Maczek’s delaying tactics would serve him and his Black Brigade well. Holding the area close to Jordanów and Wysoka Hill for two days, they frustrated the advance of a force that Maczek reckoned was ten times greater than their own, before carrying out a fighting withdrawal, engaging the Germans in guerrilla attacks to continually slow their pursuit.12 In the end, Jordanów was a German victory, but a costly one: more than sixty of the 18th Corps’ tanks had been destroyed.13
Such Polish tactics, coupled with the imaginative use of terrain and fixed defences, could prove remarkably effective. Once those positions were lost, however, or abandoned for fear of being outflanked and encircled, the resulting withdrawal quickly turned into a headlong flight, with efforts to regroup constantly endangered by the speed of the German advance, and by the threat of air attack. Those attacks could wreak havoc, not only bringing a high cost in lives and materiel, but also fatally compromising morale. Jan Karski recalled how his unit was loaded onto a train in Oświęcim, and endured a fitful journey eastward being targeted by German aircraft, which ‘bombed and strafed the train for nearly an hour’. Those who survived that ordeal, he wrote, were ‘no longer an army, a detachment, or a battery, but individuals wandering collectively toward some wholly indefinite goal. We found the highways jammed with hundreds of thousands of refugees, soldiers looking for their commands and others just drifting with the tide.’14
In the Polish Corridor, it was the same story. Here the Polish defenders – mainly the 9th and 27th infantry divisions and the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade – had initially contained the German advance in places with a spirited defence along the line of the river Brda, as well as in a number of other engagements, such as at Tuszyny and Chojnice. Given the overwhelming numerical superiority of the German forces invading the Corridor – the German 4th Army comprised six infantry divisions, two motorised divisions and one armoured division ranged against two Polish infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade – and coupled with the strategic vulnerability of the area, the plan for the Polish forces was for a fighting retreat south-eastward, to the line of the river Vistula, which – it was hoped – could be more effectively defended.
Initially, that fighting retreat was quite effective. At Gostycyn, the Polish 34th Infantry Regiment gamely engaged the German armoured spearhead of the 3rd Panzer Division in a battle that lasted for several hours and temporarily slowed the advance.15 Further east near Błądzim, meanwhile, Polish forces adopted a different tactic, engaging forward units of the German 5th Infantry Regiment with artillery and rifle fire before swiftly withdrawing. ‘Hardly had they seen us’, one frustrated German infantryman wrote, ‘before they galloped off on their horses, leaving their artillery, and took up positions 600 metres further away.’16
Elsewhere, Polish forces used ambushes or surprise attacks to keep their enemy at bay. At Klonowo, a Polish counter-attack threw the German advance into momentary chaos, as a Wehrmacht officer recalled:
A quick about turn to retreat through an abandoned village! But this village is not nearly as deserted as it looks from the outside. There is an immediate banging and crashing against the armour. With a jerk, the [armoured] car stops; it has lost a wheel. The next second, my driver slumps noiselessly sideways over the gearstick.17
One of those killed in that same engagement was a young lieutenant, Heinrich von Weizsäcker, serving with the prestigious 9th Infantry Regiment, who was shot in the throat during the Polish counter-attack. His body, which could not be recovered for some time, was watched over that night by his younger brother Richard, later president of Germany, prior to burial the next day. ‘The war had hardly begun’, Richard von Weizsäcker would later write, ‘and it had already changed my life forever.’18
Despite such delaying actions, however, German forces would not be halted. General Heinz Guderian, long an advocate of mobile, tank-led warfare, led his 19th Army Corps on relentlessly, at times personally spearheading the advance. At Sokole-Kuźnica on the Brda, he galvanised German forces, putting a stop to their ‘idiotic firing’, and sent assault teams across the river in rubber boats to outflank the Polish defenders. ‘Casualties were negligible,’ he noted in his memoirs. By the end of the day, the bridgehead was secured and the 3rd Panzer Division was once again advancing eastward towards Świecie on the Vistula.19 Polish forces still in the Corridor were in danger of being cut off.
