In the 10-hour engagement that followed, the Germans launched three assaults on the Polish lines, but with only minimal success. As one of the defenders recalled, stalemate ensued: ‘A mass of tanks, about forty … Mokra is in flames. Smoke and dust … the tanks, in a frenzy, rake fire from their cannons and machine guns. Our batteries are keeping up, firing head on.’108 For Panzer commander Willi Reibig it was a sobering experience: ‘The name Mokra had no meaning for us. A village like any other. But if only we had known!’109 There were two primary reasons for his rueful comment. The first was the effectiveness of the ‘Uruguay’ anti-tank rifle, which could cut a swathe through the German light tanks. It worked not by penetrating the enemy armour directly, but by causing a spall of metal shards to be ejected inside the vehicle, which would kill or injure the occupants and damage the engine and machinery. The results were impressive, as one Polish lancer recalled:
I grabbed the rifle … lay down behind a barn and fired at the side of a tank. It burst with a billow of black smoke. While I was still on the ground, the turret hatch opened and one of the crew began to come out. Before he had time to swing his foot out of the tank, a shot was fired and he slumped from the hatch, dead.110
The second reason for German soldiers to remember Mokra was the deployment of the armoured train, which provided vital supporting fire throughout the battle. Though under constant threat from air attack, Śmiały was able to move into position on the embankment to engage each German advance with a ‘torrent of cannon and machine gun fire’, firing until its barrels overheated.111 Caught in the open space, and threatened on three sides, the tanks of 4th Panzer paid a heavy price. ‘There’s a crashing and smashing like mad,’ wrote Willi Reibig.112 In the resulting chaos,
a great number of tanks caught fire, many had snapped tracks and were immobilised. Their crews started jumping out of their turrets, drawing a powerful fire from light and heavy machine guns. In the commotion and smoke, some German tanks lost their sense of direction and ended up ramming into each other and firing at one another.113
If the Germans had thought that they would roll over the Polish army with ease, Mokra provided a check to their hubris, a reminder of Helmuth von Moltke’s maxim that ‘no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy’. Despite their brave defence, however, by the end of the day the Poles could no longer hold their defensive positions. In danger of being outflanked, with ammunition running low and Śmiały damaged and forced to disengage, the remaining men of the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade executed a surreptitious withdrawal, moving under cover of darkness to new defence lines a few kilometres to the east. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, they had stopped the German advance at the cost of 190 men killed and a further 300 injured.114 A cavalry brigade had held off an armoured division for 10 hours.
German losses at Mokra were estimated at around 500 killed, with some 100 vehicles destroyed. But additional psychological damage had been inflicted: the confidence of the men of 4th Panzer had been severely dented. That evening, the cry of ‘Alarm!’ from a panicked sentry sent the division’s support column – including field kitchens and artillery batteries – scurrying westward in fear. As the divisional diary noted, ‘all too easily, there’s a sudden, unexpected, contagious collapse’, which was only rectified by the intervention of the commander, General Georg-Hans Reinhardt.115
Despite the efforts of senior officers to restore morale, that collapse in confidence could be highly infectious. As a staff officer of the 4th Army noted, on the very first night of the war: ‘Tonight everywhere there are burning villages, houses and barns. Here and there wild shooting, supposedly irregulars. Everywhere there is nervousness.’116 That tension would bring with it baleful consequences, contributing to a trigger-happy climate in which atrocities and executions became grimly commonplace.
