In the circumstances, it is understandable that news of the Soviet invasion gave a new urgency to Polish escape efforts. The move was easiest, perhaps, for Poland’s airmen, who could – theoretically at least – simply board their aircraft and take off southward. This is what happened in the case of Franciszek Kornicki’s squadron, which was stationed near Lwów and was able to depart quickly once the order to evacuate was given. Their fifty P.7 and P.11 aircraft landed some time later at Cernăuţi airfield in Romania (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine). Kornicki was not among them, however. After an ‘enterprising pilot’ had taken his plane, he was obliged to make his way to Romania overland.98 A similar journey awaited the pilots of the 3rd Poznań Air Squadron. They had begun the war with twenty-one aircraft, but were down to just two when the order to evacuate was given, meaning that most of them, along with their ground crew, were obliged to travel south in a column of trucks.99
For some Polish airmen, the real challenge was emotional rather than logistical. Not only did evacuation mean a final acknowledgment of defeat, they would also have to abandon their families. As one pilot recalled when he was ordered to evacuate: ‘I understood that the show was over, and I felt strange. I couldn’t believe that it was all over – Romania … dear God.’ On his last flight, he had time to ponder: ‘I look at everything. I am flying over the river Dniester, thinking: It is guiding me for the last time. Time passes quickly. I turn my head back … I can still see our land. Another moment and it is gone.’100 A few airmen took that evacuation particularly hard. Air force photographer Oswald Krydner crossed the Romanian border on 18 September, on foot over the river Prut. He recalled:
I walked onto the bridge, no one stopped me, so I kept going. I stood on Romanian soil. Then I turned around. On the other side of the river I saw the Polish flag was flying. Poland was there, Halinka [Krydner’s wife] was there, our blood-stained land was there. Our people were being murdered by the enemy, our wives, our families. Dear God, have mercy. Tears poured down my face. I stood there, leaning on the railing, staring at the other side, half-conscious, numb.101
For some, the sense of capitulation was too much. ‘I have never seen so many people weeping,’ one bomber pilot remembered. ‘From time to time a shot would be heard, as someone who found the shame of defeat unbearable, and the future too horrible to contemplate, took his own life.’102
If some of the airmen were at least able to reach safety with comparative ease, Poland’s remaining ground forces were often obliged to fight their way southward. This was the strategic situation that provided the background to one of the largest engagements of the September campaign. Already on 17 September, Polish forces to the north and west of the town of Tomaszów Lubelski, 80 kilometres north-west of Lwów, found their route south blocked by the massed ranks of the Wehrmacht. On paper at least, those Polish forces were not inconsiderable, counting among their number elements of the Kraków and Lublin armies, including five infantry divisions, the 1st Mountain Brigade and the Kraków Cavalry Brigade. Most notably, they included the Warsaw Armoured Motorised Brigade, which was equipped with around eighty armoured vehicles, including twelve Vickers 6-Ton tanks and twenty-two of the heavier 7TP models. Under the command of Colonel Stefan Rowecki, one of the most talented commanders in the field, it was one of only two motorised units in the Polish army. It was also an army that was at the end of its endurance. Most units had been reduced to mere remnants of those that had mustered at the start of the war: the Kraków Army was down to about three divisions, half its original strength; and the 11th Infantry Regiment had been reduced by two-thirds to barely 1,000 men. Moreover, the soldiers that remained were exhausted, having marched hundreds of kilometres with little respite.103
To make matters worse, their hardware too was failing. Cut off from its supply train, the Polish force was running dangerously low on fuel, obliging Rowecki to employ desperate measures. On 17 September he ordered that his own column was to be dissolved and scavenged for petrol. ‘I had several hundred of the brigade’s cars abandoned, having drawn fuel from them,’ he wrote. ‘Beautiful limousines and other excellent cars were blown to smithereens. I kept only the combat vehicles, the rest were destroyed, even the pontoon column.’ Some of the men had tears in their eyes, he recalled, but ‘we had no choice’. Tragically, even those measures yielded only 3,000 litres of fuel, a third of what was required for a single day’s travel.104
