Poland and armored and easily outmatched any foreign cruiser They could, and later did, cruise as powerful commerce raiders See also Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935); Z-Plan POINTBLANK DIRECTIVE ( JUNE 10, 1943) A strategic bombing order issued by the Combined Chiefs of Staff to the Western Allied air forces on June 10, 1943 It authorized a united effort to destroy Germany’s industrial and war-making capacity and production, but with a central and primary focus on first destroying the German fighter arm and fighter production It was essentially a reaffirmation of the agreed goals of the Combined Bomber Offensive as set out at the Casablanca Conference ( January 14–24, 1943), with a more specific list of targeting priorities POISON See chemical weapons; death camps; Hague Conventions; nerve agents; prisoners of war; punji stakes; V-weapons program; Zyklon-B POL “Petroleum, Oil, Lubricants.” A logistics and supply term used by U.S armed forces POLAND Poland had disappeared as an independent state by the end of the 18th century, partitioned by Austria, Prussia, and Russia It did not reappear until 1918, when the defeat of all three empires of the east permitted the Poles to reestablish a state Poland was then enriched with a strip of territory taken from Germany at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to create a Baltic outlet at Danzig, reached via the Polish Corridor Warsaw made its presence felt in the east with a successful expansionist war, defeating an aggressive thrust by the Bolshevik Red Army in the Polish–Soviet War (1920) Poland joined the Little Entente and allied most closely with France in the 1920s General Josef Pilsudski (1867–1935) dominated Polish politics and foreign policy until 1943 He had been in exile in Siberia from 1887 to 1892, and had asked Japan to support a Polish rebellion during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) Pilsudski led a Polish unit in the Austrian Army in the war against Russia during World War I When Germany showed at BrestLitovsk in 1918 that it was far more interested in eastward expansion than in Polish emancipation, he protested angrily and was arrested and briefly imprisoned He was elected president of independent Poland after Germany’s defeat in 1918, and led Polish forces against the Bolsheviks in the Polish-Soviet War in 1920 Briefly voted out of office, in 1926 Pilsudski returned to power in a coup d’etat Thereafter, he was quite dictatorial His voice alone spoke for Poland in foreign affairs It was raised early and often about the danger that Adolf Hitler and Nazism posed to peace, but Pilsudski’s warnings went unheeded in Western capitals In all discussions of collective defense in the 1930s Poland refused to consider transit for the Red Army, necessary for it to reach the Czech–German frontier to repel any German invasion That was one reason no eastern defense pact was agreed From October 1938 to March 1939, Poland came under threat from 857