Episode 556: The Twenty Years' Armistice

0:00Hello and welcome to Westerns save episode 556, the 20 years armistice. Now today we're going to do this a little bit differently because we are going to start to get into the origins and the beginnings of World War II, World War II in Europe, the where we're going to switch to Asia next time and catch them back up. But I kind of want to start with an overall thesis with this one that there really isn't a firm piece ever after World War I. The idea is that really that there's not two World Wars. There's just one. There's just sort of a wall between the two, an armistice, if you will. The 20 years armistice. This is an idea I've read in some books and I find a little bit convincing. So let's back up in the spring of 1919

1:03in the Great Hall at Versailles. The most powerful men in the world gathered to end the deadliest warmen in human history with four years of corpses behind them and somewhere between 16 and 20 million people dead. They wanted to build a piece so durable that nothing like it would ever happen again. The diplomats called the document that they produced the Treaty of Versailles. And when French Marshal Ferdinand Falk, the man who had commanded Allied armies to victory, the man who had taken the German surrender in a railway carriage in the fortress of Companille, when Falk read the terms of the Treaty, he did not celebrate. He actually set the pages down and said something prescient. This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years. End quote. Falk was so prescient, in fact, he was off by 65 days. That's it. The treaty was signed on the 28th of June 1919. The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939, 20 years and a

2:04little over two months. Falk had not made a prophecy in the mystical sense. He made a diagnosis. He looked at the settlement his own side had imposed and he understood that it solved nothing, that had taken the central problem of European power and frozen it on resolve beneath a thin veneer of paper and a lot of pride. And he understood the crust eventually would crack. So here's where we begin. Not with the idea that the Second World War broke out in 1939, but with the idea that genuinely unsettling idea that the Second World War never really broke out because it had never ended. That what we call the First World War and the Second World War are not two wars, but one, a single European catastrophe with an intermission in the middle. A war that began in the summer of 1914, paused for breath in 1918, and resumed in the autumn of 1939,

3:05exactly where it had left off over the same ground between the same nations driven by the same unanswered question. Today I'm going to explain why the intermission ended. All right, first, I'm going to make the case that there was only ever one World War and that everything from 1939 forward is the second act of a play that started a quarter century earlier. After that, we're going to look at how this war for all that continuity was something the world had never seen before because the men of 1914 fought over borders and empires and balances of power. The men of 1939 fought about something different. World War II is about the future of the human race. It's an inherently ideological war. The First World War was a war between nations. The Second World War was a war of ideas and one idea in particular, an idea so monstrous that would redefine what war could even mean. Then lastly, to finish up today,

4:13I want to follow the armies into Poland, standing at Westerplade at quarter to five in the morning on the 1st of September, and then watch a new kind of warfare, tear a nation apart in about five weeks. We'll see technologies that tank the Diabomber, the radio that turn to the slaughterhouses of stalemate of the trenches of the First World War into something fast, mobile, and even more terrible. And we'll end our episode on a single day, the 6th of October 1939. The day the last Polish army laid down its arms, and the day a triumphant adult Hitler stood before the Reichstag and offered the world what he called peace. But let's turn back for a moment. Let's begin in the wreckage of the last war. To understand why the war resumed, you have to understand what the First World War had left unfinished, and the simplest way to do it is this. Let's just explain it this way. The First World War destroyed the old order of Europe, but it didn't replace it with

5:15anything stable. It knocked down the house and then left the rubble exactly where it fell. Think about what vanished between 1914 and 1918. Four empires, four were swept off the mound. The German Empire of the Hosenhullerans, gone, the Kaiser fleeing into exile in the Netherlands. The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs, that ancient patchwork of a dozen nationalities shattered into pieces. The Russian Empire of the Roman Ovs, consumed by revolution, the Tsar and his family shot in a cellar. The Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe carved up at last. Centuries, centuries, a dynastic rule. The whole architecture of monarchical Europe, it was just gone in 51 months. And into that vacuum, the peacemakers tried to just pour a new Europe. They drew new countries out of ruins, poll and reborn after a century of partition. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,

6:18Baltic states. They drew these borders according to a beautiful and dangerous principle, national self-determination. The idea that every people should govern itself. Beautiful because it spoke to something real dangerous, because the peoples of central and eastern Europe were not arranged in neat separable blocks. They were mixed together, village by village, street by street. Every border drawn to liberate one nation trapped in a minority of another nation on the wrong side of the line. Every new country was born with a grievance built into its very foundations. And at the very center of this unstable new map, set the great unresolved problem. The problem that had really caused the war in the first place. Historians sometimes call it the German question. It goes like this. In 1871, Germany unified, and the moment it unified, it became the most powerful single state on the European continent. More people than France, more industry than Britain, than army second to none. A Germany that strong, sitting in the middle of Europe, was a permanent disruption to the old balance

