The Luftwaffe wiped out the Polish air force in the first two days. Poland was on its own and its cavalry lances would be matched against the monstrous new machines of war: the Panzers. It had signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, which publicly guaranteed that the two nations would not attack each other and privately divided Poland between them. The Soviet Union – Russia and its Communist satellites – would be no help. When they finally did, they sent insufficient forces and it was too late. The Poles also believed that the French would attack Germany in the rear, across Germany’s western frontier. One tactic the Germans had perfected during the Spanish Civil War was the terror bombing of civilian targets, including, infamously, the Basque market town of Guernica. The Polish Air Force had just 842 obsolescent planes, while the Luftwaffe, the German air force, could put 4,700 modern aircraft in the air. The Germans also had overwhelming superiority in the air. The German Panzer spearhead would be followed by four motorised infantry divisions, four light divisions and forty regular infantry divisions. inside the vehicle should be soaked with fuel (possibly by ripping out the fuel pipe) and the vehicle is to be set on fire. Waste wool, combustible material, ammunition, etc. A crew may abandon an immobilised tank only if they have run out of ammunition or can no longer fire, and if other vehicles cannot be expected to save it… If there is a risk that the tank may fall into enemy hands, it should be destroyed. No tanks must fall into enemy hands without the crew and the crews of neighbouring tanks doing their utmost to rescue or destroy it.
However, the German High Command was not 100 per cent confident of victory. Although the Polish army would outnumber the attacking Germans once it had all been mustered, the Poles started out with seventeen ill-equipped infantry divisions, three infantry brigades and six cavalry brigades – real cavalry brigades with horses, not the armoured units cavalry later became. The Poles had just one armoured brigade, 660 tanks in all versus Germany’s 2,100. The first lesson, it was believed, should be easy. The proper use of the Panzer, he believed, was something that would have to be learnt in war itself. However, there were a handful of men who believed that tank warfare would work on the plains of Poland. They were going to have to learn a whole new discipline – the art of mechanised warfare. The Wehrmacht, the German army, quickly realised that there was more to tanks than guns and armour. They also destroyed the surface of the roads they used, slowing those who followed. The crews lacked the experience to fix mechanical problems on the spot and a tank broken down on a bridge or a narrow road could hold up a whole brigade. Things went little smoother during the occupation of Czechoslovakia the following year. When German tanks rolled over the border into Austria in 1938, at least 30 per cent had broken down before they reached Vienna. The deployment of Panzers in Spain was considered largely a failure. It was not one of the terror tactics that the Germans had perfected during the Spanish Civil War that had raged for the previous three years. The attack was spearheaded by Panzers, seven divisions of them. At dawn on 1 September 1939, a huge German army rolled across the 1,250-mile Polish border. The Second World War began with a terrific gamble.
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