World War: Red Sprint

From its seats on the Eastern sideline, watching the smashing performance of the German juggernauts, J. Stalin’s Red Army was at last unleashed at 4 a.m., Sunday, September 17. Led by its air pilots and big tanks, it rattled into Poland along all main east-west highways on a 500-mile front, from the Dzwina River (above Polotsk) on the north to the Dniester (Rumanian border) on the south. From past reports of the Russian mobilization, some observers guessed that 2,000,000 men were on the move. At nightfall, the first war communique from Moscow listed a long line of towns swiftly taken, mostly rail junctions, after “throwing back weak advance units and reserves of the Polish Army. . . .”

Baranowicze, Rowne, Tarnopol, Zaleszczyki were all invaded at once. Out of the raving wilderness that was Poland came word that Marshal Smigly-Rydz diverted a whole Army corps from Wilno to confront the Russians in the northeast, that a hot fight ensued at Molodeczno, rail junction between Wilno and Minsk. Elsewhere opposition was nominal or minus. Refugees over the Rumanian border described the new invaders as traveling peaceably along the same Ukrainian roads as the fugitive Poles. It was a mass movement of occupation rather than of conquest, although performed the same way as the crashing German onslaught—mechanized forces piercing far ahead, infantry on slower trucks bringing up the rear. Conjunction of the west-moving Russian horde with the east-flowing Germans was awaited tensely. Would they embrace each other? Or would they quarrel over their prey? The answer soon came: the Nazi Air Force cooperated heartily with the Soviet spearheads to bomb and flatten even the slightest resistance.

As a workout for the giant Red Army, the invasion of Poland was only a brief sprint. For its significance—the partitioning of collapsed Poland—observers read the political dispatches from Moscow and Berlin (see p. 22).