Inferno - Max Hastings [10]
Franciszek Kornicki, a pilot, went to visit a wounded comrade in a Łódź hospital: “It was a terrible place, full of wounded and dying men lying everywhere on beds and on the floor, in rooms and corridors, some moaning in agony, others lying silent with their eyes closed or wide open, waiting and hoping.” Gen. Adrian Carlton de Wiart, head of the British military mission in Poland, wrote bitterly: “I saw the very face of war change—its glory shorn, no longer the soldier setting forth into battle, but the women and children being buried under it.”
ON SUNDAY, 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany, in fulfilment of their guarantees to Poland. Stalin’s alliance with Hitler caused many European communists, compliant with Moscow, to distance themselves from their nations’ stand against the Nazis. Trades unionists’ denunciations of what they branded an “imperialist war” influenced attitudes in many French and British factories, shipyards and coal mines. Street graffiti appeared: “Stop the War: The Worker Pays,” “No to Capitalist War.” Independent Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, a standard-bearer of the left, hedged his bets by calling for a struggle on two fronts: against Hitler and also against British capitalism.
The secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, delineating the parties’ territorial ambitions, were unknown in Western capitals until German archives were captured in 1945. But in September 1939, many citizens of the democracies perceived Russia and Germany alike as their foes. The novelist Evelyn Waugh’s fictional alter ego, Guy Crouchback, adopted a view shared by many European conservatives: Stalin’s deal with Hitler, “news that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities, brought deep peace to one English heart … The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” A few politicians aspired to separate Russia and Germany, to seek the support of Stalin to defeat the greater evil of Hitler. Until June 1941, however, such a prospect seemed remote: the two dictatorships were viewed as common enemies of the democracies.
Hitler did not anticipate the British and French declarations of war. Their acquiescence in his 1938 seizure of Czechoslovakia, together with the impossibility of direct Anglo-French military succour for Poland, argued a lack of both will and means to challenge him. The Führer himself quickly recovered from his initial shock, but some of his acolytes were troubled. Herman Göring, commander-in-chief (C-in-C) of the Luftwaffe, his nerve badly shaken, raged down the telephone to Germany’s foreign minister, Joachin von Ribbentrop: “Now you’ve got your fucking war! You alone are to blame!” Hitler had striven to forge a German warrior society committed to martial glory, with notable success among the young. But older people displayed far less enthusiasm in 1939 than they had done in 1914, recalling the horrors of the previous conflict, and their own defeat. “This war has a ghostly unreality,” wrote Count Helmuth von Moltke, an Abwehr intelligence officer but an implacable opponent of Hitler. “The people don’t support it … [They] are apathetic. It’s like a danse macabre performed on the stage by persons unknown.”
The American CBS correspondent William Shirer reported