First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  This night, for the first time, Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5.45 a.m. we have been returning fire, and from now on bombs will be repaid with bombs. Whoever fights with poison gas will be fought with poison gas. Whoever departs from the rules of humane warfare can only expect that we shall do the same. I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.38

  It was a masterpiece of feigned innocence, which concluded with Hitler piously, and dishonestly, declaring that his air force would ‘restrict itself to attacks on military targets’, as he had no desire to ‘do battle against women and children’. The speech was greeted with a chorus of ‘heils’ and applause which, as General Halder noted, was ‘as ordered, but thin’.39 For all the hyperbole, however, one word that was conspicuously absent from the speech was ‘war’. As a memorandum sent from Berlin to all German embassies and consulates that night made clear, that word was to be scrupulously avoided. ‘This action is for the present not to be described as war’, the instruction read, ‘but merely as engagements which have been brought about by Polish attacks.’40

  For that reason, perhaps, the speech was met with a degree of indifference on the streets of Berlin. Such had been the tumultuous events of the previous few years that many seemed to have overlooked its significance. Many of those listening to the radio that morning in Berlin would not have fully appreciated that the speech heralded war. They would have imagined another bout of sabre-rattling, a limited incursion perhaps, followed by a negotiated victory: that was how Hitler had progressed thus far – in the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia – and that was how the broad mass of the population would have wanted him to continue. Consequently, there was little sense of panic, or even any grasp of the momentous nature of the events that they were witnessing. As the American correspondent William Shirer noted: ‘The people on the streets, I noticed, were apathetic despite the immensity of the news which had greeted them from their radios.’ When the newsboys came down the street selling their special editions, he said, ‘no one laid down their tools to buy one’.41

  If apathy reigned in Germany, the public mood across Poland was a mixture of defiance and optimism. According to one Polish pilot, morale among his comrades that morning was ‘fantastic’, and they did not mind that their aircraft were outdated: ‘No one cared about that, we just wanted to fight, we wanted to zoom through the air, to avenge old wrongs and new, to kill for the slander and brazenness.’42 One diarist in Lwów (L’viv) summed up the popular spirit. ‘We are not afraid,’ Alma Heczko wrote. ‘We must win and we shall win. We won 20 years ago and we shall win again now. Back then we were weaker and we won Poland back, and now that we are strong we will not give away a single piece of our land.’ Some were even relieved that the dark, troubled summer had been finally brought to an end. ‘One thing is certain,’ recalled an infantry major, ‘I felt relaxed, or even happy, that the exhausting wait was over and the game had begun.’43

  That optimism, while not entirely misplaced, was at least partly influenced by the positive spin that the Polish media put on the opening day of the conflict. The morning’s newspapers had missed the invasion, of course, and spoke of Poland’s ‘finger on the trigger’ and ‘Hitler’s ludicrous demands’, but the evening editions carried the news in full banner headlines. ‘The whole nation in defence of freedom,’ proclaimed Wieczór Warszawski; ‘With faith, trust and courage, we go into battle,’ intoned Echo. Radio, meanwhile, broadcast patriotic music and accounts of Polish cavalry units advancing into East Prussia, promising that ‘the hour of victory is at hand’.44

  The morning had begun with the solemn tones of radio announcer Zbigniew Świętochowski proclaiming the outbreak of war: ‘Hello. Hello. This is Warsaw on all wavelengths. At 5.40 German troops crossed the Polish frontier, breaking the non-aggression pact. A number of cities were bombed. In a moment you will hear a special message.’ Later, Świętochowski would return to the airwaves to give air-raid warnings. The pianist Władysław Szpilman recalled the first such broadcast he heard, on that first morning of the war:

  The howl of sirens sounded from the loudspeakers installed on lamp-posts, in windows and over shop doorways. Then I heard the radio announcer’s voice: ‘This is an alarm warning for the city of Warsaw … Be on alert! Now on their way are …’ At this point the announcer read out a list of figures and letters of the alphabet in military cipher that fell on civilian ears like a mysterious cabbalistic threat. Did the figures mean the number of aircraft on their way? Were the letters code for the places where the bombs were about to be dropped? And was the place where we were now standing one of them?45

  Whether they understood them or not, such coded warnings, with their introduction of ‘Uwaga! Uwaga!’ (‘Attention! Attention!’), would become one of the abiding memories of the war for many Poles.

