First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  Yet the Germans did not have things all their own way. Their losses on that first day amounted to some forty aircraft, compared to twenty-nine combat losses for the Poles. The P.11s and P.7s, though outclassed, had nevertheless proved their worth. Moreover, the dispersal of Polish fighter squadrons had certainly come as a surprise, leaving mainly obsolete models and trainers to be destroyed on the ground. Behind the propaganda, the Luftwaffe was well aware that it had been fooled. As a memorandum of the 1st Air Fleet conceded: ‘Whereabouts of the enemy air arm largely unknown.’75 The Poles were certainly outgunned by the sleek Messerschmitts, Heinkels and Dorniers of the Luftwaffe, and were clearly outnumbered, but they were still in the fight. And, what was more, they were more than capable of giving their opponents a bloody nose.

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  While Wieluń was being bombed, and the Westerplatte and the Polish Post Office were being besieged, German forces also began their land assault of Poland. At dawn, they moved off from their forward positions, many of them sensing the magnitude of the moment. One officer noted at 4.43 a.m.: ‘I light a cigarette – when it goes out, the war will be on.’76 Crossing the frontier was often momentous. In some instances, German soldiers carried out a ceremonial destruction of the border post – as at Zoppot (Sopot), north of Danzig, where the striped barrier was gleefully ripped from its hinges for the benefit of an accompanying propaganda unit. One Wehrmacht diarist merely recorded his pride at having participated in the invasion: ‘It is a wonderful feeling, now, to be a German,’ he wrote.77

  The morning was particularly memorable for one German officer. Forty-two-year-old Major Ottomar Domizlaff had served in World War I and the post-war German Reichswehr, and was now commander of the 1st Battalion of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, stationed in East Prussia. Overzealous and rather disliked by his men, Domizlaff had already crawled some distance over the Polish frontier, north of Mława, when the German artillery opened fire to announce the start of the war, and the unfortunate major received a splinter wound in his buttock. ‘Harmless but painful’, wrote a fellow officer, but ‘the story spread like wildfire throughout the division, which was soon roaring with laughter’.78 Despite being caused by friendly fire, the injury meant that Domizlaff was later awarded a Wound Badge, almost certainly the first of the Second World War .

  For many others, the opening moments of the war could be wholly uneventful. As their unit moved off, one rifleman asked his officer: ‘Is that the Polish border, Herr Leutnant?’ ‘That was the Polish border,’ came the answer.79 The experience of Hans von Luck, a company commander in the 2nd Light Division, was perhaps typical. Advancing eastward into the Polish Corridor, he recalled that ‘the frontier was manned by a single customs official. As one of our soldiers approached him, the terrified man opened the barrier. Without resistance, we marched into Poland. Far and wide, there was not a single Polish soldier in sight.’80

  In some places, certainly, German troops advanced virtually unopposed. Elsewhere, they faced stubborn Polish resistance. At Węgierska Górka, for instance, in the Beskid hills of Poland’s far south, the advancing forces of the 7th Bavarian Infantry Division, part of the German 14th Army, received a rude awakening. There, among the rolling hills and wooded valleys, a network of defensive bunkers had been belatedly begun by the Poles that summer, and, although only four of the planned sixteen had been provisionally completed and manned by the outbreak of war – and they were still lacking power, water and communications – they nonetheless made for a considerable obstacle to any force seeking to advance north along the valley of the river Soła. Each bunker had a crew of around twenty officers and men, and was armed with a 37mm anti-tank gun and a selection of light and heavy machine guns.

