Dan Snow's History Hit - The Invasion of Poland in World War Two

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

In this episode from the archive, Roger Moorhouse discusses the Polish campaign of 1939 comprehensively, separating the myths from reality and outlining the abject horrors that the Poles suffered under the twin occupation of the Nazis and the Soviets. 

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On the 1st of September 1939 at 4.45am the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Polish positions in the free city of Danzig on the Baltic coast. They were the first shots of the Second World War in Europe. German armour and infantry units already crossed the border at several points and a propaganda operation was in place to claim that German forces were acting in self-defence. The German invasion of Poland had begun. It would lead to declarations of war by Britain and France on Germany, the start of another war on the European continent. This episode of History is a replay of one that we first broadcast on the European continent. This episode of History Hit is a replay of one that we first broadcast on the anniversary of that event in 2019, on the 80th anniversary. It's got

Roger Morehouse, one of our favourite historians here at History Hit. He's written a series of books on Polish-German history from the Second World War, and he wrote a great account of this battle for Poland in 1939. We've got a flutter of World War II podcasts out at the moment. Richard Overy, the world's greatest expert on the Second World War, with his slight new interpretation of the war as a great clash of imperial entities. And we've got a lot of Second World War material on History Hit TV. We've got a lot of it, I'm afraid to say. A lot of documentaries about it, a lot of podcasts.

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In the meantime, though, here is Roger Morehouse. Roger, thanks very much for coming back on the show. Pleasure. Always good to have you on. Now, this is you on now this is um this is as big as this is it this is the start of the second world war but you're rather than writing it for the british point of view actually reminding us that it was in fact the poles that were initially in uh in the crosshairs of hitler's wehrmacht yeah i think i mean the poles bless them

i think they get a poor deal uh in a lot of things. I mean, certainly the Anglo-Saxon perspective on history tends to stop, you know, kind of at Berlin. And most things points east of that are pretty much ignored, with notable exceptions. But I think Poland sort of falls foul of that. And a good example really is the Polish campaign, you know, 39. It starts the war. It's very significant, as I show in the book. A lot of the salient features of the later war, the barbarisation of warfare, the targeting of civilians, all of that sort of thing, blitzkrieg no less, is all in the Polish campaign. And yet, it doesn't really feature in our collective narrative of the Second World War. Beyond maybe a page, it might get the

odd mention that the Poles send cavalry against tanks, all of that sort of mythology. And it struck me when I was writing the last book on the Nazi-Soviet pact that there's a big gap in our understanding, actually, of that campaign. And rather than seeing it from a purely Western perspective and talking about Westminster shenanigans and Britain sort of doing the right thing, as in going to war, but they're not actually doing much about it, to actually sort of switch the perspective and try and see it from the Polish perspective and use Polish sources as well. So I've kind of switched the point of attack, as it were, to look at it from a Polish perspective.

And it's a very different story. To start at the beginning, Poland, which had disappeared, had been swallowed up by its neighbours in the 18th century and 19th, suddenly re-emerges after Versailles. It is occupying bits of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, bits of the former Russian Empire, bits of the former German Empire. Why did that unique geography provide the excuse for Adolf Hitler to go to war against Poland? Well, you've got the situation after the First World War, where basically both the Soviet Union as a successor state to Russia, and then Nazi Germany as of 1933, are both revisionist states.

They both want to revise what happened at the end of the First World War. It's worth mentioning that Poland actually sort of does re-emerge after that 123 years of being wiped from the map. Its re-emergence is kind of done on its own bat. So it profits from that collapse, but it's already de facto created its own state by the time Versailles is kind of rubber stamping its existence. So it doesn't owe its existence solely to Versailles. That's a point worth mentioning. But to those two revisionist states, to Nazi Germany and to the Soviet Union, it's an abomination. It's taken their land.

