First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  That vigorous defence of the frontiers, though strategically questionable, was deemed politically necessary, to contradict any suggestion on the part of its would-be allies that Poland was unwilling to defend itself. Once those international alliances had been triggered, the logic ran, Polish forces were to avoid being encircled and destroyed, and while inflicting maximum losses on the enemy, to conduct a fighting withdrawal to more defensible lines, such as the area east of the river Vistula, which bisected the country north to south. In the third phase, there would be a counter-offensive to coincide with the expected entry into the war of Poland’s western allies.23

  As this outline makes clear, Poland’s strategic planning in 1939 was explicitly predicated upon material military assistance from her foreign allies. Boiled down to its essentials, ‘Zachód’ meant Poland holding out until an Allied offensive in the west could relieve the German pressure. Poland, then, was looking for allies in the west, just as the British and the French were, belatedly, looking for active ways to contain Hitler. Though the two sides found each other in the spring of 1939, the problem was that both were looking for different things.

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  Anglo-French attempts to deal peacefully with the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany had reached their apogee with the Munich Conference of September 1938, where Czechoslovakia – the then object of Hitler’s ire and ambition – was dismembered in the hope of securing a wider peace. For the Poles, Munich provided the opportunity to restore the tiny district of Zaolzie, lost to Czechoslovakia in 1919, to Polish control, thereby opening themselves to damaging accusations, if not of collusion with Hitler, then at least of benefiting from Czechoslovakia’s demise. In the process they squandered a good deal of international sympathy, most notably from their eastern neighbour Stalin, who contrived to view Munich as little more than an abject accommodation with fascism.

  More importantly, however, the Munich Conference sealed the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany, which Hitler had solemnly declared to be ‘his last territorial demand in Europe’.24 British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, meanwhile, waved his ‘piece of paper’ – the newly signed Anglo-German Declaration – at Heston aerodrome and proclaimed ‘peace for our time’. It was a peace that proved vanishingly short-lived. In March 1939, Hitler’s troops marched into Prague and occupied the rump of Czechoslovakia, rendering the Munich Agreement a dead letter. Appeasement had failed and new ways had to be found to contain Germany.

  At the end of March 1939, that new policy became apparent. Addressing the House of Commons, Chamberlain extended a British guarantee to Poland, the next likely target of German aggression, pledging to ‘lend the Polish government all support in their power … in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence’.25 Of course, from a British perspective, there was very little that could practically be done to defend Polish independence in case of conflict: Britain’s resources of men and materiel simply did not make an active intervention in central Europe a realistic prospect. When former prime minister David Lloyd George proclaimed that Chamberlain ‘could not send a single battalion to Poland’ in the event of war, he was right.26 Neither, one might add, was there much Anglo-French will to launch a vigorous assault on Germany from the west in support of Poland. But for Chamberlain, that was not the point; one might even say that Poland was not the point. For him, the guarantee represented a return to reason and diplomacy, rather than the deployment of brute force. It was an expression of solidarity and support, certainly, not only for Poland but also for France, which had long been concerned that Britain’s commitment to European affairs was flaky. But, more than that, it was a signal that further German aggression would not be tolerated. It was a line in the sand, an attempt to contain Hitler through threats – however empty those threats may have been.

  Yet, despite this rather hollow guarantee, Poland felt that it had got what it wanted: it had its foreign allies and could now continue its military planning in the firm expectation of their assistance. And, crucially, those expectations were neither dimmed nor contradicted when high-level Franco-Polish discussions began, that spring, to put flesh on the bones of the promised alliance. On the contrary, they were stoked. In May, the French commander-in-chief, General Maurice Gamelin, and the Polish minister of war, General Tadeusz Kasprzycki, signed the so-called Kasprzycki–Gamelin Convention, which promised an immediate French air attack on Germany in the event of a German invasion, followed by a diversionary land assault on the third day of French mobilisation, and then a larger-scale relief offensive, comprising ‘the bulk’ of French forces, which would begin after the fifteenth day.27

  The British, too, made promises, albeit more obliquely. In July 1939, General Edmund Ironside, inspector general of the British army, visited Warsaw for talks. And though he was cautious in private, confessing to his diary that ‘we can do very little to help the Poles’,28 in public he was perhaps rather too generous in describing his vision of military cooperation. According to the Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, he undertook to ‘study the possibility’ of transferring RAF formations to Poland, along with a General Staff mission, as well as promising ‘to supply … 100 bomber aircraft of the newest type’ and a contingent of Hurricanes to Britain’s new ally. Naturally, his Polish interlocutors considered the talks to be ‘most satisfactory’, and, a month later, enquiries were duly made about an advance RAF bomber force based on Polish soil.29 Needless to say, none of these aircraft was ever delivered.

