THE WORLD WATCHES AND WAITS

POLAND, FINLAND AND THE PHONEY WAR

By evening on September 3rd 1939, both Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Both countries - indeed most of the world - expected events to gather speed; for a state of war such as had been known a generation earlier in France rapidly to be re-established. Hitler had snatched and held the political initiative for so long that he was expected by almost everybody to seek to retain it in the West, even as his armies subjugated Poland in the East. For, phoney as the war might have seemed in Birmingham or Rouen, in Detroit or Toronto, to the hard-pressed Poles the war was terrifyingly real. By the time France declared war on the evening of 3rd September, the Poles had been in battle for almost three days.

The German technique of Blitzkrieg - lightning war - was used for the first time in Poland, and proved to be devastatingly effective. At 0430 on 1st September, 48 divisions, six of them armoured, with 1,400 aircraft, invaded on three fronts, from East Germany, East Prussia and Slovakia. The master plan for the invasion, Case White, called for rapid neutralisation of Polish communications, airfields and troop concentrations, and the Junkers 87 "Stuka" dive bomber was used with deadly effect as a form of airborne artillery, taking over the role of harassing enemy positions that had previously been carried out by more vulnerable land based guns. Nonetheless, an early attempt on September 1st to dispose of the Polish Air Force, which had a total of 842 largely obsolete aircraft, only 400 of which were battle-worthy, succeeded only in part, and the Polish airmen fought on heroically and with surprising effectiveness throughout the campaign.

On Sunday, September 3rd, after days of bombing of Warsaw by German He 111 twin-engined bombers, and successful bombing raids by the Poles on German armour in the Radom-Piotrkow area, to the South West of Warsaw, the 1st and 4th Panzer divisions crossed the River Warta, and German forces captured Czestochowa. In the North West, the Polish Corridor, which had been a major cause of the dispute between Germany and Poland, was severed. By September 5th, the Germans had broken through to the Vistula and had taken Bydgoszcz in the North West, had destroyed the town of Sulejow by concentrated bombing, and had forced the Polish High Command under Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz to order a retreat. The advance on Warsaw seemed unstoppable, and on September 5th the Polish Government left Warsaw for Lublin.

By September 8th, the battle of the Bzura, West of Warsaw, had begun in earnest. The 4th Panzer Division, which had advanced 225km in 7 days, lost 60 tanks in an attempt to storm the outer defences of the capital. Recognising that they had a tougher fight on their hands than had been anticipated, the Wehrmacht moved substantial reinforcements to Poland for the final assault on Warsaw, and by the 15th the capital was surrounded. Despite ultimatums on the 16th and the 25th, mass air attacks on the city and huge fires, the Poles fought on until the 27th, when after a massive indiscriminate artillery bombardment of Warsaw the Polish garrison commander was forced to offer to surrender.

Meanwhile, Russia had invaded Poland from the East on 17th September, advancing 100km with virtually no resistance, and the Polish Government and all surviving Polish aircrews had decamped to Rumania.

So, in Poland, the war was anything but phoney. By the time Hitler arrived for his victory parade in Warsaw on October 5th, 10,572 Germans had died in the fighting and 30,322 had been wounded. Some 217 German tanks and 285 planes had also been destroyed. The Poles had lost about 50,000 dead, some 750,000 prisoners of war to Germany plus about 217,000 to the USSR, and 333 aircraft. Some 105,000 Poles escaped abroad to fight again. Although fast, the German victory was not easy.

Away from the agony of Poland, to those on land there seemed to prevail an uneasy peace. Britain and France had mobilised from September 1st, and the British Expeditionary Force was landed in France during September and October. On September 9th, Marshal Smigly-Rydz had appealed to General Gamelin of France for decisive action in the West to divert some of the force of the German assault away from Poland, but to no avail. The French Army demolished three bridges over the Rhine during minor skirmishes east of the Moselle, but elsewhere the armies waited. Hitler, in his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, had at first intended that his attack in the West, on Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, should be mounted in October 1939, but drew back and deferred the assault until 1940.