It's almost a personification of the Versailles settlement. You know, it has to go. So even before 1933, actually, senior German ministers are saying that the future grounds of a German-Soviet collaboration must include the destruction of Poland. So even in the early 1920s, even, it's been talked about. So the point at which Germany and the Soviet Union find common ground will inevitably mean the destruction of Poland. And that's what happens with the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939. And then a week later, you've got the German invasion of Poland. I mean, just give us a sense. I mean, why is there this antipathy towards Poland? Is it peak? Or is it the fact that there are

Germans living now under a Polish government being forced to learn Polish? Yeah, I mean, there is that element. I think primarily it's the interwar Poland symbolizes the Versailles Treaty for those two countries, and they want to get rid of the Versailles Treaty. The other aspect is, of course, yes, there are about a million and a half Germans living in Poland, ethnic Germans living in Poland. Those are the remnants of the German populations of West Prussia, which becomes the Polish Corridor, the Pulsan District and Upper Silesia. So you've got large numbers of Germans within Poland. You've got large numbers of Belarusians and Ukrainians on the eastern frontier as well. So it has large minorities, which is part of Poland's

interwar problem. That in essentially post-First World War, pushing its boundaries as far as it could, particularly in the East, it actually inherits or develops for itself a minorities problem, which is never really solved in the interwar period. If anything, it's exacerbated. Poland, as a state that sort of restored itself in 1918, is quite sort of aggressively nationalistic in its domestic policy. So it doesn't sit well with having large minorities within the state. That's a problem for it. And it's a problem that they're never fully reconciled.

It's a problem with nationalism. Yeah, it is. I mean, you can understand why the Polish interwar state is quite nationalistic, because it's suffered all of that in 120-odd years of occupation. So when it finally is able to have its own state, it's almost inevitably going to be quite patriotic, nationalistic. But that doesn't sit well with the fact that it's got large minorities in its midst. So it's a problem of its own making that it never really solves. It's almost like the ideology of nationalism

ramped up by a load of Frenchmen in the 18th century proved inappropriate when implanted on the very complex geography of Eastern Europe. And it is very complex as well. You don't have clear sort of delineation of populations. You've got very often urban or semi-urban populations are different from the rural populations that surround them and things like that. So it's actually very, very difficult to draw ethnically clean lines

anywhere in Central Europe. And that's a sort of universal problem that is not solved in the interwar period, and is only really solved by the brutal answer, which is to deport those people that, you know, after the Second World War, they'd start deporting Germans. And you've got massive kind of ethnic upheaval in that period, not least the Holocaust. So you've got, that's essentially the only way to solve the ethnic problems of Central Europe, is by massive upheaval in that period, not least the Holocaust. So you've got, that's essentially the only way to solve the ethnic problems of Central Europe, is by massive upheaval. Or just jettison a nationalist idea of a state. That too, but you know, you are in the early 20th century, we are still in a nationalist period. Right, so Hitler partitions in breach the Munich Agreement, famous Munich Agreement. Hitler

partitions Czechoslovakia. He fixes his gaze on Poland next. What does he think? How willing is Hitler to provoke a world war, a general war by 1939? Hitler has an odd sort of psychosis about this. On the one hand, he doesn't think it will provoke a war because he thinks that the West are worms, as he described them. They're not going to stand up and fight for Poland. So he doesn't think it's going to provoke a war at all. So he's quite happy to sort of saber rattle and undermine Poland as he does. I mean, there's lots of sort of border incidents and there's, you know, propaganda offensives in the summer of 1939, which is constantly trying to portray Poland as the bad guy, as the aggressor. And that culminates in the Gleiwitz

incidents of August 31st, which is this attack on a radio station inside Germany, but close to the Polish border, which is made to look like it was done by Polish irregulars. And in fact, it was... In fact, it was the SS, yeah, that had done it itself, which is a fabulous story. And again, I sort of retell that story in the introduction to the book. It's the opening scene. And it's a great scene. And again, part of my justification for the book was to want to put the Poles back into their own narrative, as I said at the beginning. And there's one interesting case there, the victim. There was only one victim. Again, Gleiwitz gets told in the wrong way all the time. It's mixed up with other operations of the period.