Rowecki was haunted by the thought that his engines would give up in the heat of battle. ‘Every time we have to tackle a harsher bit of the trail and I see our machines stagger and moan, I feel as if something is being torn out of my heart,’ he wrote. ‘If only we could have a chance to attack the enemy and do our soldierly duty, before we ultimately run out of petrol.’105 He would get his wish. Between his brigade and the safety of Romania lay Tomaszów Lubelski, which had already been occupied by the Germans on 13 September and was now home to elements of the German 8th Army Corps, consisting of two infantry divisions, and the 22nd Panzer Corps. Not knowing what lay before him, and even lacking maps with which to navigate, Rowecki was nonetheless optimistic. His brigade was to punch a path through the German lines to enable the remainder of Polish forces to escape encirclement. ‘We are to advance on Tomaszów on 18 September,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We fight at last.’106
The attack, which began at dawn the following day, initially progressed well, with Polish forces attempting to clear the villages on the northern approaches to Tomaszów, while an armoured column entered the town from the west. The village of Tarnawatka, 6 kilometres north of Tomaszów, saw particularly bitter fighting, with the Poles battling to break through the defensive lines of the German 4th Light Division.107 Inside the town, meanwhile, German artillery fire and air attacks were unable to prevent the Polish armoured column from pressing forward. By the middle of the day much of Tomaszów had been occupied by the attackers and the main road to the south had been cut. Polish records would boast several hundred enemy soldiers killed, as well as dozens of prisoners taken and some twenty armoured vehicles destroyed.108 The damage to the town was considerable. As one German eye-witness noted that night, artillery fire, flares and explosions illuminated a scene of desolation: ‘Everywhere new fires flicker. No village and no house seems undamaged anymore.’109
Yet, having failed to take Tomaszów in a surprise attack, Polish forces now lacked the fuel, manpower and will to fight on. Already on 19 September, the Motorised Brigade was reporting that it had run out of fuel, was low on ammunition and had been forced to requisition food from the locals.110 When a determined German counter-attack on the morning of 20 September slammed into the Poles’ northern flank, hostilities were swiftly brought to an end. In the headquarters of the German 27th Infantry Division, a radio crackled into life with a message offering a Polish surrender. The Germans accepted and demanded that all surrendering units were to show a white flag and move – without their weapons – to the Tomaszów–Tarnawatka road.
That morning, the few remaining Polish tanks were destroyed – engine blocks were smashed, fuel tanks holed – before some 15,000 men laid down their arms north of Tomaszów. They included General Tadeusz Piskor, commander of the Lublin Army, and General Antoni Szylling, commander of the Kraków Army. Elsewhere around the town a further 45,000 men followed suit, and further to the south, at Horyniec, the Polish 55th Division also laid down its arms. Its commander summed up his own – and Poland’s – predicament: ‘The division shared the tragic fate of the whole army … we received no help from anywhere, we were left to fend for ourselves against the world’s most powerful forces.’111
Colonel Rowecki was not among those who surrendered. After thanking his men for their service and dismissing them, he initially headed south towards Romania, but after a few hours avoiding German patrols, he thought better of the idea and decided instead to make his way to Warsaw. He would later be instrumental in the establishment of the Polish underground resistance.112
Soon after the surr
ender of the Kraków and Lublin armies, a similar scenario played itself out to the north-east of Tomaszów Lubelski. There, on 21 September, the remnants of the Polish ‘Northern Front’ appeared, largely comprising elements of the former Narew Independent Operational Group, which had been supposed to hold the line of the river Narew in north-eastern Poland. Under the command of General Stefan Dąb-Biernacki, these units were moving south and, following the Soviet invasion of the previous week, were aiming to reach the Romanian frontier. Like the Lublin and Kraków armies before them, however, their passage was blocked by the German forces garrisoned in and around Tomaszów Lubelski. They would not get through without a fight.
