Poland’s losses, consequently, far outstripped those of its opponents. Though statistics are still confused and contested, Polish military deaths incurred in fighting the Germans are estimated at a little over 60,0002 – around four times those of Hitler’s forces. Against the Soviets, Polish military losses are extremely difficult to quantify, but have been estimated at around 18,000.3 Soviet military deaths, which were certainly massaged downwards for propaganda purposes, were mendaciously claimed at the time to be only 1,500, but must be considerably greater.4 Polish civilian deaths, meanwhile, are reckoned at around 100,000, with some 16,000 of those5 falling victim to extra-judicial killing by German military and security forces during the period of the military campaign. The total death toll – civilian and military – from the five weeks of fighting in Poland could be as high as 250,000.
Clearly, then, Poland’s defensive war of 1939 was no side-show. But away from the human cost, it was also significant for what it foreshadowed about the conflict to come. For one thing, the Polish campaign saw the widespread bombing of towns and cities, very often with no military component present on the ground, and no meaningful anti-aircraft defence. Of course, aerial bombing was already an established tactic by 1939, having first been used by the Italians in Tripolitania in 1911, and the bombing of civilians had featured in every conflict since, most infamously at Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. However, the sheer scale of the targeting of civilian populations during the Polish campaign – witnessed at Wieluń, Warsaw, Frampol, Sulejów and a thousand other locations – far outstripped anything that had been seen before. Arguably for the first time, the concept of a front line in warfare became completely redundant; as one Warsaw resident noted: ‘The front is actually above us – the war is being fought overhead.’6 Despite the countless protestations to the contrary, the deliberate bombing of civilians – by all sides – became one of the salient features of the world war that followed. The road to Coventry and Dresden began at Wieluń.
The ferocity with which the Germans bombed Polish towns in 1939 hints at the second foreshadowing that the Polish Campaign provided: that of the deliberate blurring of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. This, again, was a phenomenon that had been witnessed before – indeed, it had been almost ever-present in warfare, from the Sack of Magdeburg to the Rape of Nanking – but the war against Poland took it to another level. Almost every town and village in Poland witnessed an atrocity in the autumn of 1939, against civilians and prisoners of war, Poles and Jews alike. As might have been expected, Polish Jews found themselves victims of persecution, humiliation and worse at German hands. With its large proportion of orthodox Ostjuden, ‘Eastern Jews’, Poland appeared to conform precisely to the Nazi nightmare vision: an object lesson in the dangers of racial miscegenation. Yet, German ire was not reserved exclusively for Poland’s Jews in 1939; indeed, in that early phase it was targeted more towards ordinary Poles, who often found themselves on the receiving end of brutal and murderous reprisals. For the first time, the chaotic conditions of the war permitted the racist, exterminatory impulses of Nazism to be fully expressed, and the Wehrmacht and the SS did not hesitate to begin the process of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the territories under their control.
The numbers of non-combatants killed by the Germans during the September campaign are particularly shocking when compared to those who were murdered during the French campaign of May–June 1940. Whereas the German invasion of France and the Low Countries led to around twenty-five massacres of PoWs or civilians – most notably at Wormhoudt, Vinkt and Le Paradis – the German invasion of Poland produced, on average, more than sixteen such massacres for every day of the campaign – testament to the significance of the racial component in the barbarisation of German conduct.7
In addition, of course, there are those Poles who were murdered by the Soviets during the Red Army’s invasion after 17 September, for which there are no coherent statistics but which must total many thousands. Both invading forces applied a brutal, binary, totalitarian logic: a racist binary in the German case, a class binary in the Soviet. There were discomfiting parallels: while the Germans might decide a prisoner’s fate by whether or not he was circumcised, so the fate of prisoners of the Soviets might turn on the condition of their hands. Those with soft, uncallused palms were more likely to be singled out as potentially dangerous intellectuals. Wherever one was captured, the end result was often indistinguishable: the wanton killing of civilians and PoWs.