It's conflated with other operations. And the narrative is really wrong most of the time it's told. If you actually go back to the original sources, which I have, you can clarify what it is. And there's only one victim of Gleiwitz. And his name was Franciszek Honiok. And he was an ethnic Pole living in Upper Silesia, in German Upper Silesia. And he was picked up by the Gestapo because they wanted someone with a track record of Polish agitation.

And he had that. He was picked up from a bar and taken to a number of police stations, never registered anywhere. Despite the sort of German mania for paperwork, he was never registered anywhere. No one spoke to him. And he was their smoking gun. So he was the guy that they were going to leave at the scene, which they did. And he is shot at the end of the Gleiwitz operation. They take over this radio station. And they're supposed to transmit a sort of incendiary Polish announcement saying that, you know, the war of liberation has

begun and we're going to take German territory and all this sort of thing. They only get about nine words in and then for some reason it's broken off and then there's just white noise. But the first nine words they reckon were actually broadcast. But it didn't matter. It was just a propaganda exercise to give them the excuse. And then Honiok is left at the scene, having been drugged initially and then shot. But Honiok is never fleshed out.

So again, you see, he suffers from this idea that the Poles are beyond the radius of history. So I wanted to flesh out who Honyok was, as far as is possible. So again, I researched that to actually flesh out this first victim of World War II. So that in itself is an interesting aside, anyway. But now Hitler's willing to run the risk that he thinks that the Western powers are not going to intervene. He thinks they're weak, they're corrupted, that democracy has corrupted them, and that they won't intervene on the Poles' behalf. But just to make sure, he makes all of this effort to undermine Poland's case for assistance, to make it look like it's

the aggressor, to give every excuse possible to those voices in the West that say, oh, do we really want to be going to war for Poland? Of which there were a few. So he really doesn't think it's going to happen. There's a wonderful scene where the British declaration of war is actually delivered to him in the Reich Chancellery office on the morning of the 3rd of September, where the message is relayed back to him that the British had basically declared war.

And he turns to Ribbentrop, who's been his great advisor, and he says, what now? Because this isn't what Ribbentrop had told him would happen. And it's not what he thought would happen. So there's a profound miscalculation, actually, on Hitler's part, that he didn't expect this to trigger a world war. So talk to me about the German invasion and Polish preparations and resistance. Following the incident, the SS fake attack on that radio station,

what happens in the hours following that? Following morning, you know, the tanks are already rolling. Following morning, by the time that that incident is being reported in the German press and on the German radio, you know, the tanks are already rolling. They roll, you know, already about four o'clock. The first shots fired are at the Westerplatte, which is a Polish port just to the north of Danzig. And that was a military depot,

which had been established in the 1920s, essentially to handle sort of sensitive and military traffic, which couldn't go through Danzig itself because it would be disrupted by the German population of Danzig. So the first shots are fired by an aged German battleship, the Schleswig-Holstein, which opens fire at almost point-blank range on the Polish depot on the Westerplatte, which is a great sight. I was there a couple of weeks ago. It's a great place to go and see as the site of the opening shots couple of weeks ago. It's a great place to go and see.

The site of the opening shots of World War II is quite phenomenal. Not many people go there, I think. I think more of us should. Those are the first shots. Simultaneously, the first air raids take place. The town of Vjelun, for example, is raided soon after five o'clock. Again, Vjelun is undefended and is almost completely destroyed by German Stukas. Another town called Tichew, which is a strategically important crossing on the Vistula, the river Vistula, is raided at 4.30 in the morning as well. So already at dawn, shots are being fired and the tanks are rolling across the frontier. And what was the state of Polish preparation?

