The Day We Went to War

by Terry Charman

  6 September

  WORTHING

  Resumé of the week

  ‘It has been impossible to write daily for the last week as life has suddenly become very difficult under wartime conditions. Very few people felt this terrible blow would fall and right up to Sunday morning there was the glimmer of hope. On Friday the Germans “crossed the frontiers to resist the Poles” and the newspapers immediately declared “war begins”. Everyone’s spirits sank but rose again when Mr Chamberlain gave Hitler one more chance in a message sent on Saturday with a time limit up at eleven o’clock on the Sunday morning . . . two air-raid warnings already – one on Sunday morning about 11.35 (twenty minutes after the declaration of war) . . . I must try to write this daily now but so far I have not blacked out my bedroom window – blow! That’s where I do my reading and writing.’ (Joan Strange)

  The German war flag is raised over the ruins of Westerplatte, 7 September 1939. In describing the bombardment of the garrison, a German reporter wrote, ‘It seems as if all the fire and lightning of hell has been let loose.’

  CHAPTER 5

  The Fall of Poland

  As Britain and France finally honoured their pledges to Poland, Hitler’s forces successfully pressed on with the invasion. Two invading army groups, comprising of fifty-two divisions and totalling 1,516,000 men, launched a double pincer movement from the south and the north. They were supported by 897 bombers and 426 fighter planes of the Luftwaffe. No declaration of war had been made. But in his Reichstag speech of 1 September justifying the invasion, Hitler had claimed that regular Polish troops had invaded German territory the previous evening. This was an allusion to the faked incidents at the Gleiwitz radio station and the Hochlinden customs post.

  From the start of the campaign, the Poles found themselves faced by an enemy who had crushing superiority in aircraft, tanks, guns and men. But the Poles fought bravely, as even Hitler acknowledged in a speech at Danzig, and no more so than at Westerplatte, near the city-port. There a company of 180 men under Major Henryk Sucharski and Captain Franciszek Dabrowski held out for six days and nights against attacks by land and air, and from bombardment by the old battleship Schleswig-Holstein’s eleven-inch guns. From Warsaw, Polish commander-in-chief Marshal Smigly-Rydz wired them, ‘Soldiers of Westerplatte fight! You are fighting the fight of Poland. Poland watches your gallant struggle with pride. Fight for Poland to the last man.’

  ‘So it is now our job to free the Polish people from all this wretchedness and, under our leadership, to make it into one of the happiest nations on earth.’ An SS non-commissioned officer interrogates Polish civilians.

  ‘Cowards, cowards, they are! You can hardly get them to fight a decent fight. But they are very good at murdering!’ SS men interrogate Polish prisoners of war, Zelechov, mid-September 1939.

  After the Poles were forced to surrender due to lack of ammunition, the Germans took a party of foreign correspondents to Westerplatte. Jack Raleigh of the Chicago Tribune saw that, ‘Bombs had fallen everywhere . . . the main buildings were total wrecks.’ One large pillbox which had received a direct hit still contained the charred remains of a Polish Army cook, who had been preparing a meal as the bomb fell. Raleigh saw ‘bits of his uniform had embedded themselves in the cement around him. Blackened flesh rotted in the half darkness . . .’ It was, the journalist noted, ‘one of the most gruesome sights I saw during the whole Polish campaign’.

  In some places the Poles achieved local successes. But by Sunday, 17 September, the Corridor had been overrun, Polish forces in the River Vistula bend overcome, and the Germans had advanced to the River Bug. On that same day, the Red Army crossed Poland’s eastern frontier on its mission of ‘liberation’. Poland’s position was now absolutely hopeless. To avoid capture, the now-discredited government of Colonel Beck and Marshal Smigly-Rydz fled to Roumania, where they were interned.

  On 1 October, Austrian Nazi Wilhelm Prueller wrote in his diary: ‘Smigly-Rydz has declared that the Polish Army is now defeated. He could have made this silly observation on 1st September! For it was a joke to fight against us with horse-drawn wagons. I’ve seen only very few trucks or tanks in the Polish Army, and aeroplanes only at the beginning. And with their weapons they can’t compare with us at all. If their hand grenades were distributed to their whole army, it would mean two hand grenades for thirty-five men! Or take the company which took us prisoner: they had one MG! It was ridiculous!’