Already on the opening days of the war, the tone was set. In the village of Serock, near Bydgoszcz, the Germans executed around thirty-five Poles, mainly soldiers and railwaymen, whom they had captured in a nearby forest, in ‘retaliation’ for a shot fired at them. In Jankowice, near Katowice, twelve Poles were shot in revenge for the killing of a German officer; they included three children, aged ten, twelve and fourteen.117 In Wyszanów, near Poznań, seventeen women and children were killed when German soldiers threw hand grenades into a cellar, despite the victims’ pleas for mercy.118
The slaughter at Wyszanów was triggered, it was thought, by one of the victims trying to run away. But any pretext sufficed. In the village of Torzeniec, near Kępno, men of the Wehrmacht’s 41st Infantry Regiment avenged themselves on local inhabitants after a brief night-time firefight cost three of their men their lives. Believing that the villagers had fired on them, the soldiers responded with ‘wild shooting’, before setting barns and houses alight and then murdering those who tried to escape the burning buildings. Among the dead were a mother and her two-year-old daughter. The following morning, the Germans arrested all the surviving men from the village, court-martialled them, and sentenced them to death. Then, in a ‘gesture of mercy’, they ordered every other man to step out of line and they were executed in front of the rest. Eighteen men were killed. One of them, Józef Sadowski, voluntarily gave his life when he realised that his seventy-year-old father Stanisław had been selected. In total, thirty-four villagers in Torzeniec were murdered.119 A further thirteen were murdered in Gostyń, twenty-six in Łaziska Górne, thirty-eight in Zimnowoda, seventy-five in Parzymiechy, 159 in Albertów.120
Elsewhere, petty scores were settled. At Simonsdorf in the Danzig Free State, some forty Poles were executed by German gendarmes. The victims were railway and customs employees, along with their families, who had prevented the hijacked train containing German soldiers from reaching the bridge at Tczew by shunting it into a siding.121 According to an eye-witness, their bodies were piled up and a sign was erected declaring ‘Here lies the Polish minority from Simonsdorf’.122 They paid with their lives for frustrating German ambitions. In all, it is estimated that – in the first three days of the war alone – some seventy-two mass executions were carried out by German forces, claiming over 800 victims.123 A brutal benchmark was being set for the remainder of the campaign, and the remainder of the war.
Clearly, beyond the tenuous justification of ‘retaliation’, there was a wider barbarism in evidence, which found its expression not only in the brutal treatment of the Polish population, but in anti-Semitic violence and in the indiscriminate targeting of churches, residential suburbs, hospitals and civilian trains.124 As at Wieluń, rural villages and towns with no military significance were flattened, as if for sport. Columns of refugees were harried and hounded from the air, with German aircraft strafing them seemingly at will. Germany’s new norms of war meant the targeting of the entire population, regardless of the pious words of its leaders about ‘military targets’. The head of the British military mission to Poland, Colonel Adrian Carton de Wiart, himself a veteran of the Somme and, as a recipient of the Victoria Cross, no stranger to the horrors of warfare, noted the differences between the war he had known in Flanders and its new form. ‘I saw the very face of war change,’ he wrote, ‘bereft of romance, its glory shorn, no longer the soldier setting forth into battle, but the women and children buried under it.’125
*
The opening days of the war had shown that German forces would not be having things all their own way. The Poles were evidently neither incompetent nor lacking determination, and though the Wehrmacht’s situation reports crowed that advances had been made in every theatre,126 the reality was rather more complex. Advances had certainly been made, and had been substantial, but they were a far cry from the stereotypical image of an all-conquering German war machine crushing the hapless, inferior Poles. All the Germans’ surprise attacks of that morning – at Chojnice and Tczew and on the Westerplatte – had failed to achieve their objectives, thwarted either by their own complacency and incompetence or by the vigour of the Polish defence. Moreover, though the P
oles had suffered considerable reverses, they had nonetheless demonstrated that they were more than capable of fighting back. The image that the world would come to know of the campaign – of an inept, irresolute enemy, unable to resist the German advance and foolhardy enough to charge advancing tanks with cavalry – would be an invention of Goebbels’ propaganda. The Poles had shown that they were determined to defend themselves. It just remained to be seen whether Paris and London would assist them.
2
The Tyranny of Geography
Poland was well accustomed to fighting for its existence. Though the Polish Republic of 1939 had only been established after the collapse of the Central Powers and the Russian Empire at the end of the First World War, it drew upon a political folk memory that stretched back hundreds of years, much of it involving conflict and the violent irruptions of its neighbours. Indeed, Poland had, for a time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, been one of Europe’s primary military powers – in the Commonwealth with Lithuania from 1569, it stretched from the Baltic all the way to the Black Sea, and its armies had fought, among others, against the Tatars, Muscovy and the Kingdom of Sweden. Most famously, perhaps, Poland’s iconic ‘winged hussars’ under King Jan III Sobieski had routed the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683, thereby halting the Ottoman advance into Europe.
However, while the seventeenth century had been the high-water mark of Polish power in Europe, the century that followed it witnessed a spectacular ebb tide. As Poland’s neighbours, Prussia, the Habsburg Monarchy and Russia, consolidated and grew in strength, they increasingly saw Poland as an arena into which they could project their own influence. Their primary weapon in that process was to exploit the very institutions that had previously made Poland’s ‘noble democracy’ so successful – the elective monarchy and the liberum veto, which demanded unanimous assent for all legislation before the parliament, or Sejm. By using bribes and corrupt noblemen, Poland’s neighbours could hamstring reform, paralyse the Sejm and sow chaos, contributing to the Commonwealth’s eventual decline. Poland would soon become as familiar with malign foreign interference as it had once been with military success.
From 1772, Poland – whose frontiers had waxed and waned over the previous seven centuries – began to disappear from the map. In that year, in response to a noble rebellion against Russian influence, a first ‘partition’ of the country was agreed by Prussia, Russia and Habsburg Austria, who between them annexed 30 per cent of its territory and 28 per cent – or four million – of its people. The preamble to the Partition Treaty, signed in St Petersburg that summer, justified the action as a supposed response to the ‘spirit of faction, the troubles and intestine war which had shaken the Kingdom of Poland for so many years, and the Anarchy which acquires new strength every day’.1 One of the few Polish senators to protest against the country’s betrayal was Tadeusz Rejtan, who begged his fellow nobles in the Sejm to reject the partition, then tore his clothes open at the chest and threw himself onto the floor of the chamber, imploring the king ‘on the blood of Christ’ not to ‘play the part of Judas [and] kill the Fatherland’.2 But, the deed was done, and the partition was agreed. The dishonest subtext of the treaty was clear: Poland was collapsing into chaos, and her dutiful neighbours were rightfully stepping in to restore order. It was a narrative that would run and run.
In the two decades that followed, that diagnosis of troubles and anarchy would be studiously brought to fruition. Under the client-king Stanisław August Poniatowski – himself one of the Russian empress Catherine the Great’s many lovers – the country was torn between the stranglehold of foreign (predominantly Russian) influence and a reformist urge to survive. The reformers scored some notable successes, not least among them the National Education Commission of 1773 and the constitution of 1791, the first such document in Europe. But the prospect of constitutional reform and the longed-for restoration of national sovereignty so alarmed Poland’s autocratic eastern neighbour that, once again, an intervention was engineered, whereby Russian troops invaded in support of a local rebellion and persuaded the pusillanimous king to sue for peace. In the aftermath, the Sejm was forced to revoke the constitution and Poland was partitioned once again – this time between Russia and Prussia – losing a further 40 per cent of her original territory.
Thus stymied, Polish patriots and reformers were left with little option except to launch a national insurrection – proclaimed in Kraków in 1794 – ‘for gaining national self-rule and for the foundation of general liberty’. Soon after, a conscript army under the generalship of Tadeusz Kościuszko – one of the heroes of the American Revolutionary War – defeated a Russian army at Racławice, and the revolt spread to Warsaw and Wilno (Vilnius), where Tsarist garrisons were violently ejected. Despite such promising successes, however, the insurrection could not be sustained against both Russian and Prussian military intervention, and when Kościuszko was taken prisoner at the Battle of Maciejowice, and Warsaw fell to Russian guns, it collapsed, to be followed by an inevitable third – and final – partition. In 1795, barely a century after her armies had ‘saved Christendom’ at the gates of Vienna, Poland vanished from the map.
