How World War II Might Never Have Happened

It is taken as article of certainty among historians that World War II began on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland.

But in the first couple weeks of September 1939 after that event, it was not yet certain that this conflict would become Great War resembling the one of 1914.

Because of treaties the Poles had signed with the French and British, committing those nations to defend Polish independence, the German invasion of Poland caused Germany to be at war immediately with France and Britain as well.

But Britain and France didn't want a war with Germany. Britain had no motive for a continental war and its policy was to avoid it as completely as possible, while retaining its leverage as master of the High Seas.

Meanwhile, although in 1914 France (at least the French leadership in the Defense Ministry) had desperately wanted a war with Germany in order to regain Alsace and Lorraine (this is Clarke's thesis in The Sleepwalkers), now France had no stomach or desire for a real war with Germany.

France had all the territory in wanted in Europe itself. So when the French were forced into war with Germany after the invasion of Poland, nominally coming to Poland's aid by invading Germany from the west, their invasion was lackluster, almost a formality to show the Poles that they were fulfilling their obligation. They got about ten miles into the Saarland and decided that was far enough. The British press called it The Phoney War.

Poland, meanwhile, even without a French invasion on the other side of Germany, was not at all a pushover for the Germans,

It is true that many forward units were overrun by the initial blitzkrieg, but the Germans had not perfected this technique, and the Poles put up fierce and stubborn resistance in complexes of hill-top bunkers that had built, inside Poland, as resistance to invasion. These were more than a little successful, and slowed the advance of the German Army in no small way, even when vastly outnumbered.

In short, the myth that the Germans overran Poland in September 1939 is completely wrong. For one thing, the Polish Army was one of the largest in Europe. It would be no picnic for any army to beat them. Moreover, the Poles had a pretty good strategy for a long-term war against Germany.

It was called the Romanian Bridgehead. It took advantage of the fact that Poland, at that time, stretched southeastward from its current boundaries and included a small common border with the nation of Romania. The two then-bordering nations had in fact signed a defense pact in 1921, right after World War I.

The Second Polish Republic (1918-1939). Poland and its ally Romania shared a common border. This was the chokepoint of the entire Polish strategy to survive and repel a German invasion.

Poland's strategy was to use this common border, and the fact that Romania had a port on the Black Sea, to provide a means to resupply the Polish Army in the event of an invasion from Germany. They would be able to do this with the support of the British and French fleets in the Mediterranean. 

The strategy looked especially good since the terrain of then-southeastern Poland near the Romanian border, to which the Polish Army would retreat as a last redoubt, was rather easily defensible. The Poles planted many ammunition dumps in the rough country there, in the marshes around the Dniper River, to keep them shooting at the Germans until supply lines could be activated.

As part of the plan the Poles had decided to send their entire navy out of port, so as not to be captured by the German in the first wave of the invasion. They actually did this step, right at the end of August 1939, in the days leading up to the Germany invasion. The Polish Navy ships were sent to British and French ports, so they could be used in the resupply effort to the Polish Army (in Southeastern Poland) through the Romanian port of Constanta on the Black Sea.

But the Poles failed at one element in this plan, and it is the reason that the war became a Great War. The waited too long. They fought hard for two weeks until their commander gave the order to retreat toward Lwow, the city in southeastern Poland amidst the rough country near the Romanian border.

The order was given on September 14. Then three days later, something happened that would change everything, and the Poles never got to activate the Romanian Bridgehead, and never got o make a long stand against Germany. Instead Poland would be completely overrun, and would cease to exist as nation within a month.

The Poland Army barely even resisted this last wave. They didn't see it coming. When the Soviet Red Army crossed the border, many Poles even thought that the Soviets were coming to their aid, to fight alongside them as ally.

It is foolish to think that Stalin would have done anything else than he had done, by invading along the entire border, and quickly grabbing the area along the Romanian border before the Poles had a chance to retreat there. 

Stalin had basically tipped his hand to his intentions on August 23, with the shocking treaty he had signed with Hitler. The Americans even knew about the secret protocol to divide Poland between them. Even if the Poles weren't tipped off to this (they may have been), they would have foolish not to see it coming. It was certainly not because they trusted Stalin, but perhaps they quaintly believed that it would be Stalin's interest to do things the old fashioned way, by coming to Poland's aid.

In the poignancy of this moment is the flash of the loss of twenty million lives in the coming war. Perhaps the Poles were doomed by a Russian invasion in any scenario, but perhaps if the Polish Army had been able to retreat towards the Romanian border, and activate the resupply line through the Black Sea in such a way as to compel the French and British to protect it, it would have been much more difficult for the Soviets to wipe out the Polish Army in a still-existing "Free Poland," even as it  dwindled to a small corner of the country in the southeastern marshes.

Just having a still-fighting Polish presence there would have made the entire concept of "giant-front" war between Germany and Russia, along their (later) common border, would have been much more problematic for both sides. Moreover the French and British would have been involved in Polish resupply effort, and their (probable) direct active presence would have essentially acted as power buffer between Germany and Russia in a way that a mere treaty obligation. There is no way that Britain could have refused to aid the Poles in this scenario without a loss of honor unacceptable at the time, because it involved operations on the sea. Britain would have forfeited its status as a Great Power by such an abdication.

Stalin would have instead enjoyed seeing Germany grind its Army down fighting a war of increasingly diminishing returns against the Rump Polish State in southeastern Poland. It would have been useful to see the ways the Poles effectively neutralized aspects of the blitzkrieg, and found weaknesses in the German Army.

Moreover, he could not have attacked the Polish Army directly (which he would have needed to do in this scenario), without directly looking like the bad guy to the western powers (instead they looked the other way. There were many supporters of the Soviet regime in the western government and the western press, so the fact that the Soviets snuck their way into conquest of Poland could be easily overlooked compared German atrocities.  

Of course there still could have been a Great War by other means, but without the direct German invasion of the Soviet Union, it is hard to imagine it playing out in as horrifically destructive a way as possible.* In the end the rapid fall of Poland (which was caused by the failure of the Polish Army to retreat swiftly enough towards the Romanian Bridgehead, and left their southeastern flank exposed to easy Soviet conquest) that made this catastrophe almost inevitable.

In this alternate reality, perhaps the Warner Brothers release of Constanta wins the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1942.

Instead, in reality, the bridgehead had to be established on the west coast of Africa.

*Would Stalin have invaded Finland just six weeks after the fall of Poland in this scenario? This was naked aggression on his part, as much as Hitler's invasion of Poland, but it was not awarded the status of a war crime on the same status, for all the various same reasons that the west excused Soviet actions as reasonable and justifiable on some level. Would Stalin have taken such a step, at that time, without the cover of Germany already the designated villain of a continental conflict?