Poland

Between 1936 and 1939, Poland invested heavily in the Central Industrial Region. Preparations for a defensive war with Germany were ongoing for many years, but most plans assumed fighting would not begin before 1942. To raise funds for industrial development, Poland sold much of the modern equipment it produced. In 1936, a National Defence Fund was set up to collect funds necessary for strengthening the Polish Armed forces.²⁷ The Polish Army had approximately a million soldiers, but less than half were mobilized by 1 September. Latecomers sustained significant casualties when public transport became targets of the Luftwaffe. The Polish military had fewer armored forces than the Germans, and these units, dispersed within the infantry, were unable to effectively engage the enemy. ²⁸

Experiences in the Polish-Soviet War shaped Polish Army organizational and operational doctrine. Unlike the trench warfare of World War I, the Polish-Soviet War was a conflict in which the cavalry's mobility played a decisive role. Poland acknowledged the benefits of mobility but was unable to invest heavily in many of the expensive, unproven inventions since then. In spite of this, Polish cavalry brigades were used as a mobile mounted infantry and had some successes against both German infantry and cavalry.

The Polish Air Force (Lotnictwo Wojskowe) was at a severe disadvantage against the German Luftwaffe, although it was not destroyed on the ground early on, as is commonly believed. The Polish Air Force lacked modern fighters, but its pilots were among the world's best trained, as proven a year later in the Battle of Britain, in which the Poles played a major part.

Overall, the Germans enjoyed numerical and qualitative aircraft superiority. Poland had only about 600 aircraft, of which only 37 P-37Łoś bombers were modern and comparable to its German counterparts. The Polish Air Force had roughly 185 PZL P.11 and some 95 PZL P.7 fighters, 175 PZL.23 Karaś Bs, 35 Karaś As, and by September, over 100 PZL.37s were produced. However, for the September Campaign, only some 70% of those aircraft were mobilized. Only 36 PZL.37s were deployed. All those aircraft were of indigenous Polish design, with the bombers being more modern than fighters, according to the Ludomił Rayski air force expansion plan, which relied on a strong bomber force. The Polish fighters were a generation older than their German counterparts; the PZL P.11 fighter—produced in the early 1930s—had a top speed of only 365 km/h (227 mph), far less than German bombers. To compensate, the pilots relied on its maneuverability and high diving speed.

The tank force consisted of two armored brigades, four independent tank battalions and some 30 companies of TKS tankettes attached to infantry divisions and cavalry brigades. A standard tank of the Polish Army during the invasion of 1939 was the 7TP light tank. It was the first tank in the world to be equipped with a diesel engine and 360° Gundlach periscope. The 7TP was significantly better armed than its most common opponents, the German Panzer I and II, but only 140 tanks were produced between 1935 and the outbreak of the war. Poland had also a few relatively modern imported designs, such as 50 Renault R35 tanks and 38 Vickers E tanks.

The Polish Navy was a small fleet of destroyers, submarines and smaller support vessels. Most Polish surface units followed Operation Peking, leaving Polish ports on 20 August and escaping by way of the North Sea to join with the British Royal Navy. Submarine forces participated in Operation Worek, with the goal of engaging and damaging German shipping in the Baltic Sea, but they had much less success. In addition, many merchant marine ships joined the British merchant fleet and took part in wartime convoys.

German plan

Early German studies of military actions against Poland included

:JSw« both a small campaign to seize the Pomeranian corridor and Danzig, and a full-scale campaign. "World reaction to the absorption of the Czech lands in March 1939 and the ensuing partial Polish mobilisation rendered a surprise seizure of Danzig unlikely. As a result, Hitler ordered the OKH to begin planning a full-scale invasion in detail, codenamed Case White (Fall Weiss). Poland's precarious geography simplified the process. With Slovakia a German puppet, German armed forces could attack Poland from three sides. Furthermore, Poland had few natural defences. The country's name stems from the Slavic word for fields, and most of the western portion of the country was flat farmland. The only natural obstruction was the Carpathian mountain chain between Poland and Slovakia, but this was not intended as a major theatre of operations.

Due to concern over the possible reaction of the Western powers, the primary aim of the German planners was to ensure an extremely rapid destruction of the Polish army so that forces could be shifted westward to defend against French action. As a result, the objective became the envelopment and destruction of the Polish army west of the Vistula and Narew rivers, in a classic Prussian encirclement. A twinpincer movement from Prussia and Silesia was intended to envelope the bulk of Polish forces in western Poland. The heaviest concentration of forces was with Rundstedt's Army Group South. The main blow would be struck from Silesia towards the north-east, aimed at Warsaw. Rundstedt's main concern was the Eighth Army, which would cover the northern flank against Polish forces in Pomerania. This army was relatively weak, many of the divisions were new, and some had no march or combat training. A secondary blow would be directed out of the former Czech territories and Slovakia to deal with Polish forces in Galicia.

The task of Army Group North was more challenging because of the geography. The initial mission of Bock's forces would be to push across the Pomeranian corridor to link East Prussia with the rest of Germany. Once forces were in place, Army Group North would push southward towards Warsaw. Bock's task was complicated by the terrain along the Prussian frontier, which was more wooded and cluttered by water obstacles than Rundstedt's Silesian thrust. The initial planning aimed at a direct assault on Warsaw from the north, along the western bank of the Vistula. Bock wanted more freedom of action so that his forces could travel down the east side of the Vistula to cut off any Polish forces that might attempt to escape. His request was initially denied, as the OKW did not want major forces to become entangled in the east in case they had to be shifted back to the front with France.

Mobilisation and deployment of the Wehrmacht had to be concealed so as not to compromise German diplomatic efforts in late August, which were aimed at isolating Poland. The first stage of the deployment began on 26 June with the transfer of nine infantry divisions to the east. The second phase, involving 13 divisions, began on 3 August and ,was disguised as normal summer manoeuvres. The deployment, which involved the first major transport of units into East Prussia, was disguised as a manoeuvre by the East Prussian 1st Army Corps and the annual Tannenberg celebration, which in 1939 happened to be the 25th anniversary of the First World War victory. The next wave of mobilisation began on 19 August and involved all those formations that were six days or more away from their assembly areas on the Polish frontier. Since the original plan called for the start of the operation on 26 August, all the major formations were in place by 25 August. ²⁹

German intelligence on Polish dispositions was poor; this was in part due to German weaknesses in intelligence gathering, but also due to the conviction that the Polish army could be readily defeated. These intelligence shortcomings had little consequence in 1939, but would become more manifest in 1941 following the invasion of the Soviet Union.

In early 1939, the Polish general staff began to re-examine its 1936 studies about a potential war with Germany in light of new intelligence information about its powerful neighbour. Like many small nations, Poland devoted a great deal of effort to intelligence gathering and had both an effective human-intelligence and signals-intelligence network. The Poles had broken the German Enigma tactical coding system, though the German addition of another element to the system in the summer of 1939 cut off this means of intelligence gathering. Nevertheless, the Poles had a good appreciation of German tactical dispositions and a clear understanding of the likely German plan. A new war plan, codenamed Plan Z (Zachod West) was submitted in early March 1939. The plan estimated that Germany could mobilise about 110 division-sized formations, of which about 70 would be committed initially against Poland before being shifted to the west. PJan Z had to be reformulated after the seizure of the Czech lands on 15 March. The earlier 1936 war plan and the first draft of Plan Z assumed that the main German thrust would come from Pomerania striking to the south-east.

The revised plan correctly recognised that the main effort would now more likely be from Silesia striking to the north-east. In May 1939, discussions were held with the French general staff to discuss joint actions in the event of a German attack. Although the Poles left France convinced that the French army would launch a major attack against Germany involving between 35 and 38 divisions within two weeks of an attack on Poland, in fact Gamelin and the French general staff had no detailed plan for such an operation. Indeed, on 31 May 1939, a general directive changed the scope of the offensive to a 'feeling out operation', but the Poles were never informed of this change. The French expected ihat the Poles could hold out for three or four months, more than enough time for a proper operation to be prepared. The illusory Polish conviction that there would be an immediate French attack in the west lav at the heart of the Poles' strategic planning in 1939.

The Poles examined two broad strategic options for defence. The first, promoted by the French army's General Maxime Weygand, was to rely on the old Russian fortification line along the fiiebrza, Narew, Vistula, and San river lines. This line fitted Polish operational doctrine, since such a defensive grouping would not overextend the limited Pol ish force structure of 30 divisions. Its main problem was political. For such a plan to succeed, the Polish army would have t.o be fully mobilised arid deployed, since the majority of Polish troops had to be called up from the more populous provinces west of this defensive line. It was the presumption of Plan Z that Germany would strike before mobilisation could be fully implemented; this being the case, much of the manpower of the army would be lost before they could reach their mobilisation areas east of the river line. The other important factor that undermined support for this option was the recent examples of German military and diplomatic action. There was considerable concern tiiat if Poland's defences were situated so far eastward, the Germans would simply seize the Pomeranian corridor as well as the western provinces of Pomerania and Silesia unopposed, just as they had taken the Sudetenland. If Germany did so, it would create the impression that Poland was unwilling to fight in its own defence, thereby undermining British and French commitments to take joint military action against Germany. The Polish government was unequivocally opposed to any plan that could lead to a repeat of Czechoslovakia's uncontcsted demise.

The second plan was to position Polish troops well forward of the river line near the western frontier. It was presumed that it would take 12 to 15 days to fully mobilise the army, so the defence of the western borders in the initial phase of the operation would serve to shield the mobilisation of forces in the most populous sections of western Poland. This was especially critical as Poland was an ethnically diverse country and only about 60 per cent of the population was Polish. The Polish population was most heavily concentrated in the west, while the eastern provinces were heavily Byelorussian and Ukrainian. Since the army relied more on recruits drawn from the Polish provinces, this was a vital concern.

In addition, a strong defence of the western region would oblige Britain and France to honour their commitments to declare war on Germany. The Polish planners were under no illusions about the prospects for the small Polish army against the much larger and better equipped German army. The Poles' only hope was to prolong the defence long enough for France and Britain to mobilise and strike Germany in the west.

The resulting plan placed the bulk of Polish forces in western Poland. It is a tactic that has been widely misinterpreted in many histories of the war as a plan for a linear, static defence of the frontier on the model of the French plans. However, it had little to do with French doctrine since there were minimal border fortifications. Instead, the objective was to shield the western Polish provinces for as long as possible to enable mobilisation, and to permit a gradual withdrawal of forces eastward to prolong the war by avoiding decisive battle. Polish defensive concepts were based largely on the experience of the 1920 war with Russia, which had been a war of manoeuvre. RydzSmigly's intention was to withdraw the army eastward and to avoid decisive battle west of the Vistula.

There were several major flaws in the plan. The disposition of the forces forced the infantry divisions to cover sectors far beyond that deemed prudent in Polish tactical doctrine. As a result, the forward divisions were never able to effectively slow the German advance without becoming deeply engaged and destroyed by the larger and more powerful German forces. In addition, the plan seriously underestimated the pace of fighting. Although the Poles planned to wage a war of manoeuvre, they failed to appreciate the impact that mechanisation had had upon the Wehrmacht. The low density of understrength Polish divisions ensured the penetration of the main line of resistance by fully mobilised German formations, and once a penetration occurred, the Wehrmacht had the capability to exploit their achievements much more quickly than the Poles could react. The Poles were not the only nation to underestimate the potential of the new style of mechanised warfare and, since the Polish campaign was its first demonstration, the Polish attitude was unsurprising. Like most other European armies, they had been misled by the lessons of the recent Spanish Civil War, in which tanks and aircraft had been used in significant numbers without affecting the pace of modern combat.

The Polish predicament was that the river defence option, while militarily sound, failed to address Poland's political and strategic dilemmas. The forward defence plan, while addressing Poland's political and strategic concerns, was militarily unsound. Poland was in a hopeless situation when facing its more powerful western neighbour. The situation became even more grim in late August with the announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. The Polish government was unaware of the secret invasion protocols of the non-aggression pact, and so it was unclear whether the Soviet Union would take military action in the event of a war between Poland and Germany. Given the paucity of forces available to the Polish army, there was no shift in dispositions as a result of the pact and the eastern borders remained unprotected except for token border forces.

They intended to fully exploit their long border with the great enveloping manoeuver of Fall Weiss. German units were to invade Poland from three directions:

A main attack over the western Polish border. This was to be carried out by Army Group South commanded by General Gerd von Rundstedt, attacking from German Silesia and from the Moravian and Slovak border: General Johannes Blaskowitz's 8th Army was to drive eastward against Łódź; General Wilhelm List's 14th Army was to push on toward Kraków and to turn the Poles' Carpathian flank; and General Walter von Reichenau's 10th Army, in the centre with Army Group South's armor, was to deliver the decisive blow with a northeastward thrust into the heart of Poland. A second route of attack from northern Prussia. General Fedor von Bock commanded Army Group North, comprising General Georg von Küchler's 3rd Army, which was to strike southward from East Prussia, and General Günther von Kluge's 4th Army, which was to attack eastward across the base of the Polish Corridor. A tertiary attack by part of Army Group South's allied Slovak units from Slovakia.

From within Poland, the German minority would assist by engaging in diversion and sabotage operations through Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz units prepared before the war.

All three assaults were to converge on Warsaw, while the main Polish army was to be encircled and destroyed west of the Vistula. Fall Weiss was initiated on 1 September 1939, and was the first operation of World War II in Europe.

Polish defence plan

The Polish political determination to deploy forces directly at the Ger

man-Polish border, based on the Polish-British Common Defense Pact, shaped the country's defence plan, "Plan West". Poland's most valuable natural resources, industry and population were located along the western border in Eastern Upper Silesia. Polish policy centred on their protection especially since many politicians feared that if Poland were to retreat from the regions disputed by Germany, Britain and France would sign a separate peace treaty with Germany similar to the Munich Agreement of 1938. The fact that none of Poland's allies had specifically guaranteed Polish borders or territorial integrity certainly did not help in easing Polish concerns. For these reasons, Poland disregarded French advice to deploy the bulk of their forces behind the natural barriers such as the Vistula and San rivers, even though some Polish generals supported it as a better strategy. The West Plan did permit the Polish armies to retreat inside the country, but it was supposed to be a slow retreat behind prepared positions and was intended to give the armed forces time to complete its mobilization and execute a general counteroffensive with the support of the Western Allies.

The Polish General Staff had not begun elaborating the "West" defence plan until 4 March 1939. It was assumed that the Polish Army, fighting in the initial phase of the war alone, would be compelled to defend the western regions of the country. The plan of operations took into account, first of all, the numerical and material superiority of the enemy and, consequently, assumed the defensive character of Polish operations. The Polish intentions were: the defence of the western regions judged as indispensable for waging the war, the taking advantage of the propitious conditions for counterblows by reserve units, the avoidance of being smashed before the beginning of Allied operations in the West and the making of decisions depending of the existing situation. The operational plan had not been elaborated in detail and concerned only the first stage of operations. The British and French estimated that Poland should be able to defend itself for two to three months, while Poland estimated it could do so for at least six months. Poland drafted its estimates based upon the expectation that the Western Allies honor their treaty obligations and quickly start an offensive of their own. In addition, the French and British expected the war to develop into trench warfare much like World War I. The Polish government was not notified of this strategy and based all of its defence plans on promises of quick relief by their Western allies.