It's actually quite thorough. The Polish army is not as inept or ill-prepared or feckless as it's often described. Part of the problem with this narrative is that because nobody has had a sort of a vested interest in telling the story over the years. We're left effectively, the thing that anyone seems to know or thinks they know about the September campaign is basically German propaganda from World War II, which is that the Poles are charging German tanks with their cavalry, that they're sort of feckless, they're not worth defending, they're foolish, they're unprepared, all of this stuff. And that's really not fair. That's really not true. If you look back at what the Polish preparations were, of course, they're unprepared, all of this stuff. And that's really not fair. That's really not true. If you look back at what the Polish preparations were, of course, they are massively lacking,

particularly in armor, vis-a-vis the Germans. That's one thing. But the Poles still, they're the fifth largest standing army in the world in 1939. They have a pretty good air force. By most people's standards in 1939, their air force is pretty well equipped. They have tanks. They just don't have any of the same quality of the Germans and the same quantity. And crucially, their preparations in 1939 were as much strategically minded as they

were militarily. And the strategic aspect of this is that they didn't want to give the Western powers any excuse not to act. And that meant you had to basically defend your frontiers. So the logical argument would be in 1939, you find a defensive line that you can hold to, which would be, you know, ideally, Poland's pretty flat, so there's no natural defences except for rivers. So it was talked about amongst the Polish high command that you could defend the line of the Vistula, which runs more or less north-south through Poland,

and the line of the River Narew, which runs in the northeast, joins the Vistula. You could defend those two lines. They're both substantial rivers. They would be defensible. But then, of course, you're ceding all of western Poland to the Germans. And that would mean that the British and the French would go, well, we're not going to fight for you if you're not going to fight for yourselves. There's another more grist to the mill of those in the West who would say, well, why should we defend these idiotic Poles? So the political argument meant that you had to defend the frontier.

So then they're left in the situation that you're exposing yourself to a rapid advance of more mobile, more armored troops than you've got. And they're going to encircle you and they're going to destroy you. So the plan was basically to engage them on the frontier to make sure that that political aspect is triggered, but at the same time to try and execute a sort of fighting withdrawal as fast as possible. So it was all thought through. This wasn't some sort of, you know, again, like the German propaganda says, this wasn't some sort of foolish, feckless idea that they would take on tanks with cavalry. They never did. It's a myth. But they actually had a thought

out plan where they would engage for the political benefits that that would bring, bringing the British and the French into the war, and then withdraw to defensible lines. But the problem they had was that they couldn't withdraw fast enough against the mobile German forces. Let's talk about those mobile German forces for a second, because the Polish campaign is the first time we get a glimpse of so-called Blitzkrieg. Is there an element of myth there? I mean, how effective were the German forces in September 1939? And what was this new concept they were deploying on the battlefield? German forces are very effective, and certainly in comparison to the Poles, and particularly the Air Force.

The Luftwaffe, you know, it doesn't have freedom of the skies. Again, that's a bit more mythology. The idea that the Polish Air Force was destroyed on its bases on the 1st of September, it wasn't. It still is fighting, admittedly, against a more powerful opponent and outnumbered and outfought and outflown. But it still fights up until into the second week and beyond. But German air raiding on Poland is very effective, and it's very effective as a terror weapon. So in terms of sort of sowing destruction behind the lines, damaging Polish morale amongst

civilians and so on, hugely effective and used in a very effective way. On land, again, the Germans are very good at what they're doing, but it's very mixed. So again, the idea that, you know, they are instituting this new doctrine of blitzkrieg, which is, you know, fast moving, armoured spearheadsheads breaking through the defensive lines pushing through to the rear just you know essentially keep going and prevent the creation of any sort of phased defense on the behalf of your opponent that idea is used in some examples you know there is some coordination particularly people like guderian general guderian you know one of the godfathers of Blitzkrieg,

and he was very good at doing this and driving his forces on all the time. There's a wonderful scene that I recount in this advance where Guderian actually comes across one of his commanders and says, well, where are you headed? And the commander has his sort of map and he shows him. He says, I don't want you to go there. I want you to go there. And he points to somewhere like 100 miles further on. He says, I want you to take that by tomorrow morning. And he goes, you must be joking. But that was essentially the essence of Blitzkrieg, is that rapid advance of armored columns as far as they could possibly go

to disrupt any sort of phased defense. Listen to Dan Snow's history hit. We're talking about the invasion of Poland. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week so armored columns tanks rampaging up these streets and tracks,

aircraft like the StuK acting as mobile artillery, so talking to the tanks, bombing whatever's ahead, and not worried about the flanks. You just go deep like a sword thrust. And very often, I mean, it is not yet, in 1939, the crucial thing, it is being used. I mean, it's not yet official doctrine, but it is being used in isolated examples.

