Today in history

With the thinnest of pretexts, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. They applied the lessons the "Condor Legion" had learned so well in Spain, fast moving armored vehicles with flying artillery above the battlefield in the form of screaming Stukas lead to advances in mobile warfare that shocked the world. Guernica had burned to prove the theory of strategic bombing, but it would be for the bombardment of Warsaw that the world would stare in horror as tons upon tons of expolosive devestation rained from the skies.

It isn't that one could say they didn't believe the war was coming. The annexation of Austria, the invasion of the Sudetenland, and flagrant violations of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles all pointed at the coming war. Kristallnacht, the Nuremberg rallies and the fateful voyage of the MS St. Louis all spoke of things even darker than war, but for the most part the world had been uninterested in listening.

The Poles would fight valiantly against a superior and overwhelming force. The Blitzkrieg moved quickly and neutralized their resistance, but they did resist, for five weeks. British and French mobilization began and it seemed, briefly, that relief could come for the Poles before they capitulated to the Nazi attack. The death knell came on 17 September, when the Soviet Red Army invaded from the east, a betrayal that the Polish have not forgotten to this day.

It's worth remembering that the Polish Army fought the Germans longer than the Belgians, Dutch, or French before surrendering. The Polish government in exile ruled from London for the next six years, but then suffered another betrayal as the Western Allies sold Poland out to Stalin and the Soviet iron curtain. The Red Army later put to death some 20,000 Polish officers captured during the invasion, erstwhile 'allies' by that point or not. It is not a very proud legacy of the war.

There's another reason to mark 1 September 1939, one often forgotten in the overshadowing start of the world's most devestating war. On this day in history, Adolf Hitler authorized the creation of Action T-4, an experiment to annihilate the undesirables from German society - the criminally insane, the mentally handicapped, and the hopelessly infirm. It was the test ground for techniques later employed in the Final Solution, a trial run of an industry of death that has never, not to this day, been fully accounted for by history.

It recedes from us now, looming in the distance both sharply remembered and strangely forgotten. There were quite a number of movies made on the subject even in the last year, but they still only show part of the truth, aspects approved for a mass audience, delivering the right messages. It was a larger war than we often credit it now, with forgotten heroes and villains we'd rather not know about.

From 1 Sept 1939 to V-E day would be six years of blood and toil, horror and misery. It was a hard won victory with a price that's still visible on the character of the participants. It was also a closer thing than we might believe, there was no inevitable victory, not even with the massive economy of the United States on the side of the winners. And even today the war's last scars still tug at us, the legacy of wounds that still remain 70 years down the road.

It's a day worth remembering, if even for just a moment.