Polish forces were stretched thinly along the Polish-German border and lacked compact defence lines and good defence positions along disadvantageous terrain. This strategy also left supply lines poorly protected. One-third of Poland's forces were massed in or near the Polish Corridor, making them vulnerable to a double envelopment from East Prussia and the west. Another third were concentrated in the north-central part of the country, between the major cities of Łódź and Warsaw. The forward positioning of Polish forces vastly increased the difficulty of carrying out strategic maneuvers, compounded by inadequate mobility, as Polish units often lacked the ability to retreat from their defensive positions as they were being overrun by more mobile German mechanized formations.

As the prospect of conflict increased, the British government pressed Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły to evacuate the most modern elements of the Polish Navy from the Baltic Sea. In the event of war the Polish military leaders realized that the ships which remained in the Baltic were likely to be quickly sunk by the Germans. Furthermore, the Danish straits were well within operating range of the German Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe, so there was little chance of an evacuation plan succeeding if implemented after hostilities began. Four days after the signing of the Polish-British Common Defense Pact, three destroyers of the Polish Navy executed the Peking Plan and consequently evacuated to Great Britain.

Although the Polish military had prepared for conflict, the civilian population remained largely unprepared. Polish pre-war propaganda emphasized that any German invasion would be easily repelled. Consequently, Polish defeats during the German invasion came as a shock to the civilian population. Lacking training for such a disaster, the civilian population panicked and retreated east, spreading chaos, lowering troop morale and making road transportation for Polish troops very difficult.

German invasion

Following several German-staged incidents (like the Gleiwitz incident, a part of Operation Himmler), which German propaganda used as an excuse to claim that German forces were acting in self-defence, the first regular act of war took place on 1 September 1939, at 04:40, when the Luftwaffe attacked the Polish town of Wieluń, destroying 75% of the city and killing close to 1,200 people, most of them civilians. This invasion subsequently began World War II. Five minutes later, the old German pre-dreadnought battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte in the Free City of Danzig on the Baltic Sea. At 08:00, German troops—still without a formal declaration of war issued—attacked near the Polish town of Mokra. The Battle of the Border had begun. Later that day, the Germans attacked on Poland's western, southern and northern borders, while German aircraft began raids on Polish cities. The main axis of attack led eastwards from Germany proper through the western Polish border. Supporting attacks came from East Prussia in the north, and a co-operative German-Slovak tertiary attack by units (Field Army "Bernolák") from German-allied Slovakia in the south. All three assaults converged on the Polish capital of Warsaw. ³⁰

The Allied governments declared war on Germany on 3 September; however, they failed to provide any meaningful support. The German-French border saw only a few minor skirmishes, although the majority of German forces, including 85% of their armoured forces, were engaged in Poland. Despite some Polish successes in minor border battles, German technical, operational and numerical superiority forced the Polish armies to retreat from the borders towards Warsaw and Lwów. The Luftwaffe gained air superiority early in the campaign. By destroying communications, the Luftwaffe increased the pace of the advance which overran Polish airstrips and early warning sites, causing logistical problems for the Poles. Many Polish Air Force units ran low on supplies, 98 of their number withdrew into thenneutral Romania. The Polish initial strength of 400 was reduced to just 54 by 14 September and air opposition virtually ceased. ³¹

By 3 September, when Günther von Kluge in the north had reached the Vistula river (some 10 km (6.2 mi) from the German border at that time) and Georg von Küchler was approaching the Narew River, Walther von Reichenau's armor was already beyond the Warta river; two days later, his left wing was well to the rear of Łódź and his right wing at the town of Kielce. By 8 September, one of his armored corps—having advanced 225 km (140 mi) in the first week of the campaign—reached the outskirts of Warsaw. Light divisions on Reichenau's right were on the Vistula between Warsaw and the town of Sandomierz by 9 September while List—in the south—was on the San River above and below the town of Przemyśl. At the same time, Guderian led his 3rd Army tanks across the Narew, attacking the line of the Bug River, already encircling Warsaw. All the German armies made progress in fulfilling their parts of the Fall Weiss plan. The Polish armies were splitting up into uncoordinated fragments, some of which were retreating while others were launching disjointed attacks on the nearest German columns.

Polish forces abandoned the regions of Pomerelia (the Polish Corridor³²), Greater Poland and Polish Upper Silesia in the first week. The Polish plan for border defence was proven a dismal failure. The German advance as a whole was not slowed. On 10 September, the Polish commander-in-chief—Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły—ordered a general retreat to the southeast, towards the so-called Romanian Bridgehead. Meanwhile, the Germans were tightening their encirclement of the Polish forces west of the Vistula (in the Łódź area and, still farther west, around Poznań) and also penetrating deeply into eastern Poland. Warsaw—under heavy aerial bombardment since the first hours of the war—was attacked on 9 September and was put under siege on 13 September. Around that time, advanced German forces also reached the city of Lwów, a major metropolis in eastern Poland. 1,150 German aircraft bombed Warsaw on 24 September.

The Polish defensive plan called for a strategy of encirclement: they were to allow the Germans to advance in between two Polish Army groups in the line between Berlin and Warsaw-Lodz, at which point Armia Prusy would move in and repulse the German spearhead, trapping them. In order for this to happen, Armia Prusy needed to be fully mobilized by 3 September. However, Polish military planners failed to foresee the speed of the German advance and predicted that Armia Prusy would need to be fully mobilized by 16 September, by which time it was too late.

The largest battle during this campaign—the Battle of Bzura—took place near the Bzura river west of Warsaw and lasted 9–19 September. Polish armies Poznań and Pomorze, retreating from the border area of the Polish Corridor, attacked the flank of the advancing German 8th Army, but the counterattack failed after initial success. After the defeat, Poland lost its ability to take the initiative and counterattack on a large scale. German air power was instrumental during the battle. The Luftwaffe's offensive broke what remained of Polish resistance in an "awesome demonstration of air power". The Luftwaffe quickly destroyed the bridges across the Bzura River. Afterward, the Polish forces were trapped out in the open, and were attacked by wave after wave of Stukas, dropping 50 kg (110 lb) "light bombs" which caused huge numbers of casualties. The Polish anti-aircraft batteries ran out of ammunition and retreated to the forests, but were then "smoked out" by the Heinkel He 111 and Dornier Do 17s dropping 100 kg (220 lb) incendiaries. The Luftwaffe left the army with the task of mopping up survivors. The Stukageschwaders alone dropped 388 t (428 short tons) of bombs during this battle. The Polish government (of President Ignacy Mościcki) and the high command (of Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły) left Warsaw in the first days of the campaign and headed southeast, reaching Lublin on 6 September. From there, it moved on 9 September to Kremenez, and on 13 September to Zaleshiki on the Romanian border. Rydz-Śmigły ordered the Polish forces to retreat in the same direction, behind the Vistula and San rivers, beginning the preparations for the long defense of the Romanian Bridgehead area.

Soviet Union invaded from the east

From the beginning, the German government repeatedly asked Vyacheslav Molotov whether the Soviet Union would keep to its side of the partition bargain.³³ The Soviet forces were holding fast along their designated invasion points pending finalization of the fivemonth-long undeclared war with Japan in the far east. On 15 September 1939 the Ambassadors Molotov and Shigenori Tōgō completed their agreement ending the conflict, and the Nomonhan cease-fire went into effect on 16 September 1939. Now cleared of any "second front" threat from the Japanese, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin ordered his forces into Poland on 17 September. It was agreed that the USSR would relinquish its interest in the territories between the new border and Warsaw in exchange for inclusion of Lithuania in the Soviet "zone of interest".

By 17 September, the Polish defence was already broken and the only hope was to retreat and reorganize along the Romanian Bridgehead. However, these plans were rendered obsolete nearly overnight, when the over 800,000 strong Soviet Red Army entered and created the Belarussian and Ukrainian fronts after invading the eastern regions of Poland in violation of the Riga Peace Treaty, the Soviet-Polish Non-Aggression Pact, and other international treaties, both bilateral and multilateral. Soviet diplomacy claimed that they were "protecting the Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities of eastern Poland since the Polish government had abandoned the country and the Polish state ceased to exist". ³⁴

Polish border defence forces in the east—known as the Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza—consisted of about 25 battalions. Edward RydzŚmigły ordered them to fall back and not engage the Soviets. This, however, did not prevent some clashes and small battles, such as the Battle of Grodno, as soldiers and local population attempted to defend the city. The Soviets murdered numerous Polish officers, including prisoners of war like General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists rose against the Poles, and communist partisans organized local revolts, robbing and murdering Poles. Those movements were quickly disciplined by the NKVD.³⁵ The Soviet invasion was one of the decisive factors that convinced the Polish government that the war in Poland was lost. Prior to the Soviet attack from the east, the Polish military's fall-back plan had called for long-term defence against Germany in the south-eastern part of Poland, while awaiting relief from a Western Allies attack on Germany's western border. However, the Polish government refused to surrender or negotiate a peace with Germany. Instead, it ordered all units to evacuate Poland and reorganize in France.

Meanwhile, Polish forces tried to move towards the Romanian Bridgehead area, still actively resisting the German invasion. From 17–20 September, Polish armies Kraków and Lublin were crippled at the Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski, the second largest battle of the campaign. The city of Lwów capitulated on 22 September because of Soviet intervention; the city had been attacked by the Germans over a week earlier, and in the middle of the siege, the German troops handed operations over to their Soviet allies. Despite a series of intensifying German attacks, Warsaw—defended by quickly reorganized retreating units, civilian volunteers and militia—held out until 28 September. The Modlin Fortress north of Warsaw capitulated on 29 September after an intense 16-day battle. Some isolated Polish garrisons managed to hold their positions long after being surrounded by German forces. Westerplatte enclave's tiny garrison capitulated on 7 September and the Oksywie garrison held until 19 September; Hel Fortified Area was defended until 2 October.In the last week of September, Hitler made a speech in the city of Danzig in which he said: Poland never will rise again in the form of the Versailles treaty. That is guaranteed not only by Germany, but also… Russia. Despite a Polish victory at the Battle of Szack, after which the Soviets executed all the officers and NCOs they had captured, the Red Army reached the line of rivers Narew, Bug River, Vistula and San by 28 September, in many cases meeting German units advancing from the other direction. Polish defenders on the Hel peninsula on the shore of the Baltic Sea held out until 2 October. The last operational unit of the Polish Army, General Franciszek Kleeberg's Samodzielna Grupa Operacyjna "Polesie", surrendered after the four-day Battle of Kock near Lublin on 6 October marking the end of the September Campaign.

Civilian losses

The Polish September Campaign was an instance of total war. Consequently, civilian casualties were high during and after combat. From the start, the Luftwaffe attacked civilian targets and columns of refugees along the roads to wreak havoc, disrupt communications, and target Polish morale. Apart from the victims of battles, the German forces (both SS and the regular Wehrmacht) murdered several thousand Polish civilians. During Operation Tannenberg, nearly 20,000 Poles were shot at 760 mass execution sites by the Einsatzgruppen.³⁶ The Polish Campaign was the first action by Adolf Hitler in his attempt to create Lebensraum, or living space, for the ethnic German people. The German retaliation against the opposing Polish civilians quickly turned into an atrocity, an irregular warfare against Polish men, women, and children. The brutality that the German army carried out on the civilians was justifiable in their eyes. Many historians have studied the reasoning behind this brutality and have found that Nazi propaganda could be one of the factors. Nazi propaganda worked to manipulate the German people into believing that the Jewish and other ethnic people were the enemy

Altogether, the civilian losses of Polish population amounted to about 150,000–200,000 while German civilian losses amounted to roughly 3,250 (including 2,000 who died fighting Polish troops as members of a fifth column).

Aftermath

Poland was divided among Germany, the Soviet Union, and Slovakia. Lithuania received the city of Wilno and its environs on 28 October 1939 from the Soviet Union. On 8 and 13 September 1939, the German military districts of "Posen" (Poznan)—commanded by General Alfred von Vollard-Bockelberg—and "Westpreußen" (West Prussia)— commanded by General Walter Heitz—were established in conquered Greater Poland and Pomerelia, respectively. Based on laws of 21 May 1935 and 1 June 1938, the German Wehrmacht shared its administrative powers with civilian "chief civil administrators" (Chefs der Zivilverwaltung, CdZ). German dictator Adolf Hitler appointed Arthur Greiser to become the CdZ of the Posen military district, and Danzig's Gauleiter Albert Forster to become the CdZ of the West Prussian military district. On 3 October, the military districts "Lodz" and "Krakau" (Cracow) were set up under command of Generalobersten (ColonelGenerals)) Gerd von Rundstedt and Wilhelm List, and Hitler appointed Hans Frank and Arthur Seyss-Inquart as civil heads, respectively. At the same time, Frank was appointed "supreme chief administrator" for all occupied territories. On 28 September, another secret German-Soviet protocol modified the arrangements of August: all of Lithuania was shifted to the Soviet sphere of influence; in exchange, the dividing line in Poland was moved in Germany's favour, eastwards towards the Bug River. On 8 October, Germany formally annexed the western parts of Poland with Greiser and Forster as Reichsstatthalter, while the south-central parts were administered as the General Government led by Frank.

Even though water barriers separated most of the spheres of interest, the Soviet and German troops met on numerous occasions. The most remarkable event of this kind occurred at Brest-Litovsk on 22 September. The German 19th Panzer Corps—commanded by General Heinz Guderian—had occupied the city, which lay within the Soviet sphere of interest. When the Soviet 29th Tank Brigade—commander by S. M. Krivoshein—approached, the commanders negotiated that the German troops would withdraw and the Soviet troops would enter the city saluting each other. At Brest-Litovsk, Soviet and German commanders held a joint victory parade before German forces withdrew westward behind a new demarcation line. Just three days earlier, however, the parties had a more hostile encounter near Lwow (Lviv, Lemberg), when the German 137th Gebirgsjägerregimenter (mountain infantry regiment) attacked a reconnaissance detachment of the Soviet 24th Tank Brigade; after a few casualties on both sides, the parties turned to negotiations. The German troops left the area, and the Red Army troops entered Lviv on 22 September. The Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and the invasion of Poland marked the beginning of a period during which the government of the Soviet Union increasingly tried to convince itself that the actions of Germany were reasonable, and were not developments to be worried about, despite evidence to the contrary. On 7 September 1939, just a few days after France and Britain joined the war against Germany, Stalin explained to a colleague that the war was to the advantage of the Soviet Union, as follows:

A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries... for the redivision of the world, for the domination of the world! We see nothing wrong in their having a good hard fight and weakening each other... Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system... We can manoeuvre, pit one side against the other to set them fighting with each other as fiercely as possible... The annihilation of Poland would mean one fewer bourgeois fascist state to contend with! What would be the harm if as a result of the rout of Poland we were to extend the socialist system onto new territories and populations?