According to the Italian journalist Indro Montanelli, who accompanied the German advance, the Poles fought with ‘admirable stubbornness’. The Germans had scored notable successes, he acknowledged, but ‘don’t imagine that it was painless. The Poles hung on tenaciously until the ground beneath their feet began to burn. And even then the retreat wasn’t a flight – without once turning their backs, the stubborn Poles opposed the enemy fire.’20 As a Wehrmacht infantryman remembered, it certainly wasn’t the easy fight German troops had expected:
We reached the cemetery and jumped like rabbits between the gravestones. One salvo after another rained down … The first moans from the wounded were heard. Whoever entered into this war with enthusiasm would at this moment get goosebumps. I will never forget how I found a comrade by the side of the road with his chest torn open. He was still conscious, and one could see his heart beating. He didn’t last the day.21
Yet, as at Mława, once the line broke, the speed of the German advance meant that the Polish withdrawal from the Corridor quickly deteriorated into desperate flight. At Błądzim, Adam Zakrzewski, a colonel in the Pomorska Cavalry Brigade, witnessed shattered elements of the Polish 27th Infantry Division trickling back, away from the front line. ‘It was then that I first heard the words “We’ve been crushed”,’ he wrote. ‘I would unfortunately hear them too often in the future.’22 That trickle soon became a flood. Those that did not surrender formed long columns of men, horses and machinery, all streaming south-eastward towards the Vistula.23
The German response was to send the 20th Infantry Division on a headlong advance towards the river, so as to cut off that southward retreat. Further north, the eastward progress of the 3rd Panzer Division was so swift that it outran its supply column and soon complained of a lack of fuel and ammunition.24 Within those closing pincers, Polish forces – primarily the remains of the 9th and 27th divisions and the Pomorska Cavalry Brigade – fought an increasingly desperate and splintered rear-guard action, some attempting to break out, others fighting to the end, others still opting to lay down their weapons. In addition to being corralled on the ground, they were constantly attacked from the air. As one eye-witness recalled:
The bombing lasted about an hour and it was so intense that the sky was clouded with smoke and the bright autumn sun was no longer visible. When the squadrons flew away, the bombing was over and the smoke dispersed, a blood-chilling sight appeared in front of us. Bodies were strewn across the road, and the horses that were killed were still in harness. The remnants of equipment and wagons were scattered about us. The trenches were full of slain soldiers; those that survived emerged but there were so few of them that in reality the 34th and 50th infantry regiments had ceased to exist.25
Accounts of the grim fate of Polish forces are often brief, but no less tragic for that. Guderian – though no stranger to hyperbole – recalled in his memoir a Polish artillery regiment that was overrun and destroyed by German tanks: ‘only two of its guns managed to fire at all’.26 In another engagement, the Koronowo National Defence battalion was all but wiped out when, after withstanding the assault of the German 3rd Infantry Division, it opted to make a bayonet charge rather than surrender when its ammunition ran out; few survived.27 The 2nd Squadron of the 2nd Polish Light Cavalry Regiment, meanwhile, fought to the death at Kosowo, almost within reach of the Vistula and the safety of the far bank. Even those that made the crossing were sometimes overcome with the gravity of their collective defeat. One captain was so distraught by the bloody fate of his cavalry squadron, ambushed as they crossed the river near Chełmno, that he took his own life.28
&nb
sp; Among those that successfully escaped was Adam Zakrzewski, along with surviving units of the Pomorska Cavalry Brigade. He recorded his group’s southward progress, through abandoned villages, hugging the western bank of the Vistula. At Topolno, he recalled, their route was blocked by heavy machine-gun fire and they were forced to dismount to engage an unseen enemy. The resulting firefight was ‘the bloodiest battle’ he had yet fought, with enemy fire ‘coming from every direction’. Though they prevailed, his group paid a high price for their escape, with many officers and men wounded or killed, and ‘especially horses, which we could not hide from the enemy fire’.29 For an experienced cavalryman, it was heart-breaking.
