The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [15]
On 8 September, Reichenau’s Tenth Army reached the outskirts of Warsaw, but was initially repulsed by fierce Polish resistance. Despite years of threats by Hitler, the Poles had not built extensive fixed defences, preferring to rely on counter-attacks. This all changed in early September when the city centre of Warsaw witnessed makeshift barricades being thrown up, anti-tank ditches dug and turpentine barrels made ready for ignition. Hitler’s plan was to seize Warsaw before the US Congress met on 21 September, so as to present it and the world with a fait accompli, but that was not quite to happen.
‘The Polish Army will never emerge again from the German embrace,’ predicted Hermann Göring on 9 September. Until then, the Germans had operated a textbook attack, but that night General Tadeusz Kutrzeba of the Poznań Army took over the Pomorze Army and crossed the Bzura river in a brilliant attack against the flank of the German Eighth Army, launching the three-day battle of Kutno which incapacitated an entire German division. Only when the Panzers of the Tenth Army returned from besieging Warsaw were the Poles forced back. According to German and Italian propaganda, some Polish cavalry charged German tanks armed only with lances and sabres, but this did not in fact happen at all. Nonetheless, as Mellenthin observed, ‘All the dash and bravery which the Poles frequently displayed could not compensate for a lack of modern arms and serious tactical training.’11 By contrast, the Wehrmacht training was completely modern and impressively flexible: some troops could even perform in tanks, as infantry and as artillerymen, while all German NCOs were trained to serve as officers if the occasion demanded. Of course it helped enormously that the Germans were the aggressors, and so knew when the war was going to start.
In 1944 the Guards officer and future military historian Michael Howard went on a course ‘learning everything that was to be known about the German army: its organisation, uniforms, doctrine, personnel, tactics, weapons – everything except why it was so bloody good’.12 Part of the answer goes back to the way that the Junker state of Prussia in the seventeenth century had allowed bright middle-class youths to win advancement in the Prussian Army: Voltaire said, ‘Where some states have an army, the Prussian army has a state!’ and his contemporary the Comte de Mirabeau agreed, quipping that ‘War is the national industry of Prussia.’ Status, respect and prestige attached to officers in uniform. The lesson of the great national revival of 1813 was discipline, and it was not forgotten even in the defeat of 1918. Hindenburg, even though a defeated general, was elected president. The Germans were fighting their fifth war of aggression in seventy-five years, and, as Howard also records, when it came to digging deep slit-trenches or aiming howitzers they were simply better than the Allies. Blitzkrieg required extraordinarily close co-operation between the services, and the Germans achieved it triumphantly. It took the Allies half a war to catch up.
With only three Polish divisions covering the 800-mile-long eastern border, it came as a complete surprise when at dawn on 17 September the USSR invaded Poland, in accordance with secret clauses of the Nazi–Soviet Pact that had been agreed on 24 August. The Russians wanted revenge for their defeats at Poland’s hands in 1920, access to the Baltic States and a buffer zone against Germany, and they opportunistically grasped all three, without any significant resistance. Their total losses amounted to only 734 killed.13 Stalin used Polish ‘colonialism’ in the Ukraine and Belorussia as his (gossamer-thin) casus belli, arguing that the Red Army had invaded Poland ‘in order to restore peace and order’. The Poles were thus doubly martyred, smashed between the Nazi hammer and the Soviet anvil, and were not to regain their independence and freedom until November 1989, half a century later. In one of the most despicable acts of naked viciousness of the war, in the