Inferno - Max Hastings [15]
Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, told the Polish ambassador in Moscow that, since the Polish republic no longer existed, the Red Army was intervening to “protect Russian citizens in western Belorussia and western Ukraine.” Although Hitler had agreed to Stalin’s annexation of eastern Poland, the Germans were taken by surprise when the Soviet intervention came. So, too, were the Poles. Once the Red Army struck in their rear, wrote Marshal Rydz-Śmigły bitterly, resistance could become only “an armed demonstration against a new partition of Poland.” The Wehrmacht high command, anxious to avoid accidental clashes with the Russians, declared a boundary on the San, Vistula and Narew Rivers; wherever its forces had advanced beyond that line, they now withdrew.
Hitler hoped that Stalin’s intervention would provoke the Allies to declare war on the Russians, and in London there was indeed a brief flurry of debate about whether Britain’s commitment to Poland demanded engagement of a new enemy. In the War Cabinet, only Churchill and War Minister Leslie Hore-Belisha urged preparations for such an eventuality. Britain’s Moscow ambassador, Sir William Seeds, cabled: “I do not see what advantage war with the Soviet Union would be to us although it would please me personally to declare it on Molotov.” Much to the relief of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the Foreign Office advised that the government’s guarantee to Poland covered only German aggression. Bitter British rhetoric was unleashed against Stalin, but no further consideration was given to fighting him; the French likewise confined themselves to expressions of disgust. Within days, at a cost of only 4,000 casualties, the Russians overran 77,000 square miles of territory including the cities of Lwów and Wilno. Stalin gained suzerainty over 5 million Poles, 4.5 million ethnic Ukrainians, 1 million Belorussians and 1 million Jews.
In Warsaw, starving people still clung to hopes of aid from the west. An air-raid warden confided to an acquaintance: “You know the British. They are slow in making up their minds, but now they are definitely coming.” Millions of Poles were at first bewildered, then increasingly outraged, by the passivity of these supposed friends. A cavalry officer wrote: “What was happening in the west, we wondered, and when would the French and British start their offensive? We could not understand why our allies were so slow in coming to our assistance.” On 20 September, Poland’s London ambassador broadcast to his people at home: “Fellow countrymen! Know that your sacrifice is not in vain, and that its meaning and eloquence are felt to the utmost here … Already the hosts of our allies are assembling … The day will come when the victorious standards … shall return from foreign lands to Poland.” Yet even as he spoke, Count Raczyński was conscious, as he wrote later, that his words were “little more than a poetic fiction. Where were the Allied hosts?”
In Paris, Polish ambassador Juliusz Łukasiewicz exchanged bitter words with the French foreign minister, Georges Bonnet. “It isn’t right! You know it isn’t right!” he said. “A treaty is a treaty and must be respected! Do you realise that every hour you delay the attack on Germany means … death to thousands of Polish men, women and children?” Bonnet shrugged: “Do you then want the women and children of Paris to be massacred?” The American correspondent Janet Flanner wrote from Paris: “It would seem, indeed, as if efforts are still being made to hold the war up, prevent its starting in earnest—efforts made, perhaps self-consciously, by government leaders reluctant to go down in history as having ordered the first inflaming shots, or efforts made as a general reflection of the various populations’ courageous but confused states of mind. Certainly this must be the first war that millions of people on both sides continued to think could be avoided even after it had officially been declared.”
The French were wholly unwilling