Fighter planes roared and rolled, winds were blowing, and throughout the spring and summer of 1939, the German Navy's carrier-based air forces were intensively training to attack targets inherent in specific harbors. Based on Heydrich's map of Scarpa Bay, the German Navy quickly renovated the training ground in order to provide as much of an ideal training platform as possible for pilots. Over time, their skills have become more sophisticated.

On 22 May, the German-Italian Steel Pact was signed at the Chancellery in Berlin, which meant that Mussolini had finally abandoned his wall-to-wall policy and was determined to side with Hitler. Encouraged, Hitler immediately convened a meeting of the High Command the next day and declared his firm conviction that he intended to destroy Poland. Hitler bluntly declared that there would be no second Munich in Poland; The Polish Corridor issue was only a pretext for him to wipe out the country, and by the time of the early autumn on September 1, his army would launch a full-scale attack on Poland.

After the unprecedented victory in Munich, there was no one in Germany who could have the confidence to oppose Hitler's decision. In fact, because of the Polish corridor, the German generals were even very eager to wipe Poland, the "freak of the Versailles Treaty", off the face of the earth. And Hitler's decision undoubtedly coincided with their hearts. Brauchitsch and other generals were all gearing up and preparing to show their strength on the Debord Plain.

The only question now is how far the war between Germany and Poland can be confined to. Although German military power was already strong by the beginning of the summer of 1939, it was undoubtedly far from strong enough to defeat the combined forces of France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Poland. In order to avoid becoming an enemy of the world, the first thing Hitler had to do was to prevent the Soviet Union from forming a military alliance with the West.

Just as Hitler was preparing to make temporary peace with his "sworn enemies of National Socialism," the Soviet Union, which consisted of the "inferior" Slavs, Moscow began to hatch a new and different idea.

As early as October 1938, after the signing of the Munich Agreement, the diplomatic winds of the Soviet Union changed. Stalin not only hated Britain and France for excluding him from the Munich Conference, but he also saw the weakness of the two democracies as much as Hitler: France, which had the allied forces to kill Hitler, did not move behind the Maginot Line. Watching Czechoslovakia, their ally in Eastern Europe, suffer a catastrophe. Britain, which was as clear as a mirror to France, also indulged Hitler in every way.

There is no doubt that Britain and France have abandoned the principle of collective security and have instead pursued a policy of appeasement that follows the principle of peace and security, with no regard for the lives of their allies. In this case, what is the point of making peace with Britain and France?

According to Stalin's judgment - in Moscow only his judgment counts - the policy of alliance with Britain and France in the search for collective security had failed. Moreover, such a policy risked dragging the Soviet Union into a war with Germany, from which Western democracies might well try to stay out of it.

From March 1939 onwards, however, Britain's attitude towards the Soviet Union had become warmer again as a result of Germany's annexation of all of Czechoslovakia. in an attempt to draw the Soviet Union into a strategic encirclement of Germany and to prevent further German aggression; But Stalin always had doubts in his mind that Britain was carrying out its traditional strategy of driving the tiger and devouring the wolf, and that the Soviet Union, as a class enemy, would be in the heat of its European interests.

Stalin's wariness of the notorious "hatred planter" of Britain was undoubtedly well founded. It is intuitive that if the Soviet Union had joined this encirclement alliance against Germany, the Soviet Union would have largely had only unilateral obligations, without receiving any real value from Britain. Due to the presence of the German Western Wall Line, it would be difficult for aid from Western Europe to reach the territory of the USSR. This alliance pattern, which was clearly unfavorable to the Soviet Union, was thoroughly exposed by a meeting between Stalin and the British ambassador to Moscow.

The British ambassador said. In the event of a war with Nazi Germany, Britain would first send 3 divisions to the Continent to fight alongside the French, after which "there may be another 3 divisions." Stalin nodded quietly, and then asked, "Do you know how much the Soviet Union will use to fight the war against Germany?" The British ambassador did not reply. Stalin had already said coldly: "First 300 divisions, then 300 divisions." ”

Compared with the heavy obligations of an alliance with Britain and France, the Soviet Union's choice to cooperate with Germany had many enormous benefits at its fingertips. One. The Soviet Union could expand in Eastern Europe to further increase the territory and population under its control. You must know that Finland and the three Baltic states on the current map of Europe were all territories under the leather whip of Tsarist Russia at the beginning of this century. It was only because of the collapse of Tsarist Russia that they were able to escape independently.