The lack of action was not for want of decision on the part of the great powers. The United States, saddled with the Neutrality Acts of the Thirties, had officially announced her neutrality on September 5th, and had established with the Latin American states a Pan American Security Zone by which military operations were forbidden within 1,000km of American shores. But Australia, New Zealand and British India had declared war on the same day as Britain and France. South Africa had declared war on Germany on September 6th; Canada had followed suit on September 10th. But all remained quiet - except at sea.

The seaborne war had begun almost as soon as Chamberlain had risen from his microphone in Downing Street. A single RAF Blenheim aircraft had photographed the German Fleet at Wilhelmshaven on September 3rd, and 29 RAF Blenheims and Wellingtons had attacked the fleet both at Wilhelmshaven and on the Kiel Canal on September 4th, with a loss of 7 aircraft. On September 14th, a German submarine, the U-39, attacked Britain's HMS Ark Royal , and was depth charged by accompanying destroyers. Three days later U-29 sank another British aircraft carrier, HMS Courageous , and on October 14th the Kriegsmarine scored a spectacular success when U-47 penetrated the Royal Navy's "impregnable" anchorage at Scapa Flow and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak . Two days later, nine of the new Junkers 88 twin-engined fighter bombers, pride of the Luftwaffe , dive-bombed Royal Navy warships at Rosyth in the Firth of Forth, and HMS Southampton survived only because a bomb that penetrated her decks failed to explode. Next day, a similar raid on Rosyth crippled HMS Iron Duke .

In December, the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee , which had been tracked by British and French ships all autumn, was brought to battle off the River Plate estuary by the British cruisers Exeter, Ajax and Achilles . The badly damaged HMS Exeter was obliged to retire to the Falkland Islands, and was replaced by HMS Cumberland , and the three ships lay off the Plate and waited for the Graf Spee to emerge. She never came. On Sunday December 17th, her Captain scuttled his ship in the Plate estuary, where the wreck, later bought by the British for a sight of her radar, burned for a week.

Alarming as these events were, they could not be claimed to be the all-out war that had been expected, not least by Hitler's Generals. For, when the 1939 balance of power is studied, Hitler did not have things all his own way.

The Allies had, for a start, considerable naval superiority over Germany. Britain and France between them had 676 ships built or launched; Germany had 130, including 57 U-boats under the command of Admiral Karl Doenitz, eventually to be Hitler's successor. Most of the U-boats were short-range Class 1 and 2 boats, intended for coastal operations, and unsuitable as Atlantic raiders.

In the air, the Luftwaffe had considerable superiority. At the beginning of September 1939, Goering could claim, and put in the air, no less than 4,700 aircraft, including a formidable fleet of 552 of the sturdy and reliable Junkers 52 three-engined transports, and nine squadrons of the Ju 87 Stukas. Against this, the Royal Air Force could muster only 3,600 aircraft, of which a great number were obsolescent, or even downright obsolete, a sad situation that resulted from a lack of defence spending by the government of appeasement in the late Thirties. The French had virtually no modern bombers or fighters, and the Poles, although beginning the war with over 800 largely obsolete aircraft, lost most of them in the terrible fighting in their own country.

Comparison of land forces is not so easy. The Germans had 53 divisions in the field at the outbreak of war, every one of them superbly equipped with up-to-date weapons, as one would expect of an army created virtually from nothing in five years. Although the French had 28 divisions, they were, by comparison, poorly equipped with weapons dating mainly from the First World War. The Poles were similarly equipped with rifles and automatic weapons from the Twenties and earlier. The British Army, although professional in outlook, was also sadly ill-equipped, and suffered from too great a belief in the trench warfare tactics which, while they had not won the Great War, could at least be argued not to have lost it.