About 65,000 Polish troops were killed in the fighting, with 420,000 others being captured by the Germans and 240,000 more by the Soviets (for a total of 660,000 prisoners). Up to 120,000 Polish troops escaped to neutral Romania (through the Romanian Bridgehead and Hungary), and another 20,000 to Latvia and Lithuania, with the majority eventually making their way to France or Britain. Most of the Polish Navy succeeded in evacuating to Britain as well. German personnel losses were less than their enemies (16,000 KIA). None of the parties to the conflict—Germany, the Western Allies or the Soviet Union—expected that the German invasion of Poland would lead to a war that would surpass World War I in its scale and cost. It would be months before Hitler would see the futility of his peace negotiation attempts with the United Kingdom and France, but the culmination of combined European and Pacific conflicts would result in what was truly a "world war". Thus, what was not seen by most politicians and generals in 1939 is clear from the historical perspective: The Polish September Campaign marked the beginning of the Second World War in Europe, which combined with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Pacific War in 1941, formed the cataclysm known as World War II.

The invasion of Poland led Britain and France to declare war on Germany on 3 September. However, they did little to affect the outcome of the September Campaign. No declaration of war was issued by Britain and France against the Soviet Union. This lack of direct help led many Poles to believe that they had been betrayed by their Western allies.

On 23 May 1939, Hitler explained to his officers that the object of the aggression was not Danzig, but the need to obtain German Lebensraum and details of this concept would be later formulated in the infamous Generalplan Ost. The invasion decimated urban residential areas, civilians soon became indistinguishable from combatants, and the forthcoming German occupation (both on the annexed territories and in the General Government) was one of the most brutal episodes of World War II, resulting in between 5.47 million and 5.67 million Polish deaths (about 20% of the country's "total" population, and over 90% of its Jewish minority)—including the mass murder of 3 million Polish citizens (mainly Jews as part of the final solution) in extermination camps like Auschwitz, in concentration camps, and in numerous ad hoc massacres, where civilians were rounded up, taken to a nearby forest, machine-gunned, and then buried, whether they were dead or not.

According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941 resulted in the death of 150,000 and deportation of 320,000 of Polish citizens, when all who were deemed dangerous to the Soviet regime were subject to sovietization, forced resettlement, imprisonment in labor camps (the Gulags) or murdered, like the Polish officers in the Katyn massacre.

Misconceptions

There are several common misconceptions regarding the Polish September Campaign.

The Polish Army fought German tanks with horse-mounted cavalry wielding lances and swords.

In 1939, only 10% of the Polish army was made up of cavalry units. Polish cavalry never charged German tanks or entrenched infantry or artillery, but usually acted as mobile infantry (like dragoons) and reconnaissance units and executed cavalry charges only in rare situations against foot soldiers. Other armies (including German and Soviet) also fielded and extensively used elite horse cavalry units at that time. Polish cavalry consisted of eleven brigades, as emphasized by its military doctrine, equipped with anti tank rifles "UR" and light artillery such as the highly effective Bofors 37 mm anti-tank gun. The myth originated from war correspondents reports of the Battle of Krojanty, where a Polish cavalry brigade was fired upon in ambush by hidden armored vehicles, after it had mounted a sabre-charge against German infantry.

The Polish Air Force was destroyed on the ground in the first

days of the war.

The Polish Air Force, though numerically inferior, had been moved from air bases to small camouflaged airfields shortly before the war. Only some trainers and auxiliary aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The Polish Air Force, significantly outnumbered and with its fighters outmatched by more advanced German fighters, remained active up to the second week of the campaign, inflicting significant damage on the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe lost, to all operational causes, 285 aircraft, with 279 more damaged, while the Poles lost 333 aircraft.

Poland offered little resistance and surrendered quickly. In the first few days, Germany sustained very heavy losses: Poland cost the Germans an entire armored division, thousands of soldiers, and 25% of its air strength. As for duration, the September Campaign lasted only about one week less than the Battle of France in 1940, even though the Anglo-French forces were much closer to parity with the Germans in numerical strength and equipment. Furthermore, the Polish Army was preparing the Romanian Bridgehead, which would have prolonged Polish defence, but this plan was cancelled due to the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939. Poland also never officially surrendered to the Germans. Under German occupation, the Polish army continued to fight underground, as Armia Krajowa and forest partisans—Leśni. The Polish resistance movement in World War II in German-occupied Poland was one of the largest resistance movements in all of occupied Europe.

Blitzkrieg was first used in Poland.

It is often assumed that blitzkrieg is the strategy that Germany first used in Poland. Many early post-war histories, such as Barrie Pitt's in The Second World War (BPC Publishing 1966), attribute German victory to "enormous development in military technique which occurred between 1918 and 1940", citing that "Germany, who translated (British inter-war) theories into action… called the result Blitzkrieg." This idea has been repudiated by some authors. Matthew Cooper writes: "Throughout the Polish Campaign, the employment of the mechanized units revealed the idea that they were intended solely to ease the advance and to support the activities of the infantry…. Thus, any strategic exploitation of the armoured idea was still-born. The paralysis of command and the breakdown of morale were not made the ultimate aim of the … German ground and air forces, and were only incidental by-products of the traditional manoeuvers of rapid encirclement and of the supporting activities of the flying artillery of the Luftwaffe, both of which had as their purpose the physical destruction of the enemy troops. Such was the Vernichtungsgedanke of the Polish campaign." Vernichtungsgedanke³⁷ was a strategy dating back to Frederick the Great, and was applied in the Polish Campaign little changed from the French campaigns in 1870 or 1914. The use of tanks "left much to be desired...Fear of enemy action against the flanks of the advance, fear which was to prove so disastrous to German prospects in the west in 1940 and in the Soviet Union in 1941, was present from the beginning of the war." John Ellis, writing in Brute Force asserted that "…there is considerable justice in Matthew Cooper's assertion that the panzer divisions were not given the kind of strategic (emphasis in original) mission that was to characterize authentic armoured blitzkrieg, and were almost always closely subordinated to the various mass infantry armies." Zaloga and Madej, in The Polish Campaign 1939, also address the subject of mythical interpretations of Blitzkrieg and the importance of other arms in the campaign. "Whilst Western accounts of the September campaign have stressed the shock value of the panzers and Stuka attacks, they have tended to underestimate the punishing effect of German artillery (emphasis added) on Polish units. Mobile and available in significant quantity, artillery shattered as many units as any other branch of the Wehrmacht.

Battle of Westerplatte

The Battle of Westerplatte was the first battle in the Invasion of Poland, the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. Beginning on September 1, 1939, German naval forces and soldiers assaulted the Polish Military Transit Depot (Wojskowa Składnica Tranzytowa, WST) on the peninsula of Westerplatte, in the harbour of the Free City of Danzig. The depot was manned by fewer than 200 soldiers, but held out for seven days in the face of a heavy attack that included dive bomber attacks. The defense of Westerplatte served as an inspiration for the Polish Army and people in the face of successful German advances elsewhere, and today is still regarded as a symbol of resistance to the invasion.

In 1925 the Council of the League of Nations allowed Poland to keep only 88 soldiers on Westerplatte, but secretly the garrison was gradually expanded to 176 men and six officers. The WST was separated from the New Port of the Free City of Danzig (present day Gdańsk) by the harbour channel, with only a small pier connecting them to the mainland; the Polish-held part of the Westerplatte was separated from the territory of Danzig by a brick wall. Fortifications built at Westerplatte were in fact not very impressive: there were no real bunkers or underground tunnels, there were only five small concrete outposts (guardhouses) hidden in the peninsula's forest and the large barracks prepared for defense, supported by a network of field fortifications such as trenches and barricades. Cellars of outposts were fit to fire heavy machine guns from them. In case of war, the defenders were expected to withstand a sustained attack for 12 hours.

Prelude

At the end of August 1939, the German pre-dreadnought battleship

Schleswig-Holstein sailed to Danzig under the pretext of a courtesy visit and anchored in the channel 164 yards (150 m) from Westerplatte. On board was a Shock troop (Stoßtruppen) assault company with orders to launch an attack against the Westerplatte on the morning of August 26. However, shortly before disembarkation, the order to attack was rescinded. As a result of Britain and Poland having signed the Polish-British Common Defence Pact on August 25, and also being informed that Italy was hesitant in fulfilling its obligations regarding the Pact of Steel, Adolf Hitler postponed the opening of hostilities.

The Germans had an SS-Heimwehr force of 1500 men led by Police General Friedrich-Georg Eberhardt and 225 Marines under Lieutenant Wilhelm Henningsen to attack the depot. Overall command was handed to Rear-Admiral Gustav Kleikamp aboard the Schleswig-Holstein. He moved his ship farther upstream on August 26. Major Henryk Sucharski put his garrison on heightened alert.

Battle

On September 1, 1939, at 0448 local time, Germany began its inva

sion of Poland, starting World War II; the Schleswig-Holstein suddenly opened broadside salvo fire on the Polish garrison held by 182 soldiers and 27 civilian reservists. Major Sucharski radioed Hel Peninsula "SOS: I'm under fire". Three holes were made in the perimeter wall and oil warehouses were blazing in the southeastern sector. Eight minutes later, Lieutenant Wilhelm Henningsen's crack marines storm unit from the Schleswig-Holstein advanced in three platoons while the Wehrmacht's Pioneers blew up the railroad gate going on the land-bridge, expecting an easy victory over the surprised Poles. Staff Sergeant Wojciech Najsarek, a Polish soldier, was killed by machine-gun fire, the first victim of both the battle and war. However, soon after crossing the artillery-breached brick wall, the attackers suddenly came into a well-prepared ambush. German soldiers found themselves caught in a kill zone of Polish crossfire from concealed firing points (the Germans believed they were also fired on by snipers hidden in the trees, but in reality that was not the case), while barbed wire entanglements effectively blocked quick movements. The Poles knocked out a machine gun nest at the German Schupo and Lt. Leon Pająk opened intense howitzer fire on the advancing Germans, who faltered and stopped their attack. The single 76.2 mm field gun knocked out machine-gun nests on top of the warehouses across the harbour canal, but was destroyed by the ship's guns after firing 28 shots.

"The tactics of outpost commanders, who lured the Germans into a fire trap, letting them advance into the line of fire, contributed to these heavy losses. The Polish mortar fire, guided precisely by observers from protruding positions, added to the destruction. The system of barriers secretly prepared by the WST soldiers in the spring and summer of 1939 made it difficult for the Germans to move around the park that was Westerplatte (once a popular spa)."

At 0622, the Marines frantically radioed the ship they had heavy losses and were withdrawing, Danzig Police had tried to seize control of the harbor on the other side of Westerplatte but were defeated. Casualties were 50 Germans and 8 Poles. The Germans tried again at 0855 but met mines, fallen trees, barbed wire and intense fire. By noon the SS men fled and Henningsen was mortally wounded. The initial assault was crushed and a second attack that morning (after an artillery barrage of 90 280 mm shells, 407 170 mm shells and 366 88 mm shells) was repelled as well, the Germans suffering unexpectedly high losses. The Poles eventually retreated from the Wał and Prom outposts (and for a time also from Fort), tightening the ring of defence around the New Barracks in the centre of the peninsula. On the first day of combat, the Polish side lost one man killed and seven wounded (three died later, including two of them who were captured and died in a German hospital). On the other side, the German naval infantry lost 16 killed in action and some 120 wounded (injuries of various gravity), the majority out of the 225 men deployed. The German losses would have been even greater if not for the order by the Polish commander, Major Henryk Sucharski, for the mortar crews to cease fire in order to conserve ammunition, issued after firing just a few salvos (because of this order only 104 out of their 860 shells were spent when the mortars were destroyed on the next day). On the following days, the Germans bombarded the peninsula with naval and heavy field artillery, including a 210 mm howitzer, turning it into World War I-style moonscape. Eberhardt convinced General Fedor von Bock a ground attack was not possible. A devastating twowave air raid by 60 Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers on September 2 (the total of 26.5 tons of bombs) took out the Polish mortars, directly hit guardhouse 5 (destroying it completely with a 500 kg bomb) and killed at least eight Polish soldiers; the air raid covered the whole area of Westerplatte in enormous clouds of smoke and destroyed their only radio and all their food supplies; German observers believed that no one could possibly have survived such bombing. On the night of 3–4 September more German attacks were repelled. On September 4 a German torpedo boat (T-196) made a surprise attack from the seaside. The "Wał" post had been abandoned and now only "Fort" position prevented an attack from the north side. On September 5, a shell-shocked Sucharski held a war council which urged Westerplatte to surrender; his deputy, Captain Franciszek Dąbrowski, briefly took over command. Several cautious probing attacks by the German naval infantry, Danzig SS and police and Wehrmacht were again repulsed by the Poles; at 0300, during one of these attacks, they sent a burning train against the land bridge, but this failed when the terrified driver decoupled too early. It failed to reach the oil cistern and set ablaze the forest, valuable for cover. The flaming wagons gave a perfect field of fire and the Germans suffered heavy losses. A second fire-train attack came in the afternoon but it too failed. In the meantime, Polskie Radio continuously broadcast the message "Westerplatte still fights on" each morning of the battle. A second war council was held and the Major was set to surrender; the German Army was now outside Warsaw and gangrene had started to appear among the wounded. At 0430 September 7, the Germans opened intense fire on Westerplatte which lasted to 0700. Flamethrowers destroyed Guardhouse 2 and damaged 1 and 4. The besieged garrison lacked sufficient water and medical supplies; Cpt. Mieczysław Słaby, the WST medical officer, was unable to maintain basic care of wounded soldiers. ³⁸

At 0945 the white flag appeared; the Polish defense had impressed the Germans so much that the German commander, General Friedrich-Georg Eberhardt, allowed Sucharski to retain his ceremonial szabla (Polish sabre) in captivity (it was apparently confiscated later). At the same time Polish wireless operator Kazimierz Rasiński was murdered by Germans after the capitulation; after brutal interrogation, he had refused to hand over radio codes and was shot. Sucharski surrendered the post to Kleikamp and the Germans paraded in full order when the Polish garrison marched out, still proud and erect. In all, approximately 3,400 Germans were tied up by being engaged in the week-long action against the small Polish garrison.

Aftermath

The exact figures of German losses remain unknown, but are now often estimated to be in range of 200 to 300 killed and wounded or sometimes more. Some of them might actually have been hit by friendly fire, in particular from the battleship, which was initially anchored too close to its target. Polish casualties were much lower, including 15 to 20 killed and 53 wounded. There is a controversy regarding the burial site discovered in 1940, containing the bodies of five unidentified Polish soldiers who were possibly executed by their comrades for attempted desertion. Eight of the prisoners of war are also said to have been tortured, and did not survive German captivity. Further controversy surrounds the Polish garrison's commanding officer, Major Henryk Sucharski, and the executive officer, Captain Franciszek Dąbrowski. Major Sucharski, who survived the war but died in 1946, was promoted to the rank of generał brygady and given the highest Polish military award of Virtuti Militari, although he became a very controversial figure more recently as the previously unknown account about his role in the battle were uncovered in the 1990s (after the death of Captain Dąbrowski, as the other Polish officers vowed among themselves for their honor to not disclose in their lifetimes that their nominal commander was shell-shocked for the most of the battle). The Westerplatte became the subject of a quasihistorical dispute, which Dr. Janusz Marszalec from the Institute of National Remembrance summarized with the following: "It (the dispute) centres on the question of who commanded the defence of Westerplatte, Maj. Henryk Sucharski or Cpt. Dąbrowski. Interestingly, this dispute does not involve historians since it is not taking place as an academic debate. It is the domain of disputes of people passionate about history on the internet and in the press, in an atmosphere of gradual and consistent repetition of various unconfirmed sources. They tend to fall into emotional states of elevation and passion, during which it is difficult to apply the principles of sine ira et studio. This dispute has gone so far beyond its narrow circle of fans of the internet, moving into the mass media as a dispute over a film script and the spending of public money on a film which aims to show the new 'truth' about the defence of Westerplatte. Without a detailed analysis of this project, one can only stress that it has nothing in common with the confirmed state of knowledge about the history of the defence of the WST Westerplatte in September 1939 ... Regardless of the disputes, Sucharski and the two hundred other defenders of the WST will remain in the circle of good memory, regardless of whether they wanted to defend it to their last bullet, or whether they contemplated putting down arms already after 12 hours of the first shot of the Schleswig-Holstein on 1 September 1939."

