At 4:45 on the morning of Friday, September 1st, German panzers and motorised infantry moved across the Polish frontier. The German Air Force attacked primary Polish airfields only to find that the Poles had moved most of their planes to subsidiary airstrips. Yet these aircraft gave the Luftwaffe very little trouble, for they were slow and clumsy and certainly were no match for the best trained Air Force in the world. The Luftwaffe's main problem was heavy fog, which made its targets hard to find.
Photo of Hitler reviewing troops, History of World War 2, p.25
When the Germans struck, the Poles were not totally unprepared. German war propaganda and the Nazi-Soviet Pact were warning enough. Moreover, well trained polish mathematicians, working for the Polish Intelligence, had broken the German Enigma codes, and knew in considerable detail the line-up of German forces on its borders.
Before launching an offensive against Poland, Hitler faked a pretext for his attack on Poland. On August 31st, 1939, men wearing Polish uniforms raided a radio station, near Gleiwitz in the far south-eastern corner of Germany. At 11 p.m., a voice in broken Polish interrupted a Radio Gleiwitz programme, calling on the Silesians - the people of the border region - to take up arms against the Nazis. These 'raiders' were not Poles, but SS men acting as Poles.
Reinhard Heydrich, who was the deputy head of the German Security Service, planned a fake counter-attack. Inmates in a concentration camp, who were already condemned to death were dressed in Polish uniforms and killed with lethal injections. Then there bodies were thrown and shot at a spot near Gleiwitz to provide evidence of an exchange of fire.
Next day their bodies were displayed to the world. As early as July, 1939, the O.K.H. Directive stated: "The objective of the operation is the destruction of the Polish armed forces. The political conduct of the war demands that it be fought with crushing, surprize blows to achieve rapid success" (page 12, History of World War 2).
"Intention of the Army High Command: to disrupt, by a rapid invasion of Polish territory, the mobilisation and concentration of the Polish Army, and to destroy the bulk of troops stationed to the west of the Vistula-Narew line by converging attacks from Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia" (page 12, History of World War 2).
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© Copyright 2002 by Shahram Khan.
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