Why the Allies did not attack Germany in the West when the Wehrmacht was preoccupied in Poland has been the subject of much debate, but the answer almost certainly rests in the slowness of French mobilisation, in a mistrust by both the French and British of the principles of the mobile war (later espoused earnestly) and in a correct assessment of the strength of German air power. At the Nuremberg War Trials after the War, General Jodl and Field Marshal Keitel asserted that an attack in the West would have "encountered only feeble resistance", but this has been questioned by many historians and will doubtless be debated many times yet.

The world's attention was diverted from Hitler's war, or the lack of it, when, at the end of November 1939 the USSR renounced its 1932 Soviet-Finnish Non-Aggression Pact and invaded Finland, with the intention of adding the land of the Finns to its expanding empire. Thus began the Winter War, one of the world's great examples of the triumph of local knowledge and sheer tenacity over brute force.

A redoubtable veteran of 72 years, Field-Marshal Mannerheim, was appointed Defender of Finland and Commander in Chief. He set about defending his country with 400,000 men (9 divisions), 145 aircraft, 2 coastal defence vessels and 5 submarines against Soviet forces amounting to 30 divisions, 1,200 tanks, 696 aircraft, 28 surface warships and 11 submarines. The Russians sought to emulate the Germans' tactics of Blitzkrieg , bombing Helsinki repeatedly, believing that, once the Finnish government had been subdued, it would be straightforward to march across Finland to the Gulf of Bothnia. Field-Marshal Mannerheim knew otherwise. Realising that the Finnish winter would inhibit drastically any army's attempt to cross the country North and East of Lake Ladoga, he withdrew the majority of his forces to defend a line drawn across the narrow Karelian Isthmus and across the area to the North of Lake Ladoga. All told, there were five divisions in the Isthmus, two divisions on the other side of the lake, a mere nine battalions covering the considerable area of Central Finland, and four battalions in independent Lappland.

During December, the Soviet Army began to learn the folly of taking on the Finns in an abnormally cold winter. The Soviet 7th Army was stopped dead in the Isthmus; the 8th Army fared no better on the other side of the Lake. Two divisions were utterly destroyed by the Finns at Tolvajarvi on December 12th. The day before, the 163rd Russian division was cut off near Oulu; on the 28th, the 44th Division was ambushed and destroyed. It is estimated that in the first phase of the Winter War, the Russians lost some 27,500 men against Finnish losses of 2,700.

Now the Russians began to recognise their inability to beat the Finns at their own game and changed their tactics. According to Mannerheim, no less than 45 Soviet divisions were deployed on the Finnish front for the second phase of the war at the beginning of 1940, and the tough Marshal Timoshenko was put in command. By mid-February, the Mannerheim Line had been breached, and by early March, as the weather improved and the Finns' natural advantage diminished, Mannerheim had to advise his government to sue for peace. On March 12th, the Russo-Finnish Treaty was signed in Moscow. Finland ceded the Viipuri and Salla districts and a part of Lappland, and was obliged to meet other conditions, but her moral triumph was undiminished. The Soviet position was condemned by the United States, France, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Hungary and Italy. Only Hitler's Germany failed to condemn the attack and remained non-partisan, and, to the fury of Count Ciano, forbade the transport across Germany of arms to be supplied by Italy to the Finns.

On the Western front, however, the winter had passed with only occasional skirmishes and air attacks. Six months after the outbreak of Hitler's war, there remained little war to see. On March 20th, the French Prime Minister Daladier resigned, and was succeeded by Paul Reynaud. On April 3rd, Winston Churchill, who had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty on September 3rd 1939, became Chairman of the British Government's Military Committee, another step towards the destiny that was to have a profound effect upon the conduct of the war. On April 4th, Neville Chamberlain told a Conservative Party meeting in London that Hitler, by failing to take advantage of his military superiority in September 1939, had "missed the bus".

Just five days later, Hitler invaded Norway. The real war had begun.