And there are cases that, again, I wrote them up in the book where those columns find themselves very isolated and they end up doing a sort of hedgehog defence overnight, desperately waiting for the rest of their own forces, which in some cases is sort of 50 kilometres behind them. And might be horse-drawn or people walking. So again, the whole horse thing. I mean, the Germans had more horses in 1939 than the Poles did.

So let's get away from the idea of the Germans all being in tanks and the Poles all being in horses. Again, that's German propaganda. The trouble is, for the Poles, you hear that a German spearhead is 50 kilometres behind you and you just panic. Whereas actually, as the Russians later learned and you just panic, you just panic. Whereas actually, if they, as the Russians later learned and demonstrated, it doesn't really matter. If you just stand firm where you are, and you know, the German might actually be quite weak, even though

they've got their spear tip. But again, it kind of, it hadn't really been dealt with in that way before. And as you say, the Soviets, the Red Army had to learn how to deal with that. And they learned the hard way and with heavy losses, but the Poles weren't really versed in how to do it. Where the Poles had something to defend, where they had fortifications, bunkers, of which there were many installations, particularly places like Moiva up in the north, the frontier just south of East Prussia, they could actually hold the Germans very well. So where they had something concrete, literally concrete to defend, they actually fought very well and they could hold them off for many days until outflanked. So I mean, even Hitler sort of, you know, in a speech in Danzig on whatever, 17th of September, you know, praised the fighting ability of the ordinary

Polish soldier in this that they fought with great courage. And they did. And in many cases, they gave the Germans a bloody nose. When did Britain and France declare war? So the British and the French, you know, agonized about their declaration of war initially. The polls right from the outset, from September the 1st, were messaging London and Paris and basically saying, OK, well, the terms of our agreement have now been triggered. When are you declaring war? And the British and the French wrestled with this. The British didn't have the capacity on land to really do anything effectively at the time. They didn't have any

troops across the channel, for example. So they're rather dependent on French action. The French were less willing to act than the British were, but they both managed to sort of collectively grow a spine and actually declare war, which they did on the morning of September 3rd. This is this famous, you know, we probably all heard the radio broadcast of Chamberlain announcing to the world that he delivered an ultimatum to Herr Hitler that German forces should be withdrawn forthwith from Poland and so on. And no such undertaking has been received.

So consequently, this country is at war with Germany. Wonderful moment in, you know, sort of hairs that stick up on the back of your neck moment. But that's on the morning of the 3rd of September. And as such, I mean, a lot of what the British and the French politicians are talking about in that period where they are agonizing, they're talking about a sense of national honor. They're saying, we can't let these people down. Our honor demands that we do what we said we would do. And it is an honorable act to have declared war. Because actually, certainly from a British perspective, there's not that much that we could have done. There's really not much chance that the British could project their power to the Baltic and to Eastern Europe. That

certainly isn't the case. And as I said, there are no British troops across the channel. So there's not much that can be done in the short term in terms of a land offensive. What they could have done was to start bombing German targets, which they do do. They start rather tentatively bombing military targets, Wilhelmshaven place of ports and so on. And dropping leaflets as well, which is just preposterous. So they start dropping leaflets on the German population saying, you know, do you know what your country is doing? And separate yourselves from Hitler and his gang and so on. I mean, that was a rather ludicrous thing to do. The British attitude is somewhat half-hearted, to say the least. And there's a wonderful scene where, I think it's Kingsley Wood,

