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finally declared war on Germany, with the French Government reluctantly following six hours later. It soon became clear to everyone – except the ever hopeful Poles – that the Western Allies were not about to assault the Siegfried Line, even though the French had eighty-five divisions there facing forty German. A fear of massive German air attacks devastating London and Paris partly explained Allied inaction, but even if Britain and France had attacked in the west Poland could probably not have been saved in time. As it was, although the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force reached France by 9 September, the main British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under Lord Gort vc did not start to arrive on the Continent until the next day.

What was not appreciated by the Allies at the time was the ever present fear that Hitler had of an attack from the west while he was dealing with matters in the east. In a letter to the Deputy Prison Governor at Nuremberg in 1946, Wilhelm Keitel averred that ‘What the Führer most feared and repeatedly brought up’ was firstly the possibility of a ‘Secret agreement between the French and Belgian general staffs for a surprise thrust by the French high-speed (motorized) forces through Belgium, and over the German frontier, so as to burst into the German industrial zone in the Ruhr’, and secondly the possibility of a ‘Secret agreement between the British Admiralty and the Dutch general staff for a surprise landing of British troops in Holland, for an attack on the German north flank’.9 In the event, Hitler needn’t have worried about either development, as neither France nor Britain, let alone neutral Belgium and Holland, was so much as contemplating anything so imaginative and vigorous. It was true that Chamberlain brought the long-term anti-Nazi prophet Winston Churchill into his government as first lord of the Admiralty, with political responsibility for the Royal Navy, but that was going to be Britain’s most bellicose act for the moment, except for one unsuccessful bombing raid on the Wilhelmshaven naval base and the dropping of twelve million leaflets on Germany, urging her people to overthrow their warmongering Führer. It was unlikely that this would happen just as he was about to pull off one of Germany’s greatest victories.

German propaganda, controlled by Dr Joseph Goebbels, a man who fully deserves the cliché ‘evil genius’, had long claimed that the Reich had a fifth column of supporters inside Poland, further adding to the atmosphere of terror and mistrust there. It was to be a tactic used often in the future, although on this occasion it was to lead to around 7,000 ethnic Germans being massacred by their Polish neighbours and retreating Polish troops.10 This baleful aspect of racial Total War was to be acted out on a monstrous scale across the Continent, but while on this occasion the Poles did it from terror of betrayal, soon the Nazis were to respond in cold blood, and on a far, far larger scale.

By 5 September the Polish Corridor was cut off entirely. The Polish Pomorze Army was encircled in the north by 8 September and the German Tenth Army under General Walther von Reichenau and the Eighth Army under General Johannes Blaskowitz had soon broken over and around the Polish Kraków and Łódź armies by the 17th. The Polish Government fled first to Lublin and thence to Romania, where they were initially welcomed, but then, under pressure from Hitler, interned.

On the night of 6 September, France invaded Germany, at least technically. Hoping to give the Poles some respite, the French Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, ordered an advance 5 miles into the Saarland along a 15-mile-wide front, capturing a dozen abandoned German villages. The Germans retreated behind the defences of the Siegfried Line and waited. As France was still mobilizing, no further action was taken, and five days later the French returned to their original positions with orders simply to undertake reconnaissance work. It was hardly ‘all support in the power’ of the Allies, and there is no evidence that Hitler removed a single