THE WAR HITLER WON - The Fall of Poland, September 1939 by Bethell, Nicholas

New York 1973, Holt Rinehart, US first edition, hard bound w/dj, 6 1/2 x 9, VG/VG condition, viii, 472 pages, 2 maps, drawings, notes, bibliog, index. ------------------------------------------------At 5:40 A.M., September 1, 1939, Hitler announced his invasion of Poland. During the next seventy-two hours, while the world watched in terrified awe, while the French and British civilian and military leaders (Poland's sworn allies) equivocated, and while a neutral United States stoutly maintained her neutrality, Germany's armored columns and her Luftwaffe gained the momentum which enabled them to conclusively roll over the antiquated Polish cavalry and ground forces while driving the Polish air force from the skies. By September 28 all of Poland was theirs-abetted by a Russian invasion from the east on September 17.This was the period of the phony war, when no bombs were dropped on German soil (after all, a British Secretary of State for Air protested, it was private property), when French troops took up purely defensive positions along the Maginot Line, when Mussolini and, in a different way, the mysterious Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus moved between Berlin and the Allies as self-appointed saviors of the peace.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Nicholas Bethell's closely and vividly written account of those weeks follows the opening of the British State Papers for the period, and shows from the inside how the political decisions were made, how opportunities were lost and allegiances broken, and how the necessity of war with Hitler gradually became reality. It describes the behind-the-scenes maneuvers in Moscow and Berlin of Hitler, Ribbentrop, Stalin, and Molotov; Roosevelt's attempt to awaken Americans to the growing danger; the distrustful bargaining between Paris and London; the vacillation of Daladier, Bonnet, and Chamberlain; the bitter conflict between the French and British politicians who favored peace at any price and those who realized the true threat of Nazism; and the heroic, terrible story of the Poles themselves, outflanked and outmachined in a new type of warfare.The War Hitler Won presents an extraordinary and fascinating picture of the crucial, but little-known, political and military events of the opening days of World War II.