I don't know what is the most direct impression in everyone's mind when they hear about Poland?
Is it the battle scum that was bulldozed by the lightning war in an instant, or the small strong who made a big fuss?
Music lovers think of Poland, the patriotic musician Chopin, and friends who are interested in science may think of Marie Curie.
I visited the school library most often when I was a student, and once I accidentally flipped through the book "The Epic Trilogy of World War II" and read it with curiosity, which mainly mentioned the Nazi German invasion of Poland in World War II and the repressive rule of the years that followed, which finally triggered the Revolt of the Citizens of Warsaw in the capital in 1944. The biggest shock to me in this book was to see a weak country being invaded by the powerful forces of its neighbors and destroying its country, and since then Poland has entered my mind, and the impression remains that this is a country that has been invaded.
Ill-fated Poland is actually a great power
I myself once thought that Poland was a weak country invaded by its evil neighbors, and this idea was not realized until I grew older and came into contact with completely different information, and the impression of the past was not necessarily correct.
In the 10th century, Poland became a state and continued to expand its territory through wars and marriages, reaching its peak in the 16th century and merging with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which today's Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia were once its sphere of influence.
However, due to many foreign wars and internal turmoil, the kingdom's weak king rule and corrupt aristocratic class gradually weakened the country, and finally in the 17th century, the territory was divided between Tsarist Russia, the Kingdom of Prussia and Austria, and the country was destroyed. The divided territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was occupied mainly by the Russian Empire and did not end until the end of World War I.
Since the partition of Poland in 1795, it took more than a hundred years before it was restored in November 1918, also known as the Second Polish Republic.
He fought with Germany and the Soviet Union, and after the restoration of the country, he was invaded by the two countries
The rehabilitated Poland quickly became a European power, the Russian Empire in the north, which had a large territory, was replaced by the Soviet Union after World War I, and the German Empire in the south became the Weimar Republic after the defeat in World War I. As both the Southern and Northern powers weakened their national strength as a result of defeat, Poland rose rapidly to become a regional power powerful enough to resist its two neighboring countries, the North and the South.
Not long after the establishment of the country, the Polish government saw that the Red Army, which was not on a stable footing, was still caught in the civil war with the White Army of the Royalists and could not fight with full force, so a territorial conflict broke out with the newly formed Soviet Union. The progress of the Polish army in the early stages of the war was overwhelming, but it was unexpectedly pushed back by the Soviet army in an instant, and even the capital Warsaw was almost occupied.
In 1921, Russia and Poland signed the Riga Peace Treaty of Armistice, which also sowed the consequences of the Soviet Union's stabbing in the back in 1939 (Germany, the Soviet Union invaded Poland), because Poland occupied many disputed lands between the two countries. Before World War II, Poland's overall army strength ranked fifth in Europe, becoming a political, economic and even culturally powerful country in Europe, and its strength was not weaker than That of Germany. Later, Germany invaded Poland, but I think that Germany's superiority was not so great, because from the objective conditions, Poland at that time was neither a weak country nor a small country, and it was fully capable of fighting in the face of German troops.
Poland at the beginning of the restoration of the Polish-Soviet war has offended the Soviet Union, after the first world war defeated Germany, for the original West Prussia and part of the East Prussian territory has always been grumpy, because these lands are just like the Manchu Qing for the northeast of the same degree of importance, the same belong to the land of the national longxing, so the recovery of lost land has become an important national policy of the Nazis, Poland in the 10 years of restoration, has formed a deep grudge with the strong neighbors of the north and south.
This new grudge led Germany to tear up the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact on September 1, 1939, and invaded the Polish mainland with its troops, and the Soviet Union saw the opportunity to tear up the Soviet-Polish Non-Aggression Pact, stabbing Poland in the back, and the two great powers joined forces to bring Poland into ruin on October 6.
We often have the stereotype that Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939 with blitzkriegs, but in fact, after Hitler came to power in 1934, he was very jealous of Poland, because Germany's military strength was much smaller than that of this powerful country with a population of more than 34 million and an army of 1.5 million, and it was not at the same level as Germany that was defeated after a major war.
What made Hitler even more afraid was that France and Poland had signed an alliance as early as 1921, if Germany and France went to war head-on, there was a risk of falling into the belly and back of the enemy, and the crisis of suffering a two-sided attack would make the newly established Third Reich instantly disappear, so the situation at that time was that Germany was afraid of Poland, not Poland worried about Nazi aggression.
Although Nazi Germany provoked the invasion of Poland, most people ignore that the knife that the Soviet Union made up in the back half a month was even more deadly, because all the systematic resistance against Germany collapsed instantly after being attacked by the Soviet Union in the back.
Poland's foreign policy was crotch-pulling, and it was once enemies on all sides
Turning to the map of Europe, Poland is a continental country, it must exercise flexible diplomacy in combination and vertical, and it is necessary to avoid fighting in the middle of Germany and the Soviet Union, so it should be close to neighborliness; even if it is impossible to achieve a clever means of long-distance and close-range attack, at least it must not become an arrow target. Even if it offends the Soviet Union and Germany, Poland has almost offended all the countries around it! It's not easy!
Poland and Czechoslovakia have always had territorial disputes in the Tyching region on the border, and in 1938, during the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, Poland actually took advantage of the fire and robbery to participate in the partition of Czechoslovakia for the sake of a small profit of 800 square kilometers. The same thing happened in Lithuania next door, where polish troops occupied Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, in 1920 and became the fifth largest city in Poland.
Although France and Britain immediately declared war on Germany, the declaration of war was declared, and the army lay behind the Maginot Line and chatted and drank tea, that is, not to attack Germany, which also became a spectacle in the history of war, declaring war but not fighting.
From the history of Poland, we may understand that if you don't die, you won't die! Countries with open territory on all sides and limited land areas should do a good job in diplomacy and maintain good relations with their neighbors in order to increase their strategic depth; after all, distant relatives are not as good as close neighbors, even if they are attacked, the allies can be relied on, even if the allies are unreliable, they can persist until the moment when the big powers send troops to help, so that they have the opportunity to turn the tables.
If you are still interested in the history of World War II, I recommend the book "The Epic Trilogy of World War II", the author of which was a war correspondent at the time. He participated in 14 bombing campaigns with the U.S. Eighth and Ninth Air Forces, witnessed the Normandy landings, and followed General Patton's Third Army into France and Germany until the capture of Berlin. After the end of the war in Europe, he went to the front line of the Pacific Theater to report. Subsequently, the nearly 30-year-long writing of the "World War II Epic Trilogy" began.
At the height of the Cold War, in order to pursue the historical truth, he went deep into Moscow, consulted the undequestioned archives of the Soviet Union, confirmed that Hitler had indeed died in the Battle of Berlin, and paid attention to the fate of people, with a close eye for the war and the soul that had experienced blood and death, completed the "impossible task" of ordinary writers, and finally attached a genuine link, friends who like the history of World War II do not miss ↓↓↓
The Original World War II Epic Trilogy was purchased at ¥49.8