7:23of power. There was no comfortable place for it. Either Germany would dominate its neighbors, or its neighbors would have to hold it down. That tension. What do you do about a Germany that's too big to balance? Was the engine of 1914? And guess what? The end of the first world war did not answer it. Because here's the strange thing about how the first world war ended. Germany was defeated, but Germany was not destroyed, and Germany was not in a sense its own people could feel conquered in any way. When the armistice came in November 1918, there was not one single Allied soldier on German soil. The fighting had stopped while the front line was still inside Belgium and France. The German army did not surrender in the field. It signed an armistice and then it marched home in good order through cheering crowds under flowers. To a German soldier in the ranks, it didn't look like defeat. It felt a lot like betrayal.

8:23And out of that feeling, the most poisonous myth of the 20th century started to grow. The Duhlschlumbligen, the stab in the back. The lie that Germany's armies had never truly been beaten on the battlefield. They had been betrayed from within, sold out by politicians, by socialists, by Jews, by the cowardly civilians on the home front. It was not true. The German army in the autumn of 1918 was beaten as commanders knew it. That's why they asked for the armistice. The truth had very little to do with it. The myth gave a humiliated nation someone to blame, and it gave a young corporal named Adolf Hitler, a man who had been lying in a hospital temporary blinded by gas when the news of the armistice reached him, it gave that corporal the central obsession of his political life. And then came the treaty. And whatever you think of the Treaty of Versailles, historians have argued about it for a century, there is one thing it indisputably did. It humiliated Germany

9:25without crippling Germany. It was harsh enough to enrage, but not harsh enough to disable. That is the worst of all possible combinations. Let's just look at the terms. Germany lost about a 13th percent of its territory and a tenth of its population. It lost Alsace and Lorraine to France. It lost a great swath of its eastern lands to the newly reborn Poland. Then this is the piece we should hold on to today, because that's the ground that the next war is going to be fought over today. To give the new Poland access to the sea, the treaty cut a corridor through German territory, the so-called Polish corridor, and it physically separated the German province of East Prussia from the rest of the country. And at the mouth of that corridor was set the ancient German speaking port city of Danzig, modern in Gensk, which was taken from Germany and made into a free city under international supervision. To German nationalists, the corridor and Danzig were an open wound.

10:28German land, German people sliced off and handed to a country they regarded with contempt. And I do want to remind you, by the way, that under the Treaty of Brechtli Tosk, that Germany signed with the Soviet Union and the Nasson Soviet Union, they were supposed to get massive swaths of territory in the East territory that under the normal rules of war, they had one. But because of Versailles, everything got preempted from that original treaty. And so what Germany thought they got just vanished. And then there's the military side of this. The Treaty stripped Germany's army down to a hundred thousand men, no Air Force, no tanks, no submarines, no real navy at all. It demanded reparations, enormous sums, payment for the damage of the war. And an article 231, the clause that did more emotional damage than perhaps any other, it required Germany to accept responsibility for starting the entire war. This is the famous wargild clause. A nation made to sign a confession, basically. Now let's just stack up what we

11:34just heard. A defeated power that does not feel beaten. A nation taught to believe it was betrayed, rather than beaten. A treaty that humiliates without destabling. Lost territory full of people who still consider themselves German. A free city that everybody knows is going to be the next flashpoint. And a global economy that will, within a decade, collapse into the Great Depression, throwing millions of Germans out of work into the arms of anyone who promises to tear down the whole rotten settlement. This isn't a recipe for peace at all. This is a fuse. And so when we look at the year is 1919 to 1939, the interwar period is it's sometimes called in European textbooks. The historian is tempted to, I guess, a rather heretical thought. Well, wait a minute. What if there was never really peace at all? What if it was the armistice of wargge warned about a 20-year pause in a single continuous war? Some historians have a name for the whole span from 1914 to 1945.

