All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [4]
Any writer’s highest aspiration, more than sixty-five years after the war’s ending, is to offer a personal view rather than a comprehensive account of this greatest and most terrible of all human experiences, which never fails to inspire humility in its modern students, inspired by gratitude that we have been spared anything comparable. In 1920, when Colonel Charles à Court Repington, military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, published a best-selling account of the recent conflict, it was considered sinister and tasteless that he chose as his title The First World War, for it presumed another. To call this book The Last World War might tempt providence, but it is at least certain that never again will millions of armed men clash on European battlefields such as those of 1939–45. The conflicts of the future will be quite different, and it may not be rashly optimistic to suggest that they will be less terrible.
MAX HASTINGS
Chilton Foliat, Berkshire, and Kamogi, Kenya, June 2011
Poland Betrayed
While Adolf Hitler was determined to wage war, it was no more inevitable that his 1939 invasion of Poland precipitated global conflict than that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria did so in 1914. Britain and France lacked both the will and the means to take effective action towards fulfilment of security guarantees they had given earlier to the Poles. Their declarations of war on Germany were gestures which even some staunch anti-Nazis thought foolish, because futile. For every eventual belligerent save the Poles themselves, the struggle began slowly: only in its third year did global death and destruction attain the vastness sustained thereafter until 1945. Even Hitler’s Reich was at first ill-equipped to generate the intensity of violence demanded by a death grapple between the most powerful nations on earth.
During the summer of 1939 Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the old American South, enjoyed a surge of popularity in Poland. ‘Somehow, I considered it prophetic,’ wrote one of its Polish readers, Rula Langer. Few of her compatriots doubted that a conflict with Germany was imminent, because Hitler had made plain his commitment to conquest. Poland’s fiercely nationalistic people responded to the Nazi threat with the same spirit as the doomed young men of the Confederacy in 1861. ‘Like most of us, I believed in happy endings,’ a young fighter pilot recalled. ‘We wanted to fight, it excited us, and we wanted it to happen fast. We didn’t believe that something bad could really happen.’ When artillery lieutenant Jan Karski received his mobilisation order on 24 August, his sister warned him against burdening himself with too many clothes. ‘You aren’t going to Siberia,’ she said. ‘We’ll have you on our hands again within a month.’
The Poles paraded their propensity for fantasy. There was an exuberance in the café and bar chatter of Warsaw, a city whose baroque beauties and twenty-five theatres caused citizens to proclaim it ‘the Paris of eastern Europe’. A New York Times reporter wrote from the Polish capital: ‘To hear people talk, one might think that Poland, not Germany, was the great industrial colossus.’ Mussolini’s foreign minister, his son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano, warned the Polish ambassador in Rome that if his country resisted Hitler’s territorial demands, it would find itself fighting alone, and ‘would quickly be turned into a heap of ruins’. The ambassador did not dissent, but asserted vaguely that ‘some eventual success … might give Poland