Inferno - Max Hastings [6]
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 Jan Karski, an artillery lieutenant, 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 greater strength.” In Britain, Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers denounced as provocative Warsaw’s defiance in the face of Hitler’s threats.
The Polish nation of 30 million, including almost 1 million ethnic Germans, 5 million Ukrainians and 3 million Jews, had held borders established by the Treaty of Versailles for only twenty years. Between 1919 and 1921, Poland fought the Bolsheviks to assert its independence from longstanding Russian hegemony. By 1939 the country was ruled by a military junta, though the historian Norman Davies has argued, “If there was hardship and injustice in Poland, there was no mass starvation or mass killing as in Russia, no resort to the bestial methods of Fascism or Stalinism.” The ugliest manifestation of Polish nationalism was anti-Semitism, exemplified by quotas for Jewish university entry.
In the eyes of both Berlin and Moscow, the Polish state owed its existence only to Allied force majeure in 1919, and had no legitimacy. In a secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed on 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed on Poland’s partition and dissolution. Though the Poles viewed Russia as their historic enemy, they were oblivious of immediate Soviet designs on them, and were bent instead upon frustrating those of Germany. They knew the ill-equipped Polish army could not defeat the Wehrmacht; all their hopes were pinned upon an Anglo-French offensive in the west, which would divide Germany’s forces. “In view of Poland’s hopeless military situation,” wrote its London ambassador, Count Edward Raczyński, “my main anxiety has been to ensure that we should not become involved in war with Germany without receiving immediate help from our allies.”
In March 1939, the British and French governments gave guarantees, formalised in subsequent treaties, that in the event of German aggression against Poland, they would fight. If the worst happened, France promised the military leadership in Warsaw that its army would attack Hitler’s Siegfried Line within thirteen days of mobilisation.