Already during the war the defense of Westerplatte served as an inspiration for the Polish Army and people as the successful German advances continued elsewhere and even today is still regarded as a symbol of resistance to the invasion; a Polish Thermopylae. The Polish poet Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński wrote a widely known poem about this battle, Pieśń o żołnierzach Westerplatte ("A Song of the Soldiers of Westerplatte"). The poem reflected a widespread Polish myth of the later years of the World War II that all of defenders died in the battle, fighting to the last man. A Polish People's Army military unit was named in 1943 in memory of the soldiers (Polish 1st Armoured Brigade of the defenders of Westerplatte). In the years after war, several dozen schools and several ships in Poland were also named after the "Heroes of Westerplatte" or "Defenders of Westerplatte". The ruins of the peninsula's barracks and guardhouses still survive today. After the war one of the guardhouses, which had actually been moved several hundred yards inland, was converted into a museum; two shells from the Schleswig-Holstein's 280 mm guns prop up its entrance.

Order of battle

German

Kriegsmarine ships:

Pre-Dreadnought Battleship Schleswig-Holstein

Two torpedo boats: T-196 and T-963

Eberhardt group:

3. Marine-Stoßtrupp-Kompanie (elite naval infantry company, later renamed Marine-Artillerie-Abteilung 531) and an attached Pioneer platoon from Dessau-Roßlau

An independent howitzer battalion (Haubitzen-Abt.)

Küstenschutz der Danziger Polizei (a coast guard unit of the Danzig police) and Ordnungspolizei's Landespolizei Regiment SS Heimwehr Danzig (the local SS militia force), including SS Wachsturmbann Eimann (already part of the forming 3rd SS Division Totenkopf)

Other forces

Luftwaffe:

II & III Gruppe StG 2 Immelmann

4.(St)/TrGr 186

In all, some 40-60 Junkers Ju 87 Stuka bombers and seven other aircraft (Heinkel He 51 and Junkers Ju 52) were involved in the siege of Westerplatte.

German land forces were armed with several ADGZ heavy armoured cars, about 65 artillery pieces (2 cm FlaK 30 anti-aircraft guns, 3.7 cm PaK 36 anti-tank guns, 10.5 cm leFH 18 light howitzers and 21 cm Mörser 18 heavy howitzers), over 100 machine guns, an unknown number of medium mortars and Flammenwerfer 35 flamethrowers.

Polish

By August 1939, the garrison of Westerplatte had increased to 182 soldiers and 27 civilian reservists conscripted into service after the breakout of hostilities.

The WST was armed with one 76.2 mm wz. 02 field gun, two Bofors 37 mm wz. 36 anti-tank guns, and four Stokes-Brandt 81 mm wz. 31 medium mortars. The strong side of the garrison was a disproportionately large number of machine guns at their disposal (41 machine guns, including 16 heavy machine guns). They had also 160 rifles, 40 pistols and over 1,000 hand grenades.

Defense of the Polish Post Office in Danzig

The Defense of the Polish Post Office in Danzig (Gdańsk) was one of

the first acts of World War II in Europe, as part of the Invasion of Poland.

On September 1, 1939, Polish personnel defended the building for some 15 hours against assaults by the SS Heimwehr Danzig (SS Danzig Home Defence), local SA formations and special units of Ordnungspolizei (Danzig police). All but four of the defenders, who were able to escape from the building during the surrender, were unjustly sentenced to death by a German court martial as illegal combatants on October 5, 1939 and executed.

The Polish Post Office (Poczta Polska) in the Free City of Danzig was created in 1920 under the Treaty of Versailles, and its buildings were considered extraterritorial Polish property. The Polish Post Office in Danzig comprised several buildings.

As tensions between Poland and Germany grew, in April 1939 the Polish High Command detached combat engineer and Army Reserve Sublieutenant (or 2LT) Konrad Guderski to the Baltic Sea coast. With Alfons Flisykowski and others, he helped organize the official and volunteer security staff at the Polish Post Office in Danzig, and prepared them for possible hostilities. In addition to training the staff, he prepared the defences in and around the building: nearby trees were removed and the entrance was fortified. In mid-August, ten additional employees were sent to the post office from Polish Post offices in Gdynia and Bydgoszcz (mostly reserve non-commissioned officers).

In the Polish Post Office complex on 1 September 1939 there were 57 people: Konrad Guderski, 42 local Polish employees, 10 employees from Gdynia and Bydgoszcz, and the building keeper with his wife and 10-year old daughter who lived in the complex. Polish employees had a cache of weapons, consisting of three Browning wz.1928 light machine guns, 40 other firearms and three chests of hand grenades. The Polish defence plan assigned the defenders the role of keeping Germans from the main building for 6 hours, when a relief force from Armia Pomorze was supposed to secure the area. ³⁹

The German attack plan, devised in July 1939, determined that the main building and its defenders would be stormed from two directions. A diversionary attack was to be carried out at the front entrance, while the main force would break through the wall from the neighbouring Work Office and attack from the side.

The battle

At 04:00 Germans cut the phone and electricity lines to the building. At 04:45, just as the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein started shelling the nearby Polish Army military outpost at Westerplatte,

German forces began their assault on the Polish Post. German units detached for this task were composed of the special unit of Danzig police, local SA formations and the SS units SS Wachsturmbann "E" and SS Heimwehr Danzig, supported by at least three ADGZ heavy armored cars. The attack was commanded by German police colonel, Willi Bethke.

The first German attack, from the front, was repelled, although Germans managed to break through the entrance and briefly enter the building (at the cost of two killed and seven wounded attackers, including one group leader). The second attack, from the Work Office, was also repelled. The commander of Polish defence, Konrad Guderski, died during that second attack from the blast of his own grenade which stopped the Germans who broke through the wall. At 11:00 German units were reinforced by the Wehrmacht with two 75 mm artillery pieces, but the second attack, even with the artillery support, was again repulsed. At 15:00 Germans declared a two hour ceasefire and demanded that Polish forces surrender, which they refused. In the meantime, Germans received additional reinforcements: a 105 mm artillery piece, and a unit of sappers, which dug under the walls and prepared a 600 kg explosive device. At 17:00 the bomb was set off, collapsing part of the wall, and German forces under the cover of three artillery pieces attacked again, this time capturing most of the building except the basement.

At 18:00 Germans brought automatic pumps, gasoline tanks and flamethrowers, which they used to flood the basements with burning gasoline. After three Poles were burned alive (bringing the total Polish casualties to six killed in action), the rest decided to capitulate. The first two people to leave the building — director Dr. Jan Michoń, carrying a white flag, and commandant (naczelnik) Józef Wąsik — were shot by the Germans (according to one version, Dr. Michoń was attacked with a flamethrower). The rest of the Poles were allowed to surrender and leave the burning building. Six people managed to escape from the building, although two of them were captured the following days.

Aftermath

16 wounded prisoners were sent to the Gestapo hospital, where six subsequently died (including the 10-year old Erwina). The other 28 were first imprisoned in the police building and, after a few days, sent to Victoriaschule, where they were interrogated and tortured. Some 300 to 400 Polish citizens of Danzig were also held there.

Court martial

All the prisoners were put on trial in front of the martial court of the Wehrmacht's Gruppe Eberhardt. A first group of 28 Victoriaschuleprisoners, with a single Wehrmacht officer as defence lawyer, was tried on 8 September, a second group of 10, who recovered in the hospital, on 30 September. All were sentenced to death as illegal combatants under the German special military penal law of 1938. The sentence was demanded by the prosecutor Hans Giesecke and declared by presiding judge Kurt Bode, Vice-President of the Oberlandesgericht Danzig (Higher Regional Court of Danzig). 28 of the judgements were countersigned, and thus became legally valid, by General Hans Günther von Kluge, the further 10 by Colonel Eduard Wagner, who committed suicide on 23 July 1944 as a member of the 20 July plot.

A clemency appeal was rejected by General Walther von Brauchitsch. A similar fate awaited eleven Polish railway workers south of the city after they foiled a German attempt to use an armoured train, and were executed by the SA along with their immediate families. ⁴⁰ The prisoners were mostly executed by firing squad led by SSSturmbannführer Max Pauly (later commandant of the Neuengamme concentration camp) on 5 October and buried in a mass grave at the cemetery of Danzig-Saspe (Zaspa). One, Leon Fuz, was later recognised and murdered in the Stutthof concentration camp in November. Four defenders who managed to escape and hide survived the war. Families of the postmen were also persecuted.

Giesecke and Bode were never held responsible for this episode or held accountable for the judicial murder. They were denazified after the war and continued their careers as lawyers in Germany. Both died of natural causes in 1970s. Only in 1997/8, the German court at Lübeck (the Große Strafkammer IIb and the Dritte Große Strafkammer) invalidated the 1939 Nazi sentence, citing among the reasons that the Special military penal law had only taken effect in Danzig on November 16, 1939 and charged the presiding judge with neglience of his duties. The decision of the German court occurred thanks to the work of a German author, Dieter Schenk, who published a monograph on the defense of the post office and referred to the execution of the defenders as Judicial murder (Justizmord). Schenk stresses the commanding role of Danzig policeforces, which made a Wehrmacht court martial not competent to convict the defenders. Instead, the Free City of Danzig's penal law would have been applicable, without the alternative of a death penalty

Charge at Krojanty

The charge at Krojanty, battle ⁴¹ at Krojanty or skirmish ⁴² of Krojanty was a cavalry charge that occurred during the Invasion of Poland in the Second World War. It took place on the evening of September 1, 1939, near the Pomeranian village of Krojanty. Polish soldiers advanced east along the former Prussian Eastern Railway to railroad crossroads 7 kilometres from the town of Chojnice (Konitz) where elements of the Polish cavalry attacked and dispersed the German infantry battalion. Soon after the attack the cavalry received machine gun fire from German armoured cars stationed nearby and was forced to retreat. Delay of the German advance is claimed as successful completion of the Poles' mission.

Happening on the first day of the war, it was one of its first clashes, and part of the larger Battle of Tuchola Forest. The incident became notable as reporters visiting the site soon after saw the dead bodies of horses and cavalrymen which led to false reports of Polish cavalry attacking German tanks. Nazi⁴³ propaganda took advantage of this, suggesting that the Poles attacked intentionally, believing that the Germans still had the dummy tanks the Versailles treaty restrictions had permitted them. The scene of Polish cavalry charging the Panzers with their lances has become a myth. ⁴⁴

Happening on the first day of the war, it was one of its first clashes, and part of the larger Battle of Tuchola Forest. The incident became notable as reporters visiting the site soon after saw the dead bodies of horses and cavalrymen which led to false reports of Polish cavalry attacking German tanks.

Nazi propaganda took advantage of this, suggesting that the Poles attacked intentionally, believing that the Germans still had the dummy tanks the Versailles treaty restrictions had permitted them. The scene of Polish cavalry charging the Panzers with their lances has become a myth

Polish units were engaged in battle from 0500 against elements of German 76th Infantry Regiment (Colonel Hans Gollnick) of 20th Motorised Division under Lt. Gen. Mauritz von Wiktorin, which operated on the left (northern) flank of XIX Panzer Corps under Gen. Heinz Guderian. Early in the day Polish cavalry had intercepted German infantry moving towards the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk) and slowed their progress.

At 0800 the Germans broke through Polish Border Guard units south of the Polish cavalry, which forced the Polish units in the area to start a retreat towards a secondary defence line at the river Brda (Brahe). 18th Pomeranian Uhlans Regiment (18. Pułk Ułanów Pomorskich) was ordered to cover the retreat.

The battle

The 18th Pomeranian Uhlans spotted a group of German infantry resting in a clearing in the Tuchola Forest heath near the railroad crossroads of Chojnice - Runowo Pomorskie line.

Colonel Kazimierz Mastalerz decided to take the enemy by surprise and ordered Eugeniusz Świeściak, commander of the 1st squadron, to execute a cavalry charge at 1900 hours, leading two squadrons, about 250 strong. Most of the two other squadrons, and their TKS/TK-3 tankettes, were held back in reserve.

The charge was successful: the German infantry unit was dispersed, and the Poles occupied the clearing. However German armored reconnaissance vehicles appeared from the forest road, probably part of Aufklärungs-Abteilung 20, and soon the Polish units came under heavy machine gun fire, probably from Leichter Panzerspähwagen equipped with MG 34, or Schwerer Panzerspähwagen equipped also with a 20 mm gun. The Poles were completely exposed and began to gallop for cover behind a nearby ⁴⁵ hillock.

Commander Świeściak was killed, as was Mastalerz, who tried to save him. About a third of the Polish force was dead or wounded. On the other hand, the German advance was halted long enough to allow the withdrawal of Polish 1st Rifle battalion and National Defence battalion Czersk from the nearby battle of Chojnice.

The Polish cavalry charge impressed the Germans and caused a delay in the offensive of the German 20th Motorised Infantry Division which considered a tactical retreat. This was however prevented by personal intervention of Gen. Guderian, who in his memoirs stated that he encountered his staff "wearing helmets, preparing an antitank gun for a possible Polish cavalry ⁴⁶ attack," and that "the panic of the first day of war was overcome quickly" ⁴⁷

Aftermath and the myth

The Polish cavalry charge stopped the German pursuit for the day, and the units of Czersk Operational Group were able to withdraw southwards unopposed. Also, it took the Germans several hours to reorganise and continue the advance. On September 2, 1939, the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans Regiment was decorated by Gen. Grzmot-Skotnicki, the commander of the Operational Group, with his own Virtuti Militari medal for valour shown in this combat.

The same day, German war correspondents were brought to the battlefield, together with two journalists from Italy. They were shown the corpses of Polish cavalrymen and their horses, as well as German tanks that had arrived at the place after the battle. One of the Italian correspondents, Indro Montanelli, sent home an article, in which he described the bravery and heroism of Polish soldiers, who charged German tanks with sabres and lances. Although such a charge did not happen and there were no tanks used during the combat, the myth was used by German propaganda during the war. German propaganda magazine Die Wehrmacht reported on 13 September that the Poles had gravely underestimated German weapons, as Polish propaganda had suggested that German armored vehicles were only covered with sheet metal, leading to a grotesque attack. After the end of World War II it was still used by Soviet propaganda as an example of stupidity of pre-war Polish commanders, who allegedly did not prepare their country for the war and instead wasted the blood of their soldiers. As late as 1990s, this myth was still taught in history classes in the American high schools and colleges.⁴⁸

George Parada states:

Contrary to German propaganda, Polish cavalry brigades never charged tanks with their sabres or lances as they were equipped with anti-tank weapons such as 37 mm Bofors wz.36 (exported to UK as Ordnance Q.F. 37 mm Mk I) antitank guns, that could penetrate 26 mm of armour at 600 m at 30 degrees. The cavalry brigades were in the process of being reorganized into motorized brigades. Another weapon was anti-tank rifle model 1935 (karabin przeciwpancerny wz. 35). Its calibre was 7.92 mm and it could penetrate 15 mm of armour at 300 m at 30 degrees. In 1939, the Germans were mainly equipped with the small Panzer I and Panzer II models which were vulnerable to such weapons.

