First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  Such was the speed of the German advance in the south-western theatre, in fact, that the planned Polish defence on the Warta scarcely materialised. German forces captured the bridges over the river at Sieradz, Mnichów and the town of Warta, and swiftly set about establishing bridgeheads on the eastern bank.82 Arriving near Działoszyn on the afternoon of 3 September, infantryman Walther Krappe described the desolate scene that greeted his eyes as his division waited to cross the half-demolished bridge: ‘Women and children stood in front of their burnt-out houses and collected together their last possessions that were mostly already charred. Our artillery and flyers had done all that they could to ensure that no stone in this small town was left atop another.’83

  Upstream, the ancient city of Częstochowa also fell to the Germans that afternoon, after the withdrawal of the 7th Infantry Division, which had fought a bitter and prolonged battle with the invaders on the city’s western outskirts the previous day, destroying (according to one estimate) as many as forty enemy tanks and vehicles.84 Once the city was occupied, there were fears for the safety of its famed icon, the ‘Black Madonna’, housed in the Jasna Góra monastery, which – Polish propaganda stated – was being used by the Germans as a stable. ‘Hitler has no respect,’ one Warsaw diarist noted, ‘the world is outraged.’85 In Paris, Archbishop Cardinal Jean Verdier reacted to reports that the Germans had bombed the monastery by proclaiming: ‘For 700 years this image of the Mother of God has been the very heart of Poland. The Poles will never forget that the enemy has dared to lay a hand on their Holy Mother!’86 In fact, the Black Madonna had already been hidden by Jasna Góra’s friars and replaced with a copy. It would survive the war unscathed.87

  The fate of the Black Madonna was the least of the city’s immediate worries, however. On the first night of the war, Polish troops had ambushed a German staff car at Gnaszyn, just west of Częstochowa, taking a lieutenant-colonel captive and killing three soldiers. The arriving Germans were keen to avenge themselves, therefore, and quickly began rounding up thousands of the city’s Polish and Jewish inhabitants, before marching them to the cathedral square where they had to lie face down on the ground.88 On the afternoon of 4 September, the prisoners were searched and those that appeared to be Jewish, or were armed with even a pocketknife, were led away to an unknown fate. In the chaos that followed, one column of prisoners was machine-gunned by nervous soldiers who killed over a hundred of them. The official German war diary summarised that ‘the partisan war’ in Częstochowa had been ‘quelled’. The reality was more brutally prosaic: as one Wehrmacht soldier recalled, ‘we were ordered to fire on anything that moved’.89

  Once they had crossed the Warta, German forces advanced swiftly north-eastward, encountering little opposition. Lieutenant Wiktor Jackiewicz of the 23rd Grodno Uhlan Regiment, who had been sent by his superiors to establish the whereabouts of the enemy, watched the advance. Observing the road east of Radomsko, he was astonished at what he saw. ‘What a view spread out before my eyes,’ he later recalled: ‘tanks, lorries with infantry and mechanised artillery were roaring down the Piotrków road full steam ahead. Another column was marching from Radomsko to Przedbórz, which I estimated to be a division of motorised infantry. The column heading for Piotrków consisted without the slightest doubt of at least one armoured division.’90 Fortunately for him, Jackiewicz and his detachment of cavalry had orders not to engage.

  Other Polish forces, however, were already en route to meet the invaders. According to the German propaganda version of the campaign, the Polish air force was completely destroyed on the ground in the opening days of the war, those few brave souls that dared venture into the air being swiftly despatched by the Messerschmitts and Junkers of the Luftwaffe. The truth, however, was rather more nuanced. The Polish air force was certainly largely outdated and was most definitely outnumbered by the Germans, and it had suffered considerable losses in the opening days of the war, but it was far from spent as a combat unit. Indeed, according to Count Johann von Kielmansegg – a major on the staff of the 1st Panzer Division – 3 September would be known to his men as the Day of the Polish Air Force.91