  Polish civilians forced to flee the burning town of Govorovo, 9 September 1939. During the campaign fifty-five towns and 476 villages were deliberately burnt down by the Germans, and 714 mass executions took place, in which 16,336 Poles were murdered.

  ‘Here we can destroy all the Jews at one stroke.’ Elderly Jews forced to clear up the rubble in the destroyed village of Piatek. On 13 September, fifty Poles, including seven Jews, were murdered by the Wehrmacht.

  Warsaw had held out until 27 September when, after severe bombing and shelling, the city was forced to capitulate. Teenagers Wlodzimierz and Zbigniew Leon hid in a cellar under the family shop at Szpitalna Street. Their apartment had received a direct hit from an artillery shell, which had blown it to pieces. In the streets of the capital, Wlodzimierz saw the corpses of soldiers, civilians and horses lying where they had fallen. The Leon brothers, like most Poles, had been confident that Britain and France, by declaring war, would come to Poland’s aid. Optimistic but false rumours abounded about the RAF bombing Hamburg into ruins, and the French piercing the Siegfried Line. But no aid from the Western Allies was forthcoming. Wlodzimierz Leon and his brother, like the majority of Poles, were over-confident in their own army. This was reflected in the boast that Polish cavalrymen would be tethering their horses in Berlin’s Tiergarten within a few weeks. They were also completely unaware of the strength of Hitler’s armed forces and unprepared for the tactics of Blitzkrieg.

  After the city’s surrender, Picture Post wrote that ‘the defence of Warsaw is the first epic of this war’. The leading hero of that defence was City President, or Lord Mayor, Stefan Starzynski, who made many inspirational radio broadcasts during the siege. In them he both rallied his fellow citizens, and also called on world opinion. In his ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’ on 19 September, Starzynski, or ‘Stefan the Stubborn’ as he was nicknamed, declared: ‘These Polish men, women and children are not dying in vain, but they are dying not only for the freedom of their own country, but for the freedom of Europe. We know that our friends want to help us and will help us. Our lives may be in danger now, but our souls are undisturbed. We shall fight to the last man if we have to go down fighting. We shall stand at our post imbued with holy faith in our ultimate victory even in this dark hour. The day will come.’

  After Warsaw’s surrender, Starzynski remained in office for four weeks, before being arrested by the Germans at the end of October 1939 and sent to Dachau concentration camp.

  A few days after the city’s capitulation, Hitler held a victory parade in Warsaw. About to mount the saluting stand, the Fuehrer was greeted by General Walther von Reichenau with the words, ‘Mein Fuehrer! Ich gebe Warschau!’ (‘My Fuehrer! I give you Warsaw!’). One of the only two American reporters present, Jack Raleigh, noted how Hitler ‘unceasingly saluted file after file of grey clad men’, during the three-hour-long parade. ‘As they clumped past’, observed the newsman, Hitler would, ‘catch the eye of one or two men in each rank . . . I, being just beyond, saw the effect his glances had on the soldiers. The men’s faces fairly beamed . . . the power the man displayed even at a distance of twenty yards . . . was amazing. He seemed automatically to instil courage, loyalty, and an immense pride.’

  Driving back to Warsaw airport after that display of German military might, Raleigh came face to face with the reality of the effects of Blitzkrieg on Poland’s capital. In the space of one block he saw three women who had been driven mad by the bombing and shelling. ‘No one paid any attention to them as they wandered aimlessly up and down the bread queues gi
ggling hysterically and slavering.’ A little further on, Raleigh saw a ragged teenage boy, his cheeks ‘smudged by great gobs of encrusted dirt rivuleted by streams of tears’, standing by the kerb. Raleigh then saw how ‘suddenly he wrapped both arms about his chest and began sobbing pitiably. He did not cry as a child – rather as a lost soul, eyes wide open, flooded with tears, and great gasping sobs shaking his body. In a final paroxysm he sank to the gutter – where he lay, racking coughs and sighs shaking his small body. None of the passers-by gave him a second look.’

