‘Like most of us, I believed in happy endings,’ a young fighter pilot recalled. Poland’s fiercely nationalistic people responded to the Nazi threat with the same spirit as the doomed young men of the Confederacy in 1861. Few of her compatriots doubted that a conflict with Germany was imminent, because Hitler had made plain his commitment to conquest. ‘Somehow, I considered it prophetic,’ wrote one of its Polish readers, Rula Langer. During the summer of 1939 Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the old American South, enjoyed a surge of popularity in Poland. Even Hitler’s Reich was at first ill-equipped to generate the intensity of violence demanded by a death grapple between the most powerful nations on earth. For every eventual belligerent save the Poles themselves, the struggle began slowly: only in its third year did global death and destruction attain the vastness sustained thereafter until 1945. Their declarations of war on Germany were gestures which even some staunch anti-Nazis thought foolish, because futile.

Britain and France lacked both the will and the means to take effective action towards fulfilment of security guarantees they had given earlier to the Poles. 1 Poland Betrayed While Adolf Hitler was determined to wage war, it was no more inevitable that his 1939 invasion of Poland precipitated global conflict than that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria did so in 1914.

All hell let loose by max hastings