POLISH THEATRE: Blitzkrieger

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Eleven stirring, martial notes, the opening phrase of one of Composer Frederic null Chopin’s Polonaises, sounded every 30 seconds from the Warsaw radio station all last week to let the world know that Poland’s capital was still Polish. Hour after hour, day after day, the notes came like hope rising from an inferno. For the world also knew what other sounds filled Warsaw—the bellow of bombing planes in power dives, the scream of fighting planes on the attack, the sharp whanging of anti-aircraft guns, the mighty thump, boom and roar of half-ton bombs plowing up the city’s remaining defenses. To the North, the continuous thunder of artillery made a background for the nearer hammering of defense guns on the East, hurling shells over the rooftops toward the German positions in the western suburbs.

After the bomb explosions came screams of the dying. Hospitals were full; wounded had to be dragged into what was left of private houses. The city was crumbling, but still Warsaw fought on, both sexes and all ages behind the barricades. Mayor Straczynski went down into the streets, picked up a shovel and dug trenches. When German tanks blasted their way into the suburbs, the defense hurled bottles of gasoline against them, trying to set them afire.

Still the Polonaise sounded over the radio, and Warsaw thought it had actually thrown the Germans back. Part of the Army fighting in the narrow pocket to the west of the capital, between the German pincers, fell back into the city, joining the defenders. To the north, Modlin fortress fell and a German force crossed the Bug River east of Warsaw, cutting off retreat. From the southwest, the German drive swung eastward past Radom, crossed the Vistula. Warsaw was surrounded. Once again it faced its historic fate. For ten times Warsaw had been taken by an invader—the last time on August 5, 1915, when Mackensen’s army stormed its fortifications and Prince Leopold of Bavaria rode into the city in triumph. But although it was bombed, blasted and all but shattered, Warsaw was still holding out on September 18, 1939.

Before then the German strategy had become apparent even to Warsaw. Sweeping past the capital, an East Prussian Army had struck southeastward to Brest-Litovsk, chief railroad centre between Warsaw and Russia. In the South, three separate drives penetrated deep into the Polish Ukraine. Lwow, the Ukrainian capital, was bombed, strafed, set afire, its water supply cut off, but the invaders did not stop to occupy it. On they plunged, passing to the north and south of Lwow, to the very remotest corner of Poland, where it meets Rumania and

Soviet Russia. Foreign envoys crossed the Dniester into Rumania; the Polish Government, which had holed up in Zaleszczyki on the frontier, hesitated, then fled into Rumania. Cut off from retreat on all sides, the Polish Army was disintegrating into guerrilla bands. While the Poles defended their capital, their country was overrun.

In the north fell the forest town of Bialystok, where Polish bigwigs and their guests (often Hermann Goring) used to hunt the stag and wild boar. The fortress at Brest-Litovsk was captured, 600 prisoners taken. The retreat into Rumania became a mad stampede. Two beg red fire engines and a hook-&-ladder from Cracow roared through, clustered with refugees. Polish officers & men swam the Dniester to elude customs officers, escape internment. Polish planes, nearly 200 of them, piled into the little Rumanian airport at Cernauti, one landing on three others, wrecking all four.

The battlefront disappeared, and with it the illusion that there had ever been a battlefront. For this was no war of occupation, but a war of quick penetration and obliteration—Blitzkrieg, lightning war. Even with no opposition, armies had never moved so fast before. Theorists had always said that only infantry could take and hold positions. But these armies had not waited for the infantry. Swift columns of tanks and armored trucks had plunged through Poland while bombs raining from the sky heralded their coming. They had sawed off communications, destroyed stores, scattered civilians, spread terror. Working sometimes 30 miles ahead of infantry and artillery, they had broken down the Polish defenses before they had time to organize. Then, while the infantry mopped up, they had moved on, to strike again far behind what had been called the front. By week’s end it mattered very little whether Warsaw stood or fell. The Republic of Poland, aged 20, was lost.

A German officer entered Warsaw under a flag of truce, delivered an ultimatum that the city must surrender in 24 hours or siege guns would be moved up. General Czuma refused to receive the message. Nazi airplanes then dropped leaflets repeating the ultimatum. General Czuma agreed to parley on evacuating all civilians and the Nazi high command ordered his spokesman to come out of the city in a car, at night, with truce flags specially spotlighted. All firing must cease.

Shortly after that news, the Polonaise was heard no more from Warsaw. A curtain of German propaganda fell.

