Poland

World War II began 66 years ago today, with Germany's invasion of Poland.

The Germans outnumbered the Poles 9 to 5 (2-1 in artillery, 3-1 in tanks and aircraft). Poland's military, like the rest of the struggling nation, had suffered during the Depression. They were not completely mobilized when the Germans crossed the border; like France, they had settled on mass-producing their key weapons - fighters planes, mainly - a few years too early, meaning they had a fair number of obsolescent planes rather than too few modern ones.

But history's game of public relations has not been kind to the Poles. The German PR machine started a number of myths about the Polish campaign that last until this day.

Let's address a few of them.

Metaphor Alert! - The legend sprang up during the war that the Polish cavalry, hidebound in the nineteenth century, had charged German tanks using lances and sabres.

Not remotely true; for starters, the Poles stopped issuing lances for non-ceremonial duties after 1935 - and, in fact, the original battle that led to this legend was actually, initially, a victory for the Polish cavalry.

It started in the sort of confusion that's typical in war:

"Perhaps the most vivid image to have emerged from the September Campaign is the picture of a squadron of courageously foolhardy Polish lancers charging a wave of steel Panzers. That such attack never occured does not sem to have diminished the popularity of these tales, even among serious historians. The tales originated in the first days of the campaign from the pens of Italian correspondents on the Pomeranian front. They were embesllished by German propagandists and became more fanciful with each new telling. The orginal source was a small skirmish near the hamlet of Krojanty on the evening of 1 September. The Pomeranian Corridor was defended by several Polish infantry divisions and the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade. The area was indefensible, but the force was stationed to prevent the Germans from making an unopposed seizure of the contested Corridor, as they had the Sudetenland. Upon the outbreak of war these forces were immediately to withdraw southward. Covering the retreat was Col. Mastalerz with his 18th Lancers and a number of infantry regiments. In the early morning of 1 September, Gen. Heinz Guderian's 2nd and 20th Motorised Division began their drive on Polish forces in the Tuchola forest. The cavalry and infantry were able to hold them back until the early afternoon, when the Germans began to push the Poles back. By late afternoon a key rail and road junction through the forest was threatened and Mastalerz was ordered to repulse the German thrust at all costs. Mastalerz had his own regiment, some infantry and the Brigade's tankettes at his disposal. The TK tankettes were old and worn out, and were left with a portion of the regiment to hold the existing positions. Two Lancer squadrons mounted up and began to swing around the German flank to strike them in the rear.

Then, the Poles found a target:

By early evening they had located a German infantry battalion exposed in a clearing. The squadrons were already within a few hundred yards, and a sabre charge seemed the sensible course. In moments the two squadrons had swept out of the woods and wiped out the unprepared with hardly any casaulties.

The, the situation got much dicier for the Poles:

As the troops were re-forming, a few German armoured cars equipped with automatic 20mm cannon and machine guns happened on the scene and immediately began firing. The Poles were completely exposed, and began to gallop for cover behind a nearby hillock. Mastalerz and his immediate staff were all killed, and the losses were terrible.

And here, the legend began:

The grim evidence of this encounter was discovered the following day by Italian war correspondents, who were told by German soldiers that it resulted from the cavalry having charged tanks and so the legend began. What has escaped attention was the fact that later that evening Guderian had to step in to prevent the 2nd Motorised Division from retreating 'in the face of intense cavalry pressure'. This intense pressure came from a decimated regiment which had lost 60 per cent of its strenght in the day's fighting and was not even a tenth of the size of the German unit it was pushing back."

Myth #2: The Luftwaffe Mopped the floor with the Polish Air Force - The legend has it that the German air force destroyed the Poles aircraft on the ground, on the opening morning of the campaign (like they did two years later with the Russians, or the way the Israelis did with the Egyptian and Syrian air forces 28 years later).

In fact, the Poles not only dispersed their small, obsolescent air force in the days before the campaign, but developed, in those days before radar, a very efficient system of observers and communications to vector the old planes - and their pilots, among the best-trained in the world at the time - to the German planes. The Poles shot down a fairly staggering number of Luftwaffe aircraft. After the fall of Poland, many Polish pilots escaped, first to Romania, then to France and finally to Britain. During the Battle of Britain, Polish pilots racked up amazingly high scores.

Poland was, of course, the scene of unimaginable horrors during the war; Hitler put his Vernichtunslagern, "Extermination Camps" like Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka, in Poland - partly because of the Polish Plain's desolate remoteness, partly because a huge number of Polish Catholics were more hostile to Jews than to Nazis, making a lousy environment for escape.

But Poland's resistance to the Nazis - during the fall of '39 and, underground, for the next five years - was otherwise a story of immense courage against hopeless odds.

Posted by Mitch at September 1, 2005 09:16 AM | TrackBack