The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (272 page)

General Franz Halder agreed—up to a point. He testified: “The success against Poland was only possible by completely baring our western border.” If the French had attacked, he added, “they would have been able to cross the Rhine without our being able to prevent it” and taken the Ruhr area, “the most decisive factor” in the German conduct of the war. Yet Halder, who had greater respect for Hitler’s military intuition than his fellow members of the officer corps, was unsurprised by the inertia on the western front; on August 14 his first entry in his war diary noted that he considered a French offensive “not very likely,” that France would not attack across the Low Countries “against Belgian wishes,” and that the French would probably “remain on the defensive.”
⁸⁰

At the time Halder was the only senior general in Zossen to endorse the Führer’s prediction. On September 7, with the issue of whether to send Wehrmacht divisions to the west being discussed seriously, Halder’s diary entry ended with a few lines summing up Hitler’s views: “Operations in the West not yet clear. Some indication that there is no real intention of waging war.” The Generalstab couldn’t believe it. They remembered the indomitable poilus who had fought under Joffre and Galliéni in the early years of the last war, who had always counterattacked when attacked, whose line was never broken, whose “
Ils ne passeront pas
” denied Verdun to Germany’s finest regiments through seven terrible months, and who paid an unprecedented price—four million casualties, one out of every four of them dead—for victory in 1918.
⁸¹

But Joffre, Galliéni, Pétain, and Foch were gone, and in their place stood—though not particularly tall—Gamelin. As Halder recorded the Führer’s thoughts, the French
généralissime
prepared to launch the only offensive of his career, a piece of opéra bouffe which mocked the memories of Verdun. “
L’offensive de la Sarre
,” as he grandly called it, was in fact a pitiful sortie. Of his 85 heavily armed divisions he committed 9 to an advance on a fifteen-mile front southeast of Saarbrücken. Moving slowly, taking every precaution, the infantry occupied twenty deserted villages and gained five miles. Here and there were reports of skirmishes, but the German response was to give ground, withdraw—and pray that the
généralissime
did not commit another fifty divisions to a full-scale attack. Of the Germans’ total strength, all but eleven divisions were untrained and the rest lacked adequate arms and ammunition. Nevertheless, on September 12 Gamelin commanded a halt. He congratulated his men on their victory and instructed them to make preparations for a retreat into the security of the Maginot Line if a German offensive came roaring down through Belgium. The next day the Polish military attaché, on orders from an alarmed Rydz-Smigly, asked Gamelin whether French warplanes had attacked their mutual enemy, and whether he could accelerate his infantry advance. Later that same day the architect of the Saar “offensive” replied mendaciously, in writing: “More than half of our active divisions on the northeast front are engaged in combat.” The Boche, he said, were responding with “
vigoureuse résistance
.” Interrogation of enemy prisoners revealed that the Germans were “pouring in reinforcements”—all of this, every word, pure fiction—and French warplanes had been in action from the outset, tying down “
une part considérable
” of the Luftwaffe. He had gone “far beyond” his pledge, he concluded. “
Il m’a été impossible de faire plus
” (“It has been impossible for me to do more”).
⁸²

The ground gained in the Saar was lost when Gamelin, on September 30, ordered a retreat. The only achievement of his so-called Saar offensive was to reveal France’s persistent confidence in outdated tactical ideas, notably the doctrine that any drive against a defended position must be preceded by a massive artillery bombardment, the “tin-opener,” as it had been called in 1918. General André de Beaufre, then a captain, said that Gamelin’s action, in character, had been a meaningless gesture (“
Voilà notre aide à la Pologne!
”), and Colonel de Gaulle dismissed “
l’offensive
” contemptuously as “
quelques démonstrations
.”
⁸³

By the tenth day of fighting, the Polish cause was lost, and Rydz-Smigly, who had read the heartbreaking dispatches from Beck’s diplomats in Paris and London, knew it. He ordered a general withdrawal into southeastern Poland, planning to organize a defensive position on a narrow front to prolong resistance. But the Generalstab had thought of everything. Already over half of the marshal’s remaining forces had been trapped before they could retreat across the Vistula. Cut off from their bases, running out of ammunition, this remnant was caught in a vise between two German armies. And before Rydz-Smigly could reach his redoubt in the southeast, he, too, was encircled.