The myth of the cavalry charge against tanks was perpetuated by the Polish film Lotna (1959) in an invented reconstruction of this scene.

Battle of Grudziądz

Battle of Grudziądz was a military engagement between German and Polish forces during the early days of the Invasion of Poland in September 1939. It started on September 1, and ended with a German victory on September 4. German historiography has dealt with the fighting in the larger context of the Battle of Tuchola Forest. The Polish border city of Grudziądz (Germ. Graudenz) contained headquarters of the 16th Infantry Division, as well as the military Center of Cavalry Training (Centrum Wyszkolenia Kawalerii). Moreover, it played a crucial role as a strongpoint in order to defend the Vistula River Line and secure the route of retreat of Polish divisions of the Pomorze Army under General Władysław Bortnowski, engaged on the left, western bank of the river. Among units stationed in the Polish Corridor were the 9th, the 15th, and the 27th I.D.'s, together with the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade from Bydgoszcz. Since Polish headquarters had planned an armed intervention in the Free City of Danzig, the 27th I.D. and the Pomeranian Cavalry had been transferred northwards in mid-August 1939, to the area of Chojnice and Starogard Gdański. On September 1, 1939, at the moment of the invasion, both units remained in the Corridor, vulnerable to a German attack. East of the Vistula, along the line stretching from Grudziądz to Lidzbark (Germ. Lautenburg) stood the German 4th Army, under General Günther von Kluge. Grudziądz itself was defended by the Operational Group East (Grupa Operacyjna Wschód), under Gen. Mikołaj Bołtuć. The group consisted of the 4th from Toruń (Colonel Tadeusz Lubicz-Niezabitowski), and the local 16th Infantry Division (Colonel Stanisław Świtalski), both part of the Pomorze Army. ⁴⁹

September 1, 1939

The area of Grudziądz was assaulted by the German XXI Corps (Gen. von Falkenhorst) on 1 September, when the German 21st and 218th Infantry Divisions pushed back the Polish lines behind the small river Osa, east of Grudziądz. Main German attack was concentrated on the left Polish wing, defended by the 16th I.D. In the area of Łasin, German units were halted, but another attack, near Dąbrówka Królewska, was successful. After crossing the Osa, the Germans captured a bridgehead near Bielawki. On September 1, in the afternoon, after receiving reinforcements, the Germans continued their attack, which was finally halted by the Poles at app. 7 p.m. In the night of Sept. 1/2, General Bołtuć led the 4th Infantry Division in a counterattack the German 218th Infantry Division, in order to push the invaders back behind the Osa. Although Polish forces gained some ground, the attack was finally repulsed.

September 2, 1939

On September 2, at 8 a.m., the Germans began an assault, aiming to push further back the 16th I.D. After an artillery barrage, German infantry moved into the action, managing to expand the bridgehead. The situation of Polish troops was particularly difficult in the western wing of their line of defence, and as a result, the 66th and the 64th infantry regiments (part of the 16th I.D.) had to retreat towards the Grudziądz - Jabłonowo Pomorskie railroad. To save the situation, General Bortnowski ordered 142nd squadron of the Polish Air Force (Colonel Bolesław Stachoń) to bomb German positions. The bombing did not bring any significant gains for the Poles, and in the afternoon of that day, the Poles began to retreat. Panic broke out in some Polish units, as the Wehrmacht, supported by the local Fifth Column, attacked the 208th reserve infantry regiment.

Nevertheless, General Bołtuć ordered Colonel Lubicz-Niezabitowski's 4th I.D. to counterattack, in order to help the 16th I.D., which was under heavy German pressure. The 4th I.D. attacked from Radzyń Chełmiński towards Mełno, and the assault began at 8 p.m. Initially, the Germans retreated towards Annowo and Gruta, which was recaptured by the Poles at midnight. Furthermore, Polish 65th infantry regiment recaptured Nicwałd, but the Poles were halted before their reached their original defensive positions along the Osa. On that night General Bołtuć dismissed Colonel Stanisław Świtalski, who was unable to control his men, and replaced him with Colonel Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko.

September 3 and 4, 1939

Sunday, September 3, 1939, began with a massive German assault on Polish positions. At the same time Bołtuć received news that the Polish divisions on the western bank of the Vistula were facing defeat and the German forces had already crossed the Vistula in the south. This forced him to pull back his units in order to avoid being soon encircled. The Polish defenders destroyed the bridges over the Vistula and retreated to the south-east, towards the Drwęca river, where they took new defensive positions. Grudziądz itself was abandoned on Sunday in the early afternoon. After a few hours, elements of the German 45th Infantry Regiment entered the city, but main German forces did not capture whole Grudziądz until the morning of Monday, September 4.

Battle of Borowa Góra

Battle of Borowa Góra refers to the series of battles from 2nd to 5

September 1939 that took place near the Góry Borowskie hills, south west from Piotrków Trybunalski and east of Bełchatów. The battle, fought between the Wehrmacht and the Polish Army in the vicinity of Łódź, was a direct consequence of the Battle of the Border, an early part of the German Invasion of Poland

The three hills (278 meters above sea level) formed an important strategic point that the German XVI Army Corps needed to break through in order to advance toward Radomsko, Piotrków Trybunalski and Bełchatów, and further into central Poland. The area was defended by the Polish 2nd Legions' Infantry Regiment (part of the 2nd Legions Infantry Division), under Col. Ludwik Czyżewski, and the 146th Infantry Regiment (part of the 44th Infantry Division), under Col. Artur Pollak.

Both Polish units belonged to Łódź Army. The invading German XVI Army Corps consisted of the 1st Panzer Division, the 4th Panzer Division, the 14th Infantry Division, and the 31st Infantry Division. During the intense fighting, Polish casualties from the 2nd Legions' Regiment were 663 (including 16 officers and 67 NCOs). German losses were also high.

Background

General Wiktor Thommée, who commanded Piotrków Operational Group of Łódź Army, ordered Colonel Czyżewski to defend a 25-kilometer line in the area of Rozprza. Polish units were supposed to hold their positions until September 4, when a Polish counterattack was planned from the Sulejów forests. Since Czyżewski did not have enough soldiers, he decided to man three main defensive positions, and to patrol the space between the center.

Center of Polish defence was established in the Góry Borowskie hills. Polish units began to man their positions in the night of September 2/3. Janowski's headquarters were at a public school in the village of Janów. General Juliusz Rómmel, aware of German superiority, decided to reinforce Czyżewski, by sending the 301st Battalion of Light Tanks under Major Edmund Karpow, which consisted of 49 Vickers tanks.

The Battle

First German units approached Polish positions near Rozprza on September 3rd, at 13:00. Two hours later the Panzers attacked the Góry Borowskie hills, and the fighting lasted for several hours, until the night.

The Wehrmacht was supported by the Luftwaffe, which bombed Polish positions, and as a result, some soldiers of the Polish Army abandoned their posts. In the evening of September 3, leading units of the German 1st Panzer Division captured Rozprza, to be pushed back after some time. At app. 15:00 tanks of the 4th Panzer Division attacked Góry Borowskie, but after a fierce battle with Polish 3rd Battalion of Major Żelazowski, they retreated and regrouped at night, to attack the hills from the east in the morning of September 4th. On September 4th in the morning, German infantry of the 31st I.D. attacked along the road to Bełchatów. They were pushed back, but near Rozprza, where Panzer divisions were present, Polish defenders faced more danger. The 1st Panzer attacked Rozprza, and the 4th Panzer concentrated its efforts on capturing Jeżów. In the afternoon of September 4th, whole Polish frontline was attacked between Góry Borowskie and Rozprza. Fighting lasted into the night, and in the morning of September 5th, the Germans attacked again, with the support of the Luftwaffe. Under the circumstances Colonel Czyżewski ordered retreat towards Dłutów, opening for the Wehrmacht the road road to Piotrków. Since some Polish units were not aware of Czyżewski's order, in some spots fighting continued until morning of September 6th.

Battle of the Danzig Bay

The Battle of the Danzig Bay (Polish: bitwa w Zatoce Gdańskiej) took place on September 1, 1939, at the beginning of the invasion of Poland, when Polish Navy vessels were attacked by German Luftwaffe aircraft in Gdańsk Bay (then Danzig Bay). It was one of the first incidents in which naval units had to defend themselves against air attack.

Eve of the battle

The Polish Navy of the Second Polish Republic (1919–39) was prepared mostly as means of supporting naval communications with France in case of a war with the Soviet Union. However, after it became apparent that the aggressive side would be Germany, and the entrance to the Baltic Sea would be blocked, three out of four Polish modern destroyers were withdrawn from the Baltic Sea to Great Britain in what was called Operation Peking. The remaining forces, consisting of one large minelayer, one destroyer, five submarines and smaller vessels were to execute two major naval operations, both aimed at disrupting the German naval movement in the area of the Danzig Bay and transit movement between Germany and East Prussia. All submarines were dispatched for their operational zones in the southern Baltic to take part in Operation Worek, an attempt to sink as many German ships as possible.

Battle

All the remaining surface vessels were to be dispatched from the naval base in Gdynia to Hel Peninsula, from where they were to start the so-called Operation Rurka. The plan was to lay a naval mine barrier between Hel Peninsula and Danzig to prevent any enemy ship from entering the area.

At dusk ten Polish warships left Gdynia for Hel, located on the other side of the bay. There, the ships were to start the minelaying operation. Among them were the destroyer ORP Wicher, large minelayer Gryf, minelaying minesweepers Jaskółka, Czapla,Żuraw, Czajka, Rybitwa and Mewa and gunboats Komendant Piłsudski and Generał Haller.

While traversing the Danzig Bay, the flotilla was attacked by a group of 33 German warplanes, mostly Junkers Ju 87B Stuka dive bombers. The air raid was mostly unsuccessful and the Polish vessels suffered only minor losses. The backbone of the Polish flotilla, ORP Gryf with over 300 naval mines on board, remained unharmed.

However, soon after the first air raid was repelled, the German bombers returned, around 6 pm. There were no direct hits, but the Polish ships suffered minor damage from close misses and machine gun fire, mainly minelayer ORP Gryf and minesweeper ORP Mewa. The commanding officer of ORP Gryf, Cmdr. Stefan Kwiatkowski was killed by German machine gun fire, and her rudder was jammed. Her executive officer, Lt. Cmdr. Wiktor Łomidze feared that her cargo of mines (comprising over 33 tonnes of high explosives) was a danger to the ship and if it was hit by a bomb, it would explode immediately. Because of that, he ordered all the mines to be disposed of in the sea.

After the battle

After successful defence against several consecutive air raids, the Polish flotilla arrived at Hel. However, since ORP Gryf had abandoned all of its mines and was damaged, the Operation Rurka had to be called off. The only destroyer, ORP Wicher, did not receive the orders calling off the operation and went straight to the pre-designed zone of operations to cover the mine-layers. At night, Wicher, commanded by Lt. Cdr. Stefan de Walden, spotted two German destroyers, and later a ship misidentified as a light cruiser, but did not attack, not wanting to uncover the operation. After return to Hel Peninsula, both major vessels were there deprived of most of equipment and served as antiaircraft platforms in the Hel naval base.

Battle of Tuchola Forest

The Battle of Tuchola Forest refers to one of the first battles of the Second World War during the Invasion of Poland, 1939. The battle started on 1 September and ended on 5 September with a major German victory. Due to lack of coordination and poor command of forces on the Polish side and German numerical and tactical superiority, the Germans managed to cripple the Polish Army of Pomerania and connect mainland Germany with East Prussia, breaking through the Polish Corridor.

Tuchola Forest (Polish: Bory Tucholskie, German: Tucheler Heide) in Westprussia, since 1920 Treaty of Versailles in the Polish Corridor, is a large forest territory. Because of its difficult terrain it was viewed by the Poles as good defensive terrain. The German troops, on the other hand, had their Truppenübungsplatz Gruppe exercise area there until 1919, and were familiar with it, like Heinz Guderian, who had been born in nearby Kulm.

Polish forces in the theater were composed of elements of the Pomeranian Army: 9th Infantry Division under colonel Józef Werobej, the 27th Infantry Division under general Juliusz Drapella, and Czersk Operational Group under gen. Stanisław Grzmot-Skotnicki. German forces in the theater were composed of elements of the 4th German Army under general Günther von Kluge, specifically 19th Panzer Corps (commanded by general Heinz Guderian), and 2nd Army Corps under general Adolf Strauß. Those units were based in Western Pomerania (west of the corridor).

19th Panzer Corps consisted of the 2nd Motorized Division under general Paul Bader, the 20th Motorized Division under general Mauritz von Wiktorin and the 3rd Panzer Division under general Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg. 2nd Army Corps was composed of two infantry divisions: the 3rd Infantry Division under general Walter Lichel and 32nd Infantry Division under general Franz Böhme.

The battle

Despite several tactical Polish victories, including the Skirmish of Krojanty on 1 September, a famous Polish cavalry charge, and the destruction of a German armored train near Chojnice, German forces were able to advance quickly.

Not all Polish forces were in position by 1 September and the German advance managed to generate confusion in the Polish forces. In addition, communications problems meant that the Polish forces did not act cohesively. The Poles were forced to abandon plans for a counterattack and retreated, pursued by more mobile German motorized and armored troops. The German forces had a significant amount of armor support, including over 300 tanks commanded by the famous panzer expert, General Heinz Guderian.

Most of the Polish forces were surrounded by 3 September. Some were destroyed, while others managed to break through towards Bydgoszcz.

Aftermath

Most of the Polish forces were destroyed by 5 September. The Germans were able to break through the Polish Corridor. Some German forces were ordered to erase pockets of Polish resistance in fortified areas on the Baltic Coast, while others continued their push southeast, deeper into Polish territory.

On 6 September, Adolf Hitler visited Guderian and congratulated him on his swift progress

Battle of Łódź (1939)

The Battle of Łódź was fought on September 6–8, 1939, between the armies of Poland and Nazi Germany in World War II during the Invasion of Poland. The Polish forces were led by Juliusz Rómmel.⁵⁰ The German aggression was anticipated by the Poles since spring of 1939, when Poland refused to join the Axis against the Soviet Union (look up the Polish—Soviet War of 1919-1920). Poland’s strategy during the forecast war would be to stand the initial German attack and trigger France and Great Britain to declare the war on Germany, and, afterward, to execute a fighting retreat to the Romanian Bridgehead. Polish General Juliusz Rómmel was given command of the Łódź Army and to buy time to finish mobilization of his own army, leading three divisions, rushed to the border. He believed that only through mobility and continuous resistance ("fighting for every village"), the German advance could be slowed down enough to finish mobilization of his own army. The head quarters of the army were in the city of Łódź. The reason for the late mobilization was pressure from the French and the British not to mobilize. As of 29 August 1939, the Poles re—started the mobilization against the advice from Paris and London (look: Jabłonków Incident; German attack on 25 August 1939).

