Reply To: Poland 1939 – Preparing for 80th Anniversary of World War II

[jamesevans140Participant 2055xp 1]

@yavasa I know we have talked about the myth of horses against tanks before.  However I still can not get over how much historians repeat this myth over and over as if it was fact.  I must look up the battle as I can’t remember it name.  It was a case of Polish cavalry hitting German infantry and chopping it to pieces.  Again it was not a classic Napoleonic cavalry charge but rather using horses to out maneuver the Germans and dominate the action.  Yet this is rarely mentioned.

Had the Poles had the finances to start their modernisation even just 2 years earlier it would have had a major impact on the European war.  I believe they still would have lost but a much greater cost to the Germans.  This in turn would have delayed the invasion of France until things like the Pz-III made up at least 50% of the tank numbers.

Perhaps one wrong lesson they took away from Poland was that tankettes and their theory was still viable.  This costs them in France but by the time of the invasion of Russia they had almost corrected this.  However give the poor condition and out-dated designs the tankettes could have had a last hurrah in 1941.

My main area of research at the moment is a fracture point between late Dec 41 to Feb 42. At this point the German army was actually almost completely broken.  It is the result of opinions and decisions dating back as far as the defeat of Poland.  Then it was a case of both the Russians and Germans double guessing each other and getting it totally wrong that saved the Germans.  Of course this is an over simplistic explanation, but I love coming over these gems after so many years of studying WW2. On the other hand I don’t like what we have been fed over the years. Does our history of the Napoleonic Wars have this much misinformation in it as well, not meaning to start a debate here as it is only a comment.