The Gen

[Moggy]

Defensive doctrine of Poland used in 1939: “to be or not to be.”

Sunday, 13 December 2009
Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

The 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War was commemorated in Gdańsk, where German battleship Schlezwig-Holstein on a “goodwill visit” on September 1, 1939 at 4.45 a.m. fired the first shots of the war with its 16 inch guns aiming at Polish military base on the peninsula of Westerplatte in the free city of Gdansk. On September 1, 2009 European heads of governments gathered on Westerplatte, to commemorate and honor the anniversary of WWII.

The defensive doctrine of Poland, was applied in earnest starting on January 26, 1939 when German minister von Ribbentrop was told in Warsaw that Poland will not join the pact against Russia. Poles followed the advice of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who wrote in his last will and testament, that in order to preserve not only the independence of Poland, but in fact Poland’s very existence, the government of Poland had “to veer between Germany and Russia as long as possible and then bring the rest of the world into the conflict, rather than subordinating Poland to either one of its two neighbors.” The choice of the verb “to veer” indicated that Piłsudski was fully aware of the reality, that Poland formed a barrier between two main protagonists and most powerful contenders on the European continent: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Stalin fearful of a two front war by Germany and Japan against the USSR decided to stop the Japanese Kwantung Army by Soviet attack in August 1939, a few days before the Ribbentrop-Mołotow Pact was to be signed in Moscow. According to The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford University Press, 1995) Soviet general Grigory Zhukov was the first in history to use the blitz-krieg tactics. These tactics were developed jointly by Germans and Russians on Soviet polygons after the Treaty of Rapallo of April 16, 1922.

From May 28, 1938 on, the largest air battles in history up to that time, were fought in Asia and involved 140 to 200 Soviet and Japanese aircraft (A. Stella, Khalkhin-Gol, "The Forgotten War", Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 8, 1983). Heavy Japanese loses and betrayal by Germany, were to bring an end to Japanese-Soviet war. Zhukov organized a surprise offensive using 35 infantry battalions, 20 cavalry squadrons, 500 aircraft and 500 of the new and powerful tanks. This force locally outnumbered the forces of the advancing Kwantung Army.

On August 20, 1939 Zhukov launched a surprise attack and in ten days inflicted massive casualties on the Japanese. "Zhukov's essential achievement lay in combining tanks, artillery, aircraft and men in an integrated offensive for the first time in modern war. By 31 August, the Russians have completed what they described as the most impeccable encirclement of the enemy army since Hannibal beat the Romans at Cannae. The 23rd Division of the Kwantung Army was virtually wiped out, and at least 18,000 Japanese were killed." (P. Snow "Nomonhan -the Unknown Victory", History Today, July 1990.)

Poles, threatened by Hitler with complete eradication of the Polish state in the historic Polish lands, knew that Stalin threatened Poland with terror and enslavement. However, Nazi Germany then was the worse of the two evils. Poles made a rational decision and refused to help Germany to defeat Russia. Poland’s refusal to attack Russia saved the Soviet Union from destruction. The Russians so far do not want to admit this fact and they revive the cult of Stalin.

During the 1930ties the League of Nations was trying to prevent the outbreak of hostilities. Then, on August 11, 1939, Hitler finally said to Jacob Burkhardt, Commissioner of the League of Nations: "Everything I undertake is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and blind to grasp this, I shall be compelled to come to an agreement with the Russians, beat the West and then, after their defeat, turn against the Soviet Union with all my forces. I need the Ukraine so that they can not starve me out as happened in the last war." (Roy Dennan "Missed Chances," Indigo, London 1997, p. 65). Hitler talked about Russia being “German Africa” and Russians as “negros” to be used by the superior German race.

Hitler’s plan to create “Greater Germany” populated by “racial Germans from the River Rhine to the Dnepr River in the Ukraine,” was known to marshal Piłsudski, who understood that Hitler planned eventual eviction and mass murder of Poles and Ukrainians in their historical lands. Earlier, on March 3, 1918, in Brest Litovsk, a town occupied by Germans, Lenin’s government signed a humiliating capitulation, which yielded to German dictate and agreed to make Russia a vassal state of Germany. Berlin planned to treat Russia like Britain treated India and make a colonial empire ruled by Germany from the Rhine River to Vladivostok. In 1939 the territory of Poland blocked Germany from the direct access to the Ukraine and to Russia.

Already on August 5, 1935 Hitler started pressing the government of Poland to sign a pact with Germany against Russia. This is described in detail, by Józef Lipski, the ambassador of Poland to Germany, during the years 1933-39. Stalin’s government was aware of Hitler’s plans and of the pact between Germany and Japan against Russia signed in 1936. Stalin feared a two front war, Japanese attack from the east and German attack from the west. When Poland refused to join Germany on January 26, 1939 Stalin thought that he had a chance to entangle Germany in a long lasting war on the western front, as had happened during WWI.