12:36They call it Europe's second 30 years war. Echoing that earlier catastrophe of the 17th century, one war with a long bitter ceasefire in the middle, fought to settle the question that 1918 left open. What to do about German power in the heart of Europe? By that reading, the men of 1939 were not starting something new. They were finishing something old. The same nations, the same fault lines, the same city. Because would you believe that the spark in the end was Danzig? It lures demands in the summer of 1939 around their surface about Danzig and the corridor. The very woods that Versailles had cut 20 years earlier. But, and this is the turn our story now takes. To say it was the same war is not to say that it's the same kind of war. Because something had really changed in those 20 years. Something had crawled out of the wreckage of 1918, fed on the humiliation and the hunger and the lies, and grown into a thing the soldiers of the First World War

13:41would not have recognized. The First World War was fought by empires over power and land. The second would be fought by ideologies over the very meaning of what it meant to be human and human life. And that's the difference we need to turn to now. Now I want you to picture for a second the men who started the First World War because there's a stark difference. They were emperors, they were kings, foreign ministers and giant froccoats, generals who honestly still believed in cavalry charges. When they went to war in 1914, they went for recognizable old-fashioned reasons, for prestige to win colonies, for alliances and obligations of honor and of course, for the balance of power. The Kaiser wanted Germany to have its quote-unquote place in the sun. Austria wanted to punish Serbia. Russia wanted to protect its Slavic clients and its access to the sea. France wanted Alsadels and Lorraine back. These were national interests.

14:48The ordinary currency of diplomacy, albeit pushed to a catastrophic extreme, but still nothing unusual. Of course, yes, there was some ideology in the First World War. The Allies told themselves they had fought for democracy against autocracy, for civilization against oppression, militarism. But that was largely a story that was told after the fact to get meaning to its slaughter. At its core, 1914 was a war of nation-states competing for power within a system, they basically all accepted. None of them set out to destroy others as humans. None of them dreamed of remaking their human race. But now let's look at the men of 1939. The emperors they're all gone. In their place, stand a new kind of ruler. Men risen from the chaos and rage of the post-war years. Men who don't want to see the table of nations but want to overturn that table completely. And they covered not in the name of dynasties but ideas. Total ideas. Ideas that

15:53claimed a whole of human life. Rome, Benito Mussolini and his fascist, the original model, the cult of the state, the worship of violence and youth, and the nation reborn through struggle. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, heirs to the Bolsheviks in Lenin, ruling in the name of a world-prolitarian, and the inevitable triumph of communism, a regime that had already starved and shot millions of its own people in the name of building utopia. And in Berlin, the most dangerous of them all. I don't feel like a national socialism. We have to be precise about what exactly Nazism was because it's the thing that makes the second world war different from every war that came before it. Nazism wasn't simply aggressive nationalism. It wasn't simply militarism. At its core, it was a doctrine about race. Hitler believed, and he had written it down openly for anybody to read in mind-conf, that history is not a struggle between nations or classes but a struggle between races. That so-called

16:53Aryan race was the creator of all civilization, locked in a fight to the death against inferior races who would pollute and destroy it. That at the bottom of this racial hierarchy and most dangerous of all stood the Jews, whom Hitler cast not as a religion or a people but as a kind of disease, a parasite, an existential enemy to be removed from the body of the nation. And from this poisonous biology came two ideas that will set the world on fire. The first was called Leibin-Saram, Leibin-Sram, living space. Hitler argued that a race to survive and grow needed land, agricultural land, room to expand resources to sustain it, and the land he wanted lay in the east, in Poland, in Ukraine, in the vast spaces of the Soviet Union. He intended to conquer that land, not to govern its people, but to clear them out of the way, to push them out, to enslave them or just let them die and replace them with German settlers. This was not a war

17:56aim in the old sense, a matter of just moving a line on a map. It was a plan to depopulate and racially re-engineer have a continent. The second idea was the destruction of what Hitler called Judeo-Bolshevism. In his mind, communism and Jewishness were fused into a single enemy, a global Jewish conspiracy that had seized control of Russia and now threatened to engulf the entire world. The coming war in the east would therefore be a war of annihilation, fair constrike, fought not only by the ordinary rules of soldiers, but as a kind of crusade to wipe out an entire ideology and the people that he blamed for it. Now, I want to be careful and honest here because chronology matters. In September of 1939, the full machinery of mass murders that we associate with the Nazis, the death camps, the gas chambers, the industrialized genocide of 6 million Jews, that machinery does not yet exist. The systematic killing centers come later in 1941 and 1942.

