![]() Expecting another round of appeasement, Hermann Göring screamed obscenities over the telephone at foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. While Britain declared war on September 3rd, the German leadership was caught off guard, though Hastings reports that Hitler recovered more quickly than those surrounding him. The reactions of two of the countries that would eventually emergent triumphant from the war may surprise casual historians of WWII. To some extent, the opening salvo in the war was radically different from what followed, but in a couple of crucial ways, the invasion of Poland quickly set the tone for how the war would be fought everywhere else in Europe. If not, casualty figures should make things clear: at the cost of 16,000 dead and 30,000 wounded in its own ranks, the German military and its Soviet allies (see below) killed about 70,000 Polish troops, wounded twice as many and took ten times that number prisoner, and took the lives of up to 200,000 Polish civilians.īut reading the chapter on Poland that commences the narrative in Max Hastings’ Inferno, I realized how little I knew about what happened in September 1939. I trust that the one-sided nature of a campaign that took just over one month for the German military to complete is pretty well-known. ![]() (I’m going to resist the instinct to write “Adolf Hitler continued…”, since this was a foreign policy with deep roots in German history and significant support among German elites, however nervous they were of an Allied response.) After fabricating a series of incidents meant to demonstrate Polish aggressiveness (e.g., at the radio station at Gleiwitz), Germany invaded its neighbor on September 1, 1939. Having already remilitarized the Rhineland (March 1936), absorbed Austria (March 1938) and the northern and western borderlands of Czechoslovakia (October 1938), and then occupied Bohemia and Moravia (March 1939), Germany continued its territorial aggrandizement in defiance of the Versailles treaty as the summer of 1939 came to a close. ![]() Let’s continue with an invasion that’s probably more familiar to most Americans and Europeans: Warsaw’s Royal Castle burning during the German assault on the city in mid-September 1939 – Wikimedia ![]() I started this series - introducing American readers to the Second World War as it was fought years before the United States joined the conflic t - with Japan’s 1937 offensive against China. ![]()
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