The first engagements followed on the morning of 22 September, with Polish forces retaking a number of villages to the north-east of Tomaszów, while a spearhead of the 13th Infantry Brigade attempted to take the town itself. The most success was enjoyed by the Nowogródek Cavalry Brigade, under the command of Brigadier-General Władysław Anders, which flanked Tomaszów to the north and attacked German forces in the town of Krasnobród, seeking a way around the impasse. At dawn on a foggy morning, a two-pronged cavalry charge at German positions on the outskirts of the town soon had the enemy in retreat, pursued by sabre-wielding Uhlans. The Polish advance was temporarily checked by a counter-charge by elements of the German 17th Cavalry Regiment, making it one of the last cavalry-on-cavalry engagements in history. By that night, however, the battle was over. The Polish victory was crowned by the freeing of some 100 prisoners that were being held in a church and the capture of General Rudolf Koch-Erpach, commander of the 8th Infantry Division, the first German general to be captured in the Second World War. Moreover, victory at Krasnobród allowed some Polish units to escape southward. As Anders himself recalled: ‘At 11 p.m. the enemy was defeated, the opening made and the exhausted troops began to pass through the gap.’ But success came at a high price. Having suffered some sixty casualties, Anders’ cavalry brigade was now a spent force. ‘We had by now lost nearly all our motor transport and had no petrol for what was left,’ the general would later write in his memoir. ‘We hitched our guns to four pairs of weary horses, which, lathered in sweat, pulled them slowly forward.’113
The Polish advance on Tomaszów itself was less successful, and the modest gains made were quickly reversed after a German counter-attack. In the aftermath, most of the Polish units engaged in the area were disbanded or taken captive, with some 6,000 men surrendering to the Germans. Among them were the remnants of the prestigious 1st Legions Infantry Division, which had fought on the Narew and at Kałuszyn, but was finally destroyed by the German 8th Infantry Division east of Tarnawatka. The division’s commander, Brigadier-General Wincenty Kowalski, who had been injured in that final battle, went with his men into captivity. The commander of the front, meanwhile, General Dąb-Biernacki, dismissed his staff and, dressed in civilian clothes, made good his escape via Hungary to France. According to his critics, it was the second time that he had abandoned his troops.114
*
Slowly, inexorably, the gap between the German and Soviet lines was closing, with those Polish units caught in between obliged to surrender to one side or the other. Władysław Anders was minded to submit to neither. After his success at Krasnobród, he was pushing his dwindling band of lancers southward, despite the exhaustion that many of them felt. ‘Soldiers slept in the saddle,’ he later wrote, ‘and the officers had to keep riding along the columns to wake them.’ He did not dare to halt to rest, he recalled, for fear that the men, once asleep, would be impossible to rouse.115 The end for Anders, when it came, perfectly symbolised Poland’s fate. After a chance encounter with a German patrol close to the village of Broszki (Brozhky), west of Lwów, he ordered a cavalry charge, which routed nearby elements of the German 28th Infantry Regiment, capturing an entire battalion. When messengers from the local German headquarters arrived, to inform him that there could be no escape, he managed to persuade them to allow him a free passage in return for the release of the prisoners. Later that day, however, and only 15 kilometres to the south-east, Anders discovered that the Red Army would not be quite so accommodating. After tiptoeing past Soviet advance units, the enormity of his task finally dawned on him: ‘Our artillery fired their last rounds, and our rifles their last shots. Our horses were starved and without water. There was no chance of breaking through.’116 Following a last, bloody skirmish with Soviet forces close to the village of Zastówka, barely 20 kilometres from the Hungarian frontier, he was injured and forced to surrender.
While the remnants of Polish forces at Tomaszów Lubelski were being rounded up by the Germans, around 40 kilometres to the north-east, near the village of Husynne, on the river Bug, another group of Polish forces escaping southward met their end at the hands of the Soviets. Numbering some 1,500 men, they too were a very mixed group, composed of a mounted unit of the State Police from Warsaw, a squadron of the 14th Jazłowiecki Lancers Regiment and the elite ‘Chemical Battalion’, trained and equipped to counter the use of chemical weapons by the enemy.117 On the afternoon of 24 September, they stopped at Husynne to regroup, aware that they were being surrounded by overwhelming Soviet forces. The following day, after an artillery duel and a number of clashes with Red Army infantry, they decided to try to break out of the closing ring.
