Letter: Memories of war

Sir: Sir Edward Heath (Review, 3 September )says in his personal account of the outbreak of war : "On the previous Friday, Poland had been invaded by Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east".

In fact these attacks did not happen at the same time; the Soviets started their invasion only on 17 September 1939 when (according to the secret German-Soviet treaty) German troops would have reached the river Vistula and occupied Warsaw. The final result was, of course, the same, but had the two invasions happened simultaneously, Poland could not have put up resistance for more than a week.