  On that day, official statistics registered some 330 sorties by Polish aircraft, around a third of them over the south-western front, where Kielmansegg noted about fifteen raids on his sector alone, targeting about the seemingly endless columns of German vehicles and armour. Many of those raids were carried out by Polish ‘Karaś’ (PZL.23) light bombers, comparatively modern aircraft with an all-metal airframe and a crew of three. According to the official record, the bombers enjoyed ‘considerable success’ in engaging the German spearheads in the Radomsko region, registering sixty-one sorties for the loss of nine aircraft.92 One Polish soldier who witnessed the attacks recalled with glee ‘the blast of bombs, flames of burning vehicles and infantry scattering in panic’.93

  Kielmansegg was much less enthusiastic. While critical of the accuracy of Polish bombing, he stated that ‘you have to hand it to these Poles, they carried out their missions with tremendous guts and considerable skill’. He was also most impressed by a downed Polish airman who, despite his injuries, refused to say anything under interrogation. In all, however, he noted that though his forces were forced off the roads and into the forests to escape the raids, their progress was otherwise scarcely affected.94

  As Kielmansegg was evaluating the air attacks, a few kilometres to the north, Polish forces of the Łódź Army were digging in on Borowska Góra (Borowa Heights), three modest but strategically important hills, west of Piotrków Trybunalski. There, two divisions of infantry and a battalion of forty-seven 7TP light tanks were hoping to exploit the terrain to hold the advance of the German 4th Panzer Division, and thereby finally stabilise the line. Tank-on-tank engagements had taken place before – notably at the Battle of Jordanów, west of Kraków – but that at Borowska Góra would be one of the most significant.

  The Polish 7TP tanks of the 301st Light Tank Battalion were not the most advanced machines available. But, based on the British Vickers 6-Ton model, they were sturdy and serviceable, and a good match for the lighter, and more lightly armoured German workhorses, the Panzer I and Panzer II.95 Unsurprisingly, then, they won some successes against the invaders on 4 September, destroying fifteen tanks and armoured cars of 4th Panzer near the village of Wola Krzysztoporska, for the loss of seven of their own. However, in the fierce hand-to-hand fighting that followed, the hills of Borowska Góra changed hands a number of times, before they were finally secured by the Germans. One diarist wrote that the German infantry triumphed ‘after a hard battle of many hours’, and the Poles were ‘chased to the Devil’.96 Afterwards, the remnants of the smashed 7th Polish Infantry Division were rounded up in Janów, with many prisoners taken, including the divisional commander, General Janusz Gąsiorowski, who had the dubious honour of being the first general to be taken captive in the war. Nonetheless, the Wehrmacht’s daily report for the following day, 5 September, was less than loquacious, noting simply that ‘extensive enemy positions have been broken’ and ‘the Borowa Heights have been captured’.97

  If Borowska Góra marked one of the first tank battles of the war, a short distance to the south older methods of warfare were still very much in use. At Lesiopole, Wiktor Jackiewicz and his cavalry unit found themselves cut off after observing the rapid German advance. ‘What I so feared now happened,’ he later recalled:

  Before me was a battalion of German infantry, dispersed – luckily – not entrenched. I had only two options: to surrender to captivity, or to charge through. Only one decision was possible: to charge through at a run.

  I shall never forget the moment when I gave the signal with a whirl of my sabre and we set out at a gallop in dead silence, not a single ‘hurrah’, just the sound of galloping horses and their snorting. The Germans dispersed before us, tried to set up their machine guns; loose shots were fired and – strangest of all – there was total panic among the Germans. I had hardly any losses.98

  Far
from being an object of ridicule, a Polish cavalry charge could clearly still provoke terror in the enemy.

  Yet there would be no respite for the Poles. German forces drove on relentlessly towards Warsaw, exploiting the growing gap between the sectors held by the Łódź and Kraków armies, and advanced into the district of Piotrków Trybunalski, which was held by the under-strength reserve Prusy Army. Initially, the German attack – led by the elite 1st Panzer Division – was repulsed, denied progress by an ‘organised and effective’ network of defences, artillery positions and minefields on the western and southern outskirts of Piotrków. As Count von Kielmansegg noted with evident surprise: ‘The enemy seems determined on defence.’99 However, after a spirited Polish counter-attack by a battalion of 7TP tanks was halted, 1st Panzer regained the initiative and quickly found an opening in the Polish defences. By the early evening on 5 September, Piotrków was being outflanked and, after a further two hours of house-to-house fighting in the city itself, the battle was over.100

