the 70th anniversary of World War II
 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwa...oland_01.shtml

....At 4.45 am on 1 September 1939 the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish garrison of the Westerplatte Fort, Danzig (modern-day Gdansk), in what was to become the first military engagement of World War Two. Simultaneously, 62 German divisions supported by 1,300 aircraft commenced the invasion of Poland.....



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6...The-Scoop.html

The Scoop

Seventy years ago, a sleek limousine crossed the border of Poland and Germany and sped along the autobahn between Beuthen and Gleiwitz. Inside was a 26-year-old reporter on her first assignment for The Daily Telegraph, who was about to break the scoop of the century.

Once past Gleiwitz, the road began to climb a hill. Clare Hollingworth, now nearly 98 years old, suddenly caught sight of 65 German motorcycle dispatch riders, who overtook her car and sped away with a roar. As she looked to the side, a gust of wind lifted up the hessian sheets that had been strung alongside the road.

That was when she spied hundreds of tanks, armoured cars and field artillery – von Rundstedt's 10th Army and its Panzer Corps – massed in the valley below, waiting to roll into Poland and begin the Second World War.

Hollingworth filed the story that appeared on Tuesday, August 29, on The Daily Telegraph's front page, underneath the headline: "1,000 tanks massed on Polish border. Ten divisions reported ready for swift stroke." She went on to write: "The German military machine is now ready for instant action."

"I wasn't frightened," she says from the modest apartment in Hong Kong where she now lives, just around the corner from the Foreign Correspondents' Club. Today, Hollingworth's health is frail, her eyesight and hearing nearly gone, but she is a unique witness to the events of 1939.

....Together with her driver and a companion who also worked with the refugees, Hollingworth set off towards her scoop, leaving border guards at Beuthen (now Bytom) staring open-mouthed as she drove past.

"People tend to confuse it, but she actually had two scoops," says Garrett. "The first was to spot the tanks. The second was to see the war itself break out when the Germans invaded and she was in Katowice."

It was as the first light of dawn broke on September 1 that she was woken by explosions and distant gunfire. "Someone rushed into the room and said: 'The Germans are coming!'," she recalls. "And they were quite right!" With the roar of the planes behind her, Hollingworth called the British Embassy in Warsaw and asked to speak to Robin Hankey, her friend and the second secretary. "Robin, the war's begun," she shouted. "Are you sure, old girl?" he asked. In response, she held the telephone out of the bedroom window where the roar of tanks encircling Katowice was clearly audible.

She helped the staff at the consulate to burn documents and then drove to the border at around 10am when the gunfire subsided. She witnessed the mass evacuation and then returned to Katowice where the mood was grim. In fear of a night attack, she spent the night in Crakow, 50 miles away. Returning on September 2, she found Katowice being evacuated. She quickly stuffed her typewriter and some clothes into a pillowcase. However, she was unable to refuse a case of champagne from the French consul, who was overladen. For the next two weeks, she criss-crossed Poland, keeping just ahead of the advancing Germans.

Many of her words never made it back to London. And the copy that did arrive never carried her byline. "She told me: 'We didn't do bylines back then,'" says Garrett. "But she said it was a good thing, since it would only have worried her parents."

It was only the start of a distinguished career, that took her to wars in Algeria and Vietnam before she was appointed the Telegraph's Beijing correspondent in 1973 at the age of 62. For the last 25 years or so, she has been based in Hong Kong, dropping in each day to the Foreign Correspondents' Club....

And everyone thought if they just ignored that "one thing" or gave one more concession that the whole issue would go away......

Have I heard that somewhere before? :confused:


Poland remembers its catastrophe
By Jonny Dymond
BBC News, Gdansk

Searchlights lit up the sky as the hour of the anniversary approached - three streams of light pricking the early morning darkness.

Around the monument to the heroes of the Battle of Westerplatte, military units shuffled into formation.

A long line of dignitaries - military, governmental and religious - faced the obelisk, itself a throwback to Soviet-era sculpture.

Westerplatte is one of Poland's great moments of resistance: bombarded by the German warship Schleswig-Holstein, vastly outnumbered by German troops, and dive-bombed by Stuka planes, 180 lightly armed Polish troops guarding a military depot held out for seven days before surrendering.

At the appointed hour - 0445 (0245 GMT), marking the passage of 70 years to the minute - trumpets rang out across the Westerplatte.

Catastrophe

There was, of course, talk of heroism in the speeches of the mayor of Gdansk, the President Lech Kaczynski and the Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

But for Poland, perhaps more than any other nation on earth, World War II was nothing but a catastrophe. By the war's end, five to six million Poles had been killed, many of them Jews - a greater proportion of Poland's population than that of any other country.


Both Nazi and Soviet occupiers sought to wipe Poland and its civilisation from the map.

The country's intellectual, religious, commercial and military elite were slaughtered. Properties were confiscated, museums looted, universities and schools closed. The capital Warsaw was destroyed on the orders of Hitler.

And the country became a base for the mechanised slaughter of the Holocaust. Auschwitz, Sobibor and Majdanek were some of the camps placed here by the Nazi occupiers.

"We remember," said Mr Tusk, "because we know well that he who forgets or he who falsifies history, and has power, or will assume power, will bring unhappiness again, like 70 years ago."

'Knife in the back'

Mr Kaczynski, the country's more nationalist president, threw a little more fat on the fire of an argument raging between Poland and Russia over responsibility for the war.

Poles have long seen the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty, signed a week before war started, as the starting gun for the German invasion.

Just two weeks later, in mid September 1939, the Soviet armies occupied eastern Poland, and the country was effectively no more.

"On 17 September," said President Kaczynski, "when we were we still defending Warsaw… that day Poland received a knife in the back."

The Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will speak later in the day.

But as the dawn broke over the Westerplatte, and the trumpets sounded again to mark the end of the ceremony, it was the soldiers of Poland - who fought and fell for their country - who were, once more, remembered.

Story from BBC NEWS:

Russia's Putin rejects WW2 criticism in Poland
 

Source is here.