Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  One issue which eluded him completely was that the plight of the Poles could not be relieved by Allied defensive warfare in the west. An offensive, or a series of offensives, should be launched, and launched now, while the Wehrmacht was committed in Poland. Blood had to be spilled in a drive against the Siegfried Line or in bombing the Reich. An infantry attack on the western front depended upon France. Although the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was growing in strength every week, the overwhelming majority of the troops there were French, and their decisions would determine the Allied strategy there. The RAF could bomb, but here again France, because of her proximity to the Reich, could cast the decisive vote.

  France did. The vote was a veto. The French had ruled out bombing, Chamberlain explained to the War Cabinet, because the Nazis might retaliate by an air attack on one of the Seine bridges. Churchill was aroused, but “I could not move them,” he wrote. “When I pressed very hard, they used a method of refusal which I never met before or since. [On one occasion in Paris] M. Daladier told me with an air of exceptional formality that ‘The President of the Republic himself had intervened, and that no aggressive action must be taken which might only draw reprisals upon France.’ ” In his memoirs, Winston commented:

  This idea of not irritating the enemy did not commend itself to me. Hitler had done his best to strangle our commerce by indiscriminate mining of our harbours. We had beaten him by defensive means alone. Good, decent civilised people, it appeared, must never strike themselves till after they have been struck dead. In these days the fearful German volcano and all its subterranean fires drew near to their explosion point. There were still months of pretended war. On the one side endless discussions about trivial points, no decisions taken, or if taken, rescinded, and the rule “Don’t be unkind to the enemy, you will only make him angry.” On the other, doom preparing—a vast machine grinding forward ready to break upon us!73

  The prime minister, it developed, had decided to avenge the Poles killed in Luftwaffe raids on Warsaw, Cracow, and Katowice by punishing the Reich with “truth raids.” In truth raids, leaflets were to be substituted for bombs. This strategy assumed that once Germans read the leaflets describing Hitler’s atrocities, they would rise up and overthrow their Nazi leadership. After the first mission over Germany, Kingsley Wood revealed that this ingenious approach had been his inspiration, and that the Nazis in Berlin were deeply troubled by them. They were not without peril for the RAF; German antiaircraft gunners could not distinguish between Blenheims dropping explosives and those distributing the pamphlets threatening the stability of the regime in Berlin; hence British planes were lost. Hoare paid tribute to the truth-raiders. They wrote, he said, “a chapter of heroic bravery, of forlorn hopes, of brilliant improvisation.”74

  Ironside’s optimistic briefing of the War Cabinet had been inspired more by the Poles’ valor than their military prospects. Yet their élan was astonishing. That same Friday the Fourth Panzer Division, attacking Warsaw’s southeastern suburbs, was thrown back and Polish divisions around Kutno rallied, counterattacked across the Bzura, and drove the German Eighth Army back for three straight days. It would be a long time before any troops, under any flag, would do anything like that again. They were inspired not solely by determination to preserve their honor—though their gallantry still gleams across nearly a half century—but because they believed they were going to win. They knew they couldn’t do it by themselves. That, they thought, was unnecessary. England and France were bound to them in ironclad military alliances. Both powers had declared war on Nazi Germany. The British, they assumed, had unleashed an all-out bombing of the Ruhr, and the French army, the world’s strongest, must have penetrated deep into western Germany. If they pinned down the Wehrmacht here, the Poles reasoned, their allies would soon force Hitler to sue for peace.

  RAF bombers had been rendered impotent by French fear of Luftwaffe reprisals. Where was the French army? Here the Poles’ nemesis was the same officer who three and a half years earlier had, in effect, awarded Hitler the Rhineland by default. Gustave-Maurice Gamelin, a short, timid, rabbity man in his late sixties, was a former aide to Marshal Joseph-Césaire Joffre who had toiled his way upward through the maze of military politics to become généralissime of the enormous French army, constable of France, and leader of the combined Anglo-French high command. His rise had been extraordinary, not because he was eccentric—in mufti he was just another nondescript fonctionnaire—but because under pressure he became everything a commander ought not to be: indecisive, given to issuing impulsive orders which he almost always countermanded, and timid to and beyond a fault. Illustrative of his unpredictability was his proposal, at the outbreak of war, to invade Germany by lunging across neutral Belgium and Holland, and then, when a shocked cabinet rejected the plan, declaring that any French offensive would be doomed, that the poilus in the Maginot and their comrades above it should sit out the war. There would be more of this sort of thing later. And more. And more.