For all practical purposes Stalin offered to divide Poland between Germany and Russia by inviting the German-Soviet cooperation on March 10, 1939 in a speech broadcast by radio and addressed to the 18th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow. Eventually the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was signed in Moscow and dated August 23, 1939. The news of German-Soviet pact and German betrayal, came to Japanese in the middle of a military disaster, which lead to a cease fire and an the end of hostilities between Japan and the Soviet Union on September 16, 1939 after Japan lodged a formal protest in Berlin against the “Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact.”

Thus, Poland’s decision to defend itself ruined Hitler’s “best case scenario” and his plans to defeat Stalin in a two-front war against Russia. Instead Stalin managed to entangle the Germans in a two-front war. The “great game” consisted of competition between Hitler and Stalin who defeats whom in a two-front war by means of attacks from the east and from the west.

Hitler furious with the Poles for ruining his best-case scenario, ordered his generals on August 22, 1939 to use utmost ferocity against all ethnic Poles and as an act of vengeance to complete carefully planed destruction of Warsaw. The site of the Polish capital was to become a German provincial administrative town.

In 1939 Friedrich Pabst was nominated by Hitler as the chief architect of the New Warsaw for which he produced on February 6, 1940 a complete plan, drawn up with help of the nazi architects Hubert Gross and Otto Nurnberger. Detailed plans were made to destroy systematically all the buildings of Warsaw including all archives, museums, and monuments, while the armament industry and railroad facilities were to be enlarged. Detailed plans were made including the replacement of the Royal Castle with a Parteivolkshalle and the Column of King Sigismund with a huge statue called Niederwald Germania or Nieredwalddenkmal. Piłsudski square was renamed Adolf Hitler Platz.

Hitler decided to dynamite the Royal Castle of Warsaw in November 1939, a plan executed on September 28, 1944 within sight of the Red Army. It was on the eastern shores of the Vistula River, after Stalin issued orders to stop the front and to let the Nazis quell the Warsaw Uprising. Hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians were killed in Warsaw, including some 16000 members of the Polish Home Army.

Thus, Poland was caught in the middle of the struggle of much more powerful countries, both governed by totalitarian regimes. The Nazi government considered itself to be the “natural heir” of the British Empire. This helped the Poles to sign the Polish-British Common Defense Pact against German aggression on August 25, 1939. The signing of the Polish-British Pact occurred after Poland, on July 25, 1939. gave to Britain and France each, a copy of a the linguistic deciphering electro-mechanical device named Enigma for the German secret military code system. American code expert David A. Hatch of the Center of Criptic History, NSA, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, wrote that “the breaking of the Enigma by Poland was one of the cornerstones of Allied victory over Germany.”

Poland’s resolve to defend itself was remarkable against the backdrop of pacifist Western Europe, the Anschluss of Austria and the annexation of Sudettenland as well as the imposition of German protectorate on Czechia and Moravia. Poland derailed Hitler’s strategy by refusing to help him to attack Russia with a combined total of about 600 divisions. A force twice as large as was the Soviet army in 1939. Hitler’s ambition together with Poland’s refusal put him in the position of betraying Japan and thereby to be deprived of some 200 Japanese divisions after he lost 50 or more Polish divisions. As a result Germany faced shortage of one million soldiers on the Eastern Front each year >>>>

Polish News
_________________
Moggy
www.mogggy.org

[Wudpecker]

When I read Rudyard Kipling's book, "Kim" as a teenager, the meaning behind his "Great Game" in India was totally lost on me. The historical background was just not there for me to comprehend the movements of forces and nations on the lives of the little people.
Events in India are still a fog for me--even though I was so impressed I later named my daughter, "Kim" partly in honor of Kipling's book.

An even greater game went on before World War II. It continues today on the world scene in a new and altered format.

So many gaps in my knowledge of this "Great Game" are filled in by this article above that I must thank you, Moggy.
Like Kim, Poland was a tiny boy caught between crushing forces of Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin. Now I understand a little of these giants, grappling like Sumo wrestlers for a throw hold on one another, with some subtle pushes and shoves by such interested bystanders as Great Britain and the keenly involved ringmasters of Japan.
Hitler may have gone mad. But such a masterful strategist had few peers in his time. To over-simplify him and Stalin as just evil or insane shrouds the meaning of their actions and events in ignorance. A light dawns for me at last.