German's military blunder

German Army attacked September 1, 1939. They hoped, that the old military strategy of overwhelming the enemy with the superior numbers of men, and most especially equipment, combined with the elements of the new military strategy Blitzkrieg would bring them a quick and loss free success. The Germans were told by Adolf Hitler that the French and British military leaders were worms incapable of even pushing the pencile to declar war on the nazi Germany in the case, the nazi Germany invaded Poland. He was wrong. When no significant action was taken and opportunity to capture a sea port with 50 U--boats as well as the German bunker line through a land offensive was wasted, the French under pressure from the British, declared war on the nazi Germany together. Moreover, the German losses in Poland were significant and prevented the invasion of the Low Countries and France in 1939.

The taking of Łódź: the Polish blunder

After the initial ambushes worked (Battle of Mokra), the Germans gained momentum and easily defeated the rear units of the Army Łódź (still in the process of mobilization). Łódź had fallen. The three divisions sent to the border were cut off and ceased to exist. This created the domino effect. Because Łódź had fallen, the victorious tank brigade and the supporting infantry soldiers had to withdraw from Piotrkow Trybunalski. This exposed the flank of the Army Kraków and the Army Kraków and the fully mechanized 10. Cavalary Brigade of Stanislaw Maczek had to head towards Lviv. The withdrawal from the south—western Poland in turn forced the withdrawal from the northern Poland and left units under de facto command of General Kutrzeba (Battle of Bzura river) stranded west from the Vistula river. Even the units that did successfully withdraw, for the major part, did not make neither the Romanian Bridgehead, nor the Hungarian border crossing because on 17SEP1939, the Soviet troops took over the very bridgehead and cut off the routes of escape. Only 60,000 to 80,000 Polish soldiers escaped the German, Soviet, or Slovak capture or the need to hide to continue fight as the underground soldiers.

Polish counterattack

The Germans advanced too fast for the units of the Army Prussia to be in position to counterattack, or for other armies to encircle the Germans by forcing their spear heads into a small narrow corridor between Łódź and Warsaw. The only Polish major offensive action occurred during the Battle of Bzura river marshes also known as the Battle of Kutno (township).

Aftermath

All Poland fell completely under the control of Nazi Germany and the

Soviet Union as well as the Slovak Republic on October 6, 1939. By 1940 the city of Łódź was renamed Litzmannstadt and became an important industrial city for the German war machine. Munitions and uniforms were manufactured in the newly established Ghetto Litzmannstadt by Jewish slave labor. Jews from Poland, Germany, Benelux and Czechoslovakia as well as Roma people from Austria were brought to live and work here in appalling conditions. While most of them were taken to extermination in the Nazi death camps more than 70 000 survived until the summer of 1944. But the Soviet move forward stopped and in August 1944 also those survivors were killed by the Nazis. At the end of the war Łódź was taken by the Soviet Army on January 17, 1945, without substantial damage to the city. Only 877 Jews survived to the moment of liberation. Tens of thousands of ethnic Poles were expelled from the city. In 1939, at least 10,000 Poles were expelled. A concentration camp was build for the children of the ethnic Poles. Later, the dwellings of the Poles were taken over by the ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union. 300,000 Jews and 120,000 ethnic Poles died during the nazi German occupation.

Battle of Bzura

The Battle of the Bzura (or Battle of Kutno — German name) was a

battle in the opening campaign of World War II during the 1939 German invasion of Poland, fought between 9 and 19 September,1939, between Polish and German forces. Finally, the Germans outflanked the Polish forces and took all of western Poland.

It was the single largest battle in the 1939 September campaign and took place to the west of Warsaw, near the Bzura River. In it, a Polish breakout attack gained initial success but eventually faltered after a concentrated German counterattack.

The Polish plan for defense against the German invasion, Plan West, called for the defense of the borders. This was dictated more by political than military concerns, as Poles feared that the Germans, after taking over territories they lost in the Treaty of Versailles, would try to end the war and keep those territories. While defending the borders was more risky, the Poles were counting on the British and French counteroffensive (which never came). Due to this, Army Pomorze under general Władysław Bortnowski found itself in the Polish Corridor, surrounded by German forces on two fronts, and Army Poznań under general Tadeusz Kutrzeba was pushed to the westernmost fringes of the Second Polish Republic, separated both from its primary defensive positions, and from other Polish Armies. The German offensive proved the folly of the border defense plan in the first days of the war. Army Pomorze was defeated in the battle of Bory Tucholskie, and forced to retreat towards the south-east. Army Poznań, meanwhile, although not facing heavy German assaults, was forced to retreat east due to defeats of its neighbours (Army Pomorze in the north and Army Łódź in the south); both of them were retreating, meaning that Army Poznań was in danger of being flanked and surrounded by the German forces. On 4 September, Army Poznań moved through the city it was named after, Poznań, and abandoned it to the enemy, even through at this point it was not in contact with any significant German forces. By 6 September, Armies Pomorze and Poznań had linked up, forming the strongest Polish operational unit in the campaign, and general Bortkowski accepted the command of general Kutrzeba.

On 7 September, Polish forces became aware of the German push towards Łęczyca, which if successful could cut off the retreat route of Polish forces. By 8 September, advanced German troops reached Warsaw, marking the beginning of the siege of the Polish capital. At the same time, German forces had lost contact with Army Poznań, and German command assumed that the army must have been transported by rail to aid Warsaw's defense; they were unaware that in fact Army Poznań had merged forces with Army Pomorze, which they considered, since its defeat at Bory Tucholskie, no longer a significant threat. On 8 September the Germans were certain that they had eliminated major Polish resistance west of Vistula and were preparing to cross it and engage the Polish forces on the other side.

Meanwhile, general Kutrzeba and his staff officers had suspected, even before the German invasion, that it would be the neighbouring Armies that would bear the German attack, and had developed plans at an offensive towards the south, to relieve Army Łódź. In the first week of the campaign, those plans, however, were rejected by the Polish commander-in-chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. By 8 September Kutrzeba had lost contact with Rydz-Śmigły, who had relocated his command center from Warsaw to Brest; due to these factors, Kutrzeba decided to go forward with his plan. His situation was dire, as German forces were close to surrounding his units: the German 8th Army had secured the southern bank of the Bzura river, and the German 4th Army had secured the northern bank of Vistula, from Włocławek to Wyszogród, and its elements were attacking the rear of the Armies Pomorze and Poznań from the direction of Inowrocław and crossing the Vistula river near Płock.

Opposing forces

Polish forces consisted of Army Poznań and Army Pomorze. German forces included the 8th Army under Johannes Blaskowitz and 10th Army under Walther von Reichenau of Army Group South (Heeresgruppe Süd), elements of the 4th Army under Günther von Kluge of the Army Group North (Heeresgruppe Nord) and air support (Luftflotte 1 and Luftflotte 4).

The battle

The battle can be divided into 3 phases:

Phase I — Polish offensive towards Stryków, aiming at the flank of the German 10th Army (9–12 September)

Phase II — Polish offensive towards Łowicz (13–15 September) Phase III — German counterattack and eventual defeat of the Poles, with the latter's withdrawal towards Warsaw and Modlin (16–19 September)

On the night of 9 September, the Polish Poznań Army commenced a counterattack from the south of the Bzura river, its target being the German forces from the 8th Army advancing between Łęczyca and Łowicz, towards Stryków. The commander of Poznań Army, Tadeusz Kutrzeba noticed that the German 8th Army, commanded by general Johannes Blaskowitz, was weakly secured from the north by only the 30th Infantry Division stretched over a 30 kilometre defensive line while the rest of the army was advancing towards Warsaw. The main thrust of the Polish offensive were the units under general Edmund Knoll-Kownacki, known as the Knoll-Kownacki Operational Group (Polish 14th, 17th, 25th and 26th Infantry Divisions). The right wing of the offensive, in the area Łęczyce, included the Podolska Cavalry Brigade under general Stanisław Grzmot-Skotnicki, and on the left, advancing from Łowicz to the area of Głowno, the Wielkopolska Cavalry Brigade under general Roman Abraham. These groups inflicted considerable losses on the German defenders from the 30th Infantry Division and the 24th Infantry Division, with some 1,500 German soldiers killed or wounded and an additional 3,000 lost as prisoners during the initial push. The cavalry brigades supplemented with TKS and TK-3 reconnaissance tanks moved to threaten the flanks and rear of the advancing German units.

The German forces were thrown back approximately 20 kilometres and the Poles recaptured several towns, including Łęczyca and Piątek, and the village of Góra Świętej Małgorzaty. On 10 September, the Polish 17th Infantry Division met the German 17th Infantry Division at Małachowicze. The following day Polish forces continued their attack, advancing on Modlna, Pludwiny, Osse and Głowno. Initially underestimating the Polish advance, the Germans decided on 11 September to redirect the main force of the German 10th Army, the German 4th Army, the reserves of the Army Group South, and aircraft from 4th Air Fleet towards the Bzura. These forces included the German 1st Panzer Division, German 4th Panzer Division and the newly formed SS Infantry regiment Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. German air superiority had a significant impact, making it very costly and difficult for the Poles to move units during the day. The following day the Poles reached the line Stryków-Ozorków. That day General Tadeusz Kutrzeba learned that units of Army Łódź had retreated to the Modlin Fortress, and decided to stop the offensive, instead looking to try to break through Sochaczew and the Kampinos Forest to reach Warsaw. ⁵¹

On the morning of 14 September, General Władysław Bortnowski's 26th and 16th Infantry Divisions crossed the Bzura near Łowicz. The Polish 4th Infantry Division reached the road linking Łowicz with Głowno. At this point however, Bortnowski ordered the 26th Infantry Division to retreat. He had learned of the withdrawal of the German 4th Panzer Division from the outskirts of Warsaw, and was concerned that this Panzer division posed a threat to his men. On 15 and 16 September, Army Pomorze took up defensive positions on the northern bank of the Bzura. General Stanisław Grzmot-Skotnicki's group was located between Kutno and Żychlin, General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski's units near Gąbin, and parts of Army Poznań by the Bzura near Sochaczew, were ready to commence their drive towards Warsaw. To encircle and destroy the Polish forces, the Germans engaged most of their own 10th Army, including two armoured, one motorized, and three light divisions, equipped with some 800 tanks altogether. The attack from all sides on Polish positions started on 16 September, with the support of the Luftwaffe. On 15 September Poles were forced out of Sochaczew, a town on the Bzura river, and trapped in a triangle of Bzura, Vistula and German forces. The German 1st Panzer Division, after crossing the Bzura between Sochaczew and Brochów and engaging the Polish 25th Infantry Division managed to capture Ruszki, but its advance was then halted. Poles began to cross Bzura near Vistula, north of Sochaczew, and retreat towards Warsaw. Polish forces were forced to abandon most of their heavy equipment while crossing the river. On 17 September, German heavy artillery was shelling the crossing north of Brochów, and the largest air operation of the campaign began, with the Luftwaffe attacking the retreating Polish forces.

During the night of 17 September, the main forces of Army Poznań attacked the German forces in order to break out of the German encirclement between Witkowice and Sochaczew. The 15th Infantry Division and Podolska Cavalry Brigade again crossed the Bzura in Witkowice. In Brochow, the 25th and 17th Infantry Divisions crossed the Bzura river. The 14th Infantry Division was concentrated in Łaziska. At the same time, Army Pomorze marched towards the villages of Osmolin, Kierozia and Osiek.

In the morning the Germans started their drive towards the south along both banks of the Bzura, supported by more than 300 aircraft and heavy artillery. German howitzers, taking advantage of their position on the high ground of the Vistula's right bank, shelled Polish positions for the entire day. And after two days of heavy fighting, with no ammunition or food rations remaining, further attempts at a breakout for the Poles became impossible.

Aftermath

"[My soldiers fought] in one of the biggest and most destructive battles of all times."

—Johannes Blaskowitz, Order of the 20th September

Only a few Polish units managed to break out of the encirclement. These groups entered Warsaw and Modlin, mostly around 19 and 20 September, crossing the Kampinos Forest, and fighting German units in the area (for example, in the battle of Wólka Węglowa). Among them were Generals Kutrzeba, Knoll-Kowacki and Tokarzewski, two cavalry brigades (Wielkopolska and Podolska) of General Abraham, and the 15th and 25th Infantry Divisions. The remainder (4th, 14th, 17th, 26th and 27th Infantry Divisions), which didn't manage to cross the river, with General Bortnowski, capitulated between 18 and 22 September. Polish casualties were estimated at 20,000 dead, including three generals: Franciszek Wład, Stanisław Grzmot-Skotnicki and Mikołaj Bołtuć. German casualties are estimated at 8,000 dead. After the battle the remaining German divisions rushed towards Warsaw and Modlin and soon encircled both. The Bzura campaign ended in defeat for the Poles but because of the initial Polish local successes the German advance on Warsaw was halted for several days. The Wehrmacht was required to divert units from its push towards Warsaw. This enabled the Polish units defending Warsaw and its environs to better organize their own long-term, but ultimately failed, defense of the capital.

The campaign also showed the importance of taking initiative, proved that horse cavalry units were still an important factor on the battlefield, and proved the importance of air superiority as well as confirmed that simple numerical superiority did still matter. ⁵²

Army of Poznän

Army Poznań led by Major General Tadeusz Kutrzeba was one of the

Polish Armies during the Polish Defensive War in 1939.

Flanked by Armia Pomorze to the north and Armia Łódź to the south, the Army was to provide flanking operations in Grand Poland region, defend it and withdraw towards lines of defence along the Warta river.

During the Polish Defensive War, in the battle of the Border the German Army Group South struck between Poznań and Łódź Armies, penetrating Polish defenses and forcing Polish armies to retreat. The Poznań Army itself was not heavily engaged during those early days but was forced to retreat due to danger of being flanked. Later the Poznań Army strengthened by the remains of the Pomorze Army took part in the Polish counteroffensive Battle of Bzura; finally remaining units withdrew towards Warsaw and took part in its defense.

Organization

The Army was commanded by Major General Tadeusz Kutrzeba; its chief of staff was colonel Stanisław Lityński.

It consisted of 4 infantry divisions and 2 cavalry brigades. 14th Infantry Division (14 Dywizja Piechoty)

17th Infantry Division (17 Dywizja Piechoty)

25th Infantry Division (25 Dywizja Piechoty)

26th Infantry Division (26 Dywizja Piechoty)

Wielkopolska Cavalry Brigade (Wielkopolska Brygada Kawalerii) Podolska Cavalry Brigade (Podolska Brygada Kawalerii)

Pomorze Army

The Pomeranian Army was one of the Polish armies to take part in

the Polish Defensive War of 1939. It was officially created on March 23, 1939. Led by General Władysław Bortnowski, it consisted of 5 infantry divisions, 2 National Defence brigades and 1 cavalry brigade. The Army was tasked to defend Toruń and Bydgoszcz from a possible German attack and to carry out delaying actions in the "Polish Corridor" area.

Operational history

The Pomorze Army suffered severe losses during the Battle of Tucho

la Forest; losing about a third of its strength. In retreat towards Warsaw since September 6, it subordinated itself to Army Poznań and took part in the battle of Bzura (September 9-20).

Battle of Brześć Litewski

Battle of Brześć Litewski was a World War II battle involving German

and Polish forces that took place between 14 and 17 September 1939, near the town of Brześć Litewski (now Brest, Belarus). After three days of heavy fights for the stronghold in the town of Brześć, the Germans captured the fortress and the Poles withdrew.

