On the anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, Arthur Chrenkoff wonders if Stalin’s greatest miscalculation wasn’t refraining from attacking the Nazi forces after they’d been fighting the Polish army for three weeks in 1939:
Military situation in Poland, 14 September 1939 (map does not show Slovak Army activity in southern Poland).
United States Military Academy, Department of History via Wikimedia Commons.
In late August, the Soviet Union signed the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact with Germany, effectively green-lighting Hitler’s invasion of Poland a few days later. The secret protocols attached to the pact stipulated for the division of Central Europe between the two powers, with the Soviet Union being rewarded for its cooperation with the Nazis with the gift of eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia, or the north-eastern Romania (as well as, it transpired later, the German non-interference during the Soviet invasion of Finland).
The Soviets were not naive (even if Stalin discounted all the indications of the coming German attack in 1941) to believe in a long-term friendship with Nazi Germany. There are strong indications that the Soviet Union intended to attack Germany, perhaps sometime in 1942, but Hitler beat it to the punch. The official Russian justification for the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact has certainly always been that the Soviet Union needed to buy itself extra time to prepare for this eventual showdown, since in 1939 it was still nowhere near ready (not least because of Stalin’s decapitation of the Red Army’s top leadership during the Great Terror a few years before).
But what if that was Stalin’s greatest miscalculation ever? By 17 September, when the Red Army crossed the eastern borders of Poland in accordance with the secret partition agreement, it was pretty clear to all that Poland was close to a military defeat (it would have hold on for longer, of course, without the Soviet stab in the back, but this would not have changed much without the Western allies’ military involvement, which never eventuated). While the German armed forces were winning, they were also overcommitted and overstretched. The German high command expected a quicker and easier victory and were taken aback by the ferocity of Polish resistance, despite clear German superiority in armour, air power and logistics. By the second half of September, some ammunition stocks were beginning to run low (particularly bombs) and motorised equipment, from tanks to trucks, has been significantly degraded through a combination of attrition and significant wear and tear in Polish autumn.
So what if the Red Army, instead of eventually coming to a halt along the previously agreed demarcation line, kept going west? There was no significant Polish military force to take into account and German army was tired and weakened after three weeks of hard fighting (losing a third of its tanks and 25 per cent of its air force in the process). While Wehrmacht had numerical advantage on the ground, this was only because the Red Army chose to invade Poland with half a million men, which was certainly enough to subdue the thinly-held eastern marches, but should they have needed it, the Soviets had reserves to draw upon to even out the field against the Germans. Even with their 33 committed divisions, the Red Army had a significant advantage over the German armed forces in the Polish theatre in terms of armour and air power (two to one for the former).
Who would have triumphed in this 1939 clash of the rival totalitarian war machines? We don’t know, of course, except that at the time of the invasion of Poland, Germany was militarily at its weakest point it would be until the final months of World War Two. Should the Red Army have proven victorious in September and October 1939, it would have likely ended up in Berlin in a matter of weeks, instead of years it eventually took. It’s a reasonable guess that Great Britain and France, faced with the Soviet invasion of the Reich and the looming defeat of Hitler, would have overcome their initial inertia and moved into Germany from the west so as to prevent having the communists proverbially water their horses in the Rhine. In this scenario, we would have ended up with a divided Germany and a divided Europe (though without much of the rest of Central and south-Eastern Europe in the Soviet camp) some six years earlier and without the tens of millions of dead, a ruined continent, and the Holocaust that accompanied World War Two as it actually unfolded.
Alas.
