HITLER SEEMED UNBEATABLE AS THE NAZI BLITZ ROLLED a
nexed the' Carpatho-Ukraine. What remained of
Czechoslovakia—Slovakia—announced its independ
ence under German "protection.” Hitler also an
nexed Memel from Lithuania. Mussolini grabbed
Albania.
X Next Hitler turned to Poland. His propaganda
minister, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, began a press
campaign like those which preceded the invasions
of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
But Britain and France had been pushed as far as
they could go. This time they showed no intention
of retreating. Instead, they attempted to woo Joseph
Stalin, leader of powerful Russia, into joining a
united front against Germany.
Der Fuehrer sent his foreign minister, Joachim
von Ribbentrop. to the once-hated Kremlin and
that wily diplomat emerged with a document that
shocked the world—a non-aggression treaty with
the Soviets that assured the Nazis they could gobble
Poland at startlingly little cost in the east.
Now the “war of nerves” reached full intensity.
Germany was mobilized for war, but raged when
Poland called up her troops. Border clashes grew
in number and size. The Nazis moved 300,000 sol
diers into Slovakia, massing at four passes leading
into Poland.
Britain began sandbagging buildings and pre
pared to move London children to the safer coun
tryside. Her maneuvering fleet steamed to bottle up
the Baltic. France called up 2,000,000 men and put
, her factories and railroads on a wartime footing. Gas
masks were distributed in Vatican City. Experts
camouflaged factories in remote Bombay, India.
Ships carrying Americans to safety swarmed over
the Atlantic, and the U. S. Army and Navy began to
build up stockpiles of critically needed war materiel.
Hitler demanded that Warsaw send a representa
tive to heai the Nazis’ price for peace. On August
31 he disclosed that he was after all once-German
territory—the free city of Danzig, Posen and Upper
Silesia, and the Polish corridor leading to the Baltic
Sea:
Early the next morning he donned his gray uni
form which he vowed he would not take off until
victory or death. That night the lights went out all
over Europe
POLAND IS BLITZED
THE Nazis puureo into Poland from all direc
tions east from Pomerania: south and west
from Easi Prussia, north from occupied Slovakia.
Und.ei orders to "counter-attack and pursue,” mo
torcycle infantrymen, heavy tank forces and other
motorized troops sped along sun-hardened roads
against feecle opposition. Howling Stuka dive
bombers, speed} Messerschmitt fighters and mon
strous heavy bumpers roared ovei Warsaw, Krakow
and other key cities, slashing airfields and plane
depots, destroying railroads, ripping fixed defenses.
This was blitzkrieg—lightning war At the end
o! the first day Poles were digging for the remains
of women ana children in the wreckage of homes
blasted from the r,kj The Nazis were 20 miles in
side Poland and still moving fast. Albert Foerster
Danz.g’s No. 1 Nazi and chief ot state of the free
city, announced the region was incorporated into
the Reich.
Chamber laid and Daladier delivered an ultima
tum tu Hitler to get out of Poland. Hitler never
formally replied. On September 3, Britain and
France declared wai on Germany—an old-fashioned
touch in a period accustomed to seeing nations
strike without warning Australia and New Zealand
followed. In the United States, President Roosevelt
tailed on Americans for neutrality in act but doubt
eo they could be neutral in thought.
Military experts estimateo the Germans had
].000,000 men, under the command of General Wal
ter von Braucbitsch ready to throw against the
Poles. Poland's Marshal Smigly-Rydz had about
500,000 and could in time produce a million more
But Field Marshal Hermann Goering’s Nazi air
force had about 7,000 front-line planes against Po
land’s paltry, second-rate 600. The Germans had
an overwhelming might in mobile armor; Poland
had little strength that moved on wheels. Her
cavalry was pitted against something new—com
pletely armored divisions.
