Nowadays German commentators write of the “miracle” of the French static defense in September 1939, which made the Polish blitzkrieg possible. It is hard to see where the “miracle” lay. French military thinking was defensive and positional, because such thinking had triumphed in 1918. They had an obsession with the theoretical ten-to-one advantage of the defense in mechanized warfare. There is no doubt that in September France could have sent millions of well-trained soldiers, with more armored divisions than the Wehrmacht had in Poland, crashing out of the Maginot fortresses, or via the northern plain through Belgium and Holland, into our paper-thin western formations, and rolled to Berlin. But the will was not there. Adolf Hitler’s political and military gamble on this vital point proved brilliant. Of all his opponents, he throughout best understood and anticipated the French.
Victory
The Polish breakthrough phase took approximately four days. Complete tactical surprise was achieved because the hypocritical Polish politicians, though wholly aware of the danger, kept giving their people false assurances. The Polish air force of almost a thousand planes was destroyed on the ground. Thereafter the Lutfwaffe freely roamed the skies. Polish ground resistance was moderate to heavy, and our commanders in the field had to admire the bold cavalry dashes against tank formations. Perhaps the legend is true that the Polish horsemen were told by their government that our tanks were papier-mâché dummies! In that case, they were soon sadly disabused. The contrast between the possibilities of mechanized warfare and classic military tactics was never more strikingly demonstrated than in these ineffectual charges of the Polish horsemen against iron tanks.
Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht too was operating with but a thin knife-edge of fully motorized armored divisions. Our important ground advances were made by infantry masses on foot, exploiting the breakdown of communications, the panic, and the disarray of battle lines created by the narrow panzer thrusts. And while the Luftwaffe played a strong support role, it was the horse-drawn artillery massed outside Warsaw, and not the air bombardment, that in the end knocked out the city’s capacity to resist and brought the eventual surrender. This heavy reliance on horses betrayed our serious lack of combat readiness for world war.
By September 21 the city was ringed by Wehrmacht forces; and the news from outside was of Polish soldiers being taken prisoner in the hundreds of thousands, of one pocket after another being liquidated, of a total collapse of the front, of a national government pusillanimously fleeing to Rumania. Yet it was not until September 27 that the city, under a round-the-clock rain of shells and bombs, without food, water, or light, with many of its buildings in ruins, with disease spreading, finally gave up its vain hopes of last-minute delivers from the West, and surrendered.
Observations
From first to last, the Führer and his propagandists played down the Polish campaign as a local police action, a “special task” of the Wehrmacht. Hitler personally cancelled many sections of Case White dealing with rationing, troop mobilization, and transport, with one aim in mind: to soften the impact on the German people. This political meddling represented a considerable setback to operations, and precious months passed before the damage was righted. I may say here, that due to similar Party and Führer interference, which never ceased, the war effort was never, by professional standards, organized fully or properly.
The shabby farce enacted at our radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border on the night of August 31—the pretense that Polish soldiers had crossed over to attack the station and been repulsed, the dressing of condemned political prisoners in Polish uniforms and the scattering of their bullet-riddled bodies near the station, as an excuse for starting the invasion—none of this trivial humbug was known to the Wehrmacht. We were irrevocably on the march toward Poland seventy-two hours earlier. I myself did not learn of the incident until the Nuremberg trials; I was too busy at the time with serious matters. * Himmler was probably responsible.
Poland in 1939 was a backward and ill-informed dictatorship of reactionary colonels and politicians with fantastic territorial aims, a government extremely brutal to minorities (especially the Ukrainians and the Jews) and unjust and mendacious to its own people; a government that pounced like a hyena on Czechoslovakia at the Munich crisis and tore a province from that country in its hardest hour; a government that clumsily played a double game with Germany and the Soviet Union for twenty years; and to the last tried to talk and act like a major military power when it was in fact as weak as a kitten. It was to support this reactionary, bluffing, bigoted dictatorship that the democracies embarked on the Second World War. That government quickly and ignominiously fell to pieces and disappeared forever. But the war went on, and its starting point was soon all but forgotten. Some day, however, sober historians must again give the proper emphasis to these absurd paradoxes that governed the provoking of the world’s biggest war.
