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Adolf Hitler left Berlin that same night to survey his armies' progress in Poland, and what he saw pleased him mightily. General Heinz Guderian, the tank commander who had already swept across the 50-mile-wide Polish Corridor, the once German area linking Poland to the Baltic Sea, took the Fuhrer on a tour of the newly conquered territory. Hitler was amazed at the low number of ! German casualties, only 150 killed and 700 wounded among four divisions; his own regiment had suffered 2,000 casualties during its first day of combat in World War I. And he was impressed when Guderian showed him the shattered remains of a Polish artillery regiment. "Our dive bombers did that?" he asked. "No, our panzers," Guderian proudly answered.
Many of the Poles had fought gallantly, though, and it was here in the battle for the corridor that there spread the legend of the Polish cavalry charging German armor, like medieval knights lost in a time warp. "The Polish Pomorska Cavalry Brigade, in ignorance of the nature of our tanks, charged them with swords and lances," Guderian recalled with some wonder, "and suffered tremendous losses." Actually, the Polish cavalry was organized to combat infantry charges, and it had proved its value when the Poles defeated the Soviets in 1920. But by the time it confronted the German tanks, the cavalry was already surrounded, and its legendary charges were primarily a desperate effort to escape capture and destruction.
Despite a few convulsive counterattacks, the Germans swept forward all along the front. Blessed by dry weather, the armored spearheads advanced as much as 30 miles a day. As early as Sept. 5, Germany's Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his journal: "As of today, the enemy is practically beaten." The next day, the Wehrmacht captured Cracow, Poland's second city. Two days later, the first tanks of the 4th Panzer Division reached the suburbs of Warsaw, where they encountered sniper fire from apartment windows and found major streets blocked by overturned buses. While the tanks paused for reinforcements, the Luftwaffe kept up its bombing of the battered capital.
A Rome journalist named Enrico Altavilla provided this description: "Our objective was the great new bridge of nine spans over the ((Vistula)) river. We flew over it at 600 meters. It was crowded with autos, armored cars, trucks and private vehicles. In their panic they had created a jam, and none could go forward or backward. The first bombs missed their objective by a hair's breadth. We turned and could see the bridge already full of smoke. One of the other bombers was more accurate than ours. My pilot bit his lip. The bridge was still standing, but this time our bombs were better aimed. I saw a truck full of soldiers tossed into the air and an armored car fall into the river. The arches of the bridge were precipitated into the river one after another, forcing up high columns of water. Some soldiers floundered in the ruins. Others succeeded in reaching the bank. Some inanimate figures floated in the current. Such is war."