By the time the two big western powers were in
the war, Hitler’s legions were rolling smoothly
across the Polish plains. They already had annihi
lated Smigly-Rydz’s air force. The Polish corridor
was practically cut. Railroad lines were battered
almost' beyond recognition. The Wehrmacht was
moving close to Krakow, on the southern road to
Warsaw. Jablunka Pass, a vital route from Slovakia
into Poland, had been forced.
The Poles fought bravely but proved only that
horses were no match for tanks and cavalry lances
no defense against dive bombers.
On September 16 the Russians announced they
were moving into eastern Poland to “protect White
Russian and Ukrainian minorities.”
Caught in a mighty nutcracker, Poland tried to
continue resistance. But the Russians met the Nazis
at Brest-Litovsk on the 24th and three days later
pitiful, bomb-blasted Warsaw was in German hands.
The country was divided between Stalin and
Hitler along a line east of Warsaw. On October 6,
the last of the organized resisters—a weary band of
16,000 in the city of Kock, north of Lublin—gave up.
It was a profitable 36 days for Hitler. He counted
10,572 of his own dead and 30,322 wounded. But
he had some 400,000 Poles in his prison cages and
the bulk of the Polish people, their natural re
sources and their industries, tc help supply his
forces wherever he chose to send them next.
THE PHONY WAR
TRAVELING SALESMAN — I’d like a room,
please. Must be very, very quiet. I want to sleep.
HOTEL CLERK—Yes, sir!
TRAVELING SALESMAN—Are you positive it’s
quiet?
HOTEL CLERK—Quiet? Why, sir, this room is
so quiet you’d think you were sleeping in the
Maginot Line!
THIS story made the rounds in winter, 1939, when
the war in the west became weirdly static and—
to many" Americans, at least—a marvelous joking
matter.
On the western front, it was the time of the
“phony war,” the “sitzkrieg,” the period when the
powers sat on their frontiers and waited.
World War I, with its man-to-man trench warfare,
had been horribly bloody. After its conclusion a
theory that fixed defenses could make attack im
practical was spread in military circles in France
and England.
In the thirties the French started building such a
fortification—the Maginot line, described as an
impregnable chain of pillboxes guarding the coun
try’s approaches from Switzerland to the North
Sea. The British, with the sea and a powerful
fleet between them and the Germans, likewise felt
secure. There was no reason to take an offensive, said
Chamberlain, no sense in rushing “into adventures
which offer little prospect of success.” He did, hpw
ever, reorganize his cabinet to include two outstand
ing Hitler haters. Anthony Eden became Dominions
secretary and Winston Churchill returned to the
post he held in World War I as first lord of the
admiralty.
The French had opened a minor offensive near
Saarbruecken in September, and then returned to
the Magmot to hole up for the winter. The R.A.F
dropped paper mostly, urging the Germans to desert
Hitler.
During the cold months there were only sporadic
air raids. The British fleet blockaded Germany from
the Atlantic and might in time have been able to
starve the resources-poor enemy into surrender.
Nazi submarines began to hit British shipping,
and to endanger supply lines bringing in war sup
plies from America after the United States lifted
her arms embargo in November. One U-boat spec
tacularly penetrated Scapa Flow to sink England’s
battleship Royal Oak. The Nazi pocket battleship
WHAT THE WAR COST
IN MEN AND MONEY
ESTIMATES have been made that the war cost
30 to 60 million dead, military and civilian,
and more than a trillion dollars in government
budgeted costs. But few reliable statistics have
been compiled and the following table of avail
able figures should be labeled in most cases
"accept at your own risk."
COUNTRY
UNITED STATES
BRITISH EMPIRE
RUSSIA
FRANCE
CHINA
OTHER ALLIES
GERMANY
JAPAN
ITALY
OTHER AXIS
MONEY IN
GOVERNMENT
WAR BUDGETS
$300,000,000,000
130,355,000,000
135,856,000,000
16,980,000,000
Undetermined
9 113,000,000
280,000,000,000
49.000. 000.000
14.500.000. 000
3.750.000. 000
MILITARY
CASUALTIES
fDead, Wounded,
Missing, Prisoners)
1,070,138
1,233,796
5.300.000
to 20,000,000
2,000,000
3.000. 000
Undetermined
5.000. 000
to 18,422,440
3.000. 000
700.000
Undetermined
Deutschland roamed the North Atlantic, bla
Allied armed merchantmen. In December, t
British cruisers met up with the Admiral Graf !
another 10,000-ton pocket ship, and so badly (
aged her that she was scuttled by her ere
Montevideo, Uruguay.