It is worth recalling at this point that, just as the Polish campaign foreshadowed the hideous barbarisation of warfare that would be increasingly in evidence as the Second World War progressed, so it also prefaced more than five brutal years of occupation and oppression for Poland itself. Poland’s tribulations did not end with Kleeberg’s submission on 6 October – far from it. They persisted, through twenty-one months of division and occupation by the Germans and Soviets, and thereafter right up to 1945, as Poland was transformed into a giant laboratory for the racial theories of Hitler’s SS: a Nazi dystopia in which populations were expropriated, deported or murdered on a whim; a world in which the horrors of the Holocaust were but a prelude to a grand racial and territorial reordering that would have seen cities such as Warsaw disappear from the map and entire races consigned to oblivion. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the 200,000 Polish dead of the September campaign were but the first of the estimated 5.5 million Poles – fully one in five of the population – that would be killed in the Second World War.
The last foreshadowing from the Polish campaign is perhaps the most famous: the use of the Blitzkrieg. That German military doctrine, which foresaw the use of fast-moving armoured spearheads to cut deep into the enemy’s rear to prevent the creation of a coherent phased defence, came to be seen as key to Germany’s successes in the first half of the Second World War. Many popular history books still laud the Wehrmacht’s campaign in Poland as the very apogee of Blitzkrieg, a view which – needless to say – was first floated by contemporary German propaganda. This is to flatter German forces, however. For all the undeniable magnitude of the German victory, it can only be attributed in part to a military idea that was only imperfectly applied in 1939, and which some historians have disputed even existed at all.8
German forces were undoubtedly more mobile than their opponents. They were also, on the whole, better equipped and better led. But to attribute their victory solely to the supposed employment of Blitzkrieg is a gross simplification, which wilfully ignores the other factors that contributed to Poland’s defeat. The first of these is perhaps the most obvious: Poland was geographically doomed. Not only was it flanked on three sides by Germany and its ally Slovakia, with the equally hostile Soviet Union to the east; it also consisted predominantly of flat terrain largely lacking in natural obstacles – the great North European Plain – which is perfect for the effective use of tanks and motorised infantry. Even when the Poles were able to defend prepared positions, therefore – such as at Mława or Węgierska Górka – they were forced to withdraw due to the risk of being outflanked and surrounded. In addition, the weather played its capricious part. The summer of 1939 was one of the driest on record in central Europe, and rainfall in Poland that August was barely two-thirds of what it had been in previous years. Consequently, the river systems that might feasibly have been exploited to form an additional line of defence – most notably the Narew in the north and the Warta in the west – lacked the volume of water to make that a viable proposition.
There were also failings of the Poles’ own making. For one thing, the Polish High Command’s obsession with military secrecy – itself a throwback to Piłsudski’s time – meant that Polish units had no direct contact with troops on their flanks, were not permitted to know the grand strategic plan, and were unable to coordinate their movements effectively. While the Germans were moving faster and hitting harder, the Poles were effectively blind and deaf.
More seriously, Poland’s comparati
ve economic weakness in the inter-war years meant that, for all its size, the Polish army was ill prepared to face the Germans in 1939. A rather telling statistic here is that the entire Polish defence budget for the five years to 1939 amounted to only 10 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s budget for 1939 alone.9 Financially, at least, it was David against Goliath. The primary problem that resulted from this disparity was not the predominance of the cavalry in Polish forces – as we have seen, those troops fought as mobile infantry and could be surprisingly effective – rather, it was the lack of armour. Poland in 1939 had only two motorised brigades, yet in the Germans they faced an opponent with fully seven armoured divisions and a numerical superiority in armoured vehicles of more than 5:1.10 A similar disparity pertained in the air, where Polish pilots – for all their undoubted valour – were outnumbered and outgunned by the Luftwaffe, their largely obsolete P.7 and P.11 fighters often struggling to even engage with the sleek Messerschmitts of their enemy.