the Minister for Air, was challenged in the cabinet meeting and said, well, why aren't we bombing German arms dumps in the Black Forest, which you'd imagine was a rather obvious target. And he said, good God, are you not aware that that's private property? This rather sums up the British attitude. We were very much fighting with one arm behind our back and sort of going through the motions, or not even that, just pretending to make war. Collectively, our hearts weren't in it, I think. And it took that, you know, the German attack westward in 1940 to actually sort of galvanise British opinion and

crucially the British government, the British military. So not much is done. There is this sort of Tsar offensive that the French undertake, which is supposedly a prelude to a general attack in the West, but it never amounts to anything. The French probe into Germany. They probe. And it is a very, very half-hearted probe. I mean, there's a couple of accounts of a division being held up by a single German machine gun, for example, which is just, I mean, it's ludicrous. Half-hearted doesn't begin to describe it.

And actually, in retrospect, not that they could necessarily have known that, but the German forces in the West were absolutely paired to the bone. You know, they were really hollowed out. So all of the German air force offensive capacity was in the east. Almost all of its armor was in the east. So actually, had they been minded to push hard in the Saar Offensive, the French, they could have achieved something. But they weren't. And it lasted a couple of days and fizzled out, and they withdrew. And of course, the Poles are reporting the the Tsar offensive in the most sort of glowing, hyperbolic terms and saying, oh, you know, they're advancing on Stuttgart. No, they weren't, you know, but they wanted to believe that there was something going on in their name.

And what about the character of war in the way that it impacted on civilians? We've talked a bit about air attacks. We now associate the Second World War with unimaginable barbarism. How quickly does that start to make itself felt, even in these very, very first hours of the Second World War? It has to be said straight away. I think there's a convention sometimes that imagines that this idea of the barbarisation of warfare is something that develops slowly during the opening phase of the war, and maybe comes to its sort of horrible apogee in the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, for example, and thereafter. And we know that story from the Holocaust, the Einsatzgruppe, and all of that stuff,

the deliberate targeting of civilian populations. But to imagine that that's not happening in 1939 is completely wrong. And this is, again, is part of this problem with the perspective. If our narrative of 1939, such as it is, is essentially taken from German propaganda, then we're not going to hear this stuff. So we have to shift the perspective and look at, you know, what Poles are writing about this episode. Interestingly, the outlier here is actually the French campaign of 1940. In the French campaign of 1940, the Germans commit three massacres, all incidentally by SS forces, and they are Wormhoutz, the Paradis,

and Winkt. So within a six-week period, they commit three massacres of POWs and civilians. In the Polish campaign, the Germans alone, and bear in mind that the Soviets invade Poland as well from the east after September 17th, the Germans alone commit an estimated 600 massacres. So it's a daily occurrence. There's something like 15 or 16 per day on average during the Polish campaign. And that's purely down to the racist ideology that the German forces go in with, basically saying that the Polish people are inferior, that they are Judaized. It's not just Jews targeted, incidentally, it's Poles as well. Large numbers of Jews are also massacred, but Poles predominantly. Farmers are targeted because you can usually find a weapon on a farm

of some description. Of course, that's quite easy to just, you know, conflate with sort of partisan activity. Civilians are caught up in the crossfire and caught up in the process of blitzkrieg, where you've got, you know, isolated Polish units that are left behind, behind the lines. And it's very, again, it's very easy to describe that then as partisan activity. If the line has moved, you has moved 20 kilometers on and you're still fighting there behind the lines, effectively, then you're a partisan. You can be shot. That's the logic. So there's various reasons for it, but the underlying one is simple racism. Because the same conditions apply in 1940, and there are only three massacres only. But there are only three

massacres. So you can see that that barbarisation is there right from the outset. And it's almost an integral part of the Nazi worldview and of the ideology that they go in with. Two weeks into the campaign, Britain and France aren't doing much, and then things get a whole lot worse for the Poles. 17th September, Stalin's Red Army invades eastern Poland, which was a surprise for many people, not least many Poles. You had had the Nazi-Soviet pact signed in August, August 23rd. And those... Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed

not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week clear of eye shall we say might have realised that this was on in the offing that the

by the way we should tell everyone that you wrote an excellent book about the Molotov-Rodenskjöp pack the Nazi pack which you've been on the podcast talking about before I have

