Response to Fiona Allison's "The Nazi Invasion of Poland,1939: History of the Second World War" published on the Suite 101 website.

The analysis in this article is erroneous and enforces many preconceptions which are not helpful to 'Western' popular knowledge about the Second World War.

This type of chronological snippet of a complex series of events just helps to simplify history and adds to the whirlwind of  short, simplified and poor interpretations of the history of this and many other events.

As an example the analysis of Polish armed forces, as having many cavalry units who were armed with lances and not much else, is comical and representative of many poor assessments of this type. In reality only 10% of the Polish forces were made up of cavalry units and there existed a significant (but dated) air force and mechanised presence.

It is also important to mention that Germany sustained relatively heavy losses, with 25% of air strength lost and the equivalent of an armoured division's worth of equipment destroyed. The defensive was only a week shorter than that of the Anglo-French forces which were numerically superior to those of Poland.

The article helps to sustain a mythical understanding of the Blitzkrieg, which was in fact a label invented by the American Time magazine, and which describes a tactic developed slowly and coincidentally during the mid 1900s. The traditional interpretation is that this was a horrific new German tactic invented for World War Two, in fact it was an evolved version of 18th Century cavalry tactics, and not the main reason for the success of German military forces. Infantry and artillery units of the Wehrmacht played and equally important (if not greater) role.

It is nice to see that included are details of the phoney war but no mention was made (at the time the article was checked in Jan. 2011) of the agreement of mutual assistance between Poland, France and Britain, which was the source of short-term military planning on the part of the Polish military who expected the Western allies' assistance. The agreement was of course never honoured apart from RAF sorties dropping propaganda leaflets on Poland.

The inaccuracies in the article are most likely due to the fact that the author used two books about the history of Nazi Germany to write about the invasion of Poland, many more suitable titles could have been selected in their place. Summarising a complex subject about which books have been written is inherently difficult and this article unfortunately fails to deliver on several fronts.

If anyone is interested in accessible Anglophone material on the history of Central Europe or even interesting talks on YouTube, look for Norman Davies. Also the information on the invasion of Poland on WikiPedia (of all places) is useful.

John Pravoski

Response to Kunikov review of The Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

A short critical response to T. Kunikov's review of Wlodzimierz Brodziej's "The Warsaw Uprising of 1944" (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

Some points about the review article:

• There was no disbanded/failed uprising in Praga district before the actual battle for Warsaw.
• It was Britain not England who were hoped to help with air drops. Most Polish troops, including the Parachute Brigade who were due to be dropped to help the battle were stationed in Scotland.
• "...the first day witnessed many defeats and few successes" This is not accurate, in fact the early successes were significant given the surprise element.
• I'm not sure exactly what the conclusions of the book are but it is hard to disagree with the fact that the Red Army didn't fail to support the battle, even though it can be argued politically and ideologically it would not be reasonable for them to do so.

 John Pravoski