With continuous aerial bombardment and strafing with heavy machine guns by the Luftwaffe, the advance of whole panzer brigades of tanks and wheeled infantry must, and did, have the effect of a do or die attitude on many Polish units, especially the horse-mounted cavalry and lancers. Time and again, in sheer frustration, units on horseback charged tanks and machine guns. The admittedly poor air force was almost totally destroyed on the ground within hours, being one of the initial targets of the Luftwaffe bombing squadrons. Warsaw was bombed immediately, and other cities, spreading terror amongst civilians who had, as had no one, no experience of such tactics; trying to get away from it, they became an instant clog on the already poor roads. With three armies pushing through from the north west and west, General Bock's Third Army coming down from the north, out of East Prussia, sent out a Panzerkorps heading south east towards Brest-Litovsk. At the same time General Rundstedt's Fourteenth Army, which had initially come up from the south, turned due east towards the Vistula and itself sent out yet another Panzerkorps, heading in the same direction as the one from the north. It was nearly the end. However, in the initial advance, the sector around Poznan had not been attacked and the Polish army there, together with survivors from the Corridor forces, was able to engage the German armies to the south with enough strength, to force them to turn a whole corps northward to meet them.
But it only delayed the inevitable. No one had seen an army like this one before, nor the commitment to total warfare that it employed. In the First World War when something like the destructive power of the Second was available, the civilian populations of invaded countries were avoided and certainly not attacked; outside the battle zones in France and Belgium, life of a sort was possible. And in wars before that, although there would always be some refugees out of the battle zones, again there was really no active hostility to the enemy civilians. It was more a case of keep out of our way and we'll keep out of yours, with policing units left behind to ensure that there was no active sabotage to lines of communication as the troops advanced to take over the remainder of the territory. But the blitzkrieg threw all this out and, whether we like it or not, we now routinely use the total warfare introduced by Hitler's armies. It is, after all, so much easier to carpet bomb than to pinpoint a target; there is that much less chance of missing! In Poland the two encircling Panzerkorps arms of the Third and Fourteenth Armies joined hands near Brest-Litovsk on 17th September and, effectively, that was the end of the war in Poland. Various pockets of the Polish army were completely surrounded throughout the country and these fought on while they had ammunition, but surrender would have been kinder to surviving families.