19:01We must not collapse the timeline and pretend that the Holocaust began with the invasion Poland. But, and this is crucial, the intention was already there. The worldview is already in place, written and spoken and believed. And the moment the German army crosses into Poland, you can already see what kind of war this is going to be. Following behind the regular soldiers come special squads, task forces with a different mission, the Ainsatz group in. Their job isn't to fight the Polish army. Their job is to murder Poland's leadership, its officers, its priests, its professors, its aristocrats, its politicians, its Jews. The Germans call it Operation Tenenberg and the broader assault on the educated classes, the Intelligantskin, the logic is racial and its explicit. A people without leaders is a people that can be enslaved. In the first week of the occupation, tens of thousands of Polish civilians are deliberately killed, not as a byproduct of combat,

20:09but as a policy. The racial war has begun on day one. This is what makes 1939 different from 1914. When the German army marched into Belgium in 1914 and committed atrocities, that is true. And they were real and shocking at the time. But they were atrocities of an army at war. Brutal excesses, not a coordinated plan to exterminate a population. When the German army marches into Poland in 1939, the murder of civilians isn't just like a military excess. This isn't like in the 17th century when armies just ran berserk. It was actually the purpose. The war and the genocide are not separate things. They occur at the same time. They are actually the same thing. And there is one more piece of the ideological puzzle in 1939 and it's the most jaw-dropping because it's a moment when ideology seems to evaporate entirely. I told you that Hitler's

21:09deepest hatred was for Judeo-Bolshevism, for the Soviet Union and everything that it stood for. Then I told you that Stalin's regime defined itself as being against fascism. It had spent years denouncing Hitler as the great enemy of the working class. These two men, these two systems, they were sworn ideological enemies. They were quite literally the anti-matter of each other. And on the 23rd of August 1939, just a week before the war begins, they signed a pact. The Nazi Soviet pact, the Molta-lov-Ribtrov pact, named for the two foreign ministers to put their signatures to it, a non-aggression treaty between the two regimes that hated each other most of all in the world. The newsreels showed Rippentrop in Moscow shaking hands, Stalin smiling. Communists across the world were left reeling, ordered overnight to stop denouncing fascism. But the public treaty was not the real story here. Attached to it was a secret protocol, a hidden agreement that the world would not learn the full truth of for years,

22:11in which Hitler and Stalin simply divided Eastern Europe between them, like two thieves splitting up a house. The line was drawn through Poland. The West would be Germany's, the East would be Stalin's. The Baltic states, Finland, parts of Romania, these were all just sorted into spheres, Nazi and Soviet, so on and so forth. But why did two bitter, bitter ideological enemies do this? Because for each of them, the alliance bought something. For Hitler, it meant he could attack Poland without fear of a war on two fronts, the nightmare that had doomed Germany in the last war. The Soviets would not intervene. They would actually help. If Stalin this bought time, time to rearm time to prepare, and it bought territory above our zone, half of Poland that he could hand over without a fight. And when we get into the German invasion of the Soviet Union later on, I'll explain the backstory to this a little bit more and why it was Stalin needed time. There are some very

23:15important purges that we have to talk about. But for now, each man believed he was outsmarting the other, each intended eventually to betray the other. And in less than two years, Hitler would. But for now, in the last days of August 1939, the pact does its work. The last obstacle is removed. Stalin has agreed to look away, indeed, just to take his own share. The democracies of the West, Britain and France, who had spent the 1930s retreating before Hitler, are caught flat-footed. And the road to Poland lies open. And so all that remains is to manufacture and excuse. On the night of the 31st of August 1939, a small group of German men in army uniforms

24:15attacked a German radio station. The station was in Gleiwitz in Upper Solacea, right on the border with Poland. The attacker sees the building broadcast a short angry message in Polish over the airwaves, fired some shots and left a body behind on the ground. A man in civilian closed dead and made to look like a Polish saboteur in a raid. This whole thing was fake. The Polish attackers, in air quotes, those were SS men. The body was a German prisoner, actually. A salation man named Francis Hoinuck arrested the day before, kept alive just long enough to be murdered and dumped at the scene to provide a corpse. In the chilling code language of the operation, such bodies were referred to as Kahnzehrn, canned goods. The whole thing was a piece of theater, one of several staged incidents across the border that night, designed to give Hitler the pretext to let him stand before the world and claim that Germany had been attacked first. The Poland was

