Stalin полностью

Incredibly, the Polish regime had failed to prepare a full-fledged war plan in the event of a German attack, even after the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia had made the path to Warsaw that much easier. Poland’s contingency planning was focused on a war against the Soviet Union. Most of Poland’s military supply bases remained in its western regions, considered the rear.²²⁹ Now, rather than establish a line of defense in depth on the Vistula that could be held, Poland massed its forces forward, in the Poznań salient, troops that were encircled and annihilated. Already on September 3, Wehrmacht units in the north had crossed the entire Corridor and linked up with German East Prussia. On the same day, Ribbentrop cabled Schulenburg in Moscow to gently urge the Soviet Union to occupy its sphere of Poland “at the proper time,” as agreed in the Pact, adding that “this would be a relief to us.”²³⁰ Of course, his goal was not to gain assistance for the Wehrmacht in its war effort, but to fatally poison relations between the USSR and the Western powers. (Heydrich enthused to his subordinates, “Then Britain would be obliged to declare war on Russia, too.”) Molotov was noncommittal. Poland had an army of around 39 divisions and 16 cavalry brigades, plus reserves, while Hitler had mobilized 54 divisions (out of about 80 total at the time). Stalin was waiting to see how well the German offensive went. In the event, the Luftwaffe would end up losing almost as many planes as the small Polish air force; the Luftwaffe would also expend its entire stock of bombs, while fully one quarter of Germany’s tank park would be knocked out of commission or outright destroyed.²³¹

Stalin, no less than the Polish government, was also waiting to see what concrete military actions Britain and France would undertake. As it happened, those actions proved to be minimal (indicating, perhaps, what the USSR, too, would have received from the Western powers in an alliance against Germany). The British instituted a blockade of Germany but shrank from bombing even Germany’s airfields, despite an explicit commitment to Poland to do so. The air attack plans had been quietly abandoned for fear of provoking Luftwaffe retaliation on Britain—but the Poles had not been informed. Similarly, the French government had agreed, in the protocol signed with Poland back on May 19, 1939, to commence military action against Germany within fifteen days of the start of a war, but then, in consultation with Britain, France subsequently decided it would not do so—also without informing Poland. France’s 110 divisions did not storm into Germany, which was protected by fewer than 30 divisions, perhaps 12 of them combat ready. The entire sum of French action consisted of a small attack on the Saarland, even though, privately, Wehrmacht chief of staff Halder admitted that he could not have prevented the French from occupying the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, had they moved expeditiously.²³² As France instead hunkered down against an anticipated German attack, the Poles were left to fight alone.²³³ The Polish government, in a demoralizing move, abandoned Warsaw beginning on September 5, in a chaotic evacuation southeast, by steps, toward the frontier with Romania—planning, if necessary, to try to travel on to the West and return on the backs of Western military might.

Stalin did not know for sure that the French and the British had effectively written Poland off militarily even before the war had been launched. He was also hypercautious not to walk into a Nazi trap. On September 3, the same day Ribbentrop had tasked Schulenburg, in Moscow, with ascertaining Soviet plans for Poland, Stalin’s latest ambassador to Berlin, Alexei Shkvartsev, the former head of the textile institute, was ceremoniously received at the Chancellery. When the envoy presented his credentials to Hitler, in the presence of Göring and Ribbentrop, the Führer remarked, “The German nation is fortunate to have signed the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. This Pact will serve the cause of the commonwealth of these two nations in both the political and economic arenas.” Hitler vowed to uphold all the obligations he had undertaken, but he declined to provide any information on the course of his campaign in Poland.²³⁴ Would the Wehrmacht actually halt at the line agreed upon in the just-signed Pact? Would they even stop at the Polish border?²³⁵

The fact remained that both the Japanese and the German armies—two of the world’s biggest, and both bordering on the Soviet Union—were on the move at the same time.