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Instead, Finland rejected the Soviet demands, and on November 30 Soviet forces invaded along the entire Finnish frontier. Joseph Stalin had, in fact, already drawn up plans for a Communist Finland, and he expected the same response as the Baltic States had given. In the fall of 1939, the USSR demanded that the Finnish government cede some territory and allow bases on Finnish soil. They were compelled by Soviet pressure to accept Soviet military garrisons and political advisers on their soil. The three Baltic States - Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia - had been assigned to the Soviet Union sphere by the August and September agreements. More than one million Poles, those regarded as a threat to the Communist order, were deported to labor camps in the Soviet Union. The region was integrated at once into the Soviet system. Suffering almost no casualties, the Red Army took parts of Poland that had been seized by Russia and Austria back in the 18th century but returned to Poland after World War I. The chief beneficiary of the war in Poland was the Soviet Union. The British only dropped leaflets on German cities. The Germans bombed Polish citizens mercilessly, but for a while refrained from bombing cities in the West. On October 14, 1939, a German submarine managed to penetrate the defenses of the main British naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, and there sank the battleship Royal Oak. Conversely, German submarines began to sink Allied merchant ships. In December 1939, Britain's Royal Navy so damaged the German pocket battleship Graf Spee that it was scuttled in the South Atlantic. The lull was nicknamed the 'Phony War' - a war with no fighting.Ī small amount of naval activity did occur, which gave citizens on both sides something to cheer about. This explains why for the first six months of the war the Western states did very little. Britain and France expected a war of at least three years. The core of the plan was to blockade and contain Nazi Germany until the war of attrition forced the Germans to abandon the contest as they had done in 1918. Their military staffs had drawn up a 'war plan' during the summer of 1939 in which the loss of Poland was accepted as inevitable. Britain and France did nothing to help their smaller ally. For Poland, dismemberment and harsh totalitarian rule was the reality. On September 28, the two dictatorships signed another treaty, which divided Poland between them.Ībandoned by Western powers and failed by a group of Polish womenįor the Western powers, this provoked fears of a totalitarian alliance against them. On September 17, once it was clear that Poland was close to defeat, Red Army units moved into Poland and met up with victorious German troops along a prearranged frontier. The terms of the German-Soviet pact, signed in August 1939, gave Joseph Stalin a sphere of influence in eastern Poland. German invasion also triggered Soviet Union intervention. There was little popular enthusiasm for war, but a strong wave of anti-German and anti-Fascist sentiment produced a resigned recognition that Adolf Hitler would only stop if he was faced by force.Īlmost immediately, the British and French empires (except for Ireland) joined the contest, turning it into a worldwide war, fought not only in Europe but across the oceans. In Britain and France, the populations had braced themselves for war in the closing weeks of the summer.

Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany on September 3 when it became clear that negotiating a German withdrawal was hopeless. But in addition to the localized conflict with Poland, the German invasion provoked a global conflict. This was the war Adolf Hitler had hoped for in 1939. Klukowski two weeks later, 'to discuss the causes of our defeat.This is a fact, but we just can't believe it.' Ten days later, after a devastating air assault, Warsaw surrendered. By September 17, the war was virtually over. Polish air forces were eliminated, and the Polish army was split and encircled. By September 7, forward units were only 25 miles from Warsaw, the Polish capital. Within five days, German forces occupied all of the frontier zones.

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