One has to ask, did two sets of rules apply here? Did the guarantee of help only apply in the case of an attack from Germany? Was it an excuse? Was it a case of a strong competitor taking up a position, exactly where he was wanted, in a military dispute?
France and Britain did nothing to help Poland. To allow Russia entry into Poland without intervention however, held a very large advantage for them in Europe. After all, their economy had not been endangered before those events. Russia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Wjatscheslaw Molotov declared afterwards, “an attack from the German Wehrmacht, followed by the Red Army, was enough to destroy what was left in Poland of the monstrous product of the Versailles Pact”.
German and Russian officers shook hands when meeting one another on the agreed demarcation lines, just as the Russians and Americans were to do on the banks of the Elbe five years later. A joint German/Russian victory parade in Brest-Litovsk ended the Polish campaign. Then the suffering of the Polish people began.
The Germans declared that their territory would be ruled under a ‘General Government’. With that, Hitler returned to the doubtful practice of ‘colonial politics’. The occupying forces ruled, just as the former Russian Tsar did, or as France had ruled Morocco as a protectorate. One could not speak of the freedom to vote or of a referendum. The Poles, having had enough of the suppression and injustice to German nationals, could not however escape the consequences. The continued existence of Germany, and the war which was to come, contributed to the hard régime in Poland under which they then had to live. That does not excuse it.
The Soviet Union pushed their borders a further three hundred kilometres in a westerly direction, annexing to the east Brest-Litovsk and along the river Bug, being a vast area with a population of 12 million people. On ‘bestowing’ Russian citizenship upon the younger generation, the male citizens were then promptly conscripted to the Russian Armed Forces. The NKVD, Russia’s Secret Service, transported 1,650,000 of the population from that area to Siberia. There until 1942, 900,000 died. In 1940, there were already 15,000 Polish officers alone, in prisoner of war camps. They were shot. It was in the spring of 1943 that German troops discovered a massive grave area, twenty kilometres from Smolensk, in Katyn. It was the area where those Polish officers were buried and the blame was put at Germany’s door. That lie was deliberately nurtured until the early 1990s.
After the “destruction of the most dangerous aspect of the Versailles Pact”, to quote Hitler, he made ‘moves’ towards Paris and London. With his suggestions for peace Hitler did not understand why France and Britain wanted to interfere in a military argument between two other countries. They continued with their declaration of war, which would escalate with worldwide results. Poland had to be used to suppress Germany’s competitors, was the ensuing political comment. “Was that so wrong?” was the question then asked.
The French soldier was already tired of the war and it had really not begun. For them, politics were a fraud and they had no intention of ’dying for Danzig’. As the first allied British Expeditionary Forces landed in Cherbourg, in September 1939, the sum total of a reception committee consisted of one naval representative, two policemen, a couple of old ‘market women’ and a fisherman. There was not a hint of the ‘brothers-in-arms’ support, as was expected at that time. The higher ranks of the French Army, sitting cosily in their concrete bunkers on the Maginot Line, made jokes about the British. “The British will fight to the last soldier, the last French soldier”! They behaved as if there was no war and their Allied counterparts from over the water had the impression that the French had already acquiesced.
The war now threatened Holland. At the end of August 1939, the government announced over the radio, as well as in the press and by distribution of posters, that special trains would take the assigned conscripts to their military designations ‘somewhere in Holland’. The morale of those soldiers was mixed, the best of which could only be described as ‘good’. Many thought that the measures were a false alarm and all hoped that Holland would be spared the shock of war, as it had been twenty years before.
An ordnance officer had his hands full, his duty being to take the incomplete uniforms out of their mothballs for distribution. At first sight, the combination of uniform parts did not give a uniform fit for a soldier defending his country. Knitting committees were formed in every corner of the country to knit warm socks and gloves for the army. The absence of uniforms and weapons was a catastrophe, the soldiers wearing any sort of civilian hat and carrying wooden walking sticks for weapons, when on guard duty. Five days after reporting for duty, sailors belonging to five ‘older’ age groups, were sent back home, there being neither barracks, cooking facilities nor equipment for them. During mobilisation, the deficiency in qualified officers was very noticeable. The general disinterest in the Army, nurtured by the politicians, had not produced one single application for the Royal Military Academy in Breda during 1935–36.
The Dutch protected the whole of their coastline with floating mines. The estuary of Zierikzee and Schiermonnikoog was closed to shipping, and the ferry service to Britain was cancelled. The Army placed explosives on all of the important bridges and strategic points on the easterly border. It was only when 100% completed did the population begin to feel a little safer behind their ‘water-line’, should the war begin earnest. The military however, began to doubt the measures of defence for their land, having been taken completely unawares by Germany’s ‘lightning’ attack on Poland. They knew next to nothing about Hitler’s newest weapon, his airborne troops. None of the western powers had airborne troops and only Russia possessed such units besides Germany.
Far behind the Rhine, on the Maginot Line, with its impenetrable system of concrete bunkers, one had the sense of security. Strong men such as General Heinz Guderian, the designer of the modern and independent Panzer regiments, were few and far between, or non-existent. So Charles de Gaulle found no one to listen, as that young army captain also suggested this strategy of modern warfare. His commanding officers, staid and wary of new methods, declaring among other reasons, that ‘oil is messy, horse-manure isn’t’.
No one from my family had been conscripted. My father had protected Holland’s borders in the First World War. So now he was exempt, as were Jan Adriaan Matthijs, the eldest of the six sons at 21, and Evert nineteen years old, because he was apprenticed in the Merchant Navy at that time. The other sons at 16, 13, 10 and 4 years old were of course too young.
The whole family used to sit together in the evening sun on the terrace, throughout September 1939, to listen to the latest news issuing from the Bakelite radio that we possessed. We had no clue as to the future fate of the members of the family, as soldiers or civilians. How could we? We were part of a land which, apart from their colonial politics, had never been to war. Neither our father nor our uncle could describe to us how awful the reality of war was. So we found such reports sensational rather than fatal and we, in our naïvety, wondered at the ‘sporty’ achievements of this modern German Army. The continuous and very negative campaign against the Third Reich by the media, at that time, created a very defiant opposition in us, and in other young people too.
The Dutch fought for their official neutrality, in the hope of being spared this war, and at the same time played with fire. It would appear that foreign Secret Service agents ‘romped’ around Holland. Its General Staff sought military contact with the Allies without knowing of such contacts. This did not escape Germany’s notice and they objected. They declared that France and Britain intended a military thrust to the Ruhr, using reconnoitred positions, not only in ‘neutral’ Belgium, but in Holland as well.