The opening five weeks of slaughter were a gory template for the 300 that followed: 200,000 people died, the overwhelming majority of them Poles, and mostly civilians
But as Roger Moorhouse, a British historian, notes, there was nothing phoney about the war in Poland. . Poles would be “exposed to every horror that modern conflict could devise”, including indiscriminate aerial bombing, and massacres of civilians andYet the campaign fought by Nazi Germany from September 1st 1939, the associated Soviet invasion on September 17th, and the brave, chaotic and doomed defence launched by Poland, are strangely absent from standard histories, in any language.
Mr Moorhouse’s book remedies that gap, weaving together archival material, first-hand accounts, perceptive analysis and heartbreaking descriptions of Poland’s betrayal, defeat and dismemberment. Pre-war Poland was a big country, with the world’s fifth-largest armed forces. But it was an economic weakling. The combined Polish defence budget for the five years before the outbreak of war was just one-tenth of the Luftwaffe’s allocation for 1939 alone. The Poles had courage, flair and grit.
Despite that, Hitler’s stuttering war machine was repeatedly halted, bloodied and on occasion even defeated by the Polish defenders. The myth of invincible Blitzkrieg was burnished, self-interestedly, by the Nazis themselves. For their part, the Western allies, Britain and France, portrayed Poland as a hopeless cause to justify their defence of their ally “using vowels and consonants alone”.
Kremlin self-interest skewed the story, too. Stalin’s march into eastern Poland, under a secret deal with Hitler, was justified on the basis that the Polish state had already ceased to exist, and that only Soviet intervention could restore order. In fact, the savagery of the Soviet occupiers matched, and sometimes even exceeded, that of the Nazis. Both invaders, writes Mr Moorhouse, applied a “brutal, binary, totalitarian logic: a racist binary in the German case, a class binary in the Soviet.
The surrender of Poland’s regular forces on October 6th did not mark the end of the fighting. A well-organised underground army, reporting to the government-in-exile in London, continued the struggle until the further and final betrayal of Poland’s interests by the Western allies at Yalta. It all deserves more than the simplistic but widespread caricature of a country which met the invading tanks with a cavalry charge.
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