25:17the aggressor, that Germany was only defending itself. Almost nobody believed it, and it didn't matter. The orders had already gone out. The attack was already coming. Gleiwitz was just the opening salvo around a quarter to five in the next morning, the 1st of September 1939. An old German battleship called Sleswig Holstein was sitting in the harbor of Danzig, that contested free city I talked about before. She had arrived days earlier on a courtesy visit. Now her guns swung toward a small Polish military depot on a split of land called the Westerplate, and at 445 in the morning, she opened fire at Point Blank Range, and those were the first shots of the Second World War in Europe. At almost the very same moment, some say minutes earlier, German bombers appeared in the Don Si, over a small Polish town called Wieland, a town of no military importance. And they bombed

26:18it anyway. They came back, and they bombed it again. By the time they were done, much of Wieland, which again had no military significance, was rubble, and well over a thousand civilians were dead. Wieland is sometimes called the 1st Town Destroyed from the air in the Second World War, and it tells you on that very first morning how this war was going to be materially different. Because in the 1st World War, if you weren't on the front lines, yes, you may have had to deal with rationing. Yes, there was starvation. But this time around, no one was safe. Across the whole length of the border, the German war machine surged forward, roughly a million and a half German soldiers poured into Poland from three directions, from the West, from German Pomerania, in the north, and up from German Allied Slovakia in the south. The pan was a pincer movement, two giant arms, army group north and army group south, driving toward each other

27:20to encircle the Polish armies and trap the west of the capital Warsaw, before they could retreat to the regroup. And the way the Germans did it was something the world had never seen before. Now you have to understand what everybody expected the war to look like in 1939, because everyone expected it to look like 1914. They expected trenches. They expected two armies digging in and grinding each other to powder across a static front month after month, year after year, for tiny scraps of mud. That was the lesson of the last war burned into every general's mind. The modern firepower made attack almost impossible. The war meant steel-made siege and slaughter. What happened in Poland was the opposite. The Germans did not dig in. They moved and they moved fast. Concentrated armored spearheads, tanks, the panzers, punched through the Polish lines at chosen points, and then drove deep into the rear, not stopping to fight, but racing for the bridges,

28:22the road junctions, the headquarters, slicing defending armies into pockets, and leaving the slower infantry to mop up the encircled survivors. Overhead, the German Air Force, the Luthwaffe, owned the sky. It smashed the Polish Air Force much of it in the opening days. It bombed railways in the roads, choking off Polish movements and reinforcements, and it flew in close in support of the ground forces streaming down on Polish columns and strong points. The Western press would soon have a word for this. They called it Blitzkrieg, lightning war. Now, I owe you a note of honesty here, because the word does a little too much work. The German Army did not have a formal written doctrine called Blitzkrieg. German officers mostly talked about, I wish it was Blitzkrieg, because it's easier to pronounce this one's, a Blenka-Skrieg. That's probably not right, but it means the war of movement. It's an old Prussian tradition of fast, decisive maneuvers that went back for generations. The lightning campaigns of 1939 and 1940 were much the product of improvisation,

29:28good radios, and a desperate gamble as they were of some perfect master plan. Later historians have spent a great deal of effort punctuing the myth of the all-conquering Blitzkrieg machine. But whatever you call it, the name doesn't matter. The effect on the ground in Poland was real and it was devastating. Now, the polls are sometimes remembered unfairly, as if they tumbled hopelessly backward, as if they sent horsemen into charged tanks. There's a famous image from the campaign, Polish cavalry, actually holding lances, like medieval lances, charging German armor. It's a myth. Okay, it grew out of a real event near a village called Krunste, on the first day where a Polish cavalry unit did charge, but it charged German infantry caught in the open and scattered them successfully before being surprised by the armored cars. Italian journalist brought to the scene afterwards, spun it into the legend of the suicidal horsemen against the steel, and German propaganda was happy to repeat it. The truth is that the Polish

30:34army fought hard and often pretty well. Polish cavalry were mobile infantry, not medieval knights, and on several occasions they fought the Germans to a standstill. The polls lost, not because they were cowards or anachronistic fools, but because the situation was frankly pretty hopeless. Look at the map and you see the problem instantly. Poland in 1939 was almost surrounded by German territory. Germany to the west, German east pressure to the north, German occupied Czech lands, and friendly Slovakia to the south. There was no good defensive line. The Polish high command for political and economic reasons chose to defend the long frontier to try to hold everything, including the vital industrial and agricultural west. Rather than pull back to defensible rivers, deeper inside the country, that meant Polish forces were spread thin along an enormous border with no depth, perfectly positioned to be cut off and encircled by exactly the kind of fast armored thrusts that Germans were about to deliver. And the polls were outnumbered. They were

31:39outgunned in tanks and aircrafts, and counting desperately on a promise. The promise was this. Poland had an alliance. Britain and France had guaranteed Poland's independence. They had told Hitler in the clearest terms that an attack on Poland meant war with them. And so on the 3rd of September 1939, two days after the invasion began, the British government said Germany and ultimatum, withdraw, or we are at war. At 11 o'clock that morning, the ultimatum expired with no reply. An attired Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, the guy who had flown to Munich a year before, and had come home promising peace in our time, what he went on to the radio to tell the British people that, in consequence, quote, this country is at war with Germany. France declared war that same afternoon.

