James Holland - Blitzkrieg

Series 117

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First published 2018

Text copyright James Holland, 2018

All images copyright Ladybird Books Ltd, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover illustration by Keith Burns

ISBN: 978-1-405-92947-9

James Holland

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BLITZKRIEG

with illustrations by
Keith Burns

On Monday 21 August 1939, Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Politically and ideologically, the two countries were natural enemies, but the USSR was not ready for war, and Adolf Hitler, the German leader, wanted to invade Poland without risk of being attacked from the east in turn. Both countries understood this was a temporary treaty of convenience. It did, however, pave the way for the outbreak of the Second World War.

The following day, Tuesday 22 August, Hitler called together his senior commanders to the Berghof, his house near Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, and outlined his plans for war against Poland. Since 1919, the enclave of East Prussia, still part of Germany, had been cut off by a narrow strip of land known as the Danzig Corridor. It was time, he told them, to take it back, and to test German military strength. We are faced, he said, with his usual black-and-white world-view, with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation sooner or later. The only choice remaining was to crush Poland.

A day later, Hitler announced that the invasion would be launched in a matter of days. Curiously, that evening the Northern Lights were showing over the Alps and a shroud of deep red was cast over the Untersberg. The Fhrer and his followers were watching from the terrace as the same red light now bathed their faces and hands.

Hitler turned to one of his military adjutants and said, Looks like a great deal of blood.

Britain and France, two of the worlds most powerful nations, had vowed to defend Polands sovereignty. This meant that if Germany invaded, then they would both declare war. Many senior commanders in the Wehrmacht, the German armed services, believed this threat, but Hitler thought they were bluffing. After all, in 1936 he had marched back into the Rhineland, ceded from Germany after the end of the First World War, and the French and British had done nothing. Then, in spring 1938, his forces had poured into Austria and brought that country into the Third Reich without a shot being fired; and that autumn, German troops had occupied the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, then six months later had taken control of the entire country. Once again, the rest of the world had sat back and watched. Now, in the late summer of 1939, he could not imagine Britain or France risking war over Poland.

In Germany, Hitlers popularity had never been higher. He had created jobs, grown the armed forces, given the German people back their pride, and had taken back all the German-speaking territories, and more besides, without any opposition.

Most Germans also believed that much of Poland was rightfully theirs. Certainly, much of the western part of the country had been within Germany until Poland had been recreated following the end of the First World War. Many there spoke German rather than Polish. Nazi propaganda also told the world that Poles had been carrying out atrocities against Germans.

Propaganda had been a key component of Nazi strategy from the outset. To a large degree, this was due to Dr Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. It was Goebbels who whipped up hatred of Jews anti-Semitism and Communists, as well as convincing the German people of the rightness of Hitlers ambitions. Key to this was repetition and the new media of radio and film.

Goebbels recognized that radios, especially, were an ideal way to get a message across. Germany lagged behind other leading nations in many innovations of the age, but not when it came to radios, which were made in large numbers and cheaply, too. By 1939, almost 70 per cent of the population owned radios, and most were the DKE, or Deutscher Kleinempfnger, the German Little Radio. Small and affordable, this ensured there were more people with a radio in Germany than in any other country in the world, including the USA. Public squares, restaurants and bars were also fitted with speakers from which the radio could be heard. Repeat, repeat, repeat, was Goebbels mantra. Over the airways, on film and in newspapers, the state-controlled media were able to bombard the German people with the same messages: Hitlers genius, the rightness of German territorial ambitions, the growing strength and invincibility of the German armed forces, as well as virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Communism.

And it worked. The anger that I felt inside at their unreasonableness, Lieutenant Hajo Herrmann, a young bomber pilot, said of the Poles, matched my sacred conviction: that of German rightness.

Hajo Herrmann was one of the many bomber pilots in the Luftwaffe the German Air Force flying over to attack Polish targets in the early hours of Friday 1 September 1939. On the ground, troops poured over the border. Artillery boomed, panzers tanks rumbled forward, while Stuka dive-bombers screamed down, sirens wailing, to drop their bombs. Two days later, on 3 September, Britain and France honoured their pledge to Poland and declared war on Germany.

The German plan was to use the Luftwaffe as aerial artillery, hitting at cities, communications, military targets and also airfields and aircraft on the ground, and so effectively paralyse the Polish defence. The Polish Air Force was much smaller in size and for the most part lacked modern aircraft. Hajo Herrmann and his colleagues were able to destroy much of it in a matter of days.