  When German advance forces arrived above the town in the afternoon of 2 September, they were quickly engaged by the Polish defenders. ‘The bullets chirp and whizz close over our heads’, one German soldier wrote, ‘like the cracking of a whip … From minute to minute, we sink deeper into the ploughed furrows.’ After an initial German assault was repelled, the engagement settled into a siege, with artillery and tracer fire – ‘in thick endless streams’ – targeting the bunkers, though often with little effect. The official account of the German 7th Army Corps recalled how the artillery fire at Węgierska Górka was certainly accurate, but ‘the assault troops could see very well how the shells bounced off their targets, like stones against a steel helmet … It was clear that the artillery would not manage it alone.’81

  Meanwhile the Poles fired back with all they had, fighting off the advancing infantry and pioneers. One by one, however, the bunkers were overpowered and forced to surrender, the survivors staggering out ‘black as poodles … hardly able to see’.82 As a German war correspondent recalled, the engagement amounted to a ‘baptism of fire’ for the Bavarian division: ‘We battled at Węgierska Górka the entire night. The enemy didn’t make things easy for us. The Poles remained in the bunkers. We had to root most of them out. A few survivors left their blown-up concrete castles, smoke blackened, lips pressed together, faces pained.’83

  The last of the bunkers – codenamed ‘Wędrowiec’ or ‘Wanderer’ – was given up only at 5 p.m. on 3 September, after its ammunition had been exhausted.84 It had held out for 20 hours. Across the four manned bunkers at Węgierska Górka, thirteen defenders were killed; around twenty more got away under cover of darkness and the remainder were taken captive, including the commander, Captain Tadeusz Semik. German casualties were estimated at around 300.85 It was an engagement, the German 7th Army Corps report noted, that ‘would long be spoken of by German soldiers’, adding: ‘Brave lads, these Poles.’86 Small wonder, perhaps, that it became known to its defenders as ‘the Westerplatte of the South’.

  Though it ultimately failed to hold up the German advance, the battle at Węgierska Górka demonstrated that the Poles could give a good account of themselves, especially if they were defending prepared and fortified positions. It was a lesson that the Germans would learn again, to their cost, at Mława. Located 100 kilometres north of Warsaw and barely 10 kilometres from the southern frontier of East Prussia, Mława stood astride the shortest route from German territory to the Polish capital. For this reason, an extensive system of earthworks and bunkers was planned for the area just north of the town, which was belatedly begun in July 1939. By 1 September, those defences were already well advanced, with barbed-wire entanglements, anti-tank trenches and barriers. In addition, forty-nine concrete bunkers, though rather basic and armed only with heavy machine guns, were nonetheless completed in their essentials, with interlocking fields of fire and artillery support. A second network of six similar bunkers was established to the east of Mława, north of the town of Rzęgnowo, with the two defensive systems separated by an impassable area of forests and swamps. In all, the Mława line of defences – manned by three regiments of infantry, with cavalry brigades protecting the flanks – stretched for over 30 kilometres.87

  Beginning at dawn on 1 September, the German invasion near Mława initially proceeded swiftly, with the SS-Deutschland regiment in the vanguard, sweeping through the villages immediately south of the East Prussian border and skirmishing with those Polish units that were patrolling ahead of the defensive lines. However, when German forces encountered the fortifications – of which they appeared to be largely unaware – their headlong attack foundered. Near Piekiełko, Polish defenders allowed forward units of the German 23rd Infantry Regiment to approach to within 200 metres before opening fire. The result, one Polish sergeant recalled, ‘was incredible. 8 enemy vehicles were left on the road, 4 of them burnt out, and the rest of the column scattered in panic.’88

  German accounts of Mława were searing. One tank driver recalled the drumming of Polish bullets against his armour, followed by a ‘powerful explosion’ which destroyed the neighbouring tank, producing a ‘thick black cloud of smoke rising from the turret like a fountain’. In the heat of the battle, the tank crew had little idea of their losses, or of their progr
ess. Suddenly a spark momentarily lit the cabin. When the crew came to their senses, they saw the gunner slumped down with a spreading pool of blood on the floor. Soon after, another powerful strike: ‘the transmission grinds. Bloody hell! A shell has bust the track!’89

  That afternoon, near the village of Kuklin, another German assault reached the Mława defences, but found them impenetrable. The tanks of the 7th Panzer Regiment discovered railway tracks embedded vertically in concrete, as well as anti-tank ditches, 6 metres wide and 3 metres deep, stretching for 500 metres. In seeking to avoid such obstacles, the 7th Panzer’s tanks turned broadside, thereby exposing their lightly armoured flanks to the Poles, with predictable results. By early evening, the Germans had withdrawn having lost seven tanks, as well as a company commander, with a further thirty-two tanks damaged.90 Soon after, the divisional commander, Major-General Werner Kempf, filed his report: ‘The attack was a disaster,’ he wrote. ‘Terrible losses of panzers, numbers unknown. An attack here is hopeless.’91 The Mława line had been held, for now.

