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The Best They Could Do: Poland 1935 |
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Could they have done it? How long would it have taken? Alternate History Miscellaneous Challenges
Could you do better than the Japanese leadership? POD is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. A lot of the comments don't make sense unless you've following the dialogue. Here are some of my general-interest ones. |
It’s
May 1935. Poland’s long term
leader Józef Piłsudski has
died of liver cancer (as he did historically). Up to replace him: you.
If you thought the Japanese and Italians were in a bad position (last issue’s challenges), now you’re in a real world of hurt. You’ve got the Soviets on one side under a leadership that’s quite willing to starve millions of its people to death to become a modern military power. On the other side you’ve got the Germans under Hitler, who are quite willing to drive their economy to ruin in order to rebuild German military power. Hitler isn’t implacably hostile to Poland yet, but he needs to go through Poland to implement his overall policy of conquering living space to the east, and his long-range plan for Poland is to reduce it to an agricultural colony for Germany. So, you have two enemies with much larger economies, much larger populations, and much greater power and willingness to sacrifice people and prosperity to build up military power. But it gets worse. Not only do you have those great enemies, you also have lesser enemies who are quite willing to do you harm. To the north, the Lithuanians resent Poland’s seizure of Vilnius, a city claimed by the Lithuanians, in the chaotic days after World War I. To the south, Czechoslovakia is hostile, an attitude left over from the Czech seizure of disputed and economically important border regions inhabited mostly by Poles while the Poles were fighting the Russo-Polish war. Czechoslovakia seems like a natural ally, and defending Poland becomes much more difficult with it in the hands of a hostile power. Historically, the German occupation of Czechoslovakia almost doubled the amount of territory the Poles had to defend against a German attack. On the other hand, the Poles has to be careful not to get sucked into going to war to defend the Czechs, who they regarded as likely to fall apart into the component nationalities (Czech, Slovak, Sudetenland German, and Ukrainian) under any kind of stress. If that isn’t enough enemies, the Poles also have to worry about internal enemies. There are large, hostile German and Ukrainian minorities, both of which had elements that were armed and willing to fight against Polish rule if the opportunity presented itself. Poland was a primarily agricultural economy, without a lot of industry, without a lot of natural resources except for oil and to some extent coal and iron. Its borders lacked significant natural barriers. Much of the industry and a lot of the natural resources were near the borders—industry concentrated near the border with Germany, oil near the Soviet border. The only seaport was at the end of a narrow corridor with German territory on both sides of it. Poland could mobilize a fairly large army given enough time, but a Polish mobilization would take time, much longer than a German one due to the more primitive Polish transportation system. Historically, a third of the Polish army never finished mobilizing in the 1939 war, and only about a fourth or it was actually mobilized and in their positions when the war started. You don’t have the option of delaying your mobilization, but you will get heavy pressure from France and England to do so, because of the role that the momentum of mobilization played in the start of World War I. So why do you want this job again? There are a few advantages to the Polish position. The Polish army is highly motivated. It has had time to build up a large trained force during the period where German was disarmed. As of early 1935, the Poles have been preparing for war with the Germans since 1920. The Germans have had less than two years of open rearmament. It will take two to four years for the Germans to turn their economic and industrial power into military power sufficient to overwhelm Poland. The Germans are not self-sufficient in terms of raw materials at this point, and they are chronically near a crisis in terms of foreign exchange. The Soviets are a more immediate threat, but they have to worry about the Japanese on the Manchuria/Siberian border, and you know, though no one else does, that the Soviets are likely to rip apart their officer corp at some point unless you do something that results in that being aborted. You do have an ally of sorts in Romania. The two militaries have worked together and have a defensive alliance against the Soviets. You also have allies in the French. They will in the fairly near future give you a rather large loan to build up your military and your military-oriented industrial base. You already have the beginnings of a defense industry. Poland is producing small quantities of light tanks, fighter and bomber airplanes, as well as trucks, artillery, small arms and ammunition. Unless you somehow change this, in four years the Polish airforce and the Polish tank formations will look obsolete and tiny. In early 1935 they look modern and powerful. The Luftwaffe is just starting to build up, and their first generation of fighters is uninspiring—slow biplanes like the Arado 65 and Heinkel 51, while the German panzer force of 1935 consists exclusively of machine-gun armed Panzer 1s, and not very many of them. In 1935 and probably through 1936 and into 1937 the Polish armed forces will be competitive with the Germans, at least in terms of major weapons systems. You also have some intelligence aces up your sleeve. You have two ways of beating the German Enigma machine and reading much of the German codes. You’ll lose both of those ways in 1939 unless you figure out a way to maintain that advantage. You historically had a secret weapon of sorts, one of the few anti-tank rifles that was actually worth much, and it will be useful against German tanks of 1939. So, how do you deal with this nearly impossible strategic situation? Remember, you don’t have much money. You do have the advantage of knowing when the crunch time is likely to happen, so you can gear yourself to that to some extent, though if there is any diplomatic way to avoid the German invasion it would be wise to do so. If things go the way they did historically, the British will offer a security guarantee to Poland in the aftermath of Munich. You’ll want to think long and hard about whether or not to accept that guarantee. It does mean you are less likely to be picked off without allied help like the Czechs were, but it does mean that the Soviets can play games more easily. Without a British guarantee the Soviets have to worry that a successful German invasion of Poland will be the precursor to an invasion of the Soviet Union. As soon as Poland accepts the British guarantee, the Soviets will encourage the German invasion, figuring that the Germans will bleed themselves and the western allies dry fighting France and Britain. You probably want to hold out for a three-party guarantee, with the Soviets as one of the parties, but there is no way of knowing whether or not you’ll get it. There is some chance you may decide to act in a way that changes events in a major way before Germany gets around to building up to attack you. You might even consider a preemptive attack. You probably wouldn’t beat the Germans in the long term, but you might be able to disrupt them enough economically that they wouldn’t be able to continue their buildup. The problem with pre-emption is getting the rest of the Polish government to go along with it. Militarily the Poles probably wouldn’t do too badly in 1935 against a German army that was only at the beginning of their expansion, equipment, and training effort. The earlier the better if you’re going to try that strategy. Limited objectives would probably be wise. Taking the German-held parts of Silesia might be feasible. Doing it with minimal damage to the mines and factories would increase Polish industrial capacity and deny the Germans access to some key raw materials, especially nickel and to some extent iron and coal. On the other hand, once the Germans did build up, payback would come. I doubt if it could get much harsher than the historical German occupation, but it would be nasty. There is also the question of what the Soviets would do if the Polish army was tied down against the Germans. An alliance with the Czechs makes a lot of sense on paper, but the Czechs don’t want to ally themselves with the Poles, and Polish sentiment about the Czech stab-in-the-back makes that alliance difficult to support domestically. There are some things you could do to make the Polish military more effective. Historically the Poles put a considerable amount of money into building up factories that would have expanded production of planes and tanks in 1940 or 1941. That wasn’t a bad idea if the country was going to be around that long, but investing in more weapons and less capacity could have made the Poles a tougher nut to crack in 1939. The building of a handful of destroyers was a waste of money that could have gone to tanks or planes. There were some technologies that the Poles could have feasibly implemented. Bazooka/Panzerfaust-type weapons were certainly feasible. Poland was capable of building reasonably modern fighter planes, though they didn’t get any into production in time for the war. So, what do you think? Could you do better than the Polish leadership did historically? What would have happened if you did?
Posted on March 26, 2010.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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