The Devil's Alliance The Devil's Alliance go and read it 2014 yes it was excellent piece of work may I say so go on yeah so some people might have

sort of seen the writing on the wall that Stalin would invade eastern Poland as he did. But I think for a lot of people, it's still a surprise, not least for the Poles themselves. And part of the Soviet method, actually, as they do now, you know, with their various activities, is to sow confusion as they go in. So they invade Dorne on 17th. And a lot of the messaging, they drop leaflets, for example, on, you know, isolated sort of towns and so on. And Poland's eastern frontier is very, very rural. It's very underdeveloped.

Lots of small towns, but, you know, lots of farmland, not many people. But they go in deliberately sowing disinformation and saying, we're coming to help you against the Germans. Of course, they're not. We're not going to hurt you because we're all Slavic brothers together. So we're not attacking Poland. But Poland has collapsed. And we've come to protect our ethnic Ukrainians, ethnic Belarusians. So a mixture of messages coming out of the Red Army propaganda machine. So again, that's sort of what you see nowadays, you know, they see the same thing, this sort of deliberate disinformation, as a not necessarily to push a particular narrative,

but just to sow inaction, because people don't know how to react at all. So in some places, Polish border guards fight them. In other places, they sort of welcome them, welcome them into the barracks and say, you know, we're so glad you're helping us against the Germans. And then, by the way, oh, we're not. And they, you know, they pull out the rifles and that's it. So it's a completely bizarre picture, the Soviet invasion. And actually, it's very interesting because it's not really been done. Where you've had been a couple of books that have talked about the Polish campaign

before, they've really, because of a lack of sources and maybe a lack of will perhaps, they haven't looked at the Soviet invasion in any sort of depth at all. And the more you look into it, the more bizarre it seems. It is a military invasion, but it's absolutely chaotic on both sides. The Red Army is in no fit state really to fight because it's just come off the back of Stalin's purges, where a lot of its senior personnel have been put up against the wall and shot. So the Red Army, in many cases, they are lacking uniforms. They're lacking weapons.

You've got units marching barefoot, for example, into Poland. And the Poles who have this tradition of the cavalrymen and the very grand tradition of the Polish Ulands, wonderfully dressed in these sort of tailored uniforms and so on. And they look at these Red Army soldiers coming in with string for belts and bare feet, and they say, what is this? They're saying, this is described as an army of ragamuffins by one bystander.

You know, they say things like, Asia has invaded us. Who are these people? It's just complete incomprehension of what's going on. So it's actually a fascinating story that really doesn't get talked about in the sort of conventional narrative

of World War II. Chaotic on both sides. But what's it, the key thing to sort of bear in mind is that actually the Soviets are importing their own brand of warfare as well. So whereas the Germans in the West are importing race war, as I've said, that huge number of atrocities, their ideology drives them on to view their opponents as subhuman. In the East, the Soviets are importing class war. And they very quickly start targeting local authorities, politicians, police officers,

anyone in any sort of position of authority, school teachers, professors, doctors, priests. And this is the beginning of that sort of process of the decapitation of Polish society, which both sides do. And I talked about that in the previous book. Both the Germans and the Soviets actually collude in this idea of decapitating Polish society, to rob Poland of its elite. And that begins in the Soviet example, it begins right at the start of that invasion. They immediately start targeting landowners, start targeting policemen, and they're rounded up and sent east, or worse. In many cases, they're just shot on the spot.

