rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

Chapter 18THE FALL OF POLANDAt ten o’clock on the morning of September 5, 1939, General Haider had atalk with General von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the GermanArmy, and General von Bock, who led Army Group North. After sizing up thesituation as it looked to them at the beginning of the fifth day of the Germanattack on Poland they agreed, as Haider wrote in his diary, that ”the enemy ispractically beaten.”By the evening of the previous day the battle for the Corridor had endedwith the junction of General von Kluge’s Fourth Army, pushing eastward fromPomerania, and General von Kuechler’s Third Army, driving westward fromEast Prussia. It was in this battle that General Heinz Guderian first made aname for himself with his tanks. At one point, racing east across the Corridor,they had been counterattacked by the Pomorska Brigade of cavalry, and thiswriter, coming upon the scene a few days later, saw the sickening evidence ofthe carnage. It was symbolic of the brief Polish campaign.Horses against tanks! The cavalryman’s long lance against the tank’s longcannon! Brave and valiant and foolhardy though they were, the Poles weresimply overwhelmed by the German onslaught. This was their – and the world’s– first experience of the blitzkrieg: the sudden surprise attack; the fighter planesand bombers roaring overhead, reconnoitering, attacking, spreading flame andterror; the Stukas screaming as they dove; the tanks, whole divisions of them,breaking through and thrusting forward thirty or forty miles in a day; selfpropelled,rapid-firing heavy guns rolling forty miles an hour down even the ruttyPolish roads; the incredible speed of even the infantry, of the whole vast army ofa million and a half men on motorized wheels, directed and co-ordinated througha maze of electronic communications consisting of intricate radio, telephone andtelegraphic networks. This was a monstrous mechanized juggernaut such as theearth had never seen.Within forty-eight hours the Polish Air Force was destroyed, most of its fivehundred first-line planes having been blown up by German bombing on theirhome airfields before they could take off. Installations were burned and most ofthe ground crews were killed or wounded. Cracow, the second city of Poland,fell on September 6. That night the Polish government fled from Warsaw toLublin. The next day Haider busied himself with plans to begin transferringtroops to the Western front, though he could detect no activity there. Onthe afternoon of September 8 the 4th Panzer Division reached the outskirts of561