop movements were impossible.
The first phase of the campaign, the breakthrough on
the borders, ended on September 5. By September 7, the point of the
Tenth Army was 36 miles southwest of Warsaw. The Eighth Army on the
left had kept pace, executing its mission of protecting the flank, while
the Fourteenth Army on the right had captured the Upper Silesian industrial
area. By September 5, the two armies in Bock's Army Group North had
cut across the corridor and had begun turning to the southeast, and
two days later elements of the Third Army reached the Narew 25 miles
north of Warsaw. The Poles fought gallantly, but cavalry was no match
for tanks. On September 6, the Polish government left Warsaw for Lublin;
later it moved close to the Rumanian border, which it crossed on September
16.
The second phase of the campaign completed the destruction
of the Polish armed forces. According to the German plan, this was to
have been accomplished in a single giant encirclement west of the Vistula.
After intelligence reports indicated that the government and large numbers
of Polish troops had fled across the river, the plan was changed in
accordance with Bock's earlier proposals. The OKH, on September 11,
ordered a second deeper envelopment, reaching eastward to the line of
the Bug ( Western Bug) River.
In the meantime, the closing of the inner ring at Warsaw had created
the first and only genuine crisis of the war. The Polish Poznan Army,
bypassed in the first week, at the beginning of the second week felt
the German pincers closing behind it. Turning around, it attempted to
break through to Warsaw. For several days after September 9, staffs
of the German Eighth and Tenth armies were put to a severe test as they
swung some of their divisions around to meet the attack coming from
the west. The Poles did not break through, however, and the ring gradually
closed. On September 19, the Poznan Army, numbering 100,000 men, surrendered,
ending the last resistance by a major Polish force.
The most spectacular feature of the outer envelopment was the advance
of Gen. (later Col. Gen.) Heinz Guderian's panzer corps from East Prussia
across the Narew to Brest (Brest-Litovsk), which it took on September
17. Elements of the corps then continued past the city to make radio
contact with the Tenth Army spearhead at Wlodowa, 30 miles to the south.
The war ended for all practical purposes on September
19. The fortress at Lwow ( now Lvov ) surrendered two days later. Warsaw
itself held out until September 27. Modlin capitulated on September
28, and the last organized resistance ended on October 6, when 17,000
Polish troops surrendered at Kock. In the whole campaign the Germans
took 694,000 prisoners, and an estimated 100,000 men escaped across
the borders into Lithuania, Hungary, and Rumania. The Germans lost 13,981
killed and 30,322 wounded; Polish losses will probably never be known.
Soviet Intervention
Hastening to end the war before the Western powers could
act, the Germans on September 3 requested the Soviet Union to move against
Poland, but the Russians were not ready. The German speed had taken
them by surprise. After the German ambassador in Moscow submitted a
second request on September 10, the Soviet government apparently became
concerned lest the war end before it could enter it and the Germans
refuse to honor the secret protocol and evacuate the territory east
of the demarcation line.
On September 17, two Soviet army groups, the White Russian Front in
the north and the Ukrainian Front in the south, each with two armies,
marched into Poland. They met little Polish resistance and concentrated
their efforts on shepherding the Germans out of the Soviet zone. A last-minute
German attempt to secure control of the oilfield south of Lwow in the
Soviet zone had aroused suspicion. Approximately 217,000 Polish troops
fell prisoner to the Russians. Many of them survived to fight Germany
again either in the west or in Soviet service, but some thousands, mostly
officers, found their graves in Katyn Forest.
Partition
In formulating the secret protocol to the nonaggression
treaty, both Germany and the Soviet Union had assumed that a truncated
independent Polish state would be allowed to survive. On September 25,
however, having made a hint to this effect. six days earlier, Stalin
proposed that the conquerors divide Poland between them. In Moscow,
on September 28, Ribbentrop signed a Soviet-German treaty of friendship.
A secret protocol revised the demarcation line. Germany received the
Province of Lublin and the Province of Warszawa eastward to the Bug
River, and as compensation the USSR included Lithuania in its sphere
of influence. The Soviet Union also agreed to deliver to Germany 300,000
tons of crude oil annually, the estimated output of the Polish fields.
The revision placed the Soviet border approximately on the Curzon Line
(q.v.) and gave Germany nearly all of the ethnically Polish territory.
On the same day, Ribbentrop and Molotov issued a statement claiming
that the settlement had created a basis for a lasting peace in eastern
Europe and calling for an end to the war between Germany and the Western
powers.
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