First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  That underground state – with its ministries, security cadres, couriers and tax collectors, often operating under the very noses of the Russian authorities – would set the standard for what came to be known as konspiracja: the clandestine resistance to occupation. It would also prove highly effective at conducting a guerrilla campaign against the Russians, with small-scale engagements and ambushes across the territory of the Russian Partition. It evoked another wave of international sympathy for Poland’s plight, with commentators from the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin to the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi cheering the Polish cause from abroad, while favourable opinions were also voiced on the floor of the British House of Commons.5

  For all the fine words, however, little in the way of help would be forthcoming, and yet again the weight of Russian force was finally made to tell. The insurrection had a macabre coda, when on the morning of 5 August 1864, some eighteen months after the revolt had been launched, five of its leaders were hanged by the Russians on the ramparts of the citadel in Warsaw. As well as the 10,000 or so Poles who had been killed in fighting the tsar’s forces, a further 35,000 were deported to Siberia. While that new generation of Sybiracy struggled to maintain their faith in their cause, their compatriots at home found themselves under a strict crackdown, with every expression of Polish patriotic sentiment outlawed. Already removed from the map, Poland was in danger of extinction.

  In the aftermath, generations of Poles either emigrated or contented themselves with their lot; at best perhaps they engaged in what became known as ‘organic work’ – advancing the Polish cause through cultural and political collaboration with the partitioning powers. With Germany unifying as an empire in 1871, and Russia growing in strength and significance, it would clearly take a cataclysm to shake their dominance over the Polish lands. Only the Austrian Partition, the most liberal of the three, allowed some leeway to Polish national ambition; only there could Polish patriots breathe more easily.

  With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the ‘Polish Question’ – as it had now become – came to the fore once again. With large numbers of Polish conscripts serving in the armies of the three partitioning powers, it became politically expedient to all sides to offer some concessions to Polish national sentiment. In the four years that followed, a number of promises were made, and a number of Polish soldier-politicians sought to manoeuvre and scheme as best they could, most prominent among them Józef Piłsudski at the head of a reformed Polish Legion, fighting under German and Austrian auspices. In response, the Western Allies also made promises, notably the principle – enshrined in US president Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ of January 1918, as one of the conditions for a lasting peace – that Poland should be restored as an independent state, with ‘free and secure access to the sea’, and including all those territories ‘inhabited by indisputably Polish populations’. In the event, however, it was the collapse of both the Russian Empire in 1917 and the Central Powers in 1918 that enabled an independent Poland to re-emerge, after an absence of 123 years. Like Lenin in Petrograd, Piłsudski found power lying in the street, and merely had to stoop to pick it up.

  But Poland’s rebirth would be the product of a painful labour. Though the partitioning powers had collapsed, the result on the ground was something of a free-for-all, in which competing ambitions had to fight for their realisation. As Winston Churchill quaintly put it: ‘The War of the Giants has ended, the quarrels of the pygmies have begun.’6 Those ‘quarrels’ consisted of rumbling border conflicts with the emergent states of Lithuania and Czechoslovakia; a bloody rising in Wielkopolska against German irregulars and Freikorps; and a short-lived Polish–Ukrainian war, as a result of which Lwów was returned to Polish control. Most quarrelsome of all was the Polish–Soviet War, which ranged across the region for two years before being brought to an end in August 1920 by the Polish victory at the gates of Warsaw – the so-called Miracle on the Vistula.

  That conflict – which was a curious, highly mobile melange of cavalry assaults and armoured trains – witnessed the emergence of some of the military personalities who would achieve prominence in 1939, such as Władysław Langner and Tadeusz Kutrzeba. Foremost among them, however, was Edward Śmigły-Rydz. Born in humble circumstances in Galicia, in the Austrian Partition, in 1886, Edward Rydz (as he was then known) was orphaned in his youth and raised by his grandparents, before being informally adopted by the parents of a school friend. A talented artist, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, before a growing interest in politics and philosophy prompted a change to the prestigious Jagiellonian University. Already by this time, Rydz was an active member of Polish paramilitary organisations and added the nom de guerre ‘Śmigły’ (meaning ‘agile’) to his surname. Drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914, he found his metier: by 1916 he was already a colonel in Piłsudski’s Polish 1st Brigade, and he later took charge of the Polish underground military organisation, the Polska Organizacja Wojskowa. By the time of Poland’s rebirth in 1918, he had emerged as one of Piłsudski’s most important lieutenants, masterminding the defeat of the Red Army at Daugavpils and then commanding the Polish 3rd Army in the spring of 1920, when it captured the Ukrainian capital of Kiev: the high-water mark of the Polish offensive. Piłsudski said of him that ‘when it comes to strength of character and will, he excels above all the other generals’.7