32:39For a few hours in Warsaw there was rejoicing. The Great Western democracies were coming. The polls believed that France, with the largest army in Western Europe, would smash through Germany's lightly defended Western frontier and forced Hitler to turn around. And here is the bitter decisive truth of this campaign. They didn't come. The French made one small cautious probe into the German Sarland in early September, advanced a few miles, occupied a few empty villages, and then within days they pulled back. The British and French sat behind their fortifications and they waited. The promise defensive in the West had never happened. The polls were on their own. This Western inaction would soon get a mocking nickname, the Fony War. Or Sitzkrieg, love that one, the sitting war. Those strange months when Britain and France were technically at war with Germany, but almost nothing happened on the Western Front.

33:41It's silly, sure. As long as you're not Poland. For Poland, the Fony War was a death sentence. And then on the 17th of September came the blow that ended any last hope. From the east across Poland's other border, the one everyone had assumed was safe. The Soviet Red Army invaded. And this was the secret protocol of the Nazi Soviet pact coming due. Stalin was claiming his half. The Soviets announced with breathtaking cynicism that they were merely intervening to protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians of eastern Poland now that the Polo State had supposedly collapsed. In reality, the Polo State had not collapsed. It was still fighting. But now it was being crushed from both sides at once. A nation caught a vice between the two most powerful and ruthless dictators on earth. The Polish government, recognizing the war on its soil was lost, ordered its forces to fall back toward the Romanian border and slip out to fight

34:42another day. And then crossed into Romania itself where it was interned, handing leadership to a government in exile that would carry on the fight abroad for the rest of the war. But the soldiers actually did keep fighting. And this is the part of the story that I think deserves to be remembered. Even as the country was carved up, Polish units fought on with extraordinary courage. There was the battle of the Bursa, the largest battle of the campaign, where a Polish army caught the Germans in a flank and counter-attacked, throwing the timetable into chaos for days before being ground down. The little garrison on the western plate, the men of the Schleswig Holston had fired on a dawn the first day. Perhaps two hundred of them against thousands. They held out for seven days. The naval base on the Helping Insola, jutting into the Baltic, held out until the second of October. And the capital Warsaw refused to surrender. In circle to shelter then subjected it to a savage aerial and artillery bombardment

35:47that killed thousands of civilians and set whole districts ablaze. The city held out until the 28th of September, when with water, food and ammunition gone and the population starving under the bombs, it finally capitulated. And then there was one last act. Southeast of Warsaw, an independent Polish force under General Franzisk Kleberg, the operational group of Polsie, fought on into October, taking on both the Germans and the Soviets. At a place called Kuk, this last Polish field army fought its final battle. And on the 6th of October 1939, out of ammunition, it supplies exhausted, it laid down its arms. That day, the 6th of October is actually where I'm ending for now, because that is the day the last regular Polish unit surrendered. It's the day the campaign formally ended. After 36 days, the second largest country in central Europe had been overrun, defeated, and divided in two

36:52between Berlin and Moscow. But before we look at what that day felt like around the world, we need to pause on the machine that made it possible, because the speed of Poland's fall was not just about numbers or geography or betrayal. It was about technology, and about a new set of tools that had transformed the nature of war in the 20 years of the long armistice. Let's just imagine for a second, we could take a soldier who fought on the trenches in 1916, maybe somebody from the Somme were very done, and set him down on a Polish road in September 1939. What would he find unfamiliar? What would tell him the world of change? Well, three things above all. The tank, the airplane, and the radio. And the deepest change was not any one of these machines, but the way all three of them were now being used together. Let's start with the tank. Tanks were not new in 1939. The British embedded

