The Coast and the Navy: Gdynia, Oksywie, Hel and the Escape of the Orzeł

Poland had a coastline of only about 140 to 150 km in 1939, depending on how the Hel peninsula is counted, a single modern port at Gdynia, and a small navy that its own planners expected to lose. What happened on that coast in September was out of all proportion to its size. Three destroyers slipped away to Britain two days before the war; the ships left behind were sunk in harbor within the first week; a colonel and fifteen thousand men held Gdynia and the Oksywie heights for nineteen days; the Hel peninsula held out until 2 October; and a submarine interned in Estonia broke out at night and found its way to Scotland without charts. This chapter tells those stories, and the arguments that still surround some of them.

Why it mattered

The sea was the reason for much of the crisis of 1939. The Treaty of Versailles had given Poland access to the Baltic through the Corridor, a strip of Pomerania between Germany proper and East Prussia, and had made Danzig (Gdańsk) a Free City under the League of Nations rather than a Polish port. Poland’s answer was to build its own port a few miles up the coast. Gdynia, a fishing village in 1920, was by 1939 one of the busiest ports on the Baltic and a city of about 127,000 people, a symbol of what the new Polish state could do. Hitler’s demands for Danzig and a German road and railway across the Corridor, told in Chapter 1, were demands about this coast.

Militarily, Polish planners knew the coast could not be held for long. Once German forces from Pomerania and East Prussia met across the Corridor, which they did within the first four days (Chapter 3), Gdynia, Oksywie and Hel were cut off from the rest of Poland. The defenders were expected to hold for a week or two at most. They held for between two and four and a half weeks, and Hel was among the very last places in Poland where organized resistance ended.

The navy’s war also had consequences far beyond September. The ships that reached Britain, and the men who sailed them, became the core of a Polish Navy that fought beside the Royal Navy until 1945, at Narvik, Dunkirk, in the Atlantic convoys and off Normandy. The escape of the submarine Orzeł gave the Allies one of the first good-news stories of the war, and it gave the Soviet Union a pretext for pressing Estonia into the treaty that began the end of Estonian independence. Few episodes of September show so clearly how a small fight on the edge of the map could matter elsewhere.

A small navy and its admiral

The Polish Navy (Marynarka Wojenna) of 1939 was young, small and modern in parts. Its main base was the naval port at Oksywie, on the north side of Gdynia’s harbor, with a second base and the coastal batteries at the tip of the Hel peninsula and a naval air station at Puck. The fleet’s major units had nearly all been bought abroad in the previous decade. Two French-built destroyers, Wicher (commissioned 1930) and Burza, each about 1,500 tons with four 130 mm guns, were followed by two much larger and faster British-built ships from J. Samuel White at Cowes: Grom and Błyskawica, about 2,000 tons standard, with seven 120 mm guns and a design speed of 39 knots, among the most heavily armed destroyers of their day (Wikipedia, ship articles, citing Polish naval histories).

The largest ship of the fleet was the minelayer Gryf, built by Augustin Normand at Le Havre and commissioned in February 1938, with six 120 mm Bofors guns and racks for up to 600 mines. There were five submarines: three French-built minelaying boats of the 1920s, Wilk, Ryś and Żbik, and two large, modern Dutch-built boats, Orzeł and Sęp, commissioned in 1939. The rest of the fleet was made up of six small minesweepers of the Jaskółka class, nicknamed the “birds,” two old gunboats, Generał Haller and Komendant Piłsudski, a training ship, auxiliaries and a naval air squadron of about 17 obsolete seaplanes (Wikipedia, “Polish Navy order of battle in 1939”).

Its commander had an unusual history. Józef Unrug was born on 7 October 1884 in Brandenburg an der Havel, the son of a Prussian general of Polish noble descent. He graduated from the German naval college in 1907 and spent the First World War in the Kaiser’s navy, much of it in submarines, commanding several U-boats, among them UB-25, and later a half-flotilla of training submarines in the Baltic. In 1919 he left Germany for the new Polish state, and from 1925 he commanded the Fleet (Dowództwo Floty), the seagoing navy, as a commander and from 1932 as a rear admiral (kontradmirał) (Wikipedia, “Józef Unrug”). In the summer of 1939 he was also given command of the defense of the coast as a whole. On 31 August he moved his headquarters to Hel (Wikipedia, “Battle of Hel”).

Polish naval planning had been written mainly for a war with the Soviet Union, in which the Baltic would carry supplies from France and the navy’s job would be to keep the sea lanes open and stop a Soviet landing. Against Germany, whose Baltic squadron alone outnumbered the Polish fleet many times over and whose air force could reach every Polish harbor in minutes, the prospects were poor. The Danish straits were within easy reach of German ships and aircraft, and once war began the Polish fleet would be trapped in a small, shallow gulf. Polish staff studies accepted that the loss of Gdynia in a German war was likely, and that the coast’s value would be moral more than strategic (Łydka, Polska Zbrojna; Wikipedia, “Peking Plan”).

Operation Peking: three destroyers to Britain

The solution, pressed by the British in the last week of peace, was to send the best surface ships out of the Baltic before the war began. According to the accepted account, the British government urged the evacuation of the most modern units through Lt. Gen. Adrian Carton de Wiart, head of the British military mission, and Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz, after first resisting, agreed. On 26 August 1939, a day after the Anglo-Polish mutual assistance agreement was signed in London, Unrug signed the operation order. Its instructions went to the destroyer captains in sealed envelopes, to be opened on the code word “Peking” (Wikipedia, “Peking Plan” and “Józef Unrug”).

The signal came on 30 August. At 12:55 the signal tower at Oksywie hoisted it by flag to the destroyer division: “Peking.” About an hour and a half later, at about 14:15, Błyskawica, Burza and Grom left Gdynia in line ahead and turned north past the tip of Hel (Łydka, Polska Zbrojna; Wikipedia, “Peking Plan”). The group was commanded by Cmdr. Roman Stankiewicz; the ships’ captains were Cmdr. Włodzimierz Kodrębski (Błyskawica), Lt. Cdr. Stanisław Nahorski (Burza) and Cmdr. Aleksander Hulewicz (Grom). A note on dates: the English Wikipedia article on the plan and some other accounts put the order and sailing on 29 August, but Polish accounts, including the defense ministry’s magazine Polska Zbrojna, and the English articles on the individual ships give 30 August, which is used here.

The passage was uneventful but tense. The destroyers entered the Øresund, the strait between Denmark and Sweden, after midnight and passed a German light cruiser and a destroyer there; with the war not yet begun, