The first regular act of war against Poland that marked the beginning of the Second World War for the country, took place on September 1, 1939, at 04:40 hours, when the German Luftwaffe attacked the Polish town of Wieluń, destroying 75% of the city and killing close to 1,200 people, most of them civilians. Five minutes later, at 04:45 hours, the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte, in the Free City of Danzig on the Baltic Sea. At 08:00 hours, German troops, still without a formal declaration of war issued, attacked near the Polish town of Mokra; the battle of the border had begun.
The Allied governments declared war on Germany on September 3; however, they failed to provide Poland with any meaningful support. The German-French border had a few minor skirmishes, although the majority of German forces, including eighty-five percent of their armoured forces, were engaged in Poland. Despite some Polish successes in minor border battles, German technical, operational and numerical superiority forced the Polish armies to withdraw from the borders towards Warsaw and Lwów. The Luftwaffe gained air superiority early in the campaign. The Polish armies were splitting up into uncoordinated fragments, some of which were retreating while others were delivering disjointed attacks on the nearest German columns.
Polish forces abandoned regions of Pomerania, Greater Poland and Silesia in the first week of the campaign, after a series of battles known as the Battle of the Border. The German advance, as a whole, was not slowed down and the Germans moved quickly, overwhelming secondary positions. Warsaw, under heavy aerial bombardment since the first hours of the war, was attacked on 9 September and was put under siege on September 13. Around that time, advanced German forces had also reached the city of Lwów, a major metropolis of eastern Poland. 1150 German aircraft bombed Warsaw on September 24.
The largest battle during this campaign, the Battle of Bzura, took place near the Bzura river west of Warsaw and lasted from 9 September to 18 September. After the defeat, Poland lost its ability to take the initiative and counterattack on a large scale.
From the beginning of the Polish campaign the German government repeatedly asked Stalin and Molotov to act upon the August agreement and attack Poland from the east. Worried by an unexpectedly rapid German advance and eager to grab their allotted share of the country, Soviet forces attacked Poland on September 17. It was agreed that the USSR would relinquish its interest in the territories between the new border and Warsaw in exchange for inclusion of Lithuania in the Soviet "zone of interest."
By 17 September 1939 the Polish defence was already broken and their only hope was to retreat and reorganise along the Romanian Bridgehead. However, these plans were rendered obsolete nearly overnight, when the over 800,000 strong Soviet Union Red Army attacked and created the Belarussian and Ukrainian fronts after invading the eastern regions of Poland. This was in violation of the Riga Peace Treaty, the Soviet-Polish Non-Aggression Pact and other international treaties, both bilateral and multilateral. Soviet diplomacy claimed that they were "protecting the Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities of eastern Poland in view of Polish imminent collapse." In fact Soviets were acting in co-operation with the Nazis, carving Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence as specified in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Polish border defence forces in the east, known as the Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, consisted of about 25 battalions. Many Polish lives were lost and the Soviet invasion was one of the decisive factors that convinced the Polish government that the war in Poland was lost. Prior to the Soviet attack from the East, the Polish military's fall-back plan had called for long-term defence against Germany in the southern-eastern part of Poland, while awaiting relief from a Western Allies attack on Germany's western border. However, the Polish government refused to surrender or negotiate a peace with Germany and ordered all units to evacuate Poland and reorganise in France.
Meanwhile, Polish forces tried to move towards the Romanian bridgehead area, still actively resisting the German invasion. From 17 September to 20 September, the Polish Armies Kraków and Lublin were crippled at the Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski, the second largest battle of the campaign. The city of Lwów capitulated on 22 September in a turn of events illustrative of the bizarre turn due to Soviet intervention; the city had been attacked by the Germans over a week earlier and in the middle of the siege, the German troops handed operations over to their Soviet allies. Despite a series of intensifying German attacks, Warsaw, defended by quickly reorganised retreating units, civilian volunteers and militia, held out until its capitulation on 28 September. The Modlin Fortress north of Warsaw capitulated on 29 September after an intense 16-day battle.
Civilian losses
The Polish September Campaign was an instance of total war that would be repeated continuously throughout World War II. Consequently, civilian casualties were high during and after combat. From the start of the campaign, the Luftwaffe attacked civilian targets and columns of refugees along the roads to wreak havoc, disrupt communications and target Polish morale. Apart from the victims of the battles, the German forces (both SS and the regular Wehrmacht) are credited with the mass murder of several thousands of Polish POWs and civilians. Also, during a pre-planned Operation Tannenberg, nearly 20,000 Poles were shot in 760 mass execution sites by special units, the Einsatzgruppen, in addition to regular Wehrmacht, SS and Selbstschutz.