The final absurdity of this inept start to a terrible global struggle was that Czechoslovakia, betrayed by England in 1938, did not fight, and in the whole war period lost less than one hundred thousand people. Poland, supported by England in 1939, fought and lost almost six million dead (though about half of these were Jews). Both countries ended up as Communist puppets under the heel of the Soviet Union. Which government then was the wiser, and which people the more fortunate? When great powers fall out, small powers do well to bow to the storm wind, in whichever direction it blows strongest. That was what the Poles forgot.
__________
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:The reader will have to grow used to the German habit of blaming other countries for getting themselves invaded by Germans. This note recurs throughout General von Roon’s book, as through most of their military literature. Officers raised under the General Staff system apparently lost the power to think in other terms. Roon’s discussion of the Polish government and the British guarantee are the telling passages in his preliminary sketch of Case White.—V.H.
GERMAN ARMY ATTACKS POLAND; CITIES BOMBED, PORT BLOCKADED; DANZIG IS ACCEPTED INTO THE REICH
THENew York Times, raising its voice to suit the occasion in its eight-column once-in-a-generation italic headlines, topped the sprawl of newspapers on the desk under Hugh Cleveland’s stocking feet. The other papers had headlines far larger and blacker than the Times’s genteel bellow. Tilted back in his shirt-sleeves in a swivel chair, a telephone cradled between his head and left shoulder, Cleveland was making quick red crayon marks on a sheaf of yellow typing paper and sipping coffee as he talked. Eight years in the broadcasting business had made him deft at such juggling. Though he looked the picture of busy contentment, his voice was angry. His morning show, called Who’s in Town, featured interviews with celebrities passing through New York. The war crisis, suddenly roaring into the Columbia Broadcasting System, had snatched off Cleveland’s secretary to the newsroom for emergency service, and he was protesting to the personnel office, or trying to. He still could not get through to the manager.
A short girl in a flat black straw hat appeared in the open doorway. Behind her, in the big central offices of CBS News, the hubbub over the war news was still rising. Secretaries were rattling at typewriters or scampering with papers, messenger boys ran with coffee and sandwiches, knots of men in shirt-sleeves gathered at the chattering teletypes, and everybody appeared to be either shouting, or smoking, or both.
“Mr. Cleveland?” The girl’s voice was sweet but shaky. Her awed round eyes made her look about sixteen.
Cleveland put his hand on the mouthpiece of his telephone. “Yes?”
“The personnel office sent me up to you.”
“You? How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
Cleveland appeared skeptical, but he hung up the telephone. “What’s your name?”
“Madeline Henry.”
Cleveland sighed. “Well, okay, Madeline. If you’re in the pool, you must know the ropes. So take off that cartwheel and get started, okay? First get me another cup of coffee and a chicke
n sandwich, please. Then there’s tomorrow’s script”—he rapped the yellow sheets—“to be typed over.”
Madeline could bluff no further. She was in New York to buy clothes. The outbreak of the war had prompted her to walk into CBS to see if extra girls were needed. In the employment office a harried woman wearing yellow paper cuffs had thrust a slip at her, after a few questions about her schooling, and sent her up to Cleveland. “Talk to him. If he likes you, we may take you on. He’s screaming for a girl and we’ve got nobody to spare.”
Stepping just inside the door and planting her legs apart, taking off her hat and clutching it, Madeline confessed that nobody had hired her yet; that she was visiting New York, lived in Washington, had to go back to school, detested the thought of it, feared her father too much to do anything else, and had just walked into CBS on an impulse. He listened, smiling and surveying her with eyes half-closed. She wore a sleeveless red cotton frock and she had excellent color from a sailing weekend.
“Well, Madeline, what does it add up to? Do you want the job or not?”
“I was thinking—could I come back in a week or so?”