  The proclamations of the commander-in-chief, Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz, were another novelty. In his order of the day to Polish troops, he referred to Germany as Poland’s ‘ancient enemy’ and demanded that the invader must ‘pay dearly with his blood for every step he makes on Polish soil’. ‘Our cause is just,’ he reminded his readers, adding: ‘Regardless of the length of this war and the sacrifice that must be made, the ultimate victory will fall to us.’46 Posters and billboards reinforced the defiant message. One, showing a portrait of Śmigły-Rydz in full regalia, flanked with images of military hardware and massed ranks of soldiers, declared: ‘A violent act of force must be resisted with force’ and gave the mantra ‘We shall not relinquish our own. We shall defeat the aggressor.’

  The resulting confidence was infectious. Warsaw troop trains bore the slogan ‘Do Berlina!’ (‘On to Berlin!’), and one officer recalled that ‘no-one wanted to hear anything about retreat, let alone think about it’.47 A Bydgoszcz diarist remembered going into his bank on the morning of 1 September: ‘The branch director and his deputy were in excellent mood. According to their information, the German attack did not surprise our troops on the frontier. The situation in the Corridor was good, and our cavalry had just entered Danzig.’48

  The truth was nowhere near as rosy. The Germans enjoyed an overwhelming numerical superiority in hardware – 3:1 in artillery, 3:1 in tanks, 5:1 in aircraft – and, what is more, German equipment was generally more advanced, faster and more effective than that of their opponent.49 The disparity was evident in every theatre, and obliged some Polish forces to avoid battle altogether. The cream of the Polish navy, for example, had already departed Polish waters. ‘Operation Peking’, which had been ordered on 29 August, foresaw the transfer of Poland’s destroyer fleet to British bases as soon as war appeared imminent. Consequently, three destroyers – ORP Grom, ORP Błyskawica and ORP Burza – departed on the afternoon of the 30th, bound for Leith with orders to engage the Germans in the event of war and to scuttle themselves if they were to face capture. After being shadowed by German aircraft through the Baltic, at dawn on 1 September they were already in the North Sea, where they were met by two Royal Navy destroyers, HMS Wallace and HMS Wanderer.50 Serving under British command thereafter, they would play no part in the defence of Poland. The only significant surface vessels to remain in Polish waters were the destroyer ORP Wicher and the minelayer ORP Gryf, which remained in the Bay of Danzig to face the invader. Both were sunk on the afternoon of 3 September.

  The five-strong submarine flotilla, meanwhile, was not evacuated. Under ‘Operation Worek’, it was ordered that morning to patrol the Bay of Danzig and Poland’s Baltic coast to harass German naval operations and prevent any attempted seaborne landings. Unable to be resupplied once war broke out, however, the vessels escaped in the weeks that followed, with three being interned in Sweden and two, ORP Wilk and ORP Orzeł, making it to Britain – the latter following a daring escape from internment in Tallinn. Despite such heroics, however, the Polish submarines, like their surface fleet, would make only a negligible contribution to Poland’s defence in 19
39.51

  The situation was little better in the air. Already that morning, airfields near Warsaw, Kraków, Radom, Łódź, Katowice and countless other Polish towns and cities had been bombed, in an effort by the Luftwaffe to cripple its opponent on the ground. Anticipating the attack, the Polish air force had dispersed most of its aircraft, especially the most modern examples, to makeshift airfields, leaving the enemy to bomb largely empty sites. As one Polish air force major recalled: ‘It seems quite naïve of the Germans to have believed that during the preceding days of high political tension and with their own obviously aggressive intentions, we would leave our units sitting at their peacetime bases.’52 Though the Germans would tell themselves, and the wider world, that they had destroyed the Polish air force on the ground, the truth was rather more complex.

