British and French declarations of war caused the Poles, naturally enough to expect immediate land and air operations. Yet, neither the French nor the British did much to help the beleaguered Poles imploring their promised assistance. This was again contrary to the letter and spirit of both the Franco-Polish alliance of 1921 and the military convention of May 1039, as well as the British-Polish Mutual Assistance pact, signed on 25 August. The pact had stated categorically that in case of aggression by a European Power (which was defined as meaning
British reaction was no better than the French. On September 5, the Polish military attaché’ in
It was obvious that
Attacked from four sides, outflanked and overwhelmed,
According to the later testimony of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the Germans in September 1939 had not more than thirty poorly prepared combat divisions in the West. Most of the German troops were raw recruits, many of whom had never fired live ammunition, and this was sufficient for barely three days of fighting. The better German troops, all tanks, and practically the entire Air Force were thrown into the Polish campaign. During the second week of the war, while the battle of Kutno was still raging and the fate of
Yet, the French Army and Air Force stood passively facing these meager German contingents in the West; on the Allied side of the Western front were approximately 2,500 tanks, 10,000 guns, and nearly 3,000 French and British aircraft. After making allowance for protecting the border with Italy and leaving a dozen or so divisions in North Africa, General Gamelin had in metropolitan France at least eighty-five trained and equipped divisions to confront the German Army’s some thirty second-rate German divisions. At that time, Gamelin had six times as many guns as the Germans; he had 1.600 guns apart form his divisional artillery against Germany’s 300- and the French guns were better and of heavier caliber. Moreover, the French had 3,286 tanks while in the West the Germans had very few. The Western Allies had 934 fighter planes immediately available for action while the Germans had virtually none on the Western front; the British had 776 serviceable bombers, while all of the Germans had very few since the majority of them had been sent to the Polish front.
In retrospect it is obvious that in 1939 the Germans were not ready for war on two fronts simultaneously. They had only 98 divisions, of which 52 were active. Of the remaining 46, only 10 were fit for immediate action, be-cause the remainder had only a month or so of training. Even in the air the Germans did not have a numerical superiority over their opponents. As of September, 1939, the Allies had in fact more first-line, though not very modern, aircraft. There is no doubt that Germany’s better planes were of more advanced design than those of the Allies, but the Luftwaffe’s crushing superiority in the air was a myth, largely cultivated by Hitler to intimidate his opponents. In September 1939, the Germans had only 3,600 planes, of which, however, some 2,000 were engaged in Poland, thus leaving about 1,600 for the defense of the entire Reich, including a reserve of only 900 aircraft.18 In 1939 the Germans had no strategic bomber force and the existing craft were suited more to tactical cooperation with land units than to long-range bombing.
German intelligence reports, uncovered by the Allies after the war, indicated deep anxiety about the Wehrmacht in the West. These reports expressed fear that should the Allies attack early in September, they could reach the
As France and Britain were reluctantly mobilizing their resources, the victors were dividing their spoils. Early in October 1939, Hitler incorporated not only Dang, but also Polish Pomeranian, Posnania, and Upper Silesia and a fragment of Central Poland, including the district around the industrial city of Lodz, into the Greater German Reich. Thus, the frontiers of the Third Reich were pushed beyond those of the old Empire of 1914. The bulk and the annexed Polish land were organized into a new Wartegau. The mutilated remainder of Poland, the area around Warsaw, Cracow and Lublin, as far as the Soviet border on the Bug, was decreed to be a General Government “with Cracow as the seat of its ruler,” a rabid Nazi Dr. Hans Frank. The Germans soon started the persecution and eventual extermination of Jews as well as the educated class of the Polish society; the remaining strata were to be reduced to helots for the “Master Race.”
While in Western and Central Poland the Germans were establishing their New Order, the eastern segment of the country was suffering from the Stalinist policies of ” social engineering.” The Soviets proceeded to mass arrest of “politically unreliable elements” and their forcible deportation to distant parts of what later was to be called the “Gulag Archipelago.” At the same time Stalin turned has attention toward the three small Baltic Republics, the existence of which has hinged on Poland’s independence. The Poles has insisted on adding to the British-Polish defensive alliance an additional protocol which extended all alliance to the Baltic states. According to this annex to the treaty, Great Britian would be obliged to assist Poland in defending Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia against a German attack. Of course, neither the British nor the Polish negotiators realized that the fate of the Baltic Republics had already been determined two days earlier in Moscow by the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol.
On September 20, three days after the Soviet invasion of Poland, Moscow accused Estonia of threatening the security of the U.S.S.R. by allowing the interned Polish submarine, “OrzeI (Eagle), to escape from Tallinn. Red Army units of the Leningrad military district were ordered to be ready to march into Estonia, while a squadron of the Soviet Baltic fleet immediately sailed into Estonian territorial waters. On September 24, at the Soviet request, Estonia’s foreign minister, Karl Selter, appeared in Moscow.