The mounted State Police led the way. According to an eye-witness, with their navy blue uniforms, their polished, patent leather helmets and their horsehair crests, they seemed to recall the glory days of cavalry: ‘Even in the anaemic afternoon light, the emblems made the men seem like Napoleon’s cuirassiers, raised from their graves to charge at the Emperor’s command.’ They were not without effect, either, quickly scattering the enemy in panic. ‘The field through which the police charged’, one cavalryman recalled, ‘was covered with the bodies of trampled and slashed Bolshevik infantry.’ A supporting charge by the Jazłowiecki Lancers then dealt with the survivors, leaving behind them a mass of ‘sprawling bloody corpses’.118 Improbably, cavalry had yet again proved its worth.
The success could not last, however. As at Krojanty, at the very start of the campaign, cavalry’s success proved fleeting when faced with an armoured counter-strike. At Husynne, the Polish horsemen had barely mastered the field before a mass of Red Army tanks charged at them, their cannons blazing and machine guns chattering, forcing them into a costly retreat. By the time they reached their starting positions, they had no option but to surrender, having lost over 140 men.119 Surrounded by Soviet soldiers and ordered to lay down their weapons, the cavalrymen were separated from their horses before being berated by an uncomprehending Red Army colonel: ‘I should shoot you all to the last man! Dumb Poles!’ he shouted. ‘We have come to liberate you from the bondage of your masters and you fire at us?’120 The survivors, over a thousand men, went into Soviet captivity.
If the cavalry charge at Husynne was reminiscent of an earlier age in warfare, what followed was hideously modish. That same day, some twenty-five Polish prisoners were bayonetted in a nearby barn; murdered in cold blood by their Red Army captors.121
9
To End on a Battlefield
At dawn on Sunday 24 September, Warsaw diarist Alexander Polonius joined his local bread queue. He had wanted to beat the crowd and arrived at 5 a.m. even though the bakery did not open until 6. Nonetheless, the queue was already about a kilometre long, stretching so far along Puławska Street that he wondered glumly whether there would be any bread at the end of it at all.
The streets were quiet that morning, largely deserted except for the queues. In the city centre, the damage from the German bombs was ubiquitous: ‘scarcely a house that was not levelled or gutted,’ one observer wrote, ‘that was how all the main streets looked’.1 As Polonius waited, surveying the damaged buildings, some still wreathed in smoke, and watching a ‘blood-red dawn’ spread over Praga to the east, he had a chance to observe his fellow Varsovians. They were a motley bunch: ‘Poor people, rich people, some in strange garments,
skiing costumes, women enveloped in shawls to keep themselves warm, others with babies in their arms.’ As he watched, he noticed a small, long-haired man, incongruously wearing a grey bowler hat and an old frock coat, who – ‘much to everybody’s amusement’ – began to relieve himself against a fence. ‘Some of the youngsters threw things at him, but he merely turned his head and continued.’ Polonius mused that the old man seemed to be ‘the personification of the abnormality of our lives’.2
Inevitably, there were squabbles, as the people in the queue jostled for position, some objecting that places were being saved for others. Since the city’s power supply had failed the previous day, the lot of ordinary citizens had become infinitely more difficult. Without water, electricity or gas, they were reduced to a primitive existence, and nerves were already fraying. As one diarist noted, it was the loss of the radio that pained them the most. Without the broadcasts, she wrote, ‘we were cut off from the world. That feeling was the worst of everything we had experienced.’3
There was also gossip and news of the latest districts hit by the Germans: Praga, Powązki and Z∙oliborz were said to be under almost constant artillery barrage. Some reported the rumour that the Soviets were fighting the Germans, under the command of Edward Śmigły-Rydz, and that they had already reached Garwolin, 40 kilometres south-east of Warsaw.4 Others claimed that the British had already landed, at Danzig or Königsberg, and wondered how long it would take for their armoured columns to reach the capital.5 Some were in open despair at the unequal fight and the destruction being wreaked. ‘If we haven’t got the right arms,’ one housewife lamented, ‘why did we dare to stand up to them?’6
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