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It’s 1939 all over again! Or is it? Perhaps it’s 1950.
A date we can be certain of is 2014 when, as Kiev tipped towards the EU and NATO, Moscow-backed Russian separatists prised parts of southeastern Ukraine – Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea – back to Moscow. Eleven years later, how lies the land? Amongst the complex geopolitical manoeuvring on both sides, is there a fitting historical parallel?
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, aiming to reunite ethnic Germans in western Poland within an expanded German commonwealth. The Wehrmacht pushed east into Prussia, Danzig, Warthegau, and the remaining parts of Upper Silesia not already under German rule.
The previous year Austria had been annexed, as had the German-speaking Sudatenland of Czechoslovakia.
After decades of humiliation, a rejuvenated Germany which had been slow to benefit from a peace division at the end of a previous conflict, flexed its muscles and headed east into what had formerly been German territory.
Alarmed by an expansionist and newly self-confident resource-rich Reich, other powers including France, Britain and the United States had been courting Poland to the point of nudging a new Allies-leaning government upon the Polish people.
Be that as it may, the Wehrmacht’s fighting machine was not as impressive as Allied propagandists had insisted. Progress was slow. Dozens rather than hundreds of miles into Poland, they became bogged down in a low-intensity artillery slug-fest with the Poles which was to last well into the 1940s.
Plebiscites allowed the Germans to annex Western Poland to the satisfaction of Berlin but not in the eyes of the Allied powers who protested and applied limited sanctions but did little more.
Meanwhile, if anything, the conflict made Mr Hitler more popular at home.
Eight years after the initial invasion, intelligence reports indicated that large amounts of German material were being moved in a way that strongly suggested a deeper invasion into Poland.
Despite the siren warnings, the president of Poland (from his villa in Miami) remained sceptical, with his muted response being echoed by the leaders of other countries.
In any case, Britain was in no position to do much about it. The political situation here was that Mr Chamberlian kept on winning elections and progressing with liberal policies. Despite dire warnings from Junior Shadow Defence Minister Mr Churchill, the empire was being given away and the armed forces were being cut back. Chamberlain’s great foreign policy victory was the promise of eternal peace in our time in the Middle East at the creation of a Jewish state within Palestine.
However, in February 1947 German tanks rolled across the border and struck out for Warsaw. Again, progress was slow. Attempts by German airborne troops to capture airfields close to the Polish capital failed with the Nazi’s crack troops being repelled by a mixture of combat and non-combat personnel based at the airfields and artillery and combat brigades stationed nearby.
Across the following weeks, slow-moving German armour suffered high casualties at the hands of Polish forces augmented by British and American forces disguised in Polish uniforms. Some of the latest kit, including anti-tank grenades, inflicted heavy losses on the Germans with, by April 1st, German generals throwing in the towel and withdrawing.
However, the push to Warsaw was also accompanied by the introduction of German long-range artillery. This proved effective as V1 and V2 rockets pummelled parts of Polish cities and attacked Polish infrastructure.
Away from Warsaw, fighting along the original front line intensified with the Germans making limited but costly gains as Ukrainian refugees poured into neighbouring countries.
In response, the Allies enforced stronger sanctions on Germany. However, being reliant on coal from the Rhur, manufactures from the Rhineland and food from the Austro-Hungarian bread basket meant the sanctions were counterproductive and caused more economic upset with the Allies than with Germany.
Food inflation was a problem. Energy prices rose sharply. Additionally, blockading Germany and neighbouring countries with porous borders proved impossible. Cutbacks meant the Royal Navy was down to one active destroyer and one active submarine. Useful pieces of Empire such as Gibraltar, Cyprus and Malta had been given away to Spain, Turkey and Libya respectively.
The following spring a Polish counter-offensive began. Despite optimistic rhetoric, in 1948 the Poles made little headway. German positions were well-defended. The Germans were unafraid of casualties. The Allies had supplied the Poles with only a limited amount of older equipment, much of which the Poles lost as soon as it engaged German positions in what was now becoming a meat-grinder.
As an example, weakened by a peace dividend spent on a new welfare state rather than on defence, the British weren’t building any new tanks. In fact, they had closed their tank factories and, rather than build new were upgrading the 1939 Matilda IIs to Matilda IIIs. The problem being that for every Matlild II lost in Ukraine, there was one less future Matilda III for the British Army.
Likewise, the Dutch sent a previous generation of Fokker aircraft as they dared not risk their latest planes.
One country that did nothing to help was neighbouring Ukraine. A byword for corruption, the Ukrainians were enthusiastic ultra-nationalists with a history of anti-Semitism led by the extreme hard right Stepan Bandera.
Between 1948 and 1950 the conflict settled back to trench warfare and intermitted long-range artillery attacks.
However, a new president in the United States shook things up bigly.
A Democrat blob in Washington DC had kept Eisenhower in power since 1933. He even won the presidential election in 1948 despite strong rumours he was dead. Foreign interference was suspected, with mechanical voting machines being powered by German and Japanese-supplied vacuum tubes. Elsewhere, in what opponents were to label ‘Phoney News’, outlets such as the Washington Post ran headlines like ‘Ha Ha You Pig Dogs! You Vill All Vote Eisenhower!’
Following a disastrous presidential press conference in which a motionless and silent Eisenhower appeared covered in flies, senior Democrats bit the bullet and appointed his Vice President Harry S Trueman to the Oval Office.
Furious at being denied the top job for so long, Trueman hit the ground running both with a series of stinging executive orders and by sending his new vice president, Alben William Barkley, to Europe to address the German/Polish problem.
A mild-mannered Kentucky farmer’s son and former Methodist seminarian, Barkley shocked delegates at a European security council meeting held in Vichy by claiming Chamberlain’s Liberal England and Lebrun’s rudderless France were a bigger threat to liberty and democracy than Hitler’s Germany.
With younger Poles unwilling to fight and with German lines strengthed by units from their allies in the East, Poland was by this point suffering a slow-motion retreat.
Above the head of the Europeans, in February 1950 eleven years after the beginning of the conflict and three years after the abortive battle for Warsaw, President Trueman announced a peace conference to be held in Saudi Arabia at the invitation of King Abdulaziz, ruler of the impoverished wasteland nestled between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.
A country without an airfield, German foreign minister Von Ribbentrop and US Secretary of State Dean Acheson made rough landings on an improvised runway next to a row of tents erected beside a wadi near a one-horse town of clay huts and dirt roads known as Riyadh.
The rest, as they say, is history.
© Always Worth Saying 2025
