Most young Germans, graduates of the Nazi educational system, unhesitatingly accepted the version of events offered by their leaders. ‘The advance of the armies has become an irresistible march to victory,’ wrote a twenty-year-old Luftwaffe flight trainee. ‘Scenes of deep emotion occur with the liberations of the terrorised German residents of the Polish Corridor. Dreadful atrocities, crimes against all the laws of humanity, are brought to light by our armies. Near Bromberg and Thorn they discover mass graves containing the bodies of thousands of Germans who have been massacred by the Polish Communists.’
On 17 September, the date on which Poles expected the French to begin their promised offensive on the Western Front, instead the Soviet Union launched its own vicious thrust, designed to secure Stalin’s share of Hitler’s booty. Stefan Kurylak was a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian Pole, living in a quiet village near the Russian border. Retreating Polish troops began to trickle down its dusty main street on foot and on horseback, some crying out urgently, ‘Run – run for your lives, good people! Hide anywhere you can, for they are showing no mercy. Hurry. The Russians are coming!’ Soon afterwards, the teenager watched a Soviet tank column clatter through the village: a child who lingered in its path, frightened and confused, was casually shot down. Kurylak took refuge in his family’s potato pit.
Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, told the Polish ambassador in Moscow that, since the Polish republic no longer existed, the Red Army was intervening to ‘protect Russian citizens in western Belorussia and western Ukraine’. Although Hitler had agreed Stalin’s annexation of eastern Poland, the Germans were taken by surprise when the Soviet intervention came. So, too, were the Poles. Once the Red Army struck in their rear, wrote Marshal Rydz-
Hitler hoped that Stalin’s intervention would provoke the Allies to declare war on the Russians, and in London there was indeed a brief flurry of debate about whether Britain’s commitment to Poland demanded engagement of a new enemy. In the War Cabinet, only Churchill and war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha urged preparations for such an eventuality. Britain’s Moscow ambassador Sir William Seeds cabled: ‘I do not see what advantage war with the Soviet Union would be to us although it would please me personally to declare it on Molotov.’ Much to the relief of prime minister Neville Chamberlain, the Foreign Office advised that the government’s guarantee to Poland covered only German aggression. Bitter British rhetoric was unleashed against Stalin, but no further consideration was given to fighting him; the French likewise confined themselves to expressions of disgust. Within days, at a cost of only 4,000 casualties, the Russians overran 77,000 square miles of territory including the cities of Lwów and Wilno. Stalin gained suzerainty over five million Poles, 4.5 million ethnic Ukrainians, one million Belorussians and one million Jews.
In Warsaw, starving people still clung to hopes of aid from the west. An air-raid warden confided to an acquaintance: ‘You know the British. They are slow in making up their minds, but now they are definitely coming.’ Millions of Poles were at first bewildered, then increasingly outraged, by the passivity of these supposed friends. A cavalry officer wrote: ‘What was happening in the west, we wondered, and when would the French and British start their offensive? We could not understand why our allies were so slow in coming to our assistance.’ On 20 September, Poland’s London ambassador broadcast to his people at home: ‘Fellow countrymen! Know that your sacrifice is not in vain, and that its meaning and eloquence are felt to the utmost here…Already the hosts of our allies are assembling…The day will come when the victorious standards…shall return from foreign lands to Poland.’ Yet even as he spoke, Count Raczy
In Paris, Polish ambassador Juliusz Łukasiewicz exchanged bitter words with French foreign minister Georges Bonnet. ‘It isn’t right! You know it isn’t right!’ he said. ‘A treaty is a treaty and must be respected! Do you realise that every hour you delay the attack on Germany means…death to thousands of Polish men, women and children?’ Bonnet shrugged: ‘Do you then want the women and children of Paris to be massacred?’ American correspondent Janet Flanner wrote from Paris: ‘It would seem, indeed, as if efforts are still being made to hold the war up, prevent its starting in earnest – efforts made, perhaps self-consciously, by government leaders reluctant to go down in history as having ordered the first inflaming shots, or efforts made as a general reflection of the various populations’ courageous but confused states of mind. Certainly this must be the first war that millions of people on both sides continued to think could be avoided even after it had officially been declared.’
The French were wholly unwilling to launch a major offensive against the Siegfried Line, as Winston Churchill urged, far less to invite German retaliation by bombing Germany. The British government similarly declined to order the RAF to attack German land targets. Tory MP Leo Amery wrote contemptuously of prime minister Neville Chamberlain: ‘Loathing war passionately, he was determined to wage as little of it as possible.’ The Times editorialised in a fashion which seemed to Polish readers to mock their plight: ‘In the agony of their martyred land, the Poles will perhaps in some degree be consoled by the knowledge that they have the sympathy, and indeed the reverence, not only of their allies in western Europe but of all civilized people throughout the globe.’
It is sometimes argued that in mid-September 1939, with the bulk of the German army committed in Poland, the Allies had an ideal opportunity to launch an offensive on the Western Front. But France was even less prepared psychologically than militarily for such an initiative; and Britain’s small expeditionary force, still in transit to the Continent, could contribute little. The Germans could probably have repelled any assault without much disrupting their operations in the east, and the inertia of the French and British governments reflected the will of their peoples. A Glasgow secretary named Pam Ashford wrote in her diary on 7 September: ‘Practically everyone thinks the war will be over in three months…Many hold that when Poland is smashed up there won’t be much point in continuing.’
The Poles should have anticipated the passivity of their allies, but its cynicism was breathtaking. A modern historian, Andrzej Suchcitz, has written: ‘The Polish government and military authorities had been double-crossed and betrayed by their western allies. There was no intention of giving Poland any effective military support.’ As Warsaw faced its doom, Stefan Starzy
And he, when the city was just a raw, red mass
Said: ‘I do not surrender.’ Let the houses burn!
Let my proud achievements be bombed into dust.
So what, if a graveyard grows from my dreams?
For you, who may come here, some day recall
That