  At the airport, Raleigh and his fellow correspondents were each in turn introduced to Hitler. He then told them: ‘Gentlemen, you have seen for yourself what criminal folly it was to try and defend this city. The defence collapsed after only two days of intensive effort. I only wish that certain statesmen in other countries who seem to want to turn all Europe into a second Warsaw could have the opportunity to see, as you have, the real meaning of war!’

  After the fall of Warsaw, the Germans opened soup kitchens to feed the capital’s hungry civilian population. The soup kitchens were filmed in order to demonstrate to the world the so-called generosity of the German occupiers. In fact, Warsaw’s municipal authorities were presented with a bill for the food distributed.

  With that, the Fuehrer saluted and made for his plane to fly back to Berlin and deliver his ‘peace offer’ speech to the Reichstag. Raleigh found himself ‘burning with the injustice’ at Hitler’s words. But they obviously struck a chord with Picture Post reader J.E. Lake of Winchmore Hill, who wrote to the magazine, ‘You show pictures of suffering citizens of Warsaw and slang Hitlerism. But you do not point out that Hitler warned Warsaw, and that Warsaw could have surrendered when it liked. It was the Poles’ fault that they were bombed so mercilessly. The “heroic” resistance was futile. They could not possibly win. They were throwing away their own lives.’

  To which the magazine gave the tart response, ‘So if we fight on for justice and freedom in face of a pirate’s threat, it will be our fault if we suffer? And are there not times when a man must “throw away” his life?’

  Organised Polish resistance continued at some places until 5/6 October, and even after that, guerrilla warfare under Major Henryk ‘Hubal’ Dobrzanski went on sporadically until the spring of 1940. Many thousands of Polish servicemen managed to escape to France, where a government-in-exile under General Wladyslaw Sikorski was established at Angers.

  Poland itself was divided up between Germany and Russia in a treaty signed in Moscow by von Ribbentrop and Molotov on 29 September. Poland’s western provinces were annexed to the Greater German Reich, while a General Government of Occupied Polish Territories was set up with Nazi lawyer Hans Frank at its head. Russia received nearly 200,000 square kilometres of Polish territory, including the oilfields of Galicia. In both parts of occupied Poland, her conquerors brutally set about trying to wipe out any traces of Polish national identity. ‘East and west the prisoners rolled away into slavery’, many never to return.

  A Red Army soldier guarding a Polish Air Force PWS 26 biplane trainer at Porubanek Airfield, Wilno. At the time of the German invasion, the Polish Air Force had 392 serviceable warplanes to the Luftwaffe’s 1941.

  ‘England! This is your work!’ was the slogan on this anti-British poster that the Germans plastered throughout Warsaw. A contemporary account claimed that a nine-year-old boy, Stás Kempiski, tore down one of the posters at the corner of Trembacka and Krakowskie Przedmiesie streets. He was shot on the spot by a German patrol.

  In Warsaw, the Germans put up posters depicting a wounded Polish soldier blaming Chamberlain for the destruction of the capital with the caption ‘England, this is your work’. On 3 November 1939, two women, widow Eugenia Wlodarz and student Elzbieta Zahorska were sentenced to death and shot for tearing down copies of the posters. As she faced the firing squad, Elzbieta defiantly shouted out to them in German the first line of the Polish national anthem, ‘Noch ist Polen nicht verloren!’ (‘Poland Is Not Yet Lost!’)

  CHAPTER 6

  The War in the Air

  While Poland was being crushed, Britain and France failed to render their ally any real practical assistance. A Royal Air Force reconnaissance flight over the German fleet on 3 September 1939 was followed the next day by an attack on the ships by fifteen Blenheim and fourteen Wellington bombers. The raid was not a success. Five bombers from each force failed to find targets in the low-cloud conditions. The remaining Blenheims carried out low-level attacks on the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the cruiser Emden in Wilhelmshaven. At least three bombs landed on the Admiral Scheer, but they failed to explode. The Emden was damaged when a Blenheim crashed on it, one of the five lost in the raid. While little damage was done to the German warships that day, bombs were dropped on the neutral Danish town of Ejsberg, 110 miles north of the target area, killing two civilians.