Lord of the Lightning, which in less than three weeks had struck down a nation of 34,000,000 people, defended by an Army of 2,000,000, was a middleaged, middle-sized, good-looking soldier who was fighting his first war. As befitted the director of such forces as he commanded, he had no permanent headquarters, but was first in one place, then in another. He had supervised the advance of the East Prussian divisions which, in the first days of the war, drove straight for Warsaw, only to be held up momentarily at Pultusk and Plonsk. These obstacles overcome, he shifted to the scene of the next most stubborn resistance, Radom—and Radom fell. Three days later he was directing operations against Kutno, the only place west of Warsaw where the Poles were still holding out—and Kutno also fell. This week he was reported in the South, directing the swift drive through the Ukraine to Rumania that would tighten Poland’s garrote and break its neck.

Three weeks ago Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch was little more than a name outside Germany, an untried general who was supposed to be a good organizer but no theorist, whose rise to the position of Commander in Chief of the German Land Forces had been due at least partly to his willingness to back Adolf Hitler where more experienced generals would not. This week Brauchitsch was a name to put beside those of Moltke, Ludendorff and Schlieffen: not only was he Germany’s No. 1 Krieger (warrior), but he had fostered, planned and led the Blitzkrieg—and proved its validity up to the hilt.

In Germany, Heinrich Alfred Hermann Walther von Brauchitsch is almost as obscure as he is abroad, and for two reasons: 1) Germans are rationed only one hero and his name is Adolf Hitler; 2) Brauchitsch is the typical German Army officer, self-effacing, obedient and personally dull. Only time he ever got himself talked about was last year, when he divorced his first wife to marry young and pretty Charlotte Schmidt, daughter of a Silesian judge. Nevertheless, he possesses the thoroughness, persistence and greatness in his field that have made the Army the highest expression of German efficiency and perhaps the greatest Army in the world.

Son of a cavalry general stationed in Berlin, he grew up there, got the best schooling to be had in Germany, at the Französisches Gymnasium of Berlin, and in 1900, aged 19, became a lieutenant in the Royal Elizabeth Guard Grenadiers. The Grenadiers wore corsets and led a gay social life; Lieutenant Brauchitsch, whose nature was somewhat more vigorous, persuaded his father to get him transferred to an artillery regiment. By 1914 he had risen to the rank of captain. Throughout the four years of World War I he remained a General Staff officer, saw no fighting. In 1918 he shared the fate of thousands of other officers and was relegated to the reserve corps, his career apparently at an end.

But when Seeckt reorganized the Reichswehr in 1919, Brauchitsch got an appointment as a major in Stettin. By 1922 he was head of artillery in the Defense Ministry, a key figure in Germany’s miniature Army. He became a lieutenant colonel in 1925 and served a turn in a Prussian artillery regiment. In 1930 he was back in the Defense Ministry as director of military training, with the rank of colonel. His career seemed to lie in office work, and after serving briefly as chief of staff of the 6th Artillery Regiment he was given the routine assignment of inspecting the artillery. He became a major general in 1931, chief of artillery in March 1932.

No politician, but an ambitious careerist, Brauchitsch had studied hard during the years he spent in a swivel chair. He mastered his own specialty, artillery, then went on to pore over the more theoretical aspects of warfare. He became a firm believer in a strong defense as a prelude to any kind of warfare, and, with Adolf Hitler’s, his eyes were turned to the East as the next battleground for the Reich.

Like many Army men, Brauchitsch welcomed Hitler as the liberator of the Army from its Versailles shackles. Unlike many of his colleagues, he was able to give his allegiance to the Nazis as well as to the Army. Marked as a man whom Hitler could trust, he rose rapidly after the Nazis came into power. In 1933 he was given command of the East Prussia Military District, one of the most important in Germany because of its vulnerability from both Poland and Russia. It was Brauchitsch who was responsible for the East Prussian fortifications that were built after 1933 — a complicated system of blockhouses and two heavy fortresses designed to make East Prussia impregnable on the East. When he was in East Prussia, Brauchitsch’s chief of staff was General Walter von Reichenau, closest of all the Army officers to the Nazis and to their chief.

In 1937 Brauchitsch became chief of Group Command 4 in Leipzig, the jumping-off place to the top jobs in the German Army. By then the Army was in a turmoil. Hitler was impatient to begin his grabs and the Army knew it was not ready. Loyalties were split between the Army and the Nazis, and there was sharp disagreement between those who were willing to back Hitler in a bluff and those who counseled delay. Brauchitsch kept mum, but when the purge came and Blomberg and Fritsch lost their jobs,* his good friend Reichenau recommended him to Hitler as the man to lead the Army. In February 1938, he took over its command, with the rank of Colonel General, and became a member of the Secret Cabinet Council created to advise Hitler on foreign policy.