  To the west of Mława, the German 4th Army was pressing eastward, across the Polish Corridor, seeking to cut off the Polish forces in the north and reunite East Prussia with the Reich. Given that they were entering territory which, only a generation before, had been part of the German Empire, for some it was an emotional experience. Approaching the village of Wielka Klonia (Gross Klonia in German), General Heinz Guderian, then commanding the 19th Army Corps, was momentarily lost in reminiscences. As he wrote in his memoir: ‘Gross Klonia had once belonged to my great-grandfather Freiherr Hiller von Gärtringen. Here, too, was buried my grandfather Guderian. My father had been born in this place. This was the first time I had ever set eyes on the estate, once so beloved by my family.’92

  Once Guderian was finished reminiscing, there was fighting to be done. The German 4th Army, of which his 19th Army Corps was part, had been positioned to the west of Tuchola Forest, an area of dense woodland that the Poles had considered largely impassable and so had defended with only an infantry division and a cavalry brigade.93 The commander of the Polish ‘Pomeranian Army’ stationed in the Corridor, General Władysław Bortnowski, was well aware that the presence of his forces was intended to act only as a ‘trip wire’: to ensure that any German incursion into the Polish Corridor would not go unnoticed by the outside world.94 When he realised that he could be facing a full-scale invasion, however, he had asked that his men be withdrawn southward, to prevent them being cut off or destroyed. His request was refused. His Pomeranian Army would face the might of Guderian’s armoured spearhead alone. In the debacle, Bortnowski struggled to evacuate the 9th and 27th infantry divisions, then already engaged in the northern half of the Corridor, but the task was beyond him. Such an evacuation, he admitted, was ‘wishful thinking’.95

  While Guderian’s advance through the Tuchola Forest would soon demonstrate the revolutionary potential of the massed armoured attack, the morning’s first major engagement in the Polish Corridor, at Chojnice, owed a debt to more primitive military methods. The town had been slated to be captured by a surprise attack using an armoured train, the Panzerzug 3, one of four such trains used by the Germans in the Polish campaign. Though a throwback to an earlier age of warfare, Panzerzug 3 was a formidable beast, with an armoured locomotive at its heart, flanked by an artillery car, an anti-aircraft car, and assault cars containing men and weaponry.96 Arriving at Chojnice railway station shortly after 5 a.m., it successfully disgorged its cargo of infantry and a rail-adapted armoured car, before being engaged by Polish artillery, which destroyed its command turret, killing the train commander. In the chaos that followed, the crew attempted to retreat but were soon trapped on a demolished bridge, whereupon Polish guns destroyed the lead wagon and set fire to the remainder. Yet again, a German surprise attack had failed that morning. The war diary of the 19th Army Corps was quietly damning in its assessment: ‘The era of deploying rail-bound armoured trains against an enemy in a prepared position appears to have passed.’97

  Later that day, near the village of Krojanty, to the north-east of Chojnice, another seemingly anachronistic engagement would provoke enduring controversy. At dusk, two squadrons of the Polish 18th Pomeranian Cavalry Regiment were ordered to engage troops of the German 20th Motorised Division, so as to ease the eastward retreat of a neighbouring unit. The result was a skirmish that would go down in history, and provide Berlin with a rich seam of propaganda for the entire campaign.

  Poland’s cavalry regiments – the Uhlans – had a proud military tradition and were still seen in 1939 as the very elite of the Polish army. However, warfare had been changing rapidly in the opening decades of the twentieth century, and though all armies still boasted cavalry units at the outbreak of war – including the Germans – their role had shifted significantly. In 1939, therefore, the Polish cavalry was essentially used as mounted infantry. Equipped with field guns, light tanks and anti-tank rifles, they fought dismounted, with their horses providing for speed and mobility.