His pleasant look faded. He picked up the telephone. “Get me Personnel again. Yes, you come back sometime, Madeline.”
She said, “I’ll fetch you your coffee and sandwich right now. I can do that. I’ll type your script today, too. Couldn’t I work for you for three weeks? I don’t have to go back to school until the twenty-second. My father will kill me when he finds out, but I don’t care.”
“Where’s your father? In Washington?”
“He’s in Berlin. He’s the naval attaché there.”
“What?” Hugh Cleveland hung up the telephone and took his feet off the desk. “Your father is our naval attaché in Nazi Germany?”
“That’s right.”
“Imagine that. So! You’re a Navy junior.” He threw a five-dollar bill on the desk. “All right. Get me the sandwich, Madeline, please. White meat, lettuce, pepper, mayonnaise. Black coffee. Then we’ll talk some more. Buy yourself a sandwich too.”
“Yes, Mr. Cleveland.”
Holding the bill, Madeline rushed into the outer hall and stood there dazed. Having heard the Who’s in Town program a few times, she had at once recognized Cleveland’s peculiarly warm rich voice; a real broadcaster, with his own program, and all at once she was working for him. That was wartime for you! A girl swishing by with a bag of food told her where to buy sandwiches. But twenty chattering girls swarmed at the takeout counter of the luncheonette off the lobby. She went out on Madison Avenue and stood blinking in the warm sunshine. The New York scene was normal. Crowds marched on the sidewalks; cars and buses streamed both ways in a stench of fumes; people carried packages into and out of stores and looked in windows. The only novelty was that the news vendors with fresh stacks of afternoon papers were crying war. Madeline ran to the big drugstore across the street, where the soda fountain was jammed with secretaries and shoppers, talking and laughing over bowls of chili or soup. The usual sort of people were wandering through the aisles, buying toothpaste, lotions, aspirin, candy, and cheap clocks. A fat old blonde woman in an apron and cap quickly made up her sandwiches.
“Well, honey, who’s going to win the war?” she said sociably as she peppered the chicken.
“Let’s just hope Hitler doesn’t,” Madeline said.
“Yes, isn’t he something? Sieg Heil! Ha, ha. I think the man’s crazy. I’ve always said so, and this proves it.” She handed Madeline the sandwiches. “Well, honey, so long as we keep out of it, what do we care who wins?”
Madeline bought an evening paper that offered gigantic headlines but no fresh news. Just to scan such a dramatic front page was novel fun. Though the war was happening so far away, Madeline felt a springtime quickening in her veins. A scent of freedom, of new action, rose from the headlines. The President had announced at once, very firmly, that America was staying out of it. But things were going to be mighty different from now on. That was inevitable! All her thoughts were about the letter she would write to her father, if only she could get this job.
Cleveland, feet on his desk again, a flirtatious smirk on his face, was telephoning. He nodded at Madeline and—as he went on coaxing some girl, in his warmly rumbling voice, to meet him at Toots Shor’s restaurant—he wolfed the sandwich.
“Why don’t you eat the other one?” Madeline said. “I’m not hungry.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to rob you.” He hung up and unwrapped her sandwich. “Ordinarily I don’t eat much during the day, but with all this war talk—” He took a great bite and went on talking. “Thanks. I swear I’m as hungry as I get at funerals. Ever notice how famished you get at a funeral, Madeline? It’s the sheer delight of being alive, I guess, while this other poor joker’s just been buried in a dirty hole. Now listen, you want to work for me for three weeks, is that it? That’ll be fine. It’ll give me a chance to look over what’s around in Personnel.” He flourished a brown envelope at her. “Now then. Gary Cooper is at the St. Regis, Room 641. This is a sample Who’s in Town script. Take it to him. We may get him for Thursday.”
“Gary COOPER? You mean the MOVIE star?” Madeline in astonishment zoomed words like her mother.