  His performance during the Rhineland crisis should have revealed his incompetence to his civilian superiors. They had asked him for action then, and he had given them excuses. After that he ought to have been relieved of all responsibility for the defense of French soil. But like the rest of the senior officers in their army he had his patron, who in his case was Premier Daladier. So he had remained at his high post, and now the price must be paid, not by him, not by Daladier, but by the Poles. The issue of Polish survival was a matter of days, if not hours. France possessed the only force strong enough to save Poland by attacking Germany now. Furthermore, the Franco-Polish Military Convention of May 19, 1939, was more precise than Britain’s agreement with the Poles. Drafted by Gamelin and two Polish generals, the convention provided that “the French army shall launch a major offensive in the west [lancerait une grande offensive a l’ouest] if the Germans attack Poland.” The Poles had asked how many poilus would be available for this drive. “Between thirty-five and thirty-eight divisions,” Gamelin had replied. The Poles had also wanted to know what form the attack would take. It was spelled out in the convention: the French army would “progressively launch offensive operations… the third day after General Mobilization Day.” Yet that deadline had passed without action in Paris.75

  On August 23, when the German invasion of Poland was imminent, the irresolute French commander in chief—without telling the Poles—had reappraised the military prospects of nations who offended the Führer. As a result, his faith in his army had been shaken, and his confidence in France’s political leaders, and himself (this was justifiable), had shrunk. He hoped that by the spring of 1940, with British concurrence and the support of “matériel américain,” France would be capable of fighting, if necessary, “une bataille défensive.” Then—this from a man who had promised the Poles offensive operations on the third day after mobilization—“My opinion has always been that we could not take the offensive before roughly 1941–1942.” The French, in short, had unilaterally renounced the Franco-Polish Military Convention. Despite the fact that his signature was on the document, Gamelin concluded in his memoirs, “Our military protocol had no meaning and [did] not bind us.” In his heart, therefore, he was “satisfait.” Among other things, he had overlooked an earlier military treaty—still an absolute commitment by the French government—which Marshal Ferdinand Foch had negotiated with the Poles on February 19, 1921, pledging “effectif et rapide” support should Poland be confronted by German aggression.76

  Generals are seldom afflicted by nagging consciences, but then, they seldom betray an embattled ally. Perhaps a pang of guilt moved this commander in chief to point out that French mobilization in itself would bring some relief to Poland “by tying down a certain number of large German units on our frontier.” Daladier asked him how long the Poles, abandoned by their allies, could hold out. The généralissime replied that he believed they would put up “une résistance honorable” which would prevent “la masse des forces” of the Reich from turning agai
nst France until the English were “effectivement à nos côtés”—standing beside them, shoulder to shoulder.77

  Between them the Poles and the French had 130 divisions against Germany’s 98—really 62, because 36, as Liddell Hart put it, were “virtually untrained and unorganized.” Rydz-Smigly’s army had but to hold up the Wehrmacht divisions on the eastern front; the French, meantime, could overwhelm the green, second-rate German divisions across the Rhine. The challenge should have daunted no one. Gamelin’s forces in the west outnumbered the Germans by at least two to one—four to one, if one is to believe the Nuremberg testimony of OKW General Alfred Jodl, who told the International Military Tribunal that he had expected the Third Reich to collapse in 1939. He attributed its survival “to the fact that during the Polish campaign the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions.”78

  Most of the Zossen generals were appalled at Hitler’s gamble. To blitz Poland he had stripped the Siegfried Line defenses of armor, artillery, warplanes, and reliable troops, leaving a skeleton force to face Germany’s ancient foe in the west. It seemed inconceivable that the French would let so golden an opportunity pass, knowing that a quick Nazi conquest of Poland would free the German Generalstab of its greatest nightmare—a two-front war—and permit the Führer to concentrate the full might of the Wehrmacht in a massive attack, knifing through the Low Countries, into France. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the OKW, recalled that “We soldiers always expected an attack by France during the Polish campaign, and were very surprised that nothing happened…. A French attack would have encountered only a German military screen, not a real defense.”79

  General Franz Halder agreed—up to a point. He testified: “The success against Poland was only possible by completely baring our western border.” If the French had attacked, he added, “they would have been able to cross the Rhine without our being able to prevent it” and taken the Ruhr area, “the most decisive factor” in the German conduct of the war. Yet Halder, who had greater respect for Hitler’s military intuition than his fellow members of the officer corps, was unsurprised by the inertia on the western front; on August 14 his first entry in his war diary noted that he considered a French offensive “not very likely,” that France would not attack across the Low Countries “against Belgian wishes,” and that the French would probably “remain on the defensive.”80

  At the time Halder was the only senior general in Zossen to endorse the Führer’s prediction. On September 7, with the issue of whether to send Wehrmacht divisions to the west being discussed seriously, Halder’s diary entry ended with a few lines summing up Hitler’s views: “Operations in the West not yet clear. Some indication that there is no real intention of waging war.” The Generalstab couldn’t believe it. They remembered the indomitable poilus who had fought under Joffre and Galliéni in the early years of the last war, who had always counterattacked when attacked, whose line was never broken, whose “Ils ne passeront pas” denied Verdun to Germany’s finest regiments through seven terrible months, and who paid an unprecedented price—four million casualties, one out of every four of them dead—for victory in 1918.81