Initially, the Polish forces did not plan to defend the old fortress of Brześć. The town was located deep behind the Polish lines and was seen as a supply depot and organisation centre rather than a frontline fort. However, after the Battles of Mława and Wizna the German XIX Panzer Corps under General Heinz Guderian broke through Polish lines and sped southward with the aim of flanking Warsaw from the East and cutting Poland in two.

According to the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, the region of Brześć was assigned to the Soviet "sphere of influence". However, the Soviets did not begin their invasion of Poland yet, and had the rapidly advancing German corps stopped, it would give Poles time to regroup and prepare. Already on 8 September the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, notified the Soviet government that the German forces would have to violate the Soviet "sphere".

The ancient fortress of Brześć is at the confluence of Muchawiec and Bug Rivers. Occupying the site of a medieval castle, it was strengthened and reconstructed in Napoleonic times and then again in 1847. Heavily damaged during World War I, the fortress was turned into a matériel depot and its central part into a prison. Although largely obsolete by contemporary standards, the fortress occupied a strategic position in the Polish lines and its defence could prevent German forces from crossing Polesia into Lesser Poland and Galicia to the south. ⁵³

The aim of the German XIX Corps was to seize the fortress in order to prevent elements of a divided Independent Operational Group Narew under General Młot-Fijałkowski from retreating southwards and joining the rest of the Polish forces. The German forces consisted of an entire armoured corps: the 3rd Panzer, 2nd Motorised and 20th Motorised Divisions.

At the end of the summer the fortress was housing the march battalions of 82nd and 35th infantry regiments and elements of various smaller units. Moreover, a large number of newly mobilised reservists started to arrive at the fortress, awaiting forward deployment to their units. From these units General Konstanty Plisowski organized a force of roughly three infantry battalions, aided by an engineering battalion, several batteries of artillery and two companies of old FT17 tanks used for training, Nos. 112 and 113.

Opposing forces

The city of Brześć was defended by a small improvised force under

General Plisowski. The Polish forces consisted of three infantry battalions, one engineering battalion, some artillery and were assisted by two armoured trains (numbers 55 & 53) commanded by Captains Mieczysław Malinowski and Andrzej Podgórski. The German forces consisted of the entire XIX Panzer Corps under General Heinz Guderian.

Battle

On 14 September 77 German tanks of the 2nd Battalion of the 8th

Panzer Regiment, part of 10th Panzer Division, reached the area of Brześć and attempted to capture the fortress on the run. The probe attack was repelled by Polish infantry and the 113th company of light tanks, consisting of 12 obsolete FT-17 tanks. All the Polish tanks were destroyed, but the German forces were forced to retreat towards their initial positions. Polish Armoured train number 53 (PP53), which made a reconnaissance advance to Wysokie Litewskie, was attacked by a scout patrol from the 10th Panzer Division. The crew from the train opened fire with artillery. Several other skirmishes were fought, but were largely inconclusive.

Later that day the German artillery arrived and started bombardment of both the fortress and the town. Heavy street fighting ensued. At dawn approximately half of the town was in German hands, the other half being defended by Polish infantry. Polish anti-tank weapons, artillery and AA guns were very scarce and were unable provide enough support for the infantry. The following day Polish defenders withdrew from the town, but heavy casualties on both sides prevented the German units from continuing the attacks on the fortress. Instead, it was constantly shelled with artillery and bombed by the Luftwaffe. When reports told Polish General Plisowski that scout elements from the 3rd Panzer Division were seen near the railway station at Żabinka, north of Kobryń, he sent PP55 to prevent his forces from being cut off. A platoon of 5 scout tanks left the train near Żabinka and attacked German armoured cars near a bridge on Muchawiec River. After losing three tanks the other two withdrew. A further attack by an assault platoon from the train failed. After a combined attack of the assault platoon and PP55 artillery, the Germans left the area of the Muchawiec bridge. When they returned, PP55 attacked another battle group of the 3rd Panzer Division (consisting of scout elements and the 5th Tank Regiment, supported by the 6th Battery of the 75th light artillery Regiment). After destroying a few armoured cars, the train withdrew towards Brześć and the train station was left in German hands. ⁵⁴

The main assault finally started in the early morning of 16 September. The defenders had plenty of small arms ammunition and light arms thanks to the munitions depot in the fortress, but had almost no anti-tank weapons and insufficient artillery cover.

Although the German infantry was repelled and the assault of German tanks was stopped by two FT-17 tanks sealing the northern gate of the fortress, by nightfall it became apparent that the German pressure made the situation very grave. Despite heavy losses, the German 20th Motorized Division and 10th Armoured Division captured the northern part of the citadel. Meanwhile, the combined 3rd Armoured Division and 2nd Armoured Division comprising the XXIInd Armoured Corps entered the area. The Poles were unable to re-supply and the casualties rose to almost 40%.

At dawn General Plisowski ordered part of the Polish forces to retreat from the easternmost fortifications and regroup to the other side of the river and southwards. The evacuation was completed by early morning, 17 September when the last unit crossing the bridge blew it up to hinder the Germans. An hour later elements of the German 76th infantry regiment entered the fortress – almost unopposed. The only Polish unit to remain in the fortress was the remnants of 82nd Infantry Regiment under Captain Radziszewski who decided to fight to the end.

Aftermath

On 17 September 1939 the Red Army crossed the Polish border and started its quick advance westwards. The Soviet 29th tank brigade under Brigadier Semyon Krivoshein reached the area of Brześć later that day and took over the fortress from the Wehrmacht. During that event a joint German-Soviet parade was held in the town, after which the German forces left the area, crossed the Bug River and started their pursuit of the fleeing forces of general Plisowski.

Some 40 kilometres (25 miles) to the east the Polish improvised "Kobryń" Infantry Division under Colonel Epler was ordered to retreat in tandem with Plisowski. After the Battle of Kobryń the division evaded encirclement and joined the forces of General Plisowski. The Polish forces were soon joined by the Podlaska Cavalry Brigade and together started to make their way towards Lwów and the Romanian Bridgehead. Under command of General Franciszek Kleeberg they formed the bulwark of the remaining Polish Army, fighting effectively against both the Wehrmacht and Red Army until the Battle of Kock, that ended on 5 October 1939.

The Brest Fortress, handed over to the Soviets in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was besieged and captured again by the Wehrmacht in the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in 1941.

Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski

The Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski took place from 17 September to 26 September 1939 near the town of Tomaszów Lubelski. It was the second largest battle of the Invasion of Poland (Battle of Bzura was the largest) and also the largest tank battle of the campaign. It resulted in the destruction of the Polish forces.

The battle can be divided into two phases - from 17 to 20 September and from 21 to 26 September. They are often referred to in Polish sources as the First and Second battle of Tomaszów, respectively.

First phase

In the first phase, Polish forces, composed of Army Lublin and Army Kraków under general Tadeusz Piskor attempted to break through the German positions around Tomaszów towards the Romanian Bridgehead area. Both armies joined forces on September 15, in the area southwest of Frampol. Their road towards south was blocked, however, by two German corps - VIII Army Corps (around Biłgoraj), and by XXII Panzer Corps, consisting of 2nd Panzer Division and 4th Light Division (around Hrubieszów, Zamość and Tomaszów Lubelski). Polish forces, concentrated around Frampol, were surrounded by six to seven German divisions. Since neither Army Kraków, nor Army Lublin had any aircraft, general Antoni Szylling, commander of Army Kraków, decided to risk and attack the Germans, without knowing their real strength. He knew that panzer forces had already approached Rawa Ruska, and hoped that their units would be stretched along the road from Jarosław to Rawa. Polish forces included one of the largest Polish armored units of that time, the Warsaw Armoured Motorized Brigade, and Szyling, together with general Piskor, decided that the Warsaw Brigade would make a demonstration attack on Tomaszów, drawing the attention of the Germans. Joined Polish forces were made of five infantry divisions - 3rd, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and 55th. Furthermore, they consisted of 1st Mountain Brigade, Kraków Cavalry Brigade, and Warsaw Armoured Motorized Brigade. However, after days of heavy fighting, Polish units were reduced to 30-50% of their original strength (except for the Armoured Brigade), lacking food, antitank ammunition, petrol and maps. Furthermore, communication between separate divisions was scarce, and they had no air support, which was a huge disadvantage, as they had no idea about movements and location of German forces.

These plans, however, were quickly changed, after the Germans destroyed key Polish unit, 21st Mountain Division near the village of Dzikowiec, on September 15/16, killing general Józef Kustroń. General Piskor, realizing that German forces were stronger than he had thought, decided to act quickly, without waiting for all his divisions to concentrate. On September 17, he ordered Warsaw Armoured Motorized Brigade to attack Tomaszów and keep the town until main forces of Army Kraków joined the brigade. Tomaszów was attacked on September 18 in the morning, and by 1 p.m. half of the town was in Polish hands. Meanwhile, however, 4th Light Division joined the battle, striking rear Polish units and forcing them to withdraw. Thus, the attempt to capture Tomaszów in a surprise attack, failed. In the night of September 18/19, Warsaw Brigade, supported by infantry of 23rd and 55th divisions, attacked Tomaszów again, but without success. Third attack took place in the night of September 19/20, but Polish units were disorganized and demoralized. After a series of chaotic skirmishes, with number of killed and wounded growing, and ammunition shrinking, general Piskor decided to surrender. Some 11,000 Polish soldiers were captured, with small groups managing to hide in forests.

Meanwhile, Operational Group "Boruta" (named after General Mieczysław Boruta-Spiechowicz), which was part of Army Kraków, separated from main Polish forces and marched towards Narol. Surrounded by Germans, Polish units were destroyed one by one. Some managed to reach the area of Rawa Ruska, where 3,000 soldiers surrendered on September 20, ending this phase of the battle.

Second phase

The second phase (also known as the Second Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski ) involved Polish units from the so-called Northern Front - remaining elements of Army Lublin, Army Modlin and Operational Groups Wyszków, Narew and Nowogródzka Cavalry Brigade under generals Emil Krukowicz-Przedrzymirski and Stefan Dąb-Biernacki. On September 20, these forces were some 40 kilometers north of Tomaszów, in the area of Sitaniec. General Dąb-Biernacki, who commanded them, until the final hours had no idea about the ongoing battle and did not help fighting troops. At the same time, general Piskor did not know about Dąb-Biernacki's units operating northeast of Tomaszów. Altogether, forces of Northern Front had 39,000 soldiers and 225 cannons. They were divided into three groups - Cavalry of general Władysław Anders, Operational Group of general Jan Kruszewski, and Operational Group of general Emil Krukowicz-Przedrzymirski. Polish forces were no match to German 10th Army and 14th Army, guarding the roads to the south, but general Dąb-Biernacki, at a meeting of his officers on September 18 in the village of Wereszcze Duże near Chełm, decided to go along with an attempt to break to Hungary or Romania. Dąb-Biernacki already knew that Red Army had invaded Poland the day before, so time was of crucial importance.

Northern Front forces marched southwards from the area of Chełm in two columns, towards Zamość, which Dąb-Biernacki decided to attack. On September 18, Poles attacked Krasnystaw, but failed to capture it. On next day, Dąb-Biernacki ordered the attack on Zamość to be carried out on Sept. 20, but in the night of Sept 19/20, he found out about the ongoing battle of Tomaszów Lubelski and decided to help. Northern Front units headed towards Tomaszów, but on September 20 in the evening, they were attacked by 4th Light Division and 27th Infantry Division near Cześniki. Meanwhile, units of Operational Group of general Emil Krukowicz-Przedrzymirski reached the area of Tomaszów, and on September 21, a few hours the first phase of the battle had ended, attacked troops under command of general Ernst Busch (28th Jäger Division and 8th Jäger Division). Since Polish forces proved to be stronger than expected, field marshal Wilhelm List decided to send reinforcements to general Busch - 68th Infantry Division, 27th I.D., and 2nd Panzer Division, which had just mopped Polish forces in the first phase of the battle of Tomaszów Lubelski. In the evening of September 22, cavalry of general Władysław Anders attacked, capturing Krasnystaw, and then reaching Sambor. Other Polish units were not successful, and in several skirmishes were surrounded on September 23. General Dąb-Biernacki ordered his officers to capitulate, escaped the encirclement, and left Poland, ending up in France. General Przedrzymirski refused to obey the order, and on September 24 attacked Krasnobród, but then was stopped by 8th Jager Division. Most of the remaining Polish forces capitulated around 26 September.

Battle of Szack

Battle of Szack (Shatsk) was one of the major battles between the Polish Army and the Red Army fought in 1939 in the beginning of the Second World War. During the invasion of Poland the Polish Border Defence Corps (KOP) was severely stripped of all the reserves and heavy armament. All the available Polish forces were sent to the west to reinforce the units resisting the German invasion. When the Red Army invaded Poland on September 17, there were barely any Polish forces to oppose them. The garrisons of the KOP were overstretched and after initial clashes and skirmishes for the border forts, the Polish units had to fall back.

The deputy commander of the KOP, general Wilhelm Orlik-Rueckemann decided to unite as many troops under his command as possible and join with the rest of Polish forces in the west. He ordered all the KOP forces in Polesie area to withdraw. In several days he managed to gather approximately 9 000 men under his command, coming from various units spread along a 300 kilometre long strip of the Polish-Soviet border. On September 19 he ordered all his units to march towards Kowel, where his forces were to be joined by the Independent Operational Group Polesie under general Franciszek Kleeberg. However, the difficult situation and the outcome of the battles of Brześć and Kobryń forced Rueckemann's group to change the plans. The Polish units changed the direction and started to march through the forests towards Włodawa and Kamień Koszyrski. The group found itself in a no-man's-land between the Soviet forces and the Wehrmacht and could operate freely. However, the morale of the troops was low and on September 27 general Orlik-Rueckemann decided to engage the Soviet forces in order to achieve a victory and raise the morale.

Battle

The Polish forces were marching in two columns. In the early morning of September 28 the northern column reached the forests near the village of Mielniki while the southern column reached the forests east of Szack (now Shatsk). Polish reconnaissance reported that the town of Shatsk was occupied by Soviet infantry and tanks. OrlikRueckemann ordered both columns to form a defensive line along the border of the forest and provoked the Red Army to attack. At 8 o'clock in the morning the Soviet tank unit (composed mostly of the T-26 tanks) started a direct assault on Polish positions. The Polish forces did not open fire until the tanks came close. When the tanks were only some 500 metres from the Polish lines the Polish Bofors wz. 36 anti-tank guns opened fire. Soon they were joined by the infantry and the 75 mm artillery. All Soviet tanks were destroyed and the battalion of major Balcerzak was ordered to attack the town of Shatsk. The Soviet units were taken by surprise and after a short hand-to-hand fight the Soviet forces were routed. Only a small part of the motorised infantry managed to retreat, but had to leave behind all their lorries, artillery and 9 T-26 tanks. The Poles also captured the staff headquarters.

According to the orders of the Soviet 52nd Rifle Division found in the headquarters, the Soviet units operating from the Kobryń area and were to "clean up the area east of Bug River from the bands of Polish officers". At 2 o'clock in the evening the Soviet reserve units appeared in the area and Orlik-Rueckemann decided to withdraw his troops to the forests.

