‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,’ Hitler remarked on the eve of invading Poland in September 1939. Nobody believed his claim that Germany was acting in self-defence; but they did believe his carefully crafted propaganda to the effect that the Poles were so dumb they used cavalry armed with lances against tanks.
In this timely and authoritative book, Roger Moorhouse dispels this and other myths concocted by German and Soviet propaganda. He has trawled through an impressive quantity of unpublished Polish and German sources, as well as a wealth of eyewitness testimonies from both sides, to produce a balanced account of this much neglected yet important episode of the second world war which is both harrowing and inspiring.
There could never have been any doubt as to the outcome. Poland was a poor country, struggling to rebuild a state after more than a century of partition and an economy from the wreckage left by the first world war, in the unpromising climate of the Great Depression. Military spending over the five years prior to 1939 was less than 3 per cent of that of Germany. As Moorhouse points out: ‘The amount that Germany would spend to equip a single armoured division exceeded the entire annual budget for the Polish army.’ Poland’s 700 tanks, all but 100 of them obsolete, were outgunned by Germany’s 3,000, and the 400 or so Polish warplanes were outpaced by the Luftwaffe’s more modern 2,500, a pattern replicated in every field. Poland’s troops were highly motivated, but let down by their commanding officers and hampered by poor communications.
The Germans were able to invade from the north, west and south, which gave them an advantage over Polish forces strung out along this extended border.
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