Throughout the Corridor, numerous small towns and villages bore witness to the desperate plight of Polish forces. At Plewno, 10 kilometres west of Świecie, one German soldier described ‘a chaotic litter of baggage waggons, motor vehicles and numerous guns’ which gave ‘powerful testimony’ to the Poles’ ‘wild flight’.30 Another noted:
There are graves by the side of the road – many Polish, topped with the Polish helmet, and a few German. On both sides, there is Polish equipment: machinery, ammunition, hundreds – if not thousands – of steel helmets, gas masks, kitbags, coats, rifle and artillery shells, some still packed … Horse corpses give off a terrible stink.31
Shortly after midday on 4 September, the German ‘ring’ in the Corridor was closed when the spearheads of the two encircling armies met near Świecie. In that pocket, according to German estimates, up to 6,000 men were taken prisoner and there was a considerable haul of materiel, including 350 horses and ‘heavy and light artillery and countless waggons’.32 Polish sources noted the loss of, among others, the 16th Uhlan Regiment, the 18th Uhlan Regiment, the 2nd Light Cavalry Regiment and the 9th Infantry Division. General Władysław Bortnowski, who had commanded the Pomeranian Army, was brutally honest in his assessment. In his telegram to Edward Śmigły-Rydz, he wrote:
The situation is that all the troops which have been cut off can now be considered lost. All that is left of the 27th Division is the division commander, about 3 infantry battalions and 5 batteries … Of the 9th Division – only the incomplete 22nd Regiment and one battery … Something might still come up, but the bridgehead was destroyed at half six this morning and … in the current situation it seems to me impossible. This is the state of things.33
Looking pale and exhausted, Bortnowski blamed himself for the debacle, confessing to a fellow general: ‘It’s either a bullet in the head or resignation.’34 In the event, it would be neither. Bortnowski would fight again, but the battle for the Polish Corridor was over. It was, according to one contemporary commentator, the first encirclement battle of the modern era.35
*
Already that day, as the Polish forces in the Corridor were laying down their arms, Hitler was touring the front with his entourage. He had left Berlin the previous night, not long after the French ambassador had announced Paris’ declaration of war, intending not only to give encouragement to his troops, but also to make some public demonstration of his own will to continue the fight. Escorting the German dictator to an active battlefront was no mean operation. The Führer left the German capital aboard his armoured train – codenamed Amerika – which now became the travelling headquarters of the Third Reich, replete with adjutants, doctors, bodyguards, liaison officers, photographers, valets, secretaries, catering staff, cleaners, maids and drivers. He was also trailed by two convoys of cars and a squadron of aircraft.36
This travelling circus arrived in Bad Polzin (Połczyn-Zdrój), in Pomerania, in the early hours of 4 September, and soon after nine o’clock set off for a tour of the front in a convoy of five Mercedes cars, containing Hitler, Martin Bormann and General Wilhelm Keitel alongside a host of adjutants and bodyguards. After taking a briefing from the commander of the 4th Army, General Günther von Kluge, and mingling with star-struck soldiers, Hitler travelled on to Topolno on the Vistula, the command post of the 3rd Infantry Division, where he watched German troops crossing the river. ‘What this means to me!’ he enthused as he took in the scene through field glasses.37 When he was finished gazing across the Vistula, he was driven to the village of Plietnitz (Płytnica), where he was met by his train. Photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, for one, was delighted to return to the creature comforts of the Amerika. He recalled that ‘we were so filthy and covered with the yellow dust of the Polish roads, that we were unrecognisable. Fortunately, however, the special train was well-equipped with baths and a handsome barber’s shop, and by midnight we were transformed once more into civilised human beings.’38
Two days later, on the morning of Wednesday 6 September, after visiting the wounded at Gross Born military camp, Hitler once again set off on a tour of the front. His convoy snaked its way through the countryside of the Corridor to Grudziądz, once the Prussian citadel of Graudenz. En route, Hitler stopped at the village of Plewno, west of Świecie, where he was met by Heinz Guderian, who gave him a tour of the nearby battlefields, taking in the remains of some Polish positions. Hoffmann thought it all a ‘terrible and ghastly sight’ that robbed the victory ‘of all its glamour’, but Hitler was enormously impressed, asking whether the destruction had been caused by tanks or aircraft.39 That afternoon, the Führer also inspected some of Guderian’s troops, men of the 3rd Panzer Division, who were excitedly drawn up in the sunshine. When he arrived, he hailed their achievements, promising that ‘what has been won at the cost of German blood will stay forever German’.40 The soldiers pressed closely in towards his Mercedes, reaching out to shake his hand, a few snapping away eagerly with their cameras. ‘We are delighted beyond words … our hearts swell in his presence,’ one of them enthused.41 Hitler’s bodyguards indulged the throng, evidently content that the Führer was not at any risk. The only casualty from Hitler’s entourage that day would be Karl Krause, Hitler’s valet, who was peremptorily dismissed by his master for serving him Polish spring water over lunch, instead of his favoured – German – Fachinger mineral water.42