  In the summer of 1939, therefore, Poland and Britain were locked in a curious relationship. Poland believed that it had found the ally – along with France – that would assist in its defence; the guarantee had seemed to confirm that assumption, as had all the staff discussions that followed. Yet, for Britain at least, Poland was more of a tool than an ally. Despite all the earnest talk of active support, British politicians and military planners knew full well that there was very little that they could or would do to practically help Poland in its hour of need. Instead, they were seeking to use Poland to try to contain Hitler – to conjure up the spectre of war so as to rein in his territorial ambitions, in the hope that that spectre alone would prove to be enough of a deterrent.

  The problem with this approach was that Hitler was not going to be deterred. Poland, to his mind, did not deserve to exist as a state, let alone frustrate German ambitions.30 Consequently, when he received word of Chamberlain’s gambit, Hitler wasn’t moved to reason; he was infuriated. According to Admiral Canaris, who was present in the Reich Chancellery when news of the British guarantee arrived, Hitler flew into a rage: ‘With features distorted by fury, he had stormed up and down his room, pounded his fists on the marble table top and spewed forth a series of savage imprecations. Then, with eyes flashing with an uncanny light, he had growled the threat: “I’ll brew them a devil’s potion.”’31

  Backed into a corner, Hitler and his paladins were soon plotting a way out of the impasse, and a rapprochement with Stalin’s Soviet Union was emerging as a possible solution. Though first aired as a ruse – what Göring called a petit jeu – to intimidate the Poles, the idea soon gained traction, drawing on the traditionally pro-Russian tendencies of many of those in the German Foreign Office. Even the Nazi ideologue, and veteran anti-Bolshevik, Alfred Rosenberg opined that ‘when Germany’s life is at stake, even a temporary affiliation with Moscow would have to be contemplated’.32 Though initially reluctant, citing his long years of struggle against communism, Hitler was finally persuaded to allow his new foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to have his head and pursue negotiations with Stalin.

  When it came, Ribbentrop’s approach met Soviet strategic thinking at something of a crossroads. The Munich Conference of the previous year, from whose deliberations the USSR had been omitted, had left a sour taste in Moscow, and had appeared to provide the final proof that the idea of ‘collective security’ to contain and defeat Hitler was now definitively dead in the water. Increasingly distrustful of the Bri
tish and French, as well as the Germans, Stalin was moving towards a policy of getting the best deals he could from bilateral negotiations. In essence, this was something of a return to the ideological principles of the USSR, wherein the outside world was seen as uniformly hostile with no qualitative differences discerned between Nazism and western capitalism; both – Marxist-Leninist doctrine argued – were two sides of the same malevolent coin, the only difference being that Nazism was considered to be further down the road to its inevitable demise. It followed that relations with the outside world – whether democratic or totalitarian – could never be normal; every relationship would be viewed by the Kremlin as a zero-sum game, with the only guiding principle being the benefit and security of the USSR. Now collective security had failed, therefore, all options were on the table.

  So, as the storm clouds gathered over Europe in the summer of 1939, diplomatic circles embarked upon a rather undignified round of horse-trading, with the British and French on one side, and the Germans on the other, seeking to woo Stalin to their camp. The ‘imperialists’ were the first to publicly show their hand, sending a joint delegation, consisting of a British admiral and a French general, to Moscow in early August for negotiations. It was a mission that was almost comically doomed to failure. Not only did the British admiral – Sir Reginald Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax – raise Soviet eyebrows with his quadruple-barrelled name, he and his French counterpart were not granted plenipotentiary powers, and so lacked the authority to conduct serious material negotiations, having to refer back to London and Paris for any decisions to be made. What was more, the delegation’s six-day voyage to the Soviet Union, up the Baltic in an aged British merchantman, did little to convince the Soviets of Western seriousness.

  In that assumption at least, the Soviets were correct. Rarely in history has an international alliance been pursued with less enthusiasm. Given the justified suspicions that many in the British government still harboured towards the USSR, the Anglo-French delegation had been sent with the instruction to ‘go very slowly’.33 They were going through the motions, holding their noses while talking to the Soviets, in the hope that their mere presence in Moscow might scare Hitler into compliance, or that by talking out the summer, they could rob Hitler of his opportunity for action.

  More seriously, however, the Anglo-French delegation could offer very little of substance to Stalin. Hemmed in by their guarantee to Poland, they could offer no territorial inducements, despite Stalin’s lengthy list of irredenta, nor could they secure agreement from the Poles for a suggested passage of the Red Army through the east of the country to meet any German threat. This was not just stubbornness on Warsaw’s part; Poland’s experience of the previous century and a half suggested that once Russian soldiers arrived they could be very difficult to dislodge. It was no great surprise, then, that negotiations stalled on this point, with Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, the Soviet defence commissar, bemoaning the fact that this ‘cardinal question’ could not be answered satisfactorily.34