On September 17 two Soviet army groups, in accordance with the secret clause in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, invaded Poland from the east. Ribbentrop and Molotov had fixed the demarcation line along the river Bug, but there are always soldiers who don’t get the word; shots were exchanged between some Germans and Russians, and a few men were wounded. Then all was quiet along the Bug. Both foreign armies were in Poland, but the Poles were forgotten; the fate of their homeland had been decided in the first three days of the Nazi invasion—actually, given the fourth color Gamelin had added to the French tricolor, before the fighting had begun.

By all precedents the Poles, in extremis, should have yielded once they found that they faced both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. The Germans had them checked; now they were in checkmate. It was time to quit. They were victims of a squalid deal worked by two despots whose hands reeked of innocent blood, and they had been betrayed by two allies whose leaders had been regarded as honorable men. No indignity had been spared them. In London—where their cause found little sympathy—a cabinet minister had declared that after Nazi Germany had been crushed, “a Polish state would be reconstituted”;
the
Polish state to whose defense England had been committed was unmentioned. The Poles would gain nothing if they made a messy exit; they would merely forfeit the claims they had upon the world’s compassion. It was far more sensible to go along quietly.

But the Poles didn’t want pity, and while quietude may be good form among Anglo-Saxons in exigency, the Poles are traditionally noisy. Newspaper photographs showed German and Russian officers shaking hands, elated that the battle was over. Except that it wasn’t; there were no pictures of Poles shaking hands with anyone. Their government and high command had left Warsaw for Rumania, leaving orders to fight to the bitter end. The Poles did; fueled by patriotic fervor, they barricaded streets with streetcars, stopping Reichenau’s tanks; his infantry was forced into the ugliest and most dangerous close combat—house to house, room by room. By that mysterious process which telegraphs news throughout a country, even after its communications system has been destroyed, all Poland knew what was happening in Warsaw, and thousands of Poles followed its example. Guderian plunged deep through the Polish rear to Brest-Litovsk, but when he tried to storm the town’s ancient citadel, he found an obsolete Renault tank had been jammed, and then welded, into the doorway. Warsaw, starving, lacking water, pounded around the clock by Nazi planes and artillery, finally capitulated ten days after the Russian invasion. Pockets of resistance fought on, though the last major stronghold—17,000 men in Kock, a village southeast of the capital—did not lay down their arms until October 7. Meanwhile, 100,000 Polish soldiers and pilots had escaped to Rumania and made their way to England, where they would fight in Free Polish battalions beside the British, French, and later, the Americans; Polish destroyers and submarines reached the Orkneys and joined the Royal Navy.

Stalin left central Poland to Hitler. In return he got the eastern provinces, a free hand in Lithuania, and the oil fields of southeast Poland, with the understanding that he would ship thirty thousand tons of crude to the Reich every year. Hitler annexed part of Poland and established the rest as a Nazi vassal state, the General Government of Poland, whose governor-general was Hans Frank, a feisty, dapper young Nazi lawyer, the adoring father of five children, who began braiding his Nuremberg rope by announcing: “The Poles shall be the slaves of the Third Reich.” He also became expert in carrying out programs whose euphemistic names masked some of the vilest crimes in history. Polish intellectuals, professional men, and anyone possessing leadership qualities—men and women who might subvert Frank’s authority—were marked for slaughter. This operation, in which 3,500 persons were actually executed, persons who had committed no crime, who were singled out precisely because they had led distinguished careers, was encoded
Ausserordentliche Befriedigungsaktion
(Extraordinary Pacification Program). In another Frank campaign, all Jews were grouped together for his
Flurbereinigungs-Plan
(Housecleaning Plan). Later, after other code words had been tried, the Nazis settled on
Endlösung
, the Final Solution, to represent the destruction of the European Jews. Their time had come.
⁸⁴