That evening, after completing the journey to Grudziądz to take in the view across the nearby Vistula, Hitler was driven back to Gross Born (Borne Sulinowo). In all, over two days, his convoy had travelled 600 kilometres along dusty, often unmade roads, choked with soldiers and military materiel, all of which had been meticulously reported by the German press. Even Italian reporters joined in the chorus of praise, the account of Indro Montanelli positively brimming with adulation. ‘We met the Führer’, he wrote:
Germany’s first soldier. Simply dressed, in his iron-grey uniform, the only decoration a small Iron Cross, very modest. He had come to be with his men at the moment of the passage across the Vistula, a sacred moment in Germany’s history. He didn’t want honours, salutes, fanfare. He appeared and disappeared. One soldier among the many we saw. His face expressed no joy, no emotion, no satisfaction. You know Hitler’s face: inscrutable, pale, his gaze far off. So it was today.43
Hitler’s visit, it seems, was something like a propaganda Blitzkrieg.
*
Away from the journalists and the newsreel cameras, however, the grim realities of Hitler’s war were already becoming clear. Bydgoszcz – the former German Bromberg – was a city with a rich history, having been part of the medieval Polish Kingdom (and later Commonwealth) before being annexed by Prussia in the Partitions of the eighteenth century. By the time it was returned to Poland in 1918, the city had a large German-majority population and would develop into a bastion of German cultural and political life in the Polish Republic. In less fraught times, it might have emerged as an exemplar of Polish–German coexistence and cooperation, and for a time in the 1930s relations were indeed relatively cordial. But by 1939, with the German minority marginalised and disadvantaged within the Polish state, the climate had degenerated into one of tension and mutual suspicion, ably stoked by Nazi propaganda.44 Now, ‘Bromberg’ would become a by-word for ethnic cleansing.
The Nazi regime was already experienced in usi
ng the ethnic Germans of central Europe – the so-called Volksdeutsche – as the tools of German policy. In the Sudeten crisis of 1938, ethnic Germans had expertly played the role of the perennially persecuted and disgruntled, spurring Western intervention and the eventual dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. In September 1939, it was clearly anticipated by the Polish government that Poland’s Volksdeutsche might assist incoming German troops, conduct guerrilla warfare or desert from the Polish military. A secret order, discovered on a Luftwaffe airman downed near Poznań on 2 September, appeared to confirm that assumption, as it instructed Volksdeutsche how they were to best make contact with their ‘liberators’.45 Unsurprisingly, then, Polish accounts of the opening days of the war are littered with the real or imagined misdeeds of the German ‘fifth column’, ranging from covert signalling to the Luftwaffe to murder and acts of sabotage. In the febrile circumstances, acts of violence – even lynchings – were not uncommon. One Polish army major recalled some Volksdeutsche being brought to him, ‘beaten up and half-conscious’, suspected of espionage for supposedly having communicated to a German pilot with the motions of a whip. Their accusers, he wrote, were ‘embittered to madness’ by the war, and ‘grabbed the Germans at the slightest suspicion’. He placed them under arrest, but – after examining his conscience – released them with no further action. He refused to take their lives out of simple revenge.46
The events at Bydgoszcz provided the crowning example of this phenomenon. There, on the morning of 3 September, Polish troops, who were withdrawing south-eastward through the city, were fired on at several locations. One Polish officer spoke of witnessing a ‘real Hitlerite rising’ in Bydgoszcz, when ethnic German irregulars ‘with a lot of machine guns and grenades … managed to destroy our retreating supply trains’.47 Another eye-witness recalled the ‘violent racket of rapid gunfire’ close to his home, with the firing coming from a German-owned bakery.48 Other accounts described gunfire coming from church spires, factories and the houses of German families. Some spoke of running battles on Gdańska Street and Piastowski Square. As one Polish inhabitant put it: ‘It was clear beyond doubt that numerous groups of organised assailants were taking part in the action throughout the town.’49
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