37:57them in the First World War. They were lumbering steel boxes that crawled across. No man's land at a walking pace to break the deadlock of the trenches. But in 1916, the tank was a support weapon. It was just a giant shield to help the inventory cross. By 1939, a handful of thinkers in Britain, France, and above all Germany had reimagined what the tank could be. What if you didn't spread tanks out thinly to help the inventory? What if you concentrated them and massed them into dedicated armored divisions? The Panzer divisions. And use them not to break a trench line but to break through it and then keep going. So not a shield anymore, but a spear. Tanks designed for speed and range, punching a hole, and then driving deep into the enemy's rear before they could react. This shift from tank as infantry helper to tank as independent striking force is one of the great tactical revolutions of the century. And Polian was its first real demonstration. And then there's the airplane. In the First World War, aircrafts started as flimsy reconnaissance machines.

39:01But now had grown into fighters and bombers. The effect, though, in the 1920s that the end of the war and even in the 1910s and the Great War was pretty limited. By 1939, air power was now a war-winning arm in its own right. The Germans used it in two ways that the trench veteran would have found shocking. First, to win command of the sky, to destroy the enemy air force and then roam freely the eyes and hammer of the army. And second, as flying artillery and direct support of the tanks. A symbol of this was the Jungers 87 die bomber. The Stuka, a machine fitted with sirens, screaming wind-driven whistles called Jericho Trumpets so that it howled as it plunged toward its target. The scream was deliberate. It was a psychological weapon designed to terrify men in the open and it worked. And of course, as Wieland showed on the very first morming, the bomber couldn't be turned on cities and civilians, a preview of the terror from the sky would define the years to come. And then the quietest revolution of all, the one the trench

40:06veteran might not even notice, the radio. This is the unsung hero, or villain depending on your perspective, of new warfare. Tanks rolling fast and deep, aircraft overhead, infantry falling behind. All that maneuver is useless, even suicidal, unless the pieces can talk to each other and coordinate in real time. The German army equipped its tanks with radios so that a commander could direct his armored formations on the move, react in minutes to a changing battle, and call down air support exactly where it was needed. The radio was the prize nervous system of a whole new way of war. Without it, the panzers are just fast targets. With it, they become a coordinated organism, tank, plane, and infantry acting as one. This combination, what soldiers call combined arms warfare, conducted at high speed and bound together by radio is the real engine of those lightning victories. But I want to leave you with one corrective because the popular image of 1939, gleaming columns of tanks and unstoppable mechanized juggernaut is only half true in the other

41:08half matters. The German army of 1939 was not fully mechanized, far from it. The panzer divisions were the cutting edge, the famous spearhead, but they were a minority of the force. The vast bulk of the German army still marched on foot exactly as they had in 1914, and its guns and supplies were pulled overwhelmingly by horses. The viamarked that conquered Poland depended on something like half a million horses to move. The lightning was real, but it was a thin blade steel at the tip of a much older slower body. The gap between the dazzling modern spearhead and the plotting mass that walked behind it is a tension that's going to run through the entire German war effort and one day soon as we'll see, it's going to break it. So that's the new way of war. Fast mechanized at the tip coordinated by radio with air power as a partner in a terror. Above all, it's designed to avoid the static slaughter of the trenches and replace it with speed and encirclement. It worked spectacularly in Poland and as news of its spread,

42:14the generals of France and Britain who had prepared in their hearts to fight the last war again began to feel a sinking cold sensation, which of course brings us at last to that 6th of October to a world taking stock of which has happened. Now in early October 1939, Poland had fallen, so let's just quickly take a survey of the capitals of the world and see how each part is reacting to it. Now let's begin in Berlin. Berlin is triumphant. In five weeks Hitler has done what the Kaiser's armies could not do in four years of the last war, one a swift total crushing victory. The German public, which had greeted the outbreak of war, not with the cheering crowds of 1914, but with Graham anxious silence, is now flooded with relief and pride. The gamble paid off. The generals who privately doubted Hitler are silenced by success. And on the 6th of October itself, the very day Clyberg's last army surrenders. Hitler stands before the Reichstag and delivers a

43:18speech to the world. He has crushed Poland, he says. The matter is settled. There is no reason for the war to continue. And he offers Britain and France what he calls peace. It is of course a peace on his terms. And it offers to let the Western powers accept everything he has just done to recognize his conquest, to go home. It is a propaganda gesture aimed at splitting his enemies, and at the war-weary publics of London and Paris. Private Lee Hitler has no intention of stopping. Even as he speaks of peace, his commanders are already drawing up the plans to turn the war machine west against France and the low countries. Now let's cross to London. Britain is at war. And unlike in Berlin, there's no triumph here, only a strange suspended grimness. The bombs everyone feared have not yet fallen on British cities. Children have been evacuated from towns into the countryside. The great cities have gone dark under the blackout every window covered. The street lights out. The rationing

