In this work, Roger Moorhouse focuses on the opening act of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, a campaign that he contends has been “all but forgotten outside Poland . . . [and] is barely known or understood in the English-speaking historiography” (xvii). To be sure, Wehrmacht and Red Army military operations in Poland often serve as a mere footnote to the larger war in the east, a literature dominated by accounts of Operation Barbarossa or the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. While general histories have minimized the campaign and stylized it as the birth of Blitzkrieg, Alexander Rossino and Jochen Böhler have provided detailed studies of the campaign in English and German, respectively, even if their audience remained largely limited to specialist readers. In this regard, Moorhouse offers a welcome addition to the scholarship with a highly readable and informative narrative that makes excellent use of Polish sources in order to “rebalance the wonky Western narrative of the Second World War” (xix).
A clear strength and historical corrective of the work includes the context that Moorhouse provides concerning Polish military operations that explode several wartime and postwar myths propagated by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Chief among these shibboleths is the Blitzkrieg myth epitomized by the Reich Propaganda Ministry's depiction of Polish cavalry making futile charges against German Army tank formations. While such an engagement, as well as a cavalry battle between Wehrmacht and Polish mounted units, did occur, Moorhouse demonstrates that Polish cavalry were primarily intended to fight dismounted even if they did conduct several successful mounted forays against German infantry. Furthermore, he conclusively shows that far from being destroyed on the ground, the Polish Air Force mounted a stout if limited defense even as it faced a technologically and numerically superior Luftwaffe. With regard to Luftwaffe operations, the work highlights the unrestrained use of German aircraft against Polish cities, towns, and villages as well as the routine strafing of refugee columns leading to Moorhouse's apt insight that “[t]he road to Coventry and Dresden began at Wieluń” (314). Perhaps most importantly, he reveals that, despite the significant advantages enjoyed by German forces in terms of materiel, technology, numbers, and strategic positioning. Polish forces often gave as well as they took against German and Soviet forces, especially with the country's effective abandonment by Great Britain and France with these erstwhile Polish allies offering rhetorical but little if any materiel backing in the face of Nazi aggression.
If discussions of German-Polish combat remain scant in the historiography, those of Polish-Soviet combat have been almost completely overlooked. Moorhouse helps to remedy this omission with a detailed examination of the variety of interactions, including direct combat, between Polish military and civil forces and the Red Army after the Soviet invasion on 17 September 1939. Indeed, Polish military successes against the Red Army not only offer insights on the continuing effects of Stalin's purges on the Soviet military, but also exposed some of the problems that these forces would face in the subsequent ‘Winter War’ (1939–40) against Finland. In other words, if the Stavka (Red Army High Command) had been paying closer attention during operations in Poland, they well might have anticipated some of the issues they faced in the attack on Finland.
In Genesis des Genozids Polen 1939–1941 (Darmstadt, 2004), Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Bogdan Musial described the campaign into Poland as inherently genocidal based on the widespread use of reprisals and mass killings by German forces. Likewise, Moorhouse provides numerous accounts of atrocities by both German and Soviet forces as the former unleashed “a race war in the west of Poland” while the latter “imported class war to the east” (208). If Josef Stalin cynically justified intervention under the pretext of protecting the Ukrainian and Belorussian populations in the midst of the alleged collapse of the Polish government, Moorhouse reveals important insights into the sometimes-fraught relationships between Poles and Ukrainians. On a related point, this reviewer would have liked to see a more developed examination of the similarly problematic relationship between Polish Christians and Polish Jews at the time, a glaring lacuna based on the continuing historical debate and contention surrounding this issue. Likewise, one might question the inclusion of the discussion of the role of Pervitin (methamphetamine) in the work, especially based on the fact that the cited Wehrmacht analysis on the supposedly crucial influence of the drug was limited to specific situations and not considered determinative for the entire campaign as suggested by Moorhouse's use of the phrase “military success in 1939,” even if he ultimately concludes that “the primary driver of German atrocities . . . was simple racism” (137).
In the final analysis, Moorhouse achieves his goal of “restoring” the voices of Polish protagonists to the history of the September campaign (320). In the process, he also effectively demolishes a number of myths that emerged in large part as result of the absence of these voices in non-Polish historical narratives of the conflict. While the strategic, diplomatic, and military odds were stacked against Poland in September 1939 and effectively ensured a Polish defeat from the start of the invasion, the courage and agency of Polish forces deserves a more prominent place in the historical record—a fact made ever more salient considering the events surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as this review was being written.