At the end of the September Campaign, Poland was divided among Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Lithuania and Slovakia. Nazi Germany annexed parts of Poland, while the rest was governed by the so-called General Government. On September 28, another secret German-Soviet protocol modified the arrangements of August: all Lithuania was to be a Soviet sphere of influence, not a German one; but the dividing line in Poland was moved in Germany's favour, to the Bug River. Even though water barriers separated most of the spheres of interest, the Soviet and German troops met each other on a number of occasions.
About 65,000 Polish troops were killed in the fighting, with 420,000 others being captured by the Germans and 240,000 more by the Soviets (grand total 680,000 prisoner). Up to 120,000 Polish troops escaped to neutral Romania (through the Romanian Bridgehead) and Hungary, and another 20,000 escaped to Latvia and Lithuania, with the majority eventually making their way to France or Britain. Most of the Polish Navy succeeded in evacuating to Britain as well.
The Polish September Campaign marked the beginning of the Second World War in Europe, which combined with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Pacific War in 1941 would form the conflict known as World War II.
The invasion of Poland led to Britain and France declaring war on Germany on September 3; however, they did little to affect the outcome of the September Campaign. This lack of direct help during September 1939 led many Poles to believe that they had been betrayed by their Western allies.
Thursday 14 December 2006
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Suggested Reading
Garri S. Urban: Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead This is the true and striking story by a Jewish doctor of his struggle for survival when caught in 1939 between the evils of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia. After facing death from frontier patrols, a firing squad and torture, Urban arrives at a position of considerable power in Soviet society in a medical post. He risks his life again, fighting epidemics. These fascinating memoirs give a very rare glimpse of the Soviet Union in wartime, particularly into the exotic life of the Moiscow elite, where beautiful women, diplomats and spies mingled at parties and sex was used as a method of recruiting agents.
Ruth Kluger: Landscape of Memory - a Holocaust Girlhood Remembered Ruth Kluger is one of the child-survivors of the Holocaust. In 1942 at the age of 11, she was deported to the Nazi "family camp" Theresienstadt with her mother. They would move to two other camps before the war ended. This book is the story of Ruth's life. Of a childhood spent in the nazi camps and her refusal to forget the past as an adult in America. Not erasing a single detail, not even the inconvienient ones, she writes frankly about the troubled relationship with her mother even through their years of internment and her determination not to forgive and absolve the past.
Sir Martin Gilbert: The Holocaust A very thorough account of the experience of the Jews of Europe during World War II. This title gives a virtual day-by-day account, in men and women's own words, of the horrifying events of the Holocaust - the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish race.
Anne Applebaum: Gulag The Pulitzer Prize winning narrative of the origins and development of the Soviet concentration camps. Based on archives, interviews and new research the book explains the role that the camps played in the Soviet political and economic system.
Jean-Francois Steiner: Treblinka This is without a doubt one of the better books about the death camps. You will become intimately acquainted with Treblinka and the Nazis who ran it. Steiner's book is well-written and does justice to the horror.
Richard Overy: Russia's War The astounding events of 1941-45 in which the Soviet Union, after initial catastrophes, destroyed Hitler's Third Reich and shaped European history for the next fifty years.
Willy Peter Reese: A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944 The haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead.
Slavomir Rawicz: The Long Walk The story of a young Polish cavalry officer who was arrested by the Russians, tortured and sentenced to 25 years forced labour. His escape and journey across the Gobi desert to Tibet and freedom.- Rodric Braithwaite: Moscow 1941 Sunday Times review - ‘a wide-ranging and excellent account...Braithwaite never shirks the terrible truths'.
Suggested Films
Schindlers List
The 2004 release telling the true stroy of Schindlers attempts to save Jewish workers from the horrors of the German camps....
The Story Of The Gulag Runaway
In Stalinist Russia, Chabua Amiredjibi endured years of imprisonment, backbreaking punishment, horrific torture, and two death sentences. But his broken life and ill health did not kill his hope of gaining freedom. In all, he managed six escapes from Stalin's Gulag Camps. He stood up, fought and survived.
The 2004 release telling the true stroy of Schindlers attempts to save Jewish workers from the horrors of the German camps....
The Story Of The Gulag Runaway
In Stalinist Russia, Chabua Amiredjibi endured years of imprisonment, backbreaking punishment, horrific torture, and two death sentences. But his broken life and ill health did not kill his hope of gaining freedom. In all, he managed six escapes from Stalin's Gulag Camps. He stood up, fought and survived.