Despite the Soviet Union's high-sounding banner of "liberating all mankind" and the fact that Russians were a pitiful minority of these countries, Moscow was always thinking about reintegrating these small countries into its territory. If the Soviet Union had joined the Anglo-French alliance to contain Hitler's aggression, it would have been bound by the idea of "collective security" and would have no reason to attack these small countries.

Second, Soviet-German cooperation would buy the Soviet Union enough time in the current turbulent Europe to recover from the unprecedented wounds caused by the Great Purge. To this day, even Stalin himself, who initiated and led this unprecedented repression, realizes that the purges have spread to the point of indiscrimination; The Soviet Giant was at this time in a state of severe blood loss after bloodletting, and needed as much time as possible to recover. If Germany had cooperated, the danger of a large-scale war in the USSR would have been completely avoided in the short term.

Finally, the Soviet Union had the same gritted hatred and resentment towards Poland, which Germany was going to settle next. In April 1920, Poland, which had just become independent, took advantage of the Russian civil war to brazenly send troops to Belarus and Ukraine to loot; Although the Soviets had the upper hand on the battlefield and narrowly missed the Polish capital Warsaw, they were defeated the following year and ended the war in humiliation at the cost of losing 120,000 square kilometers of land. If the Soviet Union chooses to cooperate with Germany now, it will undoubtedly be able to avenge the revenge of the year, and even divide Poland again. And this is clearly much more pleasing to Moscow than the protection of the country!

After careful consideration, Stalin felt that the time had come to try a new approach. If Chamberlain was able to make a deal with Hitler, why couldn't he himself? As the saying goes, friends of the dead Dao do not die in the poor Dao, and there is no reason for them to put their country in danger for the sake of justice and justice!

In the height of summer in July 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union reached a trade agreement. Germany exchanged cutting-edge industrial products such as precision machine tools and aero engines for agricultural and grain products, metal ores and other raw materials of the same value to the Soviet Union. This was widely seen as a major sign of the beginning of a thaw in Soviet-German relations. Ever since Hitler came to power, Germany and the Soviet Union have quickly parted ways with each other because of serious ******** antagonism: the heads of government of the two countries have always given each other the most vitriolic verbal attacks in their speeches concerning foreign relations. Now, however, they have once again moved from hostility to cooperation.

For Poland, the German-Soviet union was undoubtedly the death knell for it. If the Polish authorities had had a fraction of Hitler's sense of situational judgment, they would have now tried to avoid a situation in which the two great powers, Germany and the Soviet Union, were confronted at the same time. Even if its relations with Germany, irreconcilable by the existence of the Polish Corridor, should immediately make concessions in the East and reconcile with the Soviet Union. However, the Poles have long been carried away by the ethereal "national feelings".

Since Russia, like Germany, was the bloody executioner of Poland and brutally oppressed them, the Poles, who had been enslaved for more than 120 years, were not willing to have anything to do with Moscow. When Britain put down its position and sincerely persuaded Poland to accept Soviet armed aid, Poland's reply was a firm no. In the Warsaw strategy, they not only had to pacify Germany, but also to suppress the Soviet Union, so as to show their heroic tenacity and indomitable national spirit. This seemingly almost inconceivable situation is the true psychological portrayal of the Polish authorities in the summer of 1939, when the German invasion was on the verge of being invaded!

Perhaps realizing that it could not contend with the two great powers of the East and the West at the same time, Poland began to desperately hug the thighs of Britain and France from the spring of 1939, asking the latter to help it when war broke out. The Poles, however, seem to have forgotten that, while Britain and France were innocent in the history of their nation, the former could not afford to send a powerful army to the continent in a short period of time, and that the assistance they could give them was very limited.

As for today's France, it is a weak chicken that has lost its backbone: when Hitler openly ordered conscription in 1935, marched on the Rhine in 1936, annexed Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, and occupied all of Czechoslovakia in early 1939, all the country responded by crouching behind the Maginot Line and quietly watching it all!

Although the war had not yet broken out, the final fate of Poland, the nascent Versailles country, was already sealed in the summer of 1939! (To be continued.) )