  No. 9 Squadron lost two Wellingtons during the raid. One of them was No. L 4275, shot down either by anti-aircraft fire or a German fighter over Brunsbuettel at the mouth of the Kiel Canal. In its crew were two young Aircraftsmen 2nd Class; twenty-year-old Kenneth Day from Essex and twenty-two-year-old Londoner George Brocking. Day’s body was recovered from the sea ten days later, and he was buried with full military honours by the Germans in Cuxhaven cemetery. Brocking’s body was never found, and he is commemorated on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede. Both men were ground crew who had volunteered as air gunners. They were also pre-war, and now non-active, members of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. On 16 July, Mosley had held a large anti-war rally at Earls Court. Six weeks later, on the day Poland was invaded, Mosley issued a message to all members of the British Union. In it, Sir Oswald declared:

  ‘To our members my message is plain and clear. Our country is involved in war. Therefore I ask you to do nothing to injure our country or to help any other Power. Our members should do what the law requires of them, and if they are members of any of the Forces or Services of the Crown, they should obey their orders, and in every particular, obey the rules of their service.’

  As they took off on their first and last operational flight over Germany, it is doubtful if Brocking and Day had had the opportunity of reading that part of their leader’s message. Nor Mosley’s reminder that ‘Nearly twenty-five years ago when I was barely eighteen years of age, I was flying over the German lines in the last war.’

  After the Kiel Raid, RAF Bomber Command operations were mainly directed at dropping propaganda leaflets over Germany. Already on the first night of the war, nearly six million leaflets had been dropped over Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, Bremen and the Ruhr industrial belt. This ‘confetti war’ soon became the source of numerous jokes. One of the first to appear in print was featured in the Peterborough column of the Daily Telegraph:

  The pilot of one of our ‘leaflet’ planes reported back to headquarters two hours before he was due. His astonished C.O. asked for an explanation.

  ‘Well, Sir,’ the young officer replied, ‘I flew over enemy territory as instructed and tipped out the parcels over the side.’

  ‘Do you mean you dropped them out still roped in bundles?’ said the C.O. in an anxious voice.

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Good God, man, you might have killed somebody!’

  Another joke told of the ‘leaflet’ plane that arrived back many hours overdue. When asked why he had taken so long, the pilot told his C.O. that to ensure safe delivery, he had posted each leaflet through the letter box. While a ‘naval’ version went:

  Lieutenant-Commander reports to the Captain on the bridge of a destroyer: ‘The ship’s engines have stopped, sir.’

  Captain: ‘I know. There’s an enemy U-boat about.’

  Lieutenant-Commander: ‘Are you going to depth-charge her, sir?’

  Captain: ‘No, I’m sending down a diver with leaflets.’

  But not everybody saw it as a joke. Churchill was characteristically con
temptuous of such methods of waging war, later recalling, ‘We contented ourselves with dropping pamphlets to rouse the Germans to a higher morality.’ Noël Coward, working in Paris on a propaganda liaison job with the French, wrote a memorandum on the subject. In it he said that if it was the policy of His Majesty’s Government to bore the Germans to death he didn’t think we had enough time. ‘For this,’ Coward recalled, ‘I was reprimanded.’

  Despite the official reason that the ‘leaflet’ raids were giving aircrew valuable training, many RAF officers and men were sceptical as to their usefulness. Quite a few shared the view of future Bomber Command chief Arthur Harris that the leaflets were only going to augment Germany’s supplies of lavatory paper for the duration. But the height of official farce over the leaflets was reached when the ‘ace’ American foreign correspondent John Gunther asked at the Ministry of Information to see a copy of a leaflet. MP Harold Nicolson recorded the exchange in his diary on 14 September:

  ‘The request was refused. He asked why. The answer was, “We are not allowed to disclose information which might be of value to the enemy.” When Gunther pointed out that two [sic] million of these leaflets had been dropped over Germany, the man blinked and said, “Yes, something must be wrong there.”’

  At Westminster, there were many who shared Churchill’s view that it was nothing short of a disgrace that while our Polish ally’s cities, towns and villages were being ruthlessly bombed and machine-gunned, all the RAF appeared to be doing was dropping leaflets. Air attacks in the west on German airfields and communications would at least relieve some pressure on the Poles. Conservative MP Edward Spears tackled the Secretary of State for Air Sir Kingsley Wood directly on the subject. There was a heated exchange between the two men. The air minister begged Spears on grounds of national security not to raise the subject in the House. Spears reluctantly agreed.