Inferno - Max Hastings [16]
It is sometimes argued that in mid-September 1939, with the bulk of the German army committed in Poland, the Allies had an ideal opportunity to launch an offensive on the Western Front. But France was even less prepared psychologically than militarily for such an initiative; and Britain’s small expeditionary force, still in transit to the Continent, could contribute little. The Germans could probably have repelled any assault without much disrupting their operations in the east, and the inertia of the French and British governments reflected the will of their peoples. A Glasgow secretary named Pam Ashford wrote in her diary on 7 September: “Practically everyone thinks the war will be over in three months … Many hold that when Poland is smashed up there won’t be much point in continuing.”
The Poles should have anticipated the passivity of their allies, but its cynicism was breathtaking. A present-day historian, Andrzej Suchcitz, has written: “The Polish government and military authorities had been double-crossed and betrayed by their western allies. There was no intention of giving Poland any effective military support.” As Warsaw faced its doom, Stefan Starzyński declared in a broadcast: “Destiny has committed to us the duty of defending Poland’s honour.” A Polish poet later celebrated the mayor’s defiance in characteristically emotional terms:
And he, when the city was just a raw, red mass
Said: “I do not surrender.” Let the houses burn!
Let my proud achievements be bombed into dust.
So what, if a graveyard grows from my dreams?
That some things are dearer than the finest city wall.
By the end of the campaign’s third week, Polish resistance was broken. The capital remained unoccupied only because the Germans wished to destroy it before claiming the ruins; hour after hour and day after day, merciless bombardment continued. A nurse, Jadwiga Sosnkowska, described scenes at her hospital outside Warsaw on 25 September:
The procession of wounded from the city was an unending march of death. The lights went out, and all of us, doctors and nurses, had to move about with candles in our hands. As both the operating theatres and the dressing stations were destroyed the work was done in the lecture rooms on ordinary deal tables, and owing to the lack of water the instruments could not be sterilised, but had to be cleansed with alcohol … As human wreckage was laid on the table the surgeon vainly attempted to save the lives that were slipping through his hands … Tragedy followed tragedy. At one time the victim was a girl of sixteen. She had a glorious mop of golden hair, her face was delicate as a flower, and her lovely sapphire-blue eyes were full of tears. Both her legs, up to the knees, were a mass of bleeding pulp, in which it was impossible to distinguish bone from flesh; both had to be amputated above the knee. Before the surgeon began I bent over this innocent child to kiss her pallid brow, to lay my helpless hand on her golden head. She died quietly in the course of the morning, like a flower plucked by a merciless hand.
Professional soldiers can seldom afford to indulge emotionalism about the horrors of war, but posterity must recoil from the complacency of Germany’s generals about both the character of their national leader