After the battle

The Polish forces withdrew unopposed and started their march towards the Bug River. The only Polish unit destroyed by the Red Army was the tabor of KOP "Polesie" Brigade, caught by surprise near the village of Mielnik by the armoured troops of the Soviet 4th Army under general Vassili Chuikov. After a short fight the Polish unit surrendered. Upon the surrender all Polish officers and NCOs were shot

on the spot (about 500)^.

However, the rest of the Polish forces evaded being captured and crossed the Bug River, where they took part in the Battle of Wytyczno.

Siege of Warsaw (1939)

The 1939 Battle of Warsaw was fought between the Polish Warsaw Army (Armia Warszawa) garrisoned and entrenched in the capital of Poland (Warsaw) and the German Army. It started with huge aerial bombardments by the Luftwaffe starting on September 1, 1939. Land fighting started on September 8, when the first German armored units reached the Wola area and south-western suburbs of the city. Despite German radio broadcasts claiming to have captured Warsaw, the attack was stopped and soon afterwards Warsaw was placed under siege. The siege lasted until September 28, when the Polish garrison under General Walerian Czuma capitulated. The following day approximately 100,000 Polish soldiers left the city and were taken as prisoners of war. On October 1 the Wehrmacht entered Warsaw, which started a period of German occupation that lasted until the Warsaw Uprising and later until January 17, 1945.

History

Air battle

From the very first hours of World War II, Warsaw, the capital of Po

land, was a target of an unrestricted aerial bombardment campaign by the German Luftwaffe. Apart from the military facilities such as infantry barracks and the Okęcie airport and aircraft factory, the German pilots also targeted civilian facilities such as water works, hospitals, market places and schools. In addition, civilians were strafed from the air with machine gun fire in what became known as a terror bombing campaign. ⁵⁵

The Anti-Air defence of the city was divided into active and passive parts. The former was composed mostly of units of the Pursuit Brigade (Brygada Pościgowa) under colonel Stefan Pawlikowski, and anti-aircraft artillery and anti-aircraft machine guns detachments under colonel Kazimierz Baran. The Pursuit Brigade was equipped with 54 fighter aircraft, mostly the PZL P.7 and PZL P.11 types. The AA artillery had 86 pieces of anti-aircraft artillery, as well as an unknown number of anti-aircraft machine guns. The latter was composed mostly of fire-fighter brigades and volunteers and was supervised by colonel Tadeusz Bogdanowicz and Julian Kulski, the deputy president of Warsaw.

Initially the air defence of Warsaw was fairly successful. By September 6, 1939, the Pursuit Brigade had managed to shoot down 43 enemy aircraft, while anti-aircraft artillery had shot down a similar number of enemy bombers. In addition, there were also 9 unconfirmed victories and 20 damaged planes. However, the brigade also suffered losses, and by September 7 it had lost 38 machines, or approximately 70% of its initial strength.

The AA defence started to crumble when on September 5 by order of the military authorities 11 AA batteries were withdrawn from Warsaw towards Lublin, Brześć and Lwów. Also, as the war progressed, the German high command redirected more bombers to attack the city. At the peak of the initial bombing campaign on September 10, there were more than 70 German bombers above Warsaw. During that day, nicknamed "Bloody Sunday", there were 17 consecutive bombing raids.

Eve of the battle

On September 3 the forces of German 4th Panzer Division under ma

jor general Georg-Hans Reinhardt managed to break through positions of the Polish Łódź Army near Częstochowa and started their march towards the river Vistula and Warsaw. The same day Polish Commander in Chief, Marshal of Poland Edward Śmigły-Rydz ordered the creation of an improvised Command of the Defence of Warsaw (Dowództwo Obrony Warszawy). General Walerian Czuma, the head of the Border Guard (Straż Graniczna), became its commander and colonel Tadeusz Tomaszewski its chief of staff. Initially the forces under command of General Czuma were very limited. Most of the city authorities withdrew together with a large part of the police forces, fire fighters and military garrison. Warsaw was left with only 4 battalions of infantry and one battery. Also, the spokesman of the garrison of Warsaw issued a communique in which he ordered all young men to leave Warsaw. To coordinate civilian efforts and counter the panic that started in Warsaw, Czuma appointed the president of Warsaw Stefan Starzyński as the Civilian Commissar of Warsaw. Starzyński started to organize the Civil Guard to replace the evacuated police forces and the fire fighters. He also ordered all members of the city's administration to retake their posts. In his daily radio releases he asked all civilians to construct barricades and antitank barriers at the outskirts of Warsaw. On September 7 the 40th Infantry Regiment "Children of Lwów" (commanded by Lt.Col. Józef Kalandyk) - transiting through Warsaw towards previously assigned positions with Army Pomorze - was stopped and joined the defense of Warsaw.

Initial clashes

The field fortifications were constructed mostly to the west of the city limits. Gradually, the forces of General Czuma were reinforced with volunteers, as well as rearguard troops and units withdrawing from the front. On the morning of September 8, the suburbs of Grójec, Radziejowice, Nadarzyn, Raszyn and Piaseczno were captured by forces of German XVI Panzer Corps. At 5pm the forces of German 4th Panzer Division attempted an assault on Warsaw's western borough of Ochota. The assault was repulsed and the German forces suffered heavy casualties with many Panzer I and Panzer II tanks lost. The following day, the 4th Panzer Division was reinforced with artillery and motorised infantry, and started another assault towards Ochota and Wola. The well-placed Polish 75 mm anti-tank guns firing at pointblank range, and the barricades erected on main streets, managed to repel this assault as well.

One of the barricades erected at the crossing of Opaczewska and Grójecka streets was defended by 4th company of the 40th "Children of Lwów" Regiment. After the war a monument was built on the spot to commemorate the battle. On several occasions lack of armament had to be made up by ingenuity. One of the streets leading towards the city centre was covered with turpentine from a nearby factory. When the German tanks approached, the liquid was ignited and the tanks were destroyed without a single shot.

The German forces suffered heavy casualties and had to retreat westward to help thwart the Bzura River counteroffensive. The 4th Panzer Division alone lost approximately 80 tanks out of the approximately 220 that took part in the assault.

Second phase

By then Gen. Czuma had gathered an equivalent of 2 infantry divisions under his command. His forces were supported by 64 pieces of artillery and 33 tanks (27 of Vickers E, 7-TP and R-35 and 6 TK-3 and TKS tankettes). On September 8 the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły ordered the creation of an improvised Warsaw Army (Armia Warszawa) under General Juliusz Rómmel. The newly created force was composed of the forces defending Warsaw and Modlin Fortress, as well as all Polish units defending the Narew and the Vistula between Warsaw and Pilica river lines. Gen. Czuma continued to be the commander of the Warsaw Defence Force, which he split into two sectors: East (Praga) under Lt.Col. Julian Janowski and West under colonel Porwit.

The Army Poznań under General Tadeusz Kutrzeba, and Army Pomorze under General Władysław Bortnowski started an offensive on the left flank of the German forces advancing towards Warsaw. As a result of this offensive that later became known as the Battle of Bzura, German commanders withdrew the 4th Panzer Division and sent it to counter the Polish threat near Kutno. Its positions were replaced by forces of a weakened German 31st Infantry Division. In this sense the desperate attempt to buy time for organisation of defence of Warsaw was a success. The defenders of the city were joined by various units of the routed Prusy Army. In addition, several new units were created in Warsaw out of reserve centres of Warsaw-based 8th Polish Infantry Division and 36th "Academic Legion" Infantry Regiment.

On September 11 the Polish Commander in Chief ordered that Warsaw was to be defended at all costs. The following day the forces of German 3rd Army (under General Georg von Küchler) broke through Polish lines along the Narew river and started its march southwards to cut Warsaw from the east. It was assaulted by cavalry units under Władysław Anders, but after heavy fights the Polish counter-offensive failed and the forces were withdrawn to the south. Other Polish units fighting under Gen. Juliusz Zulauf in the Narew River area retreated and reached Warsaw on September 14. They were incorporated as the core of the defence forces of the borough of Praga.

On September 15 the German forces reached Warsaw from the east and the capital of Poland was under siege. Only a strip of land along the Vistula leading towards the Kampinos Forest and Modlin Fortress was still in Polish hands. The defence of Modlin fortress was an important relief to the defenders of Warsaw. ⁵⁶

Siege

On September 16 the forces of Gen. Blaskowitz tried to capture Praga

on the march, but the assault was repulsed. After heavy fights for the Grochów area the German 23rd Infantry Regiment was annihilated by the Polish defenders of the 21st "Children of Warsaw" Infantry Regiment under colonel (later promoted to general) Stanisław Sosabowski.

After the Battle of Bzura ended, the remnants of the Poznań Army and the Pomorze Army broke through the German encirclement and arrived in Warsaw and Modlin. After that the forces of the defenders amounted to approximately 120,000 soldiers. The German forces preparing for an all-out assault numbered some 175,000 soldiers. On September 22 the last lines of communication between Warsaw and Modlin were cut by German forces reaching the Vistula.

As a preparation for the storming, the city was shelled day and night with artillery and aerial bombardment. Among the guns used were heavy railway guns and mortars. Two entire air fleets took part in the air raids against both civilian and military targets. Since September 20 the forces on the eastern bank of the Vistula started attacks on Praga on a daily basis. All were successfully counter-attacked by the Polish forces. On September 24 all German units concentrated around Warsaw were put under command of general Johannes Blaskowitz

On September 25 the final preparations commenced and the following day in the early morning the general assault was started on all fronts of surrounded Warsaw. Western parts of the city were attacked by 5 German divisions (10th, 18th, 19th, 31st and 46th) while the eastern part was attacked by 4 divisions (11th, 32nd, 61st and 217th). The attack was supported by approximately 70 batteries of field artillery, 80 batteries of heavy artillery and two entire air fleets (1st and 4th), which bombarded the city continuously causing heavy losses in the civilian population.

The attack was repelled and the German forces had to retreat to their initial positions. The following night the Polish forces managed to successfully counter-attack and destroyed several German outposts, especially the Polish positions in boroughs of Mokotów and Praga. On September 27 the German High Command organised yet another all-out assault that was yet again repelled with heavy casualties on both sides.

Capitulation

The military situation of Warsaw was relatively good. General Czuma

managed to gather enough forces and war material to successfully defend the city for several weeks longer. However, the situation of the civilian inhabitants of Warsaw became increasingly tragic. Constant bombardment of civilian facilities, lack of food and medical supplies resulted in heavy casualties among the civilians.

The water works were destroyed by German bombers and all boroughs of Warsaw experienced a lack of both potable water and water with which to extinguish the fires caused by the constant bombardment. Also, the strategic situation became very difficult. The Soviet Union's entry into the war and lack of support from the Western Allies made further defence of the city pointless.

On September 26 General Tadeusz Kutrzeba, deputy commander of Warsaw, started capitulation talks with the German commander. On September 27, at 12.00 a cease fire agreement was signed and all fighting halted. Soon afterwards Warsaw capitulated. Several units declined to put down their weapons and cease fire, and their commanding officers had to be visited by generals Czuma and Rómmel personally. On September 29 the garrison of Warsaw started to hide or destroy their heavy armament. Some of the hidden war material was later used during the Warsaw Uprising. On September 30 the evacuation of Polish forces to German POW camps started and the following day German units entered the city.

Opposing forces

Annexes

Campaign in Poland

(1) Guderian XIX Cuerpo de Ejercito Motorizado: 2° y 20° Division de Infanteria Motorizada y 3° Division Panzer

(2) Kempf Division Panzer Kempf: 7° Regimiento Panzer, SS Regimiento Deutschland

(3) Guderian Redespliegue XIX CEM despues de Septimbre 7 con la 10° Division Panzer incluida

(4) Von Wieterheim XIV Cuerpo de Ejercito Motorizado: 1° Division Ligera, 13° y 29° Division de Infanteria Motorizada, mas tarde la 5° Division Panzer

(5) Hoepner XVI Cuerpo de Ejercito Motorizado: 1° y 4° Division Panzer, dos divisiones de infanteria

(6) Hoth XV Cuerpo de Ejercito Motorizado: 2° y 3° Divisiones Ligeras, 25° Regimiento Panzer

(7) Von Kleist XXII Cuerpo de Ejercito Motorizado: 2° Division Panzer y 4° Division Ligera

(8) 8° Ejercito XIII AK mas la Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler transferida despues al 10° Ejercito

(9) 14° Ejercito VIII AK incluye el SS Regimiento Germania. A Grupos de Ejercitos Norte y Sur de von Bock y von Rundstedt; 37 Divisiones de Infanteria, tres divisiones de Montaña, 15 divisiones moviles, 3.195 tanques.

Ejercito Polaco 38 Divisiones de Infanteria, once de caballeria, dos brigadas motorizadas, 600 a 700 tanques ligeros.

Luftwaffe Kesselring 1° Flota Aerea con el Grupo Norte y Lohr 4° Flota Aerea con el Grupo Sur, 1.550 aviones

Fuerza Aerea Polaca 750 aviones

Panzer action in Poland, 1939

In Operation 'White', Hitler commits the German Army and Luftwaffe to the invasion of Poland. When two Army Groups, North and South, strike concentrically at a weak opponent - mostly infantry divisions deployed within fifty miles of the frontier, Polish forces are encircled and within seventeen days the campaign is virtually at an end. Warsaw, unsuited to armoured attack, continues to resist until 27 September. German double encirclement strategy and previous experience gained from Condor Legion operations in Spain prove decisive.

Hoth and Hoepner (Third and Fourth Panzer Armies) 1 September 1939. The main weight of Panzer assault lies with the three motorized corps, XIV, XV and XVI, spearheading German Tenth Army (von Reichenau).

Von Kleist and Guderian (First and Second Panzer Armies) 1 September 1939, also deployed in conjunction with infantry armies, operate on the wings of the offensive.

Operations are led by six panzer divisions, including a 'mixed' division (Kempf), four light divisions, and four motorized divisions. Included in the invasion force are SS Regiments: Adolf Hitler (SSLAH), Deutschland and Ger-mania.

Guderian (1) XIX MotK: 2nd, 20th MotDivs; 3rd PzDiv Kempf (2) PzDiv Kempf: 7th PzRegt, SS Regt Deutschland, etc. Guderian (3) Redeployed XIX MotK: After 7 September includes 10th PzDiv

Von Wietersheim (4) XIV MotK: 1st LtDiv, 13th, 29th MotDivs; and later 5th Pz Div

Hoepner (5) XVI MotK: 1st, 4th PzDivs; two InfDivs

Hoth (6) XV MotK: 2nd, 3rd LtDivs; 25th PzRegt

Von Kleist (7) XXII MotK: 2nd PzDiv; 4th LtDiv

(8) (Eighth Army) XIII AK includes SS Regt Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler before transfer to Tenth Army

(9) (Fourteenth Army) VIII AK includes SS Regt Germania A Gr North/South von Bock/von Runstedt; 37 infantry, three mountain, fifteen mobile divs, 3,195 tanks

Polish Army 38 infantry divisions, eleven cavalry, two motorized brigades, 600-700 light tanks (500 battle-fit)

Luftwaffe Kesselring 1st Air Fleet-A Gr North; Lohr 4th Air Fleet-A Gr South, 1,550 aircraft

Polish Air Force 750 aircraft (500 battle-fit)