“Who else? He may ask you questions about the show and about me. So listen and get this rundown in your head. We work without an audience in a little studio, very relaxed. It’s a room with armchairs, books, and a rug, really nice, like a library in a home. It’s the same room Mrs. Roosevelt uses for her show. We can do the script in extra big type, if he needs that. He can take five minutes or fifteen. The whole show runs an hour and a half. I started this show in Los Angeles back in ’34 and did it there for three years. I called it Over the Coffee then. Maybe he heard it. Of course he may be too busy to go into all that. Anyway, act as though you’ve been with the show for a while.”
Too dazzled and excited to talk, Madeline held out her hand for the envelope. Cleveland gave it to her, saying, “All set? Anchors aweigh. For Christ’s sake, don’t ask him for his autograph. Telephone me if there’s any holdup. Don’t fail to reappear.”
Madeline blurted, “You must have had some very stupid girls working for you,” and hurried out.
A maid opened the door of the hotel suite where Gary Cooper, in a gray suit, sat eating lunch at a wheeled table. The star rose, immensely tall and slim, smiling down at Madeline. He put on black-rimmed glasses, glanced over the script as he drank coffee, and asked questions. He was all business, the farthest thing from a bashful cowboy; he had the manner of an admiral. When she mentioned the Over the Coffee show he brightened. “Yes, I remember that.” Almost at once, it seemed, she was out on the sunny street again, overwrought, thrilled to her bones. “England mobilizes! Hitler smashes into Poland!” the news vendor at the corner hoarsely chanted.
“Bless your little heart,” Cleveland said as she came into the office. He was banging rapidly at a typewriter. “Cooper just called. He likes the idea and he’s in.” Ripping the yellow sheet out of the machine, he clipped it with others. “He remarked on what a nice girl you were. What did you say to him?”
“Hardly anything.”
“Well, you did a good job. I’m off to interview him now. There’s tomorrow’s script. Do a smooth copy of the red-checked pages, then get the whole thing to mimeo instanter. Room 309A.” Cleveland stepped into his shoes, straightened his tie, and threw on a rust-colored sports jacket. He scratched his heavy blond hair, and grinned at her, raising thick humorously arched eyebrows. She felt she would do anything for him. He was charming, she decided, rather than actually handsome. There was something infectiously jovial about him, a spark of devilish amusement in his lively blue eyes. She was a bit disappointed to see, when he stood up, that though he could not be more than thirty-one or so, his stomach bulged. But it didn’t matter.
He paused at the door. “Do you mind working nights? You’ll get paid overtime. If you come back here around eight-thirty tonight, you??
?ll find Thursday’s rough on my desk, with the Cooper spot.”
“Mr. Cleveland, I haven’t been hired yet.”
“You have been. I just talked to Mrs. Hennessy. After you get that script to mimeo, go down and fill out your papers.”
Madeline toiled for five hours to finish the script. She turned it in, messy though her work was, hoping it would not end her radio career then and there. At the employment office she learned she was starting at thirty-five dollars a week. It seemed a fortune. She took her aching back to the drugstore, made a quick dinner of a chocolate drink and a bacon and tomato sandwich, and walked back to CBS. Over the tall black Madison Avenue buildings, checkered with gold-lit windows, a misty full moon floated in a sunset sky. This day when Hitler’s war began was turning out the most delightful in Madeline Henry’s life.
On Cleveland’s desk the interview with Gary Cooper now lay, a mass of crude typing, quick scrawls and red crayon cuts. The note clipped to it said: Try to copy it all over tonight. See you around ten. Madeline groaned; she was terribly tired.
She put in a call to Warren at the bachelor officers’ quarters of the Pensacola flying school. He wasn’t there, but an operator with a Southern accent like a vaudeville imitation offered to track him down. In the smoky newsroom, girls kept crisscrossing with long teletype strips or paper cups of coffee, men were talking loud and fast, and the typewriter din never stopped. Through the open door Madeline heard contradictory rumors: Poland was already collapsing, Hitler was on his way to Warsaw, Mussolini was flying to Berlin, the French were pressing England for another Munich deal, Hitler was offering to visit Chamberlain.