And is the Soviet invasion the end for Poland? Effectively, it is. It's difficult to see that the Poles really had much of a chance against the Germans on their own. So they needed, and they knew they needed Western help. That's why they had that sort of strategic plan and so on. That's why they signed the Anglo-Polish agreement on 25th of August. They were fully expecting to have material help from the West. But their primary problem is that that didn't materialise. So on their own, they couldn't really hope to beat the West. But their primary problem is that that didn't materialise. So on their own, they couldn't really hope to beat the Germans. So they are already reeling

by the time the Soviets invade. But there could, feasibly, there might have been some space in eastern Poland where they could have regrouped. But I think that's rather tenuous. The Soviet invasion is certainly a nail in the coffin of the Polish state, not least because their tactical decision at the time is to move as much as possible in terms of administration, politicians, high command, to move them down into the southeast of the country and across into Romania, which was nominally neutral. So they called it the Romanian bridgehead, was to get as many of their troops and their units and their high command and so on across the border. And obviously,

the Soviets coming over the frontier and heading for Lvov and cutting off that line of retreat stopped that or hindered that Romanian bridgehead. So it's certainly, you know, a nail in the coffin. But of course, you know, the Poles keep fighting. The last Polish units in the September campaign actually surrender on the 6th of October. So they keep fighting for another good two and a half weeks after the Soviet invasion, which is worth bearing in mind. Just to conclude, really, the Polish government going to exile in London and Polish airmen play a key role in the Battle of Britain. And so Poland fights on in many ways.

But just give me a sense of the calamity that was unfolded on Poland from the 1st September right up to 1945. How did that country suffer? Again, we have to get away from our sort of Western perspective of World War II in this and see that actually the sort of the very cockpit of the war in World War II, you know, as Tim Snyder describes this in his book Bloodlands, is kind of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine is all of that area of Central Europe. Yeah, that's basically where World War II happened. That's where World War II happened. That's where you have the largest death tolls. That's where you have these,

you know, these rival totalitarian systems fighting out. And in the case of Poland, it's unique in that sense that Poland, for the opening two years of the war, is partitioned by the two totalitarian powers, the Soviet Union in the east, Nazi Germany in the west. And they treat their respective halves as a sort of a laboratory of their own ideology. So they're busy deporting people, they're moving people around, they're moving people around, they're executing people. I mentioned this decapitation of Polish society that goes on. So there's sort of an active process of radical social and ethnic change

being forced on Polish society in that period, and it's extremely violent. And then, of course, once the Germans attack the Soviet Union in 1941, then all of Poland falls under German occupation. And that becomes essentially the laboratory of the Holocaust. That's when the Holocaust gets going. So again, the scouring Polish populations, they're using Polish territory as a dumping ground for all of those Jewish populations and other to Nazis undesirables that they just shifted west as a prelude to extermination. So again, Poland is front center in the narrative. And then to cap it all, liberation, in inverted commas, in 1945,

is a Soviet liberation, is the same enemy that they'd already experienced between 1939 and 41, liberation is the same enemy that they'd already experienced between 1939 and 1941, that had imposed its communist system and its class war on Poland in that time. So for many Poles, liberation only really comes in 1989, when the communist system collapses. So yes, when you mentioned Poles escaping into exile and that narrative, which again is tremendously heroic. And we forget perhaps that Poles fought in exile in every theatre of the European war. Monte Cassino, Narvik, Battle of the Atlantic, Arnhem, the list goes on. But for the Poles who stayed at home, you know, this was an absolutely searing experience. Do you have a sense of overall casualties in pre-war Polish population? Essentially, it's between a fifth and a quarter of the total population

is killed in World War II. So per capita, it's, I think, one of, if not the highest death toll in World War II. I mean, that's up there with a catechismic event like the Black Death. Absolutely. Absolutely. Why I say, you know, we have to kind of shift our focus a bit, we have to get away from our rather cosy, you know, parochial, you know, Western view of Dunkirk and D-Day and all of that stuff. And actually, well, yeah, that's fine. And that's our narrative. I understand that. That's our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers. But if you really want to understand where World War II is happening and what's going on,

you have to shift your gaze further east. And where it starts. Thank you very much, Roger Moyers. Now the book is called? First to Fight. First to Fight. Everyone go and buy it in a shop or on the internet. Thank you, Roger, as ever. My pleasure. Thanks, Dan. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks.

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