58 0Chapter 29another major advantage: It was more than twice as
large as the Polish army, and twenty-two divisions
could not stop fifty-four. The Luftwaffedestroyed most
of the Polish air force on the ground in the first hours
of the war, and the Wehrmacht swept across Poland so
fast that the campaign was called a Blitzkrieg(lightning
war). The Germans reached Warsaw in barely one
week, after a time-warp spectacle of Polish cavalry on
horseback, with sword and lance, fighting in the same
campaign that introduced German Panzertanks. The
opening days of the campaign presented one of the
most hellish aspects of total war—the attack upon civil-
ian populations. Göring ordered the “saturation bomb-
ing” of Warsaw, and the Polish capital was pounded
into submission by Luftwaffe“dive-bombers” (Stukas),
which dove toward the city with nerve-shattering whis-
tles mounted in the wings. During a four-week battle,
the Luftwaffeleveled 15 percent of all buildings and
killed forty thousand civilians. After two weeks of the
German devastation of Warsaw, Stalin sent the Red
Army into eastern Poland, as foreseen in the Nazi-
Soviet Pact and as a precaution against German seizure
of the rich oil resources of Galicia and Romania. Ger-
man and Russian armies met in central Poland during
the third week of the war; a few days later, independent
Poland had disappeared (see map 29.2). Sixty thousand
Polish dead and 200,000 Polish wounded were just the
beginning of Polish suffering. Approximately six mil-
lion Poles would die before the war’s end, including
more than three million Polish Jews. Fleeing to the
Russian sector gave no safety; when a Polish army tried
this, the Red Army executed forty-two hundred Polish
officers in the Katyn Forest massacre.
World War II seemed to have ended before it could
spread. Italy and the United States declared neutrality.
Britain (sitting behind the traditional security of the
English Channel) and France (sitting behind the sup-
posed security of the Maginot Line fortifications built
across eastern France in the 1920s and 1930s) found
themselves in a “phony war,” sarcastically called the
Sitzkrieg(sitting war). Stalin took advantage of this mo-
ment to annex the Baltic states and then, in November
1939, to attack Finland. The Finns held out for weeks
behind exceptional fortifications devised by their com-
mander, General Karl von Mannerheim, who refused to
concede territory to the Russians, even after Stalin
bombed Helsinki: “We shall fight to the last old man
and the last small child. We shall burn our forests and
houses... and what we yield will be cursed by the
scourge of God.” The Finns hoped for western aid that
never arrived. The League of Nations expelled the
USSR, and many countries sent limited supplies and
sympathy, but the Finns were forced to surrender in
March 1940 (after the Russian manpower advantage
reached fifty-to-one) and to yield frontier territory.
The war continued in the west in 1939–40, but it
was hidden from sight, on the high seas. Britain’s life-
line remained, as it had been in World War I, on the
Atlantic. German submarines (Unterseebootsor U-boats)
had nearly beat the British in the first war, and an
experienced U-boat commander, Admiral Karl
Doenitz, now headed the German navy. However,
Hitler (like Napoleon before him) had paid far less at-
tention to naval preparation for war than he lavished on
his army, leaving Doenitz a total submarine fleet of
only fifty-six vessels in 1939. Doenitz launched total
war on the seas (including orders to attack passenger
ships in convoy for Britain), and the battle of the At-
lantic began shortly after the invasion of Poland. A
British liner was sunk by a German U-boat on the first
day of the war, and “wolf-pack” U-boat tactics sank
nineteen ships in two weeks, forty before the fall of
Poland. In two shocking episodes for British morale, a
U-boat sank a major British aircraft carrier (with the
loss of 514 men) in September, and another snuck into
the British base at Scapa Flow and sank the battleship
Royal Oak. By spring, Doenitz’s men had sunk 688,000
tons of merchant shipping. As the German U-boat fleet
increased, so did the toll in the battle of the Atlantic.
By 1942 it had reached 14 million tons.
TheSitzkriegended in April 1940, when Germany
attacked Denmark (with whom it had a nonaggression
treaty) on the flimsy pretext that the Danes would not
be able to defend themselves against an Allied attack,
but in reality because it was the first step in controlling
Scandinavian iron and steel. The surprised Danes could
offer no resistance, and units of the Nazi army reached
Copenhagen in only a few hours, forcing the king to
capitulate within twenty-four hours of the start of the
war. On the same day as the Danish campaign, units of
the Luftwaffeoccupied the airports at Oslo and other
major towns, and the German navy entered every ma-
jor fjord on the Norwegian coast. The Norwegians—
who had housed and fed thousands of German children
during the starvation in the closing phase of World War
I—were as astonished as the Danes had been. The king
of Norway and the government fled to the north, and
Britain and France landed a few troops there, but the
Allies (and a Norwegian government in exile) were
soon forced to evacuate. German conquest had reached
the Arctic Circle. A Nazi sympathizer agreed to lead a
collaborationist government, and Major Vidkun Quis-
ling thereby made his last name a synonym for traitor.