  As Piotrków fell, the nearby town of Sulejów was also suffering. The previous afternoon, though undefended and choked with refugees from the south and west, it had been exposed to the full force of a Luftwaffe air assault. As one eye-witness remembered, the raid was heralded by ‘a terrifying whistle’ followed by a cacophony of explosions in which, it seemed, ‘the walls were about to crumble’. Escaping the town to the potato fields beyond, she found herself surrounded by the wounded and dying: ‘All around me … I could hear moans, prayers and desperate cries for help. Next to me was a soldier, torn up by shrapnel, bleeding and begging for someone to end his suffering.’ Looking back she saw Sulejów ‘burning like a torch’. The town was almost entirely destroyed and as many as 700 lives were lost.101

  The collapse of the front around Łódź highlighted one of the major problems faced by the Poles. Aside from the acute military challenge, Polish forces struggled with failing communications. Not only were wired field telephones and radio networks severely impacted by the German bombing campaign of the opening days of the war, but a culture of military secrecy – inherited from Józef Piłsudski – compounded the resulting difficulties, meaning that neighbouring armies were not permitted to know what their fellows were doing. Indeed all communications had to be routed via the High Command in Warsaw. Astonishingly, the Polish defence plan was strictly confidential and even senior army commanders were not informed of their respective tasks beyond the first days of the war.102 As a result, the High Command often had only a tenuous grip on realities at the front – and at times even relied on German command reports for information. Field commanders, meanwhile, were constantly forced to improvise, unaware of the progress of battle in the neighbouring sector, and in only halting contact even with their own subordinates. So, when the commander of the Łódź Army, General Juliusz Rómmel, needed to coordinate operations with the neighbouring Prusy Army during the defence of Piotrków, his request had to be directed via the commander-in-chief, Edward Śmigły-Rydz himself.103

  Such problems made fighting against a superior enemy even more difficult, but in one instance they were to prove especially critical. With the fall of Piotrków Trybunalski, the ‘road to Warsaw’ was effectively blocked only by those remaining elements of the Łódź Army that were defending their eponymous city, 120 kilometres south-west of the capital. However, under determined attack from the German 4th Panzer Division, including elements of the SS-Leibstandarte, the Łódź Army began to fall back in an increasingly disorderly retreat. In the vanguard of that retreat, it appeared, was the army’s commander, General Rómmel, who had abandoned his headquarters at Julianów, west of Łódź, on the morning of 6 September, following a German air raid.104

  Without effective command, the Łódź Army’s withdrawal quickly degenerated into headlong flight. As one German account put it: ‘Everywhere, there were discarded weapons, ammunition, equipment and abandoned vehicles. Hundreds of Polish soldiers surrendered without a fight.’105 Łódź, too, was abandoned. According to one diarist, the authorities had already left the city the previous night, and freed prisoners now wandered through the streets in their prison uniforms.106 Another resident described the crowds of refugees that were streaming into Łódź, among them many army deserters. ‘These men,’ Samuel Goldberg wrote, ‘their faces filled with the terror of death and annihilation, were discarding their uniforms and their weapons to don civilian attire. Even their underclothing, which bore military markings, was removed and thrown into latrines or burned … It began to look to me as though the entire Polish Army had simply given up.’107

  In the ensuing chaos, General Wiktor Thommée, commanding the Piotrków Operational Group, sent an adjutant to Julianów to ascertain the whereabouts of the Łódź Army’s headquarters. The adjutant, Major Cezary Niewęgłowski, arrived to find only the evidence of a hurried departure. He was so shocked by what he saw as profound dereliction of duty by his superiors that, after reporting back to General Thommée, he took his own life. ‘I was a soldier for the passion, not for a piece of bread,’ he wrote in his last testament:

  I was a patriot, perhaps impetuous in my ambition, but sincere. I believed in my leaders, but I have been disappointed. For a country of 34 million to lose a war in five days – is not a military disaster, but a moral one. This disaster has shown our organisational incompetence, lack of foresight, and with it, conceit and a bottomless self-assurance of some of the ‘great’ men. This crushed me because the chaos and confusion which followed has brought unbearable humiliation upon us. Over these few days, I have witnessed the heroism and valour of our soldiers, and the incompetence of our commanders.108

  Poland’s High Command, it seemed, was not only failing its soldiers, it was losing whatever tenuous grip it had on events. As the Łódź front disintegrated, and the High Command in Warsaw found itself unable to make contact with the itinerant Łódź Army Headquarters, Śmigły-Rydz concluded that the time had come for decisive action. Bowing to the inevitable, he issued an order for the withdrawal of the Polish armies beyond the line formed by the rivers Vistula, Narew and San, thereby effectively ceding the western half of the country to the enemy.109 In truth, such a move had always been part of Śmigły-Rydz’s planning: a withdrawal to defensible lines, in anticipation of the relief that would come from an Anglo-French offensive against Germany in the west.110 However, he would not have expected the time for that withdrawal to arrive so soon.

  With a general withdrawal finally sanctioned, the Polish retreat accelerated. As one Łódź inhabitant, Fryderyk Winnykamień, recalled, military personnel mixed with civilian refugees in a ‘tide of humanity’ sweeping towards Warsaw. The twenty-year-old had left Łódź the night before with his parents and two sisters; as a Jew he was anxious not to test the Germans’ reputation for anti-Semitism. By dawn they had found themselves in an ‘uninterrupted convoy’, containing wagons, military vehicles and countless pedestrians, including ‘visibly exhausted and hungry soldiers, mercilessly driving on their horses, which looked just as exhausted and miserable as they did’. They were surrounded by civilians:

  whole families, like us, on foot carrying all that they could in cases, rucksacks and bundles … Mothers carried infants and small children in their arms, men packed like camels with all their possessions … They were driven forward by the spectres of war, of plunder and of murder, which pushed them ever onward, regardless of the lack of food, the heat of the day, or their own exhaustion.111

  Of course, such unfortunates elicited little sympathy from their German pursuers. Johann von Kielmansegg considered them simply as an obstacle to the forward progress of his unit, and even found humour in the situation, when he caught sight of an old farmer’s wife with her last remaining possessions, ‘a clucking chicken under her arm and a huge alarm clock in the other hand’.112 Neither were columns of fleeing civilians spared aerial attack. One such group was strafed by German aircraft to the east of Łódź. An eye-witness recalled a ‘shower of bullets’ in which countless c
ivilians were killed, ‘dead bodies covering the highways’ while the injured tried to crawl away to safety ‘amidst moans and shrieks’.113

  Polish prisoners of war were likewise shown little mercy by the Germans. At Ciepielów, south of Warsaw, on 8 September, the advance of the German 15th Motorised Infantry Regiment was halted by the Polish 74th Infantry Regiment in a brief but bloody engagement, in which a popular German company commander, Captain Mark von Lewinski, was killed by a Polish sniper. The regimental commander, Colonel Walter Wessel, was enraged, mourning the loss of his captain and cursing the ‘cheek’ of the Poles for wanting to halt his advance.114 In response, he ordered that some 300 Polish prisoners of war were to be treated as partisans. They were stripped of their papers and their uniform jackets and ordered to march in single file to the rear. Some minutes later, an eye-witness heard the chatter of machine guns: ‘I hurry in that direction and see … the Polish prisoners shot, lying in the ditch by the side of the road.’115 Astonishingly, but for the post-war discovery of this anonymous testimony, and a few grainy photographs, the massacre at Ciepielów might have slipped from the historical record completely.

  Actions such as these – euphemistically labelled ‘reprisals’ or ‘pacifications’ by the Germans – would become grimly commonplace. In part, of course, they were a consequence of the nature of the Blitzkrieg, in which mobile, fast-moving troops, disrupting and isolating a more static defence, caused many of the defenders to be left behind the front line, where any continued resistance could easily be interpreted as the work of ‘irregulars’ or partisans.116 The result was ‘partisan psychosis’: the fear, actively stoked by some Wehrmacht commanders, that Polish snipers and ‘bandits’ were lurking behind every hedgerow and in every building, waiting to launch an ambush or an attack from the rear.117