Inferno - Max Hastings [20]
Hitler had committed himself to conquer Poland, but as so often, he had no clear plan for what should follow. Only when it became plain that Stalin welcomed the country’s extinction did Germany’s ruler decide to annex western Poland. Before the war, Nazis liked to dismiss Poland as a “Saisonstaat”—a temporary state. Now, it would cease to be any state at all: Hitler became master of lands containing 15 million Poles, 2 million Jews, 1 million ethnic Germans and 2 million other minorities. Among his foremost characteristics was a reflexive hatred of all those who opposed his will. This soon manifested itself against the Poles—and especially, of course, against their Jews. One day in Łódź soon after the occupation began, Szmulek Goldberg was returning from work when he “encountered chaos in the streets. People were running wildly in every direction. Somebody stopped and grabbed my sleeve. ‘Hide! Hide!’ he shrieked. ‘The Germans are capturing Jews at gunpoint and taking them away on trucks.’ ” He watched trucks drive past, loaded with captives, a first earnest of Hitler’s designs upon his race. Within weeks of Poland’s conquest, the first few thousand of its Jewish citizens had been murdered.
In Britain, a mother named Tilly Rice who had been evacuated with her children from London to a fishing port in north Cornwall wrote on 7 October after the end of the Polish campaign: “In the household in which I live the whole thing has been received in bewildered silence … War is still going on, but as something distant with just occasional repercussions on the general lives of the community … My own reactions to the whole situation are growing more and more indifferent every day.” Britain and France had declared war on Germany to save Poland. Poland was now gone, and Polish representatives were expelled from the Allied Supreme War Council, where they were deemed redundant. Many British and French politicians and citizens demanded to know to what end the war was being sustained. How could it be effectively waged? The U.S. ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, shrugged and said to his Polish counterpart: “Where on earth can the Allies fight the Germans and beat them?” Though Kennedy was a shameless anglophobe, appeaser and defeatist, his question was valid, and the Allied governments had no good answer to it. After the fall of Poland, the world waited in bewilderment to discover what might follow. Since France and Britain lacked the stomach to seize the initiative, the further course of the war waited upon the pleasure of Adolf Hitler.
CHAPTER TWO
NO PEACE, LITTLE WAR
IN NOVEMBER 1939, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that, with much of Europe at war, it had decided to award no Peace Prize that year. Yet in the eyes of many British and French people, the collapse of Poland condemned to futility the struggle to which their governments had committed them. The French army, with a small British contingent in its traditional place on the left flank, confronted German forces on France’s eastern frontier. But the Allies had no appetite for offensive operations, certainly not until they were better armed. The Polish campaign had demonstrated the effectiveness of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, though not yet their full power. Gen. Lord Gort, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, was appalled by the condition of some Territorial units which arrived in October to join his own five poorly equipped divisions. He said he had not believed it possible to see such a sight in the British Army: “The men had no knives and forks and mugs.”
Allied deployments were critically hampered by Belgian neutrality. It was assumed that if Hitler attacked in the west, he would reprise Germany’s 1914 strategy, advancing through Belgium, but King Leopold declined to offer Germany a pretext for invasion by admitting Anglo-French