  Aside from the personal, the Polish–Soviet War also had a deeper significance, especially in the bruising blow that it dealt to the Soviet Union’s dreams of expanding the communist world. As the Red Army’s order of the day, on the eve of the battle for Warsaw, made plain, Soviet ambition did not end with the Polish capital: ‘Onward to the west!’ it read. ‘Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration!’8 For the Soviet leadership, the war against the Poles was only the opening phase of a wider offensive that would carry the communist idea westward to Berlin, Paris and London. The Miracle on the Vistula, therefore, not only saved central and western Europe from communism, it also dented the Kremlin’s ambitions. It was a setback that Stalin, for one, would neither forget nor forgive.9

  With the victory against the Soviets, and the resulting Treaty of Riga of 1921, Poland was once again secured on the European map. But, to some extent, that rebirth was just the beginning of Poland’s difficulties. Though she enjoyed the distant support of the Western Allies – her territorial arrangements had been largely rubber-stamped by the Treaty of Versailles in 1920, and Allied military missions had been sent to lend advice in her fight against the Soviets – Poland’s more immediate neighbours were much more malign in their intentions. Neither Germany nor the Soviet Union was reconciled to the territorial losses that they had incurred at the end of the First World War, and the reconstituted Poland represented a large proportion of their lost lands. Little wonder perhaps that the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov would later describe Poland as ‘the monstrous bastard of the Peace of Versailles’.10 It was a view that was most certainly shared in Germany, even before Hitler came to power. When the Soviets and Germans found common cause and signed the Rapallo Pact in 1922, German general Hans von Seeckt outlined in a memorandum to the German chancellor, Joseph Wirth, what he called ‘one of the firmest guiding principles of German policy’, namely that the existence of Poland was ‘intolerable and incompatible with Germany’s vital interests’.11 The logical basis for German–Russian collaboration, he suggested, was that Poland should be made to disappear.

  Perennially threatened from without, the reborn Poland also faced multiple challenges within, from the difficulty of welding together a single state infrastructure – where previously there had been three – to that of seeking to industrialise. But perhaps the most pressing problem was that of incorporating the large ethnic minorities that the state included. Given the nature of its rebirth, and the complex demographic realities in the region, the new Poland was a multi-ethnic state, with nearly 30 per cent of its population belonging t
o minorities, including around 4 million Ukrainians, 3 million Jews, 1.5 million Byelorussians and 800,000 Germans.12 Yet after the hardships endured in the national cause over more than a century, the ruling ethos of the new state was often instinctively, and narrowly, ‘Polish’ in nature; and although all essential freedoms and rights were granted to minorities, the tone was often one of tension, with mutual prejudices, recriminations and even violence commonplace. It was an atmosphere that was typified by the assassination, in 1922, of the first president of the Polish Republic, Gabriel Narutowicz, who was shot by an ultra-nationalist after it was alleged that he had won the election only thanks to the votes of the country’s minorities.13

  Given such strains, it was unsurprising that the parliamentary democratic system itself creaked, with political turmoil and short-lived administrations leading to widespread frustration. The deadlock was broken in 1926, when Józef Piłsudski – the moustachioed strongman who had led the drive to independence but had been in brooding retirement since it had been achieved – returned to the political scene at the head of a military coup, dramatically facing down the president in the middle of Warsaw’s Poniatowski Bridge. The regime that followed – known as Sanacja – was a curious hybrid: the constitution, the Sejm and political parties all remained, albeit under the ‘guidance’ of the clique around Piłsudski, with the latter serving twice as prime minister and taking the position of minister of defence for himself. Despite its authoritarian trappings, however – and there was a significant toughening of the regime in later years – Sanacja never transformed itself into a dictatorship or a one-party state; rather, it might euphemistically be described as a ‘managed democracy’.

