World War II – Europe this week remembers the commencement of hostilities

The shelling by a German warship of a Polish military depot at the Westerplatte peninsula was one of the first episodes in Nazi Germany’s aggression on Poland that led to the war.

For five days the small Polish garrison held out against the eleven-inch guns of the battleship Schleswig-Holstein and Stukas dropping 500-pound bombs.

William L. Shirer, an American correspondent based in the German capital at the time Nazi troops invaded Poland, described the events in his diary of 1st September, 1939.

“At dawn this morning Hitler moved against Poland. It’s a flagrant, inexcusable, unprovoked act of aggression. But Hitler and the German High Command called it a ‘counter-attack’!”