And so had Western civilization’s hour of maximum danger. Hitler was free now to turn the full fury of his might on England and France. Churchill had repeatedly spoken—mostly to empty seats—on the need to confront Nazi Germany with collective security. Above all, he had said, the Reich must be bracketed by strong nations, east and west, so that Hitler would know German aggression would mean a two-front war. When the Führer came to power the safeguards had seemed solid: France, England, and the Rhineland on the west, and Czechoslovakia and Poland to the east, with Russia, alienated by Nazi murders of German Communists and Hitler’s anti-Soviet polemics, frowning behind them. One by one Hitler had eliminated these threats. He could not have done it alone. He had needed help—and found it in London and Paris. The Polish army had been a disappointment. But France, whose army was vital to the security of free peoples, hadn’t even tried to exploit the period of grace—at least three weeks—when the German armies were tied down in the east. Now the democracies must face him alone—him and, in all probability, Italy, for the unprincipled Duce wanted to be on the winning side, and the Anglo-French alliance had been losing, losing, losing for nearly seven years. In England the iconoclastic General Fuller declared that France must be ruled by lunatics. There they had been in September, he wrote, with “the strongest army in the world, facing no more than twenty-six divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!” In Paris Léon Blum was recalling his conversation with a nonconformist French officer when they met in 1936. The Socialist leader had asked: “What would France do if Hitler should march on Vienna, Prague, or Warsaw?” Charles de Gaulle had replied: “According to circumstances, we shall have a limited call-up or full mobilization. Then, peering through the battlements of our fortifications, we shall watch the enslavement of Europe.” Vienna, Prague, and Warsaw had fallen. Now Blum was wondering whether those battlements and fortifications were strong enough to save France herself from bondage.
⁸⁵

H
itler had not expected France and England to go to war over Poland. After they had yielded the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, he had assumed that appeasement would continue to be the keystone of their foreign policy. He still doubted that they intended to fight. The French failure to attack the Siegfried Line when it was at its weakest had, in his view, confirmed him. The first inkling that he might have misjudged the British had been Churchill’s appointment to the War Cabinet. Told of it, Hermann Göring had dropped into a chair and said heavily: “Churchill in the Cabinet. That means war is really on. Now we shall have war with England.”
⁸⁶

The Nazi hierarchy had long been aware of Churchill. That included the Führer, which made Winston an exception. It is a remarkable fact that Hitler knew almost nothing of his enemies and even brushed aside information made available to him, preferring to rely on his instincts, which included contempt for all
Ausländer
. He did regard England as “our enemy Number One,” however, and Churchill as the symbol of British militancy. After the fall of Poland he lost little time in singling him out. Making his ritualistic peace offering, the sequel to all Nazi conquests, he declared that Poland was dead; it would never rise again; therefore why fight about it? “I make this declaration,” he said, “only because I very naturally desire to spare my people suffering. But should the views of Churchill and his following prevail, then this declaration will be my last. We should then fight…. Let those repulse my hand who regard war as the better solution!”
⁸⁷

As a cabinet minister, Churchill could now speak over the BBC whenever he chose, and on October 1, in his first wartime broadcast, he had told Britain: “Poland has again been overrun by two of the great powers which held her in bondage for a hundred and fifty years but were unable to quench the spirit of the Polish nation.” The heroic defense of Warsaw had shown that “the soul of Poland is indestructible, and that she will rise again like a rock, which may for a spell be submerged by a tidal wave, but which remains a rock.” He was more intrigued by “the assertion of the power of Russia.” He would have preferred that the Russians “should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland instead of invaders. But that the Russian armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.” Ribbentrop, he noted, had been summoned to Moscow last week to be told that “the Nazi designs upon the Baltic States… must come to a dead stop.” He continued: