THE WAR AGAINST POLAND

The German plan for the invasion of Poland had been developed since the spring of 1939 and was greatly assisted by the very favorable geographical position Germany had always had, a position further improved by the territorial changes of early 1939. It was the intention of the Germans to combine surprise coups to seize special objectives at, or even before, the moment of attack with a sudden overwhelming attack on two fronts carried forward by the mass of the German army supported by most of the German air force. As Hitler had emphasized to his military leaders on August 22, it was Poland as a people that was to be destroyed; and therefore from the beginning it was assumed that massive slaughter of Poles and particularly the extermination of their political and cultural elite would both accompany and follow the campaign designed to destroy Poland's regained independence. The possibility of some kind of subordinate puppet government in a portion of occupied Poland was temporarily left open, but any such concept would be dropped quickly: German policy made collaboration impossible for self-respecting Poles and any individuals still so inclined were turned away by the Germans in any case.

The planned surprise coups for the most part failed; even the peacetime sending of a warship with a landing party into Danzig could not force the quick surrender of the minute Polish garrison there, and the attempted seizure of the strategically important railway bridge over the Vistula at Tszew (Dirschau) was thwarted as Polish engineers blew up the great span. A portion of Poland's navy succeeded in escaping the German effort to destroy it, but the major land offensives were crushingly effective.

The Polish government had faced four problems in contemplation of any German attacks, and all were probably insoluble under the circumstances. In the first place, until 1939 the assumption had been that the 1934 agreement with Germany made it safe to confine military planning to the contingency of a renewal of the conflict with the Soviet Union, a conflict ended by the Peace Treaty of Riga of 1921, which had left to Poland substantial territory that had belonged to her before the partitions of the eighteenth century, but that the Soviet government was likely to want to recover.