**A "chilling" and "expertly" written history of the 1939 September
Campaign and the onset of World War II (Times of London).
**For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the
bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1,
1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by
Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of
the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the
targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial
bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians.
In Poland 1939, Roger Moorhouse reexamines the least understood
campaign of World War II, using original archival sources to provide a
harrowing and very human account of the events that set the bloody tone
for the conflict to come.