Know Your History

I'm a few minutes too late with this, but just go with it. Today (by which I mean yesterday) marked the 70th anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland that began World War II.

This must be one of the most important, but least commemorated, days in history. The 20th Century was truly defined by the war that began on this day. While the attack was the first "official" military action of WWII, it was merely one part in a much larger aggressive plan by Hitler that had begun several years earlier.

The re-militarization of the Rhine region (along the border with France and Belgium) in 1936, in direct violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailes, was the true first step. Britain actually supported that move, and though France strongly disapproved, Hitler knew the French would not want to start another war less than two decades after the slaughter that was World War I.

Following that, Hitler moved to annex Austria in 1938, correcting what he believed was a mistake made by Bismarck in the 1870s when the former German leader had cast Austria out of the unifying German state.

Later in 1938, Hitler was prepared to go to war with the Western Powers over the the "Sudetenland", a portion of Czechoslovakia on the German border. He announced that he was going to militarily occupy the territory, but Britain and France decided it was easier to appease Hitler's demands than to fight for the Czechs. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain said the agreement would bring "peace in our time". That peace lasted about a year.

Andrew Sullivan links to a couple of interesting blogs that memorialize the occasion. David Silbey does a great job of summing up the importance of the day:

"The invasion represented two experiments on the part of the Nazis. First, Hitler (as he had been for so long) continued pushing the western powers to see how much he could expand in Central Europe without them pushing back. He had taken Austria and Czechoslovakia with either little protest or active cooperation. Poland was obviously a much larger gamble as a full-scale military invasion.

The second experiment was with something of a new form of warfare. The German Army had spent much of the interwar years arguing furiously about how to deal with the static mess that had been the Western Front. Unlike the French, who essentially decided on the pre-built trench system of the Maginot line, the Germans looked to mobility to break the stalemate. This was not universally loved within the German high command, but there was enough support that the Germans began creating divisions of tanks and mechanized infantry, supported by mobile artillery and ground attack aircraft. When the war started in September 1939, the number of those divisions was still relatively low but they served as the spearheads as the German Army launched itself into the Polish defenses."

Also, here's what George Orwell's blog would have looked like on that day, you know, if blogs existed in 1939.