44:19is being prepared. And yet on the western front almost nothing has happened. This is the heart of the phony war. Britain has begun shipping its small professional army, the British expeditionary force, across the channel to stand besides France. The Chamberlain government, the government of appeasement, now finds itself running a war that it desperately tried to avoid. And into that government has returned a familiar rather pugnacious figure who spent the 1930s warning that this is exactly what was going to happen, Winston Churchill. He had been brought back into the cabinet as head of the Navy. When Hitler's peace offer reaches London, it will be roundly rejected. There is no deal. But for now, in early October, anxious and armed, Britain waits. Now let's jump to Paris and hear the mood is darker and more troubled still. France has the largest army in western Europe and has done almost nothing. After that one timid push into the saw, the French army has settled down behind its great fortified wall, the maschino line,

45:20and resolved to wait. The strategy is essentially defensive and passive. Let the Germans come. They'll break themselves on French stealing concrete as they were broken at their done. But beneath the strategy lies something deeper and more corrosive, a profound reluctance to fight it all. France is a country that has not recovered body or soul from the last war, a million and a half French dead, a generation gone. The trauma is everywhere in every village, war memorial. And so the question has to be done to be circulated in France. A question that captures honestly the whole national mood, asked aloud in a print by a French politician earlier that year. More here or a Danzig? Die for Danzig? Why should young Frenchmen die for a far off German city on the Baltic? That question, that deep war weary doubt about whether this war is worth fighting at all, is eating at France from within even as its armies do stand ready? Now let's go east to

46:26Moscow. Stalin in early October is the great cynical winner of autumn without firing more than a token shot he's taken his half of Poland, a vast territory, millions of new subjects, a buffer zone, push westward exactly as he wanted, and he's not finished. In these very weeks he's moving to collect the rest of his agreed sphere. He is summoning the leaders from small Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Damascus, and pressing mutual assistance trees, often at gunpoint, planting Soviet garrisons on their soil, the first step towards swallowing them whole. His attention is turning northward toward Finland, which is refusing his demand, or refusal that before the year is out, will explode into the brutal winter war. Stalin, the catastrophe is in Poland, is not a catastrophe at all, it's an opportunity and he's just seizing it with both hands. Of course in Poland itself, which on the 6th of October has ceased for the moment to exist as a state, it's a different mode. Its land is now split along the line, Hitler and Stalin drew the west and center under

47:29German occupation, the east under Soviet, and in both halves the terror has already begun. In the German zone, the SS are already at their work. The mass arrests, the execution of the educated classes, the beginning of a campaign to decapitate the nation and reduce its people to a pool of slave labor. The Jews of Poland, the largest Jewish community in Europe, are being hurted, marked and concentrated. The first steps on a road whose end is not yet built, but is already, in the minds of the men in Berlin, imagined. In the Soviet zone, there's a different terror. Mass deportations to the east arrest, the killing of officers, including the massacre of thousands of captured Polish officers, the following spring in a forest called Ketin. But Poland is not yet finished, we have to remember that. This government is regrouping in exile, its soldiers are escaping abroad to fight under other flags. Its people are beginning already to organize the most formidable underground resistance movement in occupied Europe. The state is destroyed,

48:32yes that's true, but the nation refuses to die. And then finally, way across the Atlantic, the United States, watching and officially uninvolved. America in October 1939 is neutral because it's bound by its own neutrality acts. And it's determined overwhelmingly so to stay out of another European war. The memory of the last one of those doboys sent over there in 1917 is bitter. And isolationism runs deep and strong. President Franklin Roosevelt sympathizes with Britain and France and he's quietly working to loosen the neutrality laws so that America can at least sell weapons to the democracies, that policy that will become cash and carry. But that's the limit of at least for now, no American is going to go fight. And almost no one in America yet grasps that the events of these weeks have set in motion a chain that will, in time, hold the United States into the largest war in history. And in time, make it the most powerful nation on earth.

49:34But as I alluded to at the beginning of this episode, I think it's a good one. World War II had already started. It started several years earlier, it just started in Asia. So next week, let's spin our globe, head back over to China and Japan, and get everybody caught up and on the same page before we launch ourselves further into the abyss. So