  While domestic policy was generally left in the hands of his ministers, to be run in accordance with vague ‘national principles’, Piłsudski busied himself largely with the management of foreign policy. Already prior to his return in 1926, the government in Warsaw had signed an alliance with France, in 1921, which was intended to provide solidity to Poland’s international position, deterring both German and Soviet aggression. But Piłsudski went further, formulating the ‘Doctrine of Two Enemies’ to govern Poland’s relationship with her revanchist neighbours. It meant that Poland would maintain correct – even cordial – relations with both Germany and the Soviet Union, but would ally with neither. Still, Piłsudski signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in July 1932, and after apparently toying with the idea of a preventive strike against Germany in March 1933,14 signed a similar pact with Hitler in January 1934. By the time Piłsudski died, in May 1935, Poland – despite suffering widespread unemployment and inter-ethnic tension – nonetheless appeared to be at least internationally secure.

  Aside from foreign policy, Piłsudski liked to devote his attention to the military. The Polish army had emerged in 1920 from the war with the Soviet Union full of confidence and vigour – understandably so, as it had been the army (and armed irregulars) who had realised the dream of independence and had drawn the frontiers of the Republic. However, the army spent much of the inter-war period essentially preparing for the last war – a mobile conflict, dominated by cavalry and armoured trains. To a large extent this was enforced by simple economics: with its predominantly agrarian economy, Poland could ill afford the huge costs demanded by mechanisation. Polish military spending in the five years to 1939 was less than 3 per cent of that of Hitler’s Germany over the same period. More strikingly perhaps, the amount that Germany would spend to equip a single armoured division exceeded the entire annual budget for the Polish army.15

  There were other influences at play. For one thing, Poland’s post-war military leadership had, by and large, not experienced the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War, and so had failed to come to the conclusion – as drawn by Heinz Guderian, Charles de Gaulle and J. F. C. Fuller – that mechanisation was the future. For another, the nation that re-emerged in 1920 – particularly eastern Poland, with its wide open spaces, extensive marshland and lack of infrastructure – seemed admirably suited to the continued use of cavalry. In addition, the elevated status of the cavalryman in Polish society, traditionally the crème de la crème of military service, ensured that those steps that were made towards mechanisation tended to be rather halting and tentative.

  Despite these difficulties, one should not imagine that the Polish army in 1939 lacked martial spirit. After the long decades of foreign occupation, independence was far too precious to most Poles to be given away without a fight. In any case, the Polish army was not the backward-looking, cavalry-centred anachronism that German propaganda would later have the world believe. With one million men under arms, it was the fifth-largest military force on the planet, boasting some thirty divisions of infantry and eleven cavalry brigades.16 Certainly there were shortages of transport, but the infantry dominated, and as we have seen even the cavalry fought dismounted, armed with the ferocious 75mm field gun. Neither was the Polish army shy of innovation. Polish armourers developed the highly effective wz.35 anti-tank rifle, as well as the excellent wz.1928 machine gun, and the Vis pistol – a variant of the iconic Browning M1911 Colt – which appeared in 1936, and is often described as one of the best handguns of the era.

  Where there were more serious shortcomings was in hardware, especially armour. At one time, shortly after the First World War, Poland could – thanks mainly to French largesse – boast the fourth-largest tank force in the world. By the late 1930s, however, Poland’s tanks, despite totalling nearly 700 in number, would be dwarfed by those available to its totalitarian neighbours. Moreover, most of them would not stand comparison with their rivals. Only the 7TP model – a 10-tonne, three-man tank, with a 37mm main gun, of which Polish forces had some ninety-eight examples – might expect to hold its own against the German Panzer IIs. Others, though relatively numerous, were much less formidable, such as the 400 or so TK-3 and TKS tankettes – 3-ton light reconnaissance tanks, armed only with a machine gun – or the 45 FT-17 tanks still in service, most of which were remnants of the original French cadre from 1919.17 The Germans, in contrast, could field over 3,000 tanks in September 1939, and though some 80 per cent of them were the relatively primitive Panzer I and IIs, there were about 300 of the more advanced Panzer III and Panzer IV models, both of which would go on to provide the mainstay of German armoured forces throughout the war.18 As if these numerical failings were not enough, Polish tank doctrine – such as it was – followed the French practice of using tanks for infantry support. The emerging German Blitzkrieg doctrine, by contrast, foresaw tanks punching holes in enemy lines, for following infantry to exploit. Thus while Polish armoured crews did not want for bravery, they were wholly unprepared for the coming war of 1939.

