comments and conclusions in the light of theirs.
Wherever possible, I have favoured relatively obscure anecdotage at the expense of justly celebrated personal recollections – omitting, for instance, the likes of Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy and George Macdonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe out Here. Dr Lyuba Vinogradova, who has researched my Russian material for the past decade, for this work once again identified and translated personal narratives, diaries and letters. Serena Sissons has translated thousands of words from Italian memoirs and diaries, because Mussolini’s people seem to me inadequately represented in most Anglo-Saxon narratives. I have explored unpublished Polish accounts in the Imperial War Museum archive and London’s Sikorski Institute. I am once again indebted to Dr Tami Biddle of the US Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for insights and documents derived from her own researches, which she has generously shared with me. Various friends, notable among them Professor Sir Michael Howard, Dr Williamson Murray and Don Berry, have been kind enough to read my draft manuscript and make invaluable corrections, suggestions and comments. The doyen of British naval historians, Professor Nicholas Rodger of All Souls College, Oxford, read the chapter on the British experience at sea, much to the advantage of my final text. Richard Frank, doyen of US Pacific historians, identified an alarming catalogue of egregious mistakes in my draft, for which I am deeply grateful. None of these, of course, bears any responsibility for my judgements and errors.
Any writer’s highest aspiration, more than sixty-five years after the war’s ending, is to offer a personal view rather than a comprehensive account of this greatest and most terrible of all human experiences, which never fails to inspire humility in its modern students, inspired by gratitude that we have been spared anything comparable. In 1920, when Colonel Charles à Court Repington, military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, published a best-selling account of the recent conflict, it was considered sinister and tasteless that he chose as his title The First World War, for it presumed another. To call this book The Last World War might tempt providence, but it is at least certain that never again will millions of armed men clash on European battlefields such as those of 1939–45. The conflicts of the future will be quite different, and it may not be rashly optimistic to suggest that they will be less terrible.
MAX HASTINGS
Chilton Foliat, Berkshire, and Kamogi, Kenya, June 2011
1
Poland Betrayed
While Adolf Hitler was determined to wage war, it was no more inevitable that his 1939 invasion of Poland precipitated global conflict than that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria did so in 1914. Britain and France lacked both the will and the means to take effective action towards fulfilment of security guarantees they had given earlier to the Poles. Their declarations of war on Germany were gestures which even some staunch anti-Nazis thought foolish, because futile. For every eventual belligerent save the Poles themselves, the struggle began slowly: only in its third year did global death and destruction attain the vastness sustained thereafter until 1945. Even Hitler’s Reich was at first ill-equipped to generate the intensity of violence demanded by a death grapple between the most powerful nations on earth.
During the summer of 1939 Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the old American South, enjoyed a surge of popularity in Poland. ‘Somehow, I considered it prophetic,’ wrote one of its Polish readers, Rula Langer. Few of her compatriots doubted that a conflict with Germany was imminent, because Hitler had made plain his commitment to conquest. Poland’s fiercely nationalistic people responded to the Nazi threat with the same spirit as the doomed young men of the Confederacy in 1861. ‘Like most of us, I believed in happy endings,’ a young fighter pilot recalled. ‘We wanted to fight, it excited us, and we wanted it to happen fast. We didn’t believe that something bad could really happen.’ When artillery lieutenant Jan Karski received his mobilisation order on 24 August, his sister warned him against burdening himself with too many clothes. ‘You aren’t going to Siberia,’ she said. ‘We’ll have you on our hands again within a month.’
The Poles paraded their propensity for fantasy. There was an exuberance in the café and bar chatter of Warsaw, a city whose baroque beauties and twenty-five theatres caused citizens to proclaim it ‘the Paris of eastern Europe’. A New York Times reporter wrote from the Polish capital: ‘To hear people talk, one might think that Poland, not Germany, was the great industrial colossus.’ Mussolini’s foreign minister, his son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano, warned the Polish ambassador in Rome that if his country resisted Hitler’s territorial demands, it would find itself fighting alone, and ‘would quickly be turned into a heap of ruins’. The ambassador did not dissent, but asserted vaguely that ‘some eventual success…might give Poland greater strength’. In Britain, Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers denounced as provocative Warsaw’s defiance in the face of Hitler’s threats.
The Polish nation of thirty million, including almost one million ethnic Germans, five million Ukrainians and three million Jews, had held borders established by the Treaty of Versailles for only twenty years. Between 1919 and 1921, Poland fought the Bolsheviks to assert its independence from longstanding Russian hegemony. By 1939 the country was ruled by a military junta, though the historian Norman Davies has argued, ‘If there was hardship and injustice in Poland, there was no mass starvation or mass killing as in Russia, no resort to the bestial methods of Fascism or Stalinism.’ The ugliest manifestation of Polish nationalism was anti-Semitism, exemplified by quotas for Jewish university entry.
In the eyes of both Berlin and Moscow, the Polish state owed its existence only to Allied force majeure in 1919, and had no legitimacy. In a secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet Pact signed on 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed Poland’s partition and dissolution. Though the Poles viewed Russia as their historic enemy, they were oblivious of immediate Soviet designs on them, and were bent instead upon frustrating those of Germany. They knew the ill-equipped Polish army could not defeat the Wehrmacht; all their hopes were pinned upon an Anglo-French offensive in the west, which would divide Germany’s forces. ‘In view of Poland’s hopeless military situation,’ wrote its London ambassador Count Edward Raczy
In March 1939, the British and French governments gave guarantees, formalised in subsequent treaties, that in the event of German aggression against Poland, they would fight. If the worst happened, France promised the military leadership in Warsaw that its army would attack Hitler’s Siegfried Line within thirteen days of mobilisation. Britain pledged an immediate bomber offensive against Germany. Both powers’ assurances reflected cynicism, for neither had the smallest intention of fulfilling them: the guarantees were designed to deter Hitler, rather than to provide credible military assistance to Poland. They were gestures without substance, yet the Poles chose to believe them.
If Stalin was not Hitler’s co-belligerent, Moscow’s deal with Berlin made him the co-beneficiary of Nazi aggression. From 23 August onwards, the world saw Germany and the Soviet Union acting in concert, twin faces of totalitarianism. Because of the manner in which the global struggle ended in 1945, with Russia in the Allied camp, some historians have accepted the post-war Soviet Union’s classification of itself as a neutral power until 1941. This is mistaken. Though Stalin feared Hitler and expected eventually to have to fight him, in 1939 he made a historic decision to acquiesce in German aggression, in return for Nazi support for Moscow’s own programme of territorial aggrandisement. Whatever excuses the Soviet leader later offered, and although his armies never fought in partnership with the Wehrmacht, the Nazi–Soviet Pact established a collaboration which persisted until Hitler revealed his true purposes in Operation Barbarossa.
The Moscow non-aggression agreement, together with the subsequent 28 September Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation, committed the world’s