Just before the Anschluss, General Brauchitsch is supposed to have told Adolf Hitler: “Mein Führer, if you want to use the Army to support a bluff by military pressure, you can depend on us. For more serious business, we are not yet ready.” A few days later he had taken over command of the Austrian Army. In September 1938, he said the same thing in almost the same words—and marched into the Sudetenland at the head of the German troops. He occupied Bohemia and Moravia last spring, but still the Army was not ready. Last month, as motorized divisions began concentrating in Slovakia, in Silesia and East Prussia, Walther von Brauchitsch said good-by to his pretty wife and flew across the corridor to take personal command of the awaited Polish campaign in his old stamping ground, East Prussia. This time he was ready and the campaign hung on him.

Prelude to 1939. For the kind of warfare that Germany is now waging, preparations are twofold, and the first preparation is defense. Without its Westwall, where a major battle was in progress last week (see p. 28), Germany might have been overrun almost as fast as it overran Poland. As soon as he took command of the Army, Brauchitsch began pressing for the completion of the fortifications in the West. Not until the Westwall was completed could Germany strike in the East. Hitler observed: “It will make the French Army a prisoner in France.”

With the western frontier fortified, Brauchitsch could plan his attack, and the form it took was as old as warfare itself. Only the materials and the name were new. Blitzkrieg, in its simplest terms, is merely a war of movement, as opposed to a war of position, carried out with the fastest units available. Before World War I it was cavalry that flanked enemy positions, cut off communications, destroyed supplies. In both the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 the Germans won their decisive battles within six weeks after hostilities began. In the last World War they tried and failed—but only after the retreat from Paris did the War settle down to one of position and exhaustion. This time Brauchitsch had previous German experience to rely on, plus the theories of the Italian Giuseppe Douhet, plus a new kind of cavalry: airplanes, fast tanks and infantry transported in armored trucks.

Douhet believed that early control of the air is essential for quick victory. This was proved in Spain, where Germany tested many theories and where Franco took two years to get control of the air, then won hands down. By 1937, when General Brauchitsch took command at Leipzig, it was already pretty clear that to deliver a lightning blow Germany needed not only a superlative air force, but plenty of motorized strength.

In Leipzig, and later as Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch concentrated on building up the armored motor divisions of the Army. In 1937 Germany had only two such divisions. By September 1 of this year she had six, each with an average strength of 13,000 men, besides a fleet of 8,000 tanks capable of going 18-20 m.p.h. It was this force that swept through Poland with such devastating fury.

The Prize that Walther von Brauchitsch had won for Germany was, from a military standpoint, well worth its cost in men and machines. “At almost the precise moment” that England blockaded Germany, as Field Marshal Goring remarked last fortnight, Germany got her hands on Poland’s rich coal fields. Poland’s production of 36,000,000 tons a year will increase the Reich’s coal supply to some 220,000,000 tons—if she can hold the coal-producing Saar into which France was pushing last week. If France takes or cripples the Saar, Germany will be little better off than she was before, for the Saar’s 13,500,000 tons of coal are of a much better grade than Silesia’s.

Germany won an iron & steel industry with an annual output of 2,000,000 tons; some zinc mines (annual production 191,500 tons); and a rich agricultural region producing wheat, rye, barley, oats, potatoes, sugar beets.

But Poland produces only 500,000 tons of oil a year, and oil is Germany’s greatest need. Her peacetime imports were 4,000,000 tons, and to run her war machine she will probably need 8,000,000 tons. Even a light French motorized division needs 423 gallons of gasoline to move a mile, and Germany’s Panzerdimsionen with tanks and armored trucks burn many times that much fuel. Darting in and out, operating far from base and covering scores of miles on each raid, their refueling problem becomes tremendous. If Germany is to fight a long war, she must get still more oil.

Russia’s export surplus of 2,000,000 tons will help, but Germany needs still more. Last week a German mission was in Bucharest trying to get Rumania’s 7,000,000 tons. But Rumania’s two largest companies are owned by Americans and British, and the Government’s percentage of the output is pledged to the French for a loan. It began to look as if more pressure might soon be put on Rumania.

Rumania is not so flat as Poland, and it is farther from Germany. Whether Brauchitsch’s Blitzkrieg could function as smoothly down there was a question nobody could answer. And beyond the West-wall there was still France, with 2,500,000 men and a mechanized army of its own.

* Reports that onetime Chief of Staff Werner von Fritsch was back in the field on trial last week were not true.