  Yet, at Krojanty, when the 18th Cavalry faced units of German infantry – apparently at rest – the decision was made to mount a traditional cavalry charge, one of the last of its kind. Though a superior officer attempted in vain to halt the attack, perhaps foreseeing the carnage that was to follow,98 the order stood, and with the regimental commander, Colonel Kazimierz Masztalerz, leading the way, 200 Polish cavalrymen drew their sabres, spurred their horses and charged at full gallop. Initially, the attack went well. German infantrymen, surprised if nothing else by the manner of the assault, fled, desperate to escape the thundering hooves and slashing sabres. Improbably, it seemed that the Poles had won the day. But then, as a Polish eye-witness recalled, ‘suddenly enemy tanks came out of hiding, charging our flank with a drumfire barrage. The squadrons instantly scattered towards the nearby wooded height, a good anti-tank position, but did not escape the effects of the armoured attack.’ When the regimental buglers called a while later, only half the regiment returned.99

  In the aftermath, twenty-five of the cavalrymen lay dead, including Masztalerz, with a further fifty injured.100 Major-General Stanisław Grzmot-Skotnicki, whose forces had been relieved by the skirmish at Krojanty, expressed his words of thanks. The 18th Pomeranian Regiment had ‘etched its name in gold in the pages of history of the Polish cavalry’, he said.101 The Germans, too, were momentarily impressed. Word of the Uhlans’ charge spread swiftly that evening. A few kilometres to the south, for instance, near his headquarters at Trzciany, General Guderian discovered his men hurriedly setting up field positions and donning their steel helmets in expectation of an imminent cavalry attack. He did all he could to calm them down.102 The following day, the German 2nd Division even reported that attacks by Polish cavalry had penetrated their lines as far as the artillery positions.103

  Such grudging admiration would shift to ridicule in the weeks that followed. Far from being seen – as it might have been – as a fleeting success for Polish martial élan before the victory of German technological superiority, Krojanty would be portrayed by German propaganda as a symbol of Polish foolishness, repeated in countless newspaper articles and spurious memoirs. The mythology even infected the official history of the 3rd Panzer Division, which spoke of the Polish cavalry riding with their sabres drawn, unable to believe that ‘the German panzers are made of steel’.104

  In truth, the Polish cavalry showed their mettle once again that day, far to the south, at the village of Mokra, north-west of Częstochowa. There, the German 4th Panzer Division was advancing north-eastward, probing the gap between the Polish Łódź and Kraków armies, an area held by the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade. Early that morning, after being held up negotiating anti-tank ditches dug by Polish scouts close to the border,105 the 340 or so tanks of the 4th Panzer finally made contact with the enemy, west of Mokra. They were mainly Mark I and II Panzers, which – though formidable in their own right – were far removed from the armoured behemoths developed later in the war. Neither was pa
rticularly generously armed or armoured, with less than 15 centimetres of frontal armour at best.106 Moreover, though a handful of their crews may have fought in the Spanish Civil War, for the vast majority Poland would be their baptism of fire.

  Facing the tanks of the 4th Panzer that morning was the 8,000-strong Volhynian Cavalry Brigade, which consisted of four cavalry regiments, as well as infantry, artillery and an armoured detachment equipped with armoured cars and TKS tankettes, small, two-man armoured vehicles used for reconnaissance and infantry support.107 Fighting dismounted, the Polish cavalrymen were armed with the Bofors 75mm gun and the wz.35 anti-tank gun, a long-barrelled, high-velocity rifle, known by its codename ‘Uruguay’ – both guns were able to penetrate 15 centimetres of armour at 300 metres.

  First contact was made at 7.30 when German tanks approaching from the west shelled local villages and machine-gunned fleeing civilians before being halted by the anti-tank artillery of the 21st Vistula Uhlan Regiment. After a brief withdrawal, the 4th Panzer Regiment was then drawn – by German accident or Polish design – into a large clearing around the three hamlets that made up Mokra, which was surrounded by forest on three sides. More perilously for the Germans, the clearing was bounded to the east by a wooded railway embankment, upon which a Polish armoured train – No. 53 Śmiały (‘The Bold’) – was positioned.