Poland's play to "veer from one side to another" and eventually to block Hitler's plans against the Soviet Union is a small revelation. The boy was a figure of power I never understood before. It seems today's Russia does not appreciate Poland's deadly game of the 1930's in their behalf, either.

Now I dimly see what Stalin saw in the 1930's: that a 2-front war against both Japan and Germany was to be avoided at all costs for the young Soviet nation; that the first user of the "blitzkrieg" of coordinated war forces, Marshall Zhukov, was a brilliant move to throw back the Japanese. That the purpose of signing of a peace agreement with Hitler in 1939 was to distract him into an entangling war in the West.

Throw in Stalin's other megalomaniac worries that led him to "cleanse" his officers' corps at just the wrong time in the '30s, and I have an explanation of why the Soviets were unready for Operation Barbarossa when it finally and inevitably came against them. No one dared to get ready, and be shot. The Germans were to be left quietly alone while they turned their attentions elsewhere than East. No threatening armies must be seen by the NAZI's. All must seem brotherly. A terrible miscalculation by Stalin, but understandable. He did not know, somehow, of Hitler's true intentions.

Hilter made those intentions plain, this article says. He told Jacob Burkhardt, Commissioner of the League of Nations, as late as August of 1939 exactly what he meant to do:
"Everything I undertake is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and blind to grasp this, I shall be compelled to come to an agreement with the Russians, beat the West and then, after their defeat, turn against the Soviet Union with all my forces..."

And little Poland forced Hitler to do just that, it is claimed now: it refused to voluntarily join him in attacking the Soviets. And suffered horribly for Hitler's wrath as a result. Whether a Polish army and air force would have made a material difference for mighty Germany, I cannot say. Though it seems unlikely.
But some of the shadowy plots and purposes of that critical '30s period are in sunshine now.

It is ironic that Poland, like a little Kim of Kipling's, won key British support and pledge of protection by handing over the secret German code machine, the Enigma machine, before war began. A machine that played a key role of its own in the war to come.

--

[Moggy]

One thing that becomes clearer over the years is that there were many "second world wars". Britain's was not the same the American's, and the one fought by the western allies was not the same as the one fought by the central and east Europeans.

There seems to be one unifying factor - in the run up and in the early stages all hoped that their enemies would tear each other to pieces and leave them alone.

In the long term term it may well have worked for the western allies. The military mass of the USSR ground Germany down to defeat, and then collapsed itself over a period of 55 years trying to rival western military preparations.

That wise old bird Churchill saw this long term working out of his policy. He thought that if Naziism was triumphant its grip on the human soul would be long term "a new dark age", but he thought any triumph of communism would be temporary. "He who at 30 is still a communist has no head"

The second world war 1937-1991.
_________________
Moggy
www.mogggy.org

[Wudpecker]

Yes, the long arms of history reach well backward and forward of WWII years. Your mention of Churchill's prediction on the demise of Communism does stretch the mark to 1991 at the least. That change was great indeed, and by itself may have saved a world.

The 20th Century was momentous in so many ways one hardly knows where to begin listing the changes. The first decade of the 2000's has not broken the lineage as yet.

From my vantage point Across the Pond in the United States, I believe the results of the Cold War, if not WWII, are not yet written for the so-called "American Century". This nation has yet to pay the full price of its contributions and leadership position, as Russia did. It has become the premier Debtor Nation and is still hemmoraging money worldwide. Not only in wars.

Russia paid the price and began re-thinking itself in the 1990's. The U.S. will be re-thinking itself as a capitalistic and merchantile nation in the coming years of the new century. I can't speak for our friends abroad except to say that Britain and the European Union are heavily involved.

The U.S. dodged a big bullet in the capitalist business cycle of recessions this past year by taxpayer and government "bail out" of too-big-to-fail companies. But the story is not over; the cost is not counted, only pushed ahead to the future-- again. A nation can only borrow and print so much money without seriously devaluing itself. It has to offer other forms of value.
How long can it continue doing this? Maybe much longer than I can fathom.

Finance is only one issue. Fortunately, one of the major issues of the 20th Century-- racism and racial superiority-- was largely put aside by the Great Wars and an accomodation, if not a complete end, to colonialism and slavery (chains are only one form of it). Simmering racial and ethnic resentments remain a threat in the U.S., mainly over immigration from the Latin south. But the possibility of a melting pot nation coming together as a people is now real, as reflected in Obama's election.
The rise of militant Islam is certainly a new factor.
Surprises can be expected, of course, especially in the fields of science. Most so far have been frightening in their implications, such as mastering the human genome. In a world of 6.5 billion human beings, the value of the individual is also dropping like the dollar.

--