Poland 1938?

Ray B

So if you were a citizen in Poland in September 1938 and you saw your "friends" just give away half of a neighboring country and you had the premonition that your country might be next on the list, and you saw that the aggressor country had military weaknesses that could be exploited, what would you do:

1. Believe that your allies know what is best and wait for them to take care of you.
2. Believe that as a citizen you have little power to change anything.
3. You know that after Poland is given away, food and water will be in short supply, so start stockpiling.
4. Support a government that would be willing to take necessary offensive action to fend off the aggressors.

With the light of history and hindsight the answers now seem obvious. But just as an exercise in social studies, exchange the year to the present and the country to 1. Israel, 2. Saudi Arabia, 3. United States and answer the same questions.

p3skyking

If history is any guide (and it always is for the astute), emigrating far away very quickly would be in the cards.

buschmaster

being in this country, I would have to go with #2, because too many of the rest are ding dongs. I can't stand alone. time to get the hell out.

however, if the rest of the country were populated with clones of me, being of Prussian stock, we would go on the attack and kill them all. especially at that time when preemptive war was usually the first choice of things.

jonk

If only it were that simple.

Poland was actually on very good terms with the Nazis for a good part of Hitler's reign, and yeah, it was probably with the Austrian Anschluss and Sudetenland/Munich fiasco that they started to get nervous.

But with France and Britain, having the largest armies and navies in Europe respectively guaranteeing my safety, I'd probably sleep easy, thinking that no way Germany would militarily attack. Honestly, in terms of sheer numbers, if the Allies had had their stuff together strategically and in terms of battlefield tactics, the war should have been over in September. When Hitler invaded Poland, France should have launched an immediate attack against the largely empty Ruhr. However inept or uncoordinated, it would have put Germany in a hard place. Even if they had withdrawn immediately from Poland, half of Germany would have been overrun before they could do so.

Rack Ops

Everyone remembers that Poland's hapless army got steamrolled by German Panzers, but people seem to forget they were invaded by the Soviet Union as well.

Even if the valiant Poles had managed to defeat Nazi machine guns and tanks with saber-wielding Hussars they would have still been crushed by the Russian bear stabbing them in the back.


Nothing short of atomic weapons could have saved Poland in the opening days of WW2