World War II: First Blood

After six years of both domestic and foreign - his assumption of power, the rearmament of Germany, the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the seizure of Czechoslovakia - the time had now come for the Adolf Hitler to prove himself as a warlord upon the battlefield.


On April 3, 1939, he issued orders to his High Command authorizing the invasion of Poland. He saw the attack as the solution to Germany’s problems - arising, as Hitler saw them, from the need for expanded living space for the people of the Reich - and maintained that it was unattainable “without invading other countries or attacking other people’s possessions.” Hitler went on: “Further successes are impossible without the shedding of blood.” And that first blood was to be shed in Poland.


Here, in this Quick Read, is the dramatic account of Poland’s heroic resistance and ultimate fall at the brutal hands of the German war machine.