In America, President Roosevelt proclaim
limited national emergency and factories were
ing additional workers to handle the flow of
orders piling up from abroad.
Britain and France spent a quiet winter, si
comfortable in its way. They merely had to
and build more strength and plan new waj
killing Germans when they came.
RUSSIA BRANCHES OUT
LIKE Germany, Russia had some territorial
mands to make in Europe. With Poland’s
ern regions, which had been taken from pros
Russia after World War 1, back in the fold
Soviets turned to other countries once under
dom’s rule.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania paid their a.
ance to the Czar in 1914 but became indepei
republics after the war. The Kremlin now pror
signed them to “mutual assistance” pacts and
the right to occupy naval, air and artillery
along the Baltic approaches to industrial Lenir
and the Kronstadt naval base.
In October Stalin called representatives of
land — also a prewar part of Russia — to Moi
The subject again was “mutual assistance.”
Finns were offered a strip of Soviet Kareli
their eastern border. But a strip of the Kai
isthmus north of Leningrad was to go to R
along with fights to the naval base at Hanko gi
ing the entrance to the Gulf of Finland,
islands in the Gulf of Finland, and Finnish de
tarization oh the frontiers.
The Finns demurred. On November 30 Russia
bombers over Helsinki, the capital, and <
cities while troops moved onto the Karelian istn
“Plucky little Finland,” one-fiftieth as pop
as her enemy, fought back fiercely, had the L(
of Nation's denounce Russia, won most of the w
sympathy but got only a trickle of aid, even
the inactive Britain and France in the west.
It was one‘of the coldest winters in 50 year
highly mobile Finnish ski troops held the inv
to a standstill for months.
In January the Finns were announcing th
nihilation of whole Soviet divisions. Nevert
the Russians pressed on. Their bombers po
every city in the country, and their ground
finally penetrated the Mannerheim line ofde
on the isthmusv.
Finland could not stand long against si
force. She surrendered March 12. 1940.
Her capitulation brought a stormy session
British House, of Commons, widespread' dissa'
tion with, the meager and belated assistance
by Britain, and a quotation from the World
Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, that S'
to tell the Allied story. He sai$ ;
“It is the old trouble: Too lai* late for l
oslovakia. Too late for Poland. Certainly to
for Finland. It is always too little or too late oi
That is the road to disaster.”
' The Finnish fiasco knocked Daladier out ot
in France. A new cabinet was formed by PaU
naud, former foreign minister, with Daladu
duced to minister of national defense.
Russia got all her original demands and a
more.
SCANDINAVIA FEELS THE BOOT
WITH British, French and American fa
turning out more and more munitions,
berlain announced in April, 1940, that der F
had “missed the bus."
On April 8 the British virtually sealed the
ern approaches to Germany by mining the
off Norway through which German ship
sneaked home with Narvik’s precious iron o
On the very same night Hitler’s .troops s
into Denmark and Norway.
The Danes had seen what happened to the
Their King Christian urged them to submit,
cost of one soldier the Nazis rolled up the J
peninsula, across the Skaggerak from Norwa
The move into Norway was made amid?
confusion..Tfoops hidden in the holds of Ships
pered asiiore to seize vital c°a®ta| ,pHe)n
Narvik, Bergen, Stravanger, and Trond”®\
vilian travelers” put on army umlorms and
Norwegians the battle was already ®v*ns
orders to Surrender were passed on to o
ing Norwegian officers. Nazis appeared sudd
railroad terminals and airports. Ge m
disgorged soldiers''along the southern