Poland 1939: The invasion that sparked WW2 - HistoryExtra
"‘The Soviets invad as well, which is one aspect that we traditionally forget. It's important to note that, you know, Hitler and Stalin are de facto allies in 1939. The signature of the Nazi Soviet pact on the 23rd of August, brought them into alignment into, at the very least, you could call a strategic alignment. They both had an interest in destroying Poland, they're both fundamentally anti Polish in their worldview, because they both saw Poland as the, in a sense as the personification of their national humiliation at the end of the First World War…
The Nazi Soviet pact… is another one of those chapters that is fundamentally misunderstood in the Western narrative of the war, it's always seen as the Germans or the Soviets, rather, making basically a defensive gesture to the German saying, we know you're going to attack us. But we're just going to make a pact and do whatever you want to do just to keep us out of this dreadful conflict. That, unfortunately, is reading history backwards through a lens of Soviet propaganda. That's not how it was. The Nazi Soviet pact is an aggressive act, primarily against Poland, secondarily against the Western powers’...
The Poles had tanks, they're not all on horseback. And of course the Germans have cavalry… There are more German troops on horseback, than there are Poles on horseback in 1939. They’re still using cavalry. Everyone is using cavalry in 1939. The Red Army is even using calvary. So just the fact that the Poles use calvary is not necessarily evidence of their terminal backwardness. Everyone is doing it. There are noticeably some cavalry on calvary battles in 1939, which is in itself remarkable. I'm sure that might be a surprise to some of you. And the Poles generally prevailed in those battles. Polish cavalry was about as good as it got in 1939. They are very effective. But this narrative of about cavalry against tanks is a nonsense.
There are a couple of instances you can see where this story comes from. A couple of instances in the beginning of the campaign where Polish cavalry had been very effective. They are extremely effective against German infantry… Polish cavalry clear the field of German infantry and are then countered, charged by a German armored column with predictable results… the Germans themselves in various accounts… he talks about the fear that the Polish cavalry instilled in German infantry troops in 1939, they were terrified of the Polish cavalry. So in a sense, the creation by the Germans of this myth that these foolish men on horseback had charged their tanks with their sabers drawn shouting hurrah and bashed these on the, in the most extreme versions of the narrative, bash their sabers on the steel of the tanks, you know, in in consternation that these are real tanks, when this is the most extreme version of that narrative.
You can see it's almost a sort of a way of countering that fear that some German infantry men had of Polish cavalry advances… They generally fight dismounted crucially. So actually, using an old fashioned cavalry charge is a real, it's a sort of almost a desperation tactic, or it's something you would use against infantry. If you could see that you're against infantry, you would do it...
Very quickly why this has been forgotten. It has been forgotten, essentially, because the victors write the history. So the only people that wrote about the September campaign during the war, were the Germans. So the Germans wrote a few sort of, you know, spurious propagandistic memoirs, and a few coffee table books. Not much else. And then, of course, they went on to greater invasions and greater crimes, and probably forgot about the September campaign. And then post war, the Germans took a long time to come around to writing about that history, took them really until the 1960s, by which time they spend most of their time expiating their guilt for the Holocaust, and not really talking about what they did to Poland, which was brutal and horrific. So September 39, doesn't really come into the German narrative, post war.
Soviet narrative post war, of course, they don't talk about it because they weren't there, remember? So they don't talk about it. This is one of the black spots of Russian history. The Soviet narrative of World War Two is that it started in 1941, when they were invaded and ended in 1945, when they're victorious in Berlin, and it very artfully airbrushes the two years prior to 1941 when they were actually operating in cahoots with Hitler. Cos that will be done for their narrative, so they weren't there, they don't talk about it.
British and the French also, our narrative of war very quickly becomes rather parochial. We talk about D Day, we talk about Dunkirk. We talk about Battle of Britain and we talk about these things rather endlessly and repeatedly and so it goes on and we don't really understand until arguably things like Anthony Beaver’s Stalingrad came out in 1998. That was really the first time certainly in popular history that that history readers in this country and interest in world war two were sort of transported eastwards and taken somewhere else and say, Look, there's another narrative. It wasn't all about DD, and Dunkirk and Commando comic books... Communist Poland didn't talk about it, because there was no mileage in it for Communist Poland. So the only time that's really been talked about is post 1989. After the collapse of Communism'"
