Maj.Striker said:
Regardless, at that time there was absolutely no good provocation for anyone to declare war on Germany.
Oh, but there was plenty of good reasons. For example, I have here a few books, written in the 1920s (!!), which argue that within two decades, Poland will be crushed by Germany and Russia, and France will fall next. So people weren't completely oblivious to what was going on (as one French general put it after Versailles: "this isn't a peace treaty, this is a twenty year armistice"). Here, read
this speech from 1936 - it lays out as clear as day the need for military action (only to shoot it down with a lame-brained "we should persuade France to negotiate with the guy I just said cannot be trusted").
However, this was a war that neither France nor Britain wanted - so they deluded themselves into believing that Hitler was a nice guy who was going to magically hop over Poland without hurting it, and run off into the east chasing after Stalin. And that, I would say, pretty much proves my original point - that the millions of so-called casualties of WWII are actually casualties of the peace-movement.
Your ascertainment that Polish forces had technological military equivalency or superiority is very tainted though.
Oh, very tainted, right - what a cute way of implying I'm biased because I'm Polish. An implication I don't appreciate in the least, given your apparent ignorance on this matter - which we will discuss below.
The Polish calvary divisions though perhaps equal in number were no match for the German tanks. They would have been slaughtered on the plains of Poland in 1936 just as they were in 1939. Three years would not have made a noticeable difference there.
The German army was
built from scratch from 1935 onwards. Those four years made the difference from Germany having 100,000 men and
no tanks or planes to having 1,600,000 men, 2,600 tanks, and 2,000 planes - surely, you cannot possibly be under the impression that the German army was magically rebuilt over the course of one year, and then spent the remaining three years waiting patiently for Hitler to gather up the courage to go to war? If yes, allow me to shatter that myth.
I honestly don't know how many tanks and armoured vehicles Poland or Germany had in 1936, but I can tell you a tank is not something you build overnight - so Germany, which barely even had an army at that point, was at a disadvantage. It is also important to consider that tanks in 1936 (or indeed, 1939) were not as fast, powerful or well armoured as they became later, and so they did not pose as much of a threat.
In 1936, the German army was roughly 300,000 conscripts - and no reserves to mobilise, because conscription had only been introduced in 1935, so anyone that could be put into uniform without three months of basic training
already was in uniform. Poland, on the other hand, had a pitifully small standing army of 350,000... but it had the capability to mobilise a million men at a few weeks notice - people who had been conscripted in the previous years, and so actually knew which end of a gun to point at the enemy.
(footnote: by 1938, Germany had a standing army of 600,000 men - more than the Polish standing army, but less than the combined forces of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France)
Three other things are worth noting. Firstly, the "cavalry against tanks" thing is a myth. The Polish army may have been poorly equipped in 1939, but it wasn't stupid - you don't charge a tank. The cavalry was a blitzkrieg weapon - it had better striking power than infantry (especially given that many cavalry units had light artillery), and it was much faster... but you don't charge tanks with it, because cavalry units had enough heavy weaponry to deal with tanks the, ahem, new-fashioned way.
(footnote: in 1939, Poland lost about 200,000 men, the Germans lost about 50,000; in 1940, France lost 390,000 men, the Germans lost about 35,000. So Poland, whose army was smaller but included more cavalry, lost less troops and inflicted more casualties... what was that you said about cavalry getting slaughtered?)
(second footnote: during WWII, Germany also used cavalry troops - IIRC, they reached upwards of 500,000 in numbers; the Soviets also used cavalry, in even greater numbers; truly, cavalry was an obsolete formation that nobody used any more
)
Secondly, the Polish air force (which is a particular interest of mine) was in 1936-38 at its absolute peak. It so happens that, at this time, it had some of the best fighter planes in the world (just about every country in the Balkans bought their planes from Poland). Yes, the new German planes were superior, but in March 1936, they were only just getting into production - the Bf109 fighter was in prototype stages. The infamous Stuka didn't exist at all yet, and neither did most of its other planes, which would for the most part only begin prototype testing in 1936 or later. So here, too, Poland stood superior - we had a small air force, but a good one, while they had... well, an air
farce.
Finally, that was a comparison of Poland and Germany - and while I believe I've made it clear that Poland could have taken out Germany single-handed in 1936, I'm going to add a few words about France - because, I'll remind you, I originally said that Poland didn't go to war because France was unwilling to support them, so any speculation about the outcome of that war must include the French. I'll keep this brief, though.
In 1939, France had 900,000 men, with 5,000,000 more ready for mobilisation. That's... a lot. Dunno about 1936, but the French didn't invest much in their military at this time, so it likely wasn't much less. In 1936 or even 1938, the French wouldn't have had tanks at all, but if Germany had to defend both the west and east, German tanks (if there was any) would not have been a big issue. You mentioned the Germans having good leaders. Yes, absolutely - but what good would they have been, in the face of a technologically and numerically-superior foe attacking from two (or three, if we count the Czechs) directions?
So, feel free to dispute whether Poland would have been able to do it alone (no, wait, scratch that - please don't dispute it, I don't want to debate this secondary issue any more than necessary
), but the fact that Germany could have been easily defeated by the combined forces of Poland and France even as late as 1939 is entirely beyond dispute - and that's all that matters here, since my original argument was that it was the French and British unwillingness to go to war that cost the world some 50 million people.
My apologies for the long post. I tried to keep it brief - honest
.
). Similarly, while Hitler had indeed announced the great new German army in 1935, there's a long way from announcing something to actually creating it. The fact that he originally ordered the trebling of the army's size in secrecy is pretty indicative of how things looked - unless you know of a way of hiding two hundred thousand men in uniform, you have to agree that most likely this order meant building up the army infrastructure (officers, et cetera) in preparation for the open introduction of conscription, when the army would reach the 300,000 size openly. In any case, the German army was capable of training roughly 300,000 conscripts a year - so if conscription was introduced in March 1935, the highest possible estimate of total German strength by the time of the Rhineland crisis was about 300,000 conscripts, plus whatever they had before. Even if we assume they had 300,000 (but they didn't, because you really can't hide 200,000 men in a barn), the end result is still a mere 600,000, which is a little less than Poland's 1,350,000 men (350,000 plus conscripts). There's just no comparison - Germany would have been screwed.