Of course, the fact that a Polish state had ceased to exist did not mean that the Polish people disappeared; they continued their lives as peasants and nobles, merchants and intellectuals, either in exile or as subjects of the partitioning powers. In the decades that followed, all of them had to respond to their predicament, either by assimilating to the dominant culture, by tactically collaborating with the occupier – in the hope that something of ‘Poland’ might thereby be saved – or by actively resisting. It would be this spectrum of responses that defined Polish life for the next century.
For those that chose to resist, Poland’s military tradition and the more recent insurrections were important inspirations. Yet, rarely has martial endeavour met with so little political reward. During the nineteenth century, generation after generation of Poles fought and died for a cause that rarely seemed to materially advance. Under Napoleon, some 25,000 served in the Polish Legions as France’s most loyal lieutenants, taking on – at times – Poland’s partitioning powers, but unable to fight directly for a restored, independent Poland. Their sacrifice, though synonymous with the victory at Samosierra in 1808, was perhaps typified by the dark fate of the legionnaires sent to quell a rebellion in the distant French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti), a mission from which few would return.
Indeed, though the Polish Legions would become an integral part of partitioned Poland’s narrative of itself, they were mostly fighting far from the country that they hoped to resurrect. It was a distance that was symbolised by the song that would later become the reborn Poland’s national anthem, ‘Dąbrowski’s Mazurka’. Its lyrics not only open with the iconic line ‘Poland is not yet lost, so long as we still live’, but also contain in its chorus the demand that the legionaries’ commander – the Dąbrowski of the title – ‘March! March! … from the Italian land to Poland’. For all their efforts in Napoleon’s cause, the Legions did little to further the goal of Polish rebirth.
A generation later, Poland took up arms once more. In November 1830, in response to growing Russian repression at home and the rumour that the tsar’s Polish soldiers might be used to crush revolutions abroad, a military coup managed to take Warsaw and oust the Russian garrison. In the months that followed, Russia’s heavy-handed response succeeded in transforming this local revolt into a national uprising, under the inspiring (and inspired) motto ‘Za naszą i waszą wolność’ – ‘For our freedom and yours’. When the Russian army returned in February 1831, however, they swiftly regained the initiative, and after Warsaw fell that September following a bloody siege, the revolt was crushed and the status quo ante restored. Abroad, a wave of liberal sympathy for Poland’s plight garnered some noble verbiage but little material gain. Meanwhile, the first cohorts of Sybiracy – Poles deported to a punitive exile in Siberia – made their way east.3
If th
e fight against Russian occupation was the most pressing and the most vehement, it does not mean that those in the other partitions meekly accepted their lot. In 1846, in a prelude to the revolutions that would sweep Europe two years later – the so-called Springtime of the Nations – Poles rose to demand independence in Kraków, in the Austrian Partition, and in the Wielkopolska region around Poznań, then part of the Prussian Partition. Predictably, the risings were crushed by Prussian and Austrian forces –with extreme brutality in Galicia, where peasants were paid in salt for the heads of Polish nobles.4 Another rising in Wielkopolska in the spring of 1848, which sought to take advantage of the new revolutionary reality across Europe, was similarly suppressed by Prussian forces.
If those insurrections against foreign rule were perhaps not determined enough, they paled into insignificance compared to the next Polish uprising. In January 1863, a forced conscription of Polish youth to a twenty-year term of service in the Russian army provoked an angry armed response. This time, however, the insurrection proved to be more than a purely military adventure. In the intervening years since the last revolts, Polish society had changed; the ‘national idea’ was more widespread and more fervently held than previously, and the insurgents now boasted a fully fledged political programme to bolster their cause. Alongside that unifying ethos, the revolt had a comprehensive organisational structure, which possessed all the attributes of an underground state. The cause of Polish independence, it seemed, had come of age.
First to Fight Page 6