Whenever I read about World War 2, I always feel sympathy and admiration for plucky Poland, the little nation that could. They get invaded by two vastly more powerful neighbours, lose a huge proportion of their populations to horrors committed by both their oppressors and maintained a heroic resistance against unfathomable odds, with the lowest collaboration of any German occupied nation.
The very casus beli for Britain and France was Germany’s invasion of Poland, giving the Poles hope that the west would soon ride to the rescue against at least one of their enemies - only to have their hopes sorely dashed after the Battle of France. So, they soldiered on, their government in exile in London, their best pilots in the RAF helping secure the sky of their ally.
Then the Soviets gain the upper hand, the Red Army steamrolls their way through Poland and in an act of criminal injustice suppressed the Armia Krajowa, cynically refused to lift a finger to help the Warsaw Rising and does not recognise the London Poles, preferring instead a puppet communist government of Lublin Poles.
The subject of Poland was a very sore point between Churchill and Stalin, Churchill supporting their independence and Stalin determined to have a Soviet controlled buffer state (ignoring his actions the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), as well as just distrusting the Poles on a personal level - ostracising one of his best marshalls, Rokossovsky, because he was half Polish.
Was there anything that the western Allies could have done during the war to make Poland’s lot easier, to say nothing of their independence? If Roosevelt had been tougher with Stalin, would it have made any difference (say, making the materiel available through lend-lease that enabled the Red Army’s logistics to support their rapid push through Poland in the first place dependant on independence)?
Be prepared to invade Germany in September of 1939.
Realistically, that was their shot. Had the Allies attacked in force Germany would either not have been prepared or, likelier still, would have had no choice but to concentrate their forces on the Western front instead of against Poland. Without the German invasion it’s possible the Soviets would not have invaded.
Of course France and the UK just weren’t going to do that.
Invaded Europe in 1943, and pushed hard to seize Berlin and push to Warsaw?
I think it would have been a failure, possibly lunacy, but unfortunately possession is nine tenths of the law, and at the end of the war the Soviets possessed Poland.
Naw. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in august '39, at that moment Poland was screwed, Allied invasion or no. The Germans remilitarized the Rhineland and were prepared for defense in depth against an enemy with serious command and logistical ineptitude, if they wanted Plan XVII part deux they’d suffer.
Keep in mind also the Polish–Soviet War '19-'21 was a post WWII factor in Russia’s intransigence. Perhaps Russians weren’t as impressed with pluck when it had been used to invade them.
To a certain extent, yes. People forget that despite the tremendous suffering of the Polish people, their government acted in some mighty strange ways:
-Marshal Pilsudskie’s war against Russia (1922)-that was almost insane adventurism
-Poland’s annexation of (German) Silesia-that was guaranteed to stoke resentment among the new Polish citizens
-annexing chunks of Czech inhabited territory (see above)
that said, Poland has the bad luck to be a largely flat plain, open to invasion, with few defensive barriers…and when you live between two major hostile powers, yo can be sure that bad things will happen.
And I would suggest this was one of the reason for Poland’s seemingly incomprehensible actions listed by** ralph124c** above. All of those involved either trying to further weaken a former and (likely then, and correct later) future enemy, while trying to control strategic zones which might enable Poland to defend ehrself. The Poles aren’t perfect, but I do have a great admiration for their attempt to do the morally correct action and never give in to tyranny. This has often put them at odds with their similar desire to, well, not get the crap kicked out of them, and it’s not always clear in retrospect what was the cunning or moral thing to do. I’ve noticed that historically, the Poles would usually suffer their worst times just after trying to develop a better or more ‘enlightened’ government or social system.
(Slight hijack coming)
Likewise, I find it troubling that post-WW2 the Poles basically kicked every German out of their country. On the other hand, they’d have probably done the same to the Russians if they could and I can’t say I find their anger or their fear totally unjustified, given that they’d experienced one fo the most horrible occupations in history. Poland is a country which, in the end, has probably suffered more and caused proportionately less injustice than any other ancient nation. It’s also instructive to note that while the Czars did whip up some Pogroms (anti-Jewish riots/forced relocations), the Poles did nothing like what most every Western or Eastern European nation did.
As others have said, about the only thing would have been to have a Normandy landing in 1943. But that working is doubtful. The Allies still had to gain air superiority and win the Battle of the Atlantic. You also have the fact the British weren’t very keen on taking the Germans head on. They had been kicked out of Norway, Belgium, France, Greece and driven into mid Egypt before winning at El alamein. the Japanese had also kicked them out of Hong Kong, Singapore and Burma. Most of their strategy was to replicate what they did against another corporal 140 years earlier: Use the resources of empire and finance and fight some peripheral battles.
Churchill at one time wanted to land in Yugoslavia and move north. But many military historians feel this plan was ignorant of terrain and logistics…Churchill never was a logistics man.
Launching an attack against Germany in September 1939 could have worked…hell, it couldn’t be any worse than doing nothing. But blockheads like Chamberlain and Daladier thought the Germans would come to their senses, get rid of Hitler and make peace.
I suppose after the war the United States had a nuclear advantage (many vs zero for the Russians). But even if you nuke the Soviet Union, you still have to conquer them militarily…possible but very many casualties. You also would have a large segment upset with attacking Russia after the killed the vast majority of Germans that attained room temperature, at the loss of 27 million.
Sad to say, Poland was screwed. A war that started to prevent them from being rule by a real nasty dictatorship, ended with being ruled by a nasty dictatorship for over 40 years.
But for the two and a half centuries before that, they were the dominant power of north-central Europe… so much of the animosity with both eastern and western neighbors probably derives from this period of military and commercial domination.
Possibly. But while Poland was a power, it wasn’t aggressive towards the Germans or towards the Russians. It only absorbed Lithuania peacefully, and conariwise, the Germans (in the form of Teutonic Knights and later Prussia) kept up hostilities the other way. In fact Poland is one of those great powers which expanded much of its territory peacefully, instead of by conquest. The Poles usually turned their miltary focus inward.
Stepan Bandera and a metric assload of other Ukrainians dating back at least to the Zaporozhtsi would not share this rainbows and unicorns view of Poland.
I didn’t say they were perfect. But Poland wasn’t, by and large, leading massive campaigns of conquest and repression. Whereas that basically defines Russia, Turkey, Austria and Prussia.
The union with Lithuania was peaceful, but Poland did conquer Livonia and Estonia from Russia and came close, at one point to taking over Russia, and in the south, tried to conquer Moldova and Transylvania. It was never a particularly peaceful state, constantly on the verge of war with Russia, Sweden and the Ottomans, not to mention, having to spend a lot of time and energy putting down Ruthenian nationalist uprisings.