  For many Poles, then, the first experience of the war was the sound of bombing. In the capital, Władysław Szpilman was woken on 1 September by the distant thud of explosions. Not far away, Alexander Polonius heard the ‘muffled reports’ of what he took to be Polish anti-aircraft artillery. Marta Korwin climbed up to the roof of her building to ‘watch the exciting spectacle’, wondering which districts of Warsaw had been hit.53 To the east, near Lublin, the Olszowski family’s first news of the war was seeing aircraft circling above them. ‘I thought it was manoeuvres,’ one of them recalled,

  then I heard some machine guns and everybody came out of the house to see what was happening. Grandpa said, ‘My God! It’s war!’ and rushed indoors to switch on the wireless … Everybody was stunned. With ears glued to the loudspeaker we were trying to catch the fading words. The battery or the accumulator, or both, were packing up. When we could no longer hear even a whisper from the wireless set, Grandpa turned the switch off and looked at our anguished faces. He knelt down in front of the picture of Jesus Christ and started to pray aloud. We repeated after Grandpa: ‘Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name …’54

  The first of the German bombing raids, however, was not on Warsaw; rather it was a strategic attack on the bridges over the Vistula at Tczew, 20 kilometres south of Danzig. The bridges, one rail and one road, had been built in the nineteenth century and, side by side, spanned the 1,000 metres of the Vistula and its flood plain. As a crucial crossing point on Poland’s largest river, the western bank in Poland itself and the eastern bank in the Danzig Free State, the Germans considered it essential that the bridges be captured intact, so as to ease the passage of invading troops across the Polish Corridor.55 The Polish defenders, however, well aware of the site’s strategic importance, had the bridges mined with 10 tonnes of explosives.56

  So, shortly after 4.30 in the morning of 1 September, even before the Schleswig-Holstein had opened fire on the Westerplatte, a force of forty-five Junkers Ju-87 Stukas assumed their formation in the skies above Tczew. Their primary task was to knock out the power plant and cabling to prevent a detonation of the mines, with diversionary raids to be carried out on signal boxes and the railway station at Tczew itself. At the same time, a goods train, hijacked by German troops, would approach the rail bridge from the eastern side, before disgorging its human cargo that would attempt to take control of the target. Despite the boldness of its conception, however, the mission was a failure. Before reaching the bridges, the train was sidelined at Simonsdorf (Szymankowo) by suspicious Polish customs officials, who sent up a flare to alert the nearby garrison at Tczew to the imminent danger. Moreover, as German pilot Paul-Werner Hozzel explained, patchy fog over the target meant that the Stukas could not hope to be accurate, and though they dropped their bombs as ordered, and watched ‘the rising mushroom-shaped explosions’ on the embankment, they were only able to temporarily disable the charges.57 An hour later, the bridges were blown up by the Poles. The opening German operation of the war had been an outright fiasco.

  If the raid at Tczew had a limited strategic rationale, that at Wieluń, a small town some 20 kilometres from the German border of Silesia, had a rather different logic. At 5.40 that morning,58 as a damp dawn was breaking, a squadron of Stukas shattered the silence. According to the account of pilot Oskar Dinort, commanding officer of the dive bombing squadron Sturzkampfgeschwader 2, the attack followed a well-practised drill:

  Close radiator flap

  Turn off supercharger

  Tip over to port

  Set angle of dive to 70 degrees

  Accelerate: 220, … 250, … 300mph59

  Plummeting earthward, their sirens screaming, the Stukas released their bombs at around 700 metres, before pulling out of the dive, climbing into the brightening skies and repeating the procedure. It was the first of three raids that the town endured that day.

  On the ground, the attack caused chaos: one eye-witness recalled that ‘hell’ was unleashed. With no anti-aircraft defences – and no military presence at all – the town of some 16,000 souls was entirely at the mercy of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Its hospital and church were quickly flattened, and over 300 other buildings, 70 per cent of the total, were destroyed, including monastery complexes, a synagogue, an Orthodox church and the old and new market squares.60 Over 50 tonnes of bombs were dropped, transforming the heart of Wieluń into a moonscape of smoking rubble. One of those present recalled hurrying to the town centre in the aftermath to see what had happened. ‘It was destroyed,’ he wrote. ‘Everywhere there were bodies and body parts: arms, legs, a head.’61 Nobody could be sure how many had been killed, with estimates ranging from a few hundred to 1,600. The Stuka crews suffered no losses at all: there was no Polish defensive fire. Indeed, as the Luftwaffe report on the attack would note, there was ‘no sign of the enemy’ whatsoever.62

  The question of why Wieluń was targeted has long exercised historians. Some have suggested that the raid was a cynical morale-boosting exercise for another Stuka squadron, which had suffered a disaster in a dive-bombing demonstration flight, two weeks earlier, when thirteen aircraft crashed in fog, with all crews lost.63 It could also be that the raid was simply made in error. It is clear, for instance, that German military intelligence wrongly believed that Polish army formations and staff headquarters had been stationed in the town over the previous days, with one German agent reporting the presence of the 8th Uhlan Regiment.64 Yet such rationalisations ignore the simplest explanation, which is that the Luftwaffe was engaged in an act of psychological warfare: aiming to break the spirit of the Poles as quickly as possible, by sowing chaos and panic behind the front lines.65 Whatever the reason, one conclusion cannot be gainsaid: Wieluń clearly showed that Hitler’s claim that his airmen would restrict themselves to military targets was a bare-faced lie.

