- Launched on September 1, 1939, the German campaign to seize Poland encountered spirited but comparatively poorly coordinated resistance. Though the German army was not the mechanized juggernaut it would be half a year later, the Poles were ultimately overwhelmed by an enemy unleashing its first Blitzkrieg—a war plotted not as a series of battles, but as a relentless, comprehensive combined-arms campaign from its launch to its final objectives. In two weeks the Germans had the capital of Warsaw surrounded; within the next week the conquest would be complete.
—Jon Guttman, HistoryNet Historian
