The World Watches And Waits - Poland, Finland And The Phoney War

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THE WORLD WATCHES AND WAITS - POLAND, FINLAND AND THE PHONEY WAR

WWII* Chapter 2

By evening on September 3rd 1939, both Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Both countries - indeed most of the world - expected events to gather speed; for a state of war such as had been known a generation earlier in France rapidly to be re-established. Hitler had snatched and held the political initiative for so long that he was expected by almost everybody to seek to retain it in the West, even as his armies subjugated Poland in the East. For, phoney as the war might have seemed in Birmingham or Rouen, in Detroit or Toronto, to the hard-pressed Poles the war was terrifyingly real. By the time France declared war on the evening of 3rd September, the Poles had been in battle for almost three days.
The German technique of Blitzkrieg - lightning war - was used for the first time in Poland, and proved to be devastatingly effective. At 0430 on 1st September, 48 divisions, six of them armoured, with 1,400 aircraft, invaded on three fronts, from East Germany, East Prussia and Slovakia. The master plan for the invasion, Case White, called for rapid neutralisation of Polish communications, airfields and troop concentrations, and the Junkers 87 "Stuka" dive bomber was used with deadly effect as a form of airborne artillery, taking over the role of harassing enemy positions that had previously been carried out by more vulnerable land based guns. Nonetheless, an early attempt on September 1st to dispose of the Polish Air Force, which had a total of 842 largely obsolete aircraft, only 400 of which were battle-worthy, succeeded only in part, and the Polish airmen fought on heroically and with surprising effectiveness throughout the campaign.

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