  But Joffre, Galliéni, Pétain, and Foch were gone, and in their place stood—though not particularly tall—Gamelin. As Halder recorded the Führer’s thoughts, the French généralissime prepared to launch the only offensive of his career, a piece of opéra bouffe which mocked the memories of Verdun. “L’offensive de la Sarre,” as he grandly called it, was in fact a pitiful sortie. Of his 85 heavily armed divisions he committed 9 to an advance on a fifteen-mile front southeast of Saarbrücken. Moving slowly, taking every precaution, the infantry occupied twenty deserted villages and gained five miles. Here and there were reports of skirmishes, but the German response was to give ground, withdraw—and pray that the généralissime did not commit another fifty divisions to a full-scale attack. Of the Germans’ total strength, all but eleven divisions were untrained and the rest lacked adequate arms and ammunition. Nevertheless, on September 12 Gamelin commanded a halt. He congratulated his men on their victory and instructed them to make preparations for a retreat into the security of the Maginot Line if a German offensive came roaring down through Belgium. The next day the Polish military attaché, on orders from an alarmed Rydz-Smigly, asked Gamelin whether French warplanes had attacked their mutual enemy, and whether he could accelerate his infantry advance. Later that same day the architect of the Saar “offensive” replied mendaciously, in writing: “More than half of our active divisions on the northeast front are engaged in combat.” The Boche, he said, were responding with “vigoureuse résistance.” Interrogation of enemy prisoners revealed that the Germans were “pouring in reinforcements”—all of this, every word, pure fiction—and French warplanes had been in action from the outset, tying down “une part considérable” of the Luftwaffe. He had gone “far beyond” his pledge, he concluded. “Il m’a été impossible de faire plus” (“It has been impossible for me to do more”).82

  The ground gained in the Saar was lost when Gamelin, on September 30, ordered a retreat. The only achievement of his so-called Saar offensive was to reveal France’s persistent confidence in outdated tactical ideas, notably the doctrine that any drive against a defended position must be preceded by a massive artillery bombardment, the “tin-opener,” as it had been called in 1918. General André de Beaufre, then a captain, said that Gamelin’s action, in character, had been a meaningless gesture (“Voilà notre aide à la Pologne!”), and Colonel de Gaulle dismissed “l’offensive” contemptuously as “quelques démonstrations.”83

  By the tenth day of fighting, the Polish cause was lost, and Rydz-Smigly, who had read the heartbreaking dispatches from Beck’s diplomats in Paris and London, knew it. He ordered a general withdrawal into southeastern Poland, planning to organize a defensive position on a narrow front to prolong resistance. But the Generalstab had thought of everything. Already over half of the marshal’s remaining forces had been trapped before they could retreat across the Vistula. Cut off from their bases, running out of ammunition, this remnant was caught in a vise between two German armies. And before Rydz-Smigly could reach his redoubt in the southeast, he, too, was encircled.

  On September 17 two Soviet army groups, in accordance with the secret clause in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, invaded Poland from the east. Ribbentrop and Molotov had fixed the demarcation line along the river Bug, but there are always soldiers who don’t get the word; shots were exchanged between some Germans and Russians, and a few men were wounded. Then all was quiet along the Bug. Both foreign armies were in Poland, but the Poles were forgotten; the fate of their homeland had been decided in the first three days of the Nazi invasion—actually, given the fourth color Gamelin had added to the French tricolor, before the fighting had begun.

  By all precedents the Poles, in extremis, should have yielded once they found that they faced both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. The Germans had them checked; now they were in checkmate. It was time to quit. They were victims of a squalid deal worked by two despots whose hands reeked of innocent blood, and they had been betrayed by two allies whose leaders had been regarded as honorable men. No indignity had been spared them. In London—where their cause found little sympathy—a cabinet minister had declared that after Nazi Germany had been crushed, “a Polish state would be reconstituted”; the Polish state to whose defense England had been committed was unmentioned. The Poles would gain nothing if they made a messy exit; they would merely forfeit the claims they had upon the world’s compassion. It was far more sensible to go along quietly.

  But the Poles didn’t want pity, and while quietude may be good form among Anglo-Saxons in exigency, the Poles are traditionally noisy. Newspaper photographs showed German and Russian officers shaking hands, elated that the battle was over. Except that it wasn’t; there were no pictures of Poles shaking hands with anyone. Their government and high command had left Warsaw for Rumania, leaving o
rders to fight to the bitter end. The Poles did; fueled by patriotic fervor, they barricaded streets with streetcars, stopping Reichenau’s tanks; his infantry was forced into the ugliest and most dangerous close combat—house to house, room by room. By that mysterious process which telegraphs news throughout a country, even after its communications system has been destroyed, all Poland knew what was happening in Warsaw, and thousands of Poles followed its example. Guderian plunged deep through the Polish rear to Brest-Litovsk, but when he tried to storm the town’s ancient citadel, he found an obsolete Renault tank had been jammed, and then welded, into the doorway. Warsaw, starving, lacking water, pounded around the clock by Nazi planes and artillery, finally capitulated ten days after the Russian invasion. Pockets of resistance fought on, though the last major stronghold—17,000 men in Kock, a village southeast of the capital—did not lay down their arms until October 7. Meanwhile, 100,000 Polish soldiers and pilots had escaped to Rumania and made their way to England, where they would fight in Free Polish battalions beside the British, French, and later, the Americans; Polish destroyers and submarines reached the Orkneys and joined the Royal Navy.