Blitzkrieg September 1, 1939: a new kind of warfare engulfs Poland

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Overhead, another new German weapon seized control of the skies: the Junkers-87 Stuka dive bomber, which plunged down to blast road junctions and railroad lines; it also had a device that emitted screams to spread terror among its victims. And then there were the heavy bombers. General Wladyslaw Anders, who would eventually lead the Polish exile army through the battles of North Africa and Italy, heard the ominous drone of Heinkel-111s overhead and later remembered that "squadron after squadron of aircraft could be seen flying in file, like cranes, to Warsaw." At 6 a.m. those deadly cranes began raining bombs on the unprepared, ill-defended city and its civilian inhabitants. In those same surprise raids on that first gray morning, the German Luftwaffe virtually wiped out the entire 500-plane Polish air force on the ground. The dawn surprise, the rampaging panzers, the shrieking dive bombers, all were elements in a new German invention that was to change the nature of warfare: blitzkrieg.

Blitzkrieg and deception. In disputed Danzig, the once German port administered by the League of Nations since the end of World War I, the attack had begun half an hour before the invasion, when local Nazi Storm Troopers seized several key buildings and intersections. From the harbor, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived a few days earlier on a "courtesy visit," began emptying its 11-in. guns at the Westerplatte peninsula, where the Poles were authorized to station 88 soldiers. The only real resistance came from the Polish Post Office on Heveliusplatz, where 51 postal workers barricaded the doors. When the Storm Troopers blasted open part of the building, the Poles retreated to the cellar; the Nazis sprayed them with gasoline and set them afire. By nightfall, Danzig had, said its local Nazi leader, "returned to the Great German Reich."

The Poles were amazed at the speed of the German successes -- even the Germans were surprised -- but the defenders counted on two allies to save them. One was General Mud, who traditionally emerged from the September rains that regularly converted the Vistula River into an impassable barrier and the vulnerable fields of central Poland into a morass. The other ally was the Anglo-French partnership, which bound the two great powers of the West to defend Poland by armed force.