  The situation in the air was no more comforting. Here too, Poland’s air force had initially been relatively strong, numbering some 700 aircraft in 1919.19 However, the financial implications of maintaining and updating such a force in the years that followed proved prohibitive. In the 1920s an ambitious plan to expand the Polish air force to 200 combat squadrons foundered due to the cost, and the dissenting vision of Piłsudski, who was curiously unconvinced of the importance of air power. Later efforts to develop a domestic aero industry bore some fruit, not least the PZL P.7, an all-metal, high-wing, monoplane fighter, which was state of the art when it was introduced in 1933, and its more powerful successor, the PZL P.11, which appeared the following year. Another success was the PZL.37 Łoś, or ‘Moose’, an adaptable and capable twin-engine light bomber, which entered service in 1938. Yet, given the rapid advances in aeronautical technology in the late 1930s, and the vast amounts of money devoted to rearmament by Hitler’s Germany, the Polish air force would go to war in 1939 with obsolete hardware. With 400 or so serviceable Polish combat aircraft facing around 2,500 machines of the Luftwaffe, it was vastly outnumbered and outgunned.20

  Poland’s military and political leaders were well aware of these shortcomings – what one High Command wit called the ‘doctrine of poverty’21
– and that awareness influenced their strategic thinking in the late 1930s in two ways. First, Polish defensive planners realised that any coming war most likely had be a collective effort: Poland could not afford to fight her enemies alone and so urgently needed to secure reliable allies. Second, it became clear that Poland did not have the means to realistically plan for a two-fronted war. Initially, therefore, given that the Soviet Union appeared to be the most pressing threat, an eastern operational plan – named ‘Wschód’ or ‘East’ – was developed from 1936, which foresaw some six army groups concentrated along the eastern frontier to carry out delaying actions and channel any Red Army offensive into more readily defensible and fortified areas, such as that at Sarny, east of Brest.22

  Following the Austrian Anschluss of 1938, when Germany’s expansionist tendencies became more obviously manifest, work began on an analogous western operational plan, codenamed ‘Zachód’ or ‘West’. ‘Zachód’ anticipated German planning for an invasion of Poland, which was in turn predicated on simple geography. Poland was effectively encircled by Germany, with the provinces of Silesia in the south-west and East Prussia in the north forming two jaws of a vast pincer. Hence, it was logical to expect any attack to drive in three general directions: eastward into western Poland, north-eastward from Silesia in the direction of Warsaw, and southward from East Prussia, also directed at the capital. Simply flooding those largely indefensible border regions with Polish troops made little strategic sense. Yet, the Poles did not want to be accused of a lack of will that might have compromised any Anglo-French commitment to their defence, so ‘Plan Zachód’, completed in the spring of 1939, envisaged a rather complex balancing act to deal with this strategic predicament.

  Polish armies were intended in the first instance to engage any invasion, so as to give time for deeper-lying defence lines to be developed and reserves to be mobilised. They were deployed along Poland’s frontiers, with heaviest concentrations in those areas where the German advance was expected. In the north, in the Corridor, the Pomeranian Army was stationed on the lower Vistula, between Bydgoszcz and Tczew. South of East Prussia, the Modlin Army was situated around Mława and Ciechanów, while the Narew Group was strung along the border to the east, from Łomża to Suwałki. To the west, the Poznań Army manned the area of Wielkopolska, protruding like a salient into Germany’s eastern flank. To the south of that lay two of the strongest formations: the Łódż Army, which was defending the south-western approaches to Warsaw, the direction from which the main German thrust was expected; and the Kraków Army, which was tasked with holding the vital industrial area of Upper Silesia, as well as the approaches to Poland’s second city. Lastly, the Carpathian Army was positioned along the Slovakian frontier to the south, from Nowy Sącz east to Sanok (see map).