  In truth, what the Anglo-French delegation was offering was a principled preservation of the status quo, and Stalin had very little interest in that. In the circumstances of 1939, with conflict looming once again on the continent of Europe, ‘business as usual’ carried little appeal for him. Stalin scented an opportunity. As he laconically explained to the later British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps: ‘The USSR wanted to change the equilibrium … England and France wanted to preserve it.’35 As a leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin knew that war could be a powerful motor in ‘changing the equilibrium’, and he was certainly not averse to encouraging his ideological enemies to fight each other. Later that month, he outlined his reasoning to the Politburo:

  A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries for the redivision of the world, for the domination of the world! We see nothing wrong in their having a good hard fight and weakening each other. It would be fine if, at the hands of Germany, the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken. Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system … We can manoeuvre, pit one side against the other to set them fighting each other as fiercely as possible.36

  Stalin’s foreign minister would be even more explicit. ‘Lenin was not mistaken when he assured us that the Second World War will help us to gain power throughout all Europe, just as the First World War helped us to gain power in Russia,’37 Molotov explained. As long as the Soviet Union could remain aloof from it, war was something to be welcomed.

  While such ideological considerations no doubt provided the background to Stalin’s thinking, the immediate material benefits of an arrangement with Hitler would have been extremely persuasive on their own. Already at the beginning of his flirtation with the Soviets, Ribbentrop had flagged up Germany’s willingness to make wide-ranging concessions when he told the Soviet attaché in Berlin, Georgy Astakhov, that ‘there is no question between the Baltic and the Black Sea which cannot be settled to the complete satisfaction of both parties’.38 A few days later, Astakhov spelled out to his superiors in Moscow the opportunity that was opening up, explaining that Germany was willing to pay any price to prevent an alignment between the USSR and the Western Powers, and that Berlin would give up the Baltic states, Bessarabia and eastern Poland ‘if we can give them the promise not to interfere in the conflict’.39 Negotiations were evidently much easier if what you were willing to ‘give up’ wasn’t yours to begin with.

  By the time that Ribbentrop arrived in Moscow, on the afternoon of 23 August 1939, the German–Soviet relationship was already blossoming. Meetings had been conducted with attachés and emissaries, positions had been clarified and draft treaties prepared, all driven on by Hitler’s desire to have an agreement in place in time for his invasion of Poland, which he had earmarked to begin on 26 August. Nonetheless, their arrival in the Soviet capital would be a curious experience for some of the senior personnel of the Third Reich. As one of them noted: ‘There was a feeling of ambivalence that fate should lead us to Moscow, which we had previously fought bitterly as the enemy of European culture.’40

  After a welcoming ceremony at Khodynka airfield outside Moscow – for which swastika banners had to be requisitioned from a Soviet film studio, where they had recently been used for making anti-Nazi propaganda films – Ribbentrop and his entourage were whisked to the Kremlin for the first of their meetings with their Soviet counterparts. After the pleasantries were out of the way, they got down to business with the relatively simple task of agreeing the draft of a Soviet–German non-aggression pact, to run for ten years. Ribbentrop rashly suggested a hundred-year term, but Stalin was unimpressed, replying that ‘people will laugh at us for not being serious’.41 The text was then agreed. It was a rather anodyne document with a preamble and seven articles, barely 300 words in total, which stressed the objective of ‘strengthening the cause of peace between Germany and the USSR’ and declared that both parties would ‘desist from any act of violence, any aggressive action, and any attack on each other’.42

  That done, discussion moved to the more ticklish question of the ‘Secret Protocol’ – which Stalin announced ‘we will not publish anywhere else’43 – in which the spoils of their collaboration ‘in the event of a territorial and political rearrangement’ would be delineated. Ribbentrop told Stalin that Hitler accepted that eastern Poland, Bessarabia, Finland, Estonia and Latvia up to the river Dvina would all fall ‘within the Soviet sphere of influence’. Without flinching, Stalin demanded all of Latvia. Ribbentrop was obliged to put a call in to Hitler, who was anxiously waiting at the Berghof for news of the negotiations. Within half an hour, Hitler returned the call and tersely agreed to the change. With that, the fate of some twenty-three million people across central Europe was sealed.44

  Underpinning the ‘territorial rearrangements’ promised by the Secret Protocol was a trade deal, signed three days earlier, which allowed for the exchange of 180 million R
eichsmarks of Soviet raw materials for 120 million Reichsmarks of German finished goods. An additional credit facility of 200 million Reichsmarks was extended to Moscow that was to be repaid in raw-material shipments after 1946. Pointedly, Molotov claimed that ‘we have never had any equally advantageous economic agreement with Great Britain, France, or any other country’.45

  After the Secret Protocol had been agreed, the two sides sat down to a tour d’horizon of current affairs, ranging from Japan and Turkey to France and Britain, while a draft communiqué was drawn up in an anteroom. The hard work done, the signatories and their respective entourages then gathered for an impromptu reception, where caviar, sandwiches, vodka and Crimean champagne were served. Interminable toasts followed, in the Russian manner. At one point, Stalin raised his glass to toast Hitler: ‘I know how much the German nation loves its Führer. I should therefore like to drink to his health.’46