  Wieluń’s grim fate could well have been visited upon Warsaw had the weather not intervened. Alongside the strategic targeting of Polish airfields that morning, German plans had foreseen a massive attack on the Polish capital – codenamed ‘Operation Waterfront’ (Unternehmen Wasserkante) – utilising both of the Luftwaffe’s air fleets to damage the city’s industrial capacity and sap civilian morale. In the event, however, low cloud and fog over central Poland meant that the operation was postponed in favour of more isolated actions by the 1st Air Fleet, some of whose aircraft drew a heavy toll from a spirited defence. The Polish Pursuit Brigade (Brygada Pościgowa) was especially effective, intercepting the formations of Luftwaffe bombers with its own PZL P.11 and P.7 fighters. One of its pilots, Lieutenant Jerzy Palusinski, recalled the scene as his squadron rose to engage the Heinkels and Dorniers of the enemy:

  There was a furious fight in front of us. Something around 200 planes in one place, at the same time. On my right, I noticed three fat bombers heading south […] from the distance of 400 feet [120 metres] I fired at the target with a long burst of fire. Manoeuvring my machine I aimed at the right engine and once again pulled the trigger. The Heinkel’s engine was set on fire and after a while it dropped off the formation and crashed to the ground.66

  In the vicious battle that morning, to the north of Warsaw, the Germans lost fifteen aircraft,6
7 and were effectively prevented from dropping their bombs on the capital. The first of those losses, a Heinkel, was shot down by Alexander Gabszewicz and Andrzej Niewiara, both flying P.11s. Gabszewicz excitedly landed his aircraft close to his crashed victim and picked up a souvenir – a piece of the tailplane and a twisted machine gun – before rejoining the fray; he would himself be shot down later that day.68 In another engagement, P.11 pilot Stefan Okrzeja engaged a Dornier Do-17 over Radzymin, sending it plunging earthward ‘like a giant fireball’. Such was the excitement of the other members of Okrzeja’s squadron that their twelve planes ‘flew around that 300-metre high pillar of smoke, as if performing a war dance’. It was their first downed enemy: ‘a beautiful sight’.69 Okrzeja was shot down and killed four days later over Wyszków, barely 10 kilometres away.

  To the south, over Kraków, better weather meant that the German 4th Air Fleet could operate more effectively, but the conditions were just as favourable for the defenders. A heavy German raid on the main airfield at Rakowice, early that morning, gave rise to the first air victories of the war. Soon after take-off from Balice airfield, a P.11c fighter, piloted by Captain Mieczysław Medwecki, was shot down by Unteroffizier Frank Neubert, flying a Ju-87 Stuka. Minutes later, Pilot Officer Władysław Gnyś – who had taken off alongside Medwecki – avenged his colleague’s death by shooting down two Do-17 bombers.70

  On that first day of the war, the Luftwaffe launched more than 2,000 sorties, carrying out raids on over 100 Polish towns and cities, including Warsaw, Kraków, Ostrów Mazowiecka, Poznań, Katowice, Grodno, Kielce and Kutno, where their dive-bombers attacked an evacuation train, causing numerous casualties.71 They also targeted at least thirty Polish airfields, where they destroyed some 180 Polish aircraft, including at Małaszewicze, near Terespol, where nine of the latest PZL.37 Łoś bombers – 10 per cent of the total available – were destroyed on the ground, and at Krosno, where nineteen aircraft were lost when a hangar was bombed.72 At Rakowice airfield in Kraków, meanwhile, two military hangars were destroyed with the loss of some thirty-one aircraft, with ten killed on the ground.73 The following day, the airfield and air force academy at Dęblin was attacked by around 100 aircraft, causing significant destruction on the ground as well as killing or wounding thirty personnel. No Luftwaffe aircraft were shot down during the attack.74 With results like that, it is little wonder, perhaps, that German propaganda would proclaim that the air war had already been won.