Once battle had been joined, other shortcomings were swiftly made manifest. As has been shown, the decision to station Polish forces along the frontier, while politically understandable, was militarily catastrophic, opening up the likelihood of a swift encirclement by a superior, more mobile enemy. The resulting inability to stem the German advance then forced other errors, most notably among them Śmigły-Rydz’s decision to evacuate the High Command to Brest on 7 September, and thereafter to Romania, all of which fatally impaired his dwindling ability to exert any meaningful influence on events.
The Soviet invasion on 17 September not only disrupted the organisation of any coherent defence in Poland’s east – were such a thing possible – it also dashed the High Command’s last hope: the mass evacuation of men and materiel to the Romanian frontier, the so-called ‘Romanian bridgehead’. With that, Poland’s fate was effectively sealed and soon after only the besieged garrisons of Warsaw, Modlin and Hel continued to resist, as well as those splintered and scattered forces still adrift between the German and Soviet lines.
Poland’s defeat in 1939 was the child of many fathers, therefore, which makes it all the more peculiar that the simplistic mythology of an all-conquering Blitzkrieg has persisted for so long. Where the story of Poland’s defensive war is known at all, beyond Poland, it is often this myth – of ‘cavalry against tanks’, the desperate Polish lancers taking on the armoured might of the Wehrmacht – that takes centre stage. It was a story first publicised, unsurprisingly, by the organs of German propaganda: a way of ridiculing the enemy while producing a stereotype of Polish foolhardiness and German superiority. Ordinarily, perhaps, that story might – like other German propaganda myths – have quietly died off, enduring the death of a thousand corrections. But in Poland’s case, it seemed nobody after the war had a vested interest in correcting it: the Germans had many more egregious crimes to expiate, the Soviets were not minded to defend the pre-war Polish regime, and the British and the French were seemingly content to allow the narrative of Poland as an inept and incompetent ally to prevail. Only Poles in exile tried to speak the truth, but seen all too often as the archetypal ‘Cold Warriors’ and serial disturbers of the peace, they would make little headway against the combined forces of ignorance and inertia.
On the Soviet side, meanwhile, another myth took hold, which was just as durable as the German one, and no less insidious: the idea that the Red Army did not invade Poland at all in 1939. Stalin went to great lengths to preserve the fiction of the Soviet Union’s ‘neutrality’ in that first year of the war, with his armies marching into Poland on the spurious premise of protecting that country’s Byelorussian and Ukrainian populations from its supposed collapse, and ordered to keep their distance from the Germans. Hitler even lent a shoulder to the wheel, proclaiming in Danzig that the war had been won in three weeks, in an attempt to relieve the Red Army of the political burden of sharing the ‘glory of victory’. In the post-war period, with Stalin anxious to obliterate all evidence of his collaboration with Hitler, the invasion was whitewashed again, portrayed as a simple police action and excised from the Soviet narrative of the war. The overriding mythology of a blameless Red Army, and of the ‘peace-loving’ Soviet Union as the perennial victim, would brook no contradiction.
Yet, as this book has demonstrated, the Red Army’s entry into Poland was no benign intervention to restore order or protect the rights of embattled minorities: it was a military invasion, a ‘lightning strike’ to destroy the remaining Polish forces and capture the territory promised to Stalin under the Nazi–Soviet Pact. And, though the fighting that followed in eastern Poland was of shorter duration and of a rather different character than that against the Germans, it was no less bitter, unleashing a vicious class war against soldiers and civilians alike. In the post-war years, as Poland was resurrected under communist control, this subject too disappeared, consigned to the proscribed list, one of the forbidden ‘black spots’ of Polish–Soviet history. Only after 1989 could it be told at all.
And what of the other outside actors in the Polish drama of 1939 – the British and the French? Their role is perhaps the least immediately toxic, predicated as it was – unlike the Germans and the Soviets – on the desire to avoid war rather than foment it, but it was scarcely effective or considered. The root problem, aside from a certain imperial arrogance, was that Anglo-French policy was based on a misconception: the belief that if the Poles were sufficiently galvanised by their support, then the mere spectre of war would be enough to bring Hitler to his senses and curb German aggression. But the Poles needed little goading. They were always going to fight for their independence: their proud military tradition, and their history of occupation and partition surely dictated that. What they needed was the thing that would not be forthcoming – genuine material assistance; action, not words.
Moreover, the possibility that Hitler might not be brought to reason was not entertained in London and Paris. Meat was never put onto the bones of the resulting alliance with the Poles, despite the airy promises of Gamelin and Ironside in that troubled summer of 1939. The British and French declared war on Hitler on 3 September – their sense of national honour would permit nothing less – but they did precious little in the short term to aid their ally. Theirs was still largely a rhetorical war – a Phoney War, a Drôle de Guerre – in spite of the fact that very real battles were being fought in Poland, in the fervent expectation of Allied assistance. Those that portray Allied policy towards Poland in September 1939 as crudely Machiavellian are wide of the mark: it was more benign – and more naïve – than that. Yet in end effect – in the popular hopes that it raised, in the strategies that it influenced, in the expectations that it aroused – it amounted nonetheless to the betrayal of an ally.
Like all history, Poland’s defensive war of 1939 was a complex affair – in the fevered diplomacy that prefaced it, just as in the military campaigns that it, in turn, unleashed. With its armoured trains and cavalrymen, it seems a throwback to the battlefields of the past, while its hideous novelties of aerial bombing and the targeting of civilians pointed the war to the horrors that were to follow. As the opening campaign of the Second World War – which cost some 250,000 lives, and contained all the wicked hallmarks of the later conflict – it surely warrants our attention and understanding, rather than being passed over in a couple of paragraphs, or still mired in the mythologies and propaganda battles of the vilest totalitarians of the twentieth century. Most of all, it is a story from which the voices of its primary victims – the Poles themselves – have been excluded for far too long. One hopes that this book might begin the process of restoring them to their own narrative.
1. Helmut Naujocks, the ‘intellectual gangster’ and architect of the Gleiwitz Incident.
2. The victim: Franciszek Honiok.
3. ‘Attention! Here is Gleiwitz!’
4. 4.48 a.m.: the battleship Schleswig-Holstein opens fire.
5. Unleashing hell: the Stuka attack on the Vistula bridge at Tczew.
6. German
troops advance cautiously on the Polish Post Office in Danzig.
7. German soldiers destroy the border post near Zoppot.
8. ‘Is that the Polish border, Herr Leutnant?’
9. Hitler before the Reichstag, playing the innocent.
10. British Prime Minister Chamberlain, defending Poland with vowels and consonants alone.
11. More in expectation than hope: crowds in Warsaw cheer the British declaration of war.
12. Showing their mettle: the famed Polish cavalry.
13. Hitler’s Wehrmacht: the harbingers of race war.
14. Led away to an unknown fate: Polish prisoners of the Wehrmacht.
15. Open season: Jewish prisoners.
16. Kazimiera Mika bends over the body of her sister, killed in a German air raid.
17. One of many: a German massacre of civilians.
18. Polish prisoners of war, murdered near Ciepielów.
19. ‘Quickened with new energy and strength’: Polish cavalry advance through Sochaczew during the Battle on the Bzura.
20. The chaos of defeat: a Polish supply train.
21. Major General Tadeusz Kutrzeba, Polish commander on the Bzura.
22. New foes: a Soviet tank in eastern Poland.
23. ‘An army of beggars’: Stalin’s soldiers invade.
24. All smiles: Guderian and Krivoshein enjoy their victory.
25. Best of enemies.
First to Fight Page 34