17 Mar 01

The Invasion of Poland, September 1939

As the end of the third decade of the Twentieth Century drew to a close, Hitler in Germany, unlike most other world figures, truly realized the implications of emerging technology on warfare and geopolitics. Armies could be motorized and mechanized, vastly enhancing their mobility and firepower. The German Army, first in secret, then openly, was thus rapidly expanding and modernizing.

No longer dependent on horses for transportation, trucks and aircraft could quickly deliver large armies to remote locations and keep them supplied indefinitely. Tanks could casually roll over conventional defensive pistons. Instead of directly attacking large, stagnant defensive installations, mechanized armies, with the aid of combat aircraft, could now simply bypass them and attack far to the rear. Sieges, which used to take months and years, now took only days. Sieges, not of cities, but siege for the sake of siege itself, for the sake of demoralizing entire populations. Linear, TRENCH WARFARE was speedily giving way to MANEUVER WARFARE, and a swift, humiliating rout awaited all who failed to take notice.

Like Napoleon before him, Hitler's grand vision for a New European Age was inexorably materializing, this time with modern tools. The rest of Europe, wallowing in denial and cowardice, was unprepared. The collapse and subsequent absorption of Czechoslovakia into Germany in 1938 had been accomplished via political maneuvering with hardly a shot being fired, but, in their wildest imagination, no one thought a nation like Poland, which boasted a three-million man army, could be overwhelmed and overrun in a mere thirty days. When it happened, the world went into shock. They called it BLITZKRIEG. Welcome to the Twentieth Century!

Poles were an ancient people occupying a beautiful land, albeit continuously hounded by bad luck and bad positioning. Poland had been successively invaded and cut up by Austrians, Germans, and Russians. By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, significant Polish populations resided inside all three empires. With British and French support, Poland declared independence when World War I ended. However, there was much contention with regard to what the new nation's borders actually were. Accordingly, for the next six years, Poland was continuously at war with all its neighbors over the exact location of borders. Peace finally came in 1923, with the new nation of Poland "stabilized" but containing within its borders large populations of ethnic Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Germans, Austrians, Lithuanians, Kashubians, and Jews. To make matters worse, significant populations of ethnic Poles still lived outside Poland's borders. It was an unworkable situation that was destined to fall apart.

By 1939, fifty-two-year-old Martial Edward Rydz had emerged as the central personality in Poland. He was a virtual dictator, although that is not what he called himself. Rydz had been a fighter during World War I and during all the border clashes since. His code name had been "Smigly," which meant "lightning," and he was subsequently known as Smigly-Rydz.

Fully aware of his unstable borders, Smigly-Rydz maintained a large, standing army and an even larger body of reservists. He had some tanks and armored cars, a few aircraft, and conventional infantry and artillery, but his army was hopelessly obsolete, both in its equipment and in its thinking. It was mostly dependent upon foot and horse transportation. All cavalry units were horse mounted. Supplies were transported mostly by horse-drawn cart. Infantry was foot mobile.

Basil H Liddell-Hart was the leading exponent of maneuver warfare in the 1930s. However, he was largely ignored by his British colleagues, who, like everyone else, were all still fighting World War I. Indeed, he was ignored by military thinkers in nearly all of Europe and America too. Unhappily, he was not ignored by the Germans! In fact, General Heinz Guderian vindicated Liddell-Hart's theories during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. Fresh from their success in Spain, Germans were ready to try the new tactics on a grand scale!

On 23 Aug 1939, Hitler and Stalin unexpectedly signed a nonaggression pact! Germany no longer had to fear interference from Russia. The French and British were shocked into indecision. With the signing of the pact and the fall of Czechoslovakia, an armed, German invasion of Poland was regarded as inevitable. Hitler was already ranting about "oppressed" German-speaking populations within Polish borders. That was a hint! However, Smigly-Rydz was confident he could bog down, with a World War I-style, linear defense, any German invasion long enough for French and British forces to invade Germany proper and take pressure off him. German forces would then be handily ejected from his country. His biggest mistake was believing the French or the British would honor their words!

By late 1939, with the fall rainy season fast approaching, Smigly-Rydz should have known that Hitler would have to invade in September at the latest, or be forced to postpone his invasion until spring. Incredibly, Smigly-Rydz delayed full mobilization until after the invasion started. His procrastination was fatal!

In the early morning hours of 1 September 1939, German artillery began an intense bombardment of Poland's border defenses, supply dumps, and airfields. German aircraft coincidentally attacked bridges, communication centers, and Polish aircraft still on the ground. German electronic warfare specialists simultaneously jammed all Polish radio frequencies. Shortly thereafter, German tanks and reconnaissance vehicles smashed through Polish border defenses. The invasion had come!

Smigly-Rydz went into a panic. He tried to communicate directly with eleven, separate army groups. However, radio communication was all but impossible, and virtual rivers of panicked refugees, along with intermittent strafing by German fighter aircraft, prevented his units from moving to the front. Few of his regular units were even able to reach their assigned defensive positions before they were outflanked, bypassed, and isolated by rapidly moving, mechanized German divisions. His reserve forces never congealed.

Some Polish aircraft did make it into the air, but, when they returned, they had no place to land, because their airstrips had been cratered. There was no way for them to refuel and rearm. Individual Polish units fought bravely, but their lack of mobility make them easy pickings for the highly mobile and mechanized Germans. Entire Polish divisions, isolated and surrounded, surrendered. The Polish could not retreat fast enough!

On the seventeenth day of the German invasion, the Russians invaded Poland from the East! Whatever chance Poland may have had, disappeared! Hitler and Stalin had obviously agreed to divide Poland when they signed their pact a month earlier. Thirteen days later, Poland's defeat was complete. It's brief and painful twenty-one year history as a sovereign nation was at an end.

Defeated and humiliated, Smigly-Rydz went into exile in France. He shortly returned to German-occupied Poland to fight as a guerrilla and was killed in 1943. For every Polish soldier who died in battle in the fall of 1939, one hundred Polish civilians would be massacred by the invading Germans over the next five years. Germans regarded Poles as little more than vermin.

With Germany's defeat at the end of World War II, Poland was, once more, sold down the river, this time by Harry Truman, who gave it to Stalin as an appeasement. Only recently, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, has Poland reemerged as a sovereign nation. Poland's run of bad luck has finally ended!

Lesson: Five million years ago our ancestors shared a jungle environment in what is today South Africa with a number of other species of the genus, Homo. Our nearest living relative today is the chimpanzee, with whom we have a 97% DNA similarity. That was 200,000 generations ago.

An ice age started drying out the African Continent, and tropical jungle started giving way to savanna. Our ancestors adapted to the change. They become bipedal and, 120,000 years ago, the first Homo Sapiens emerged. Five thousand generations later, here we all are.

The point: Successful species adapt to change. Those who don't become marginalized and eventually extinct. Chimpanzees stayed in the jungle, and that is today the only place where they are still found.

Eisenhower once pointed out that plans are folly, but preparation is critical. Change is relentless. We must all see it coming and adapt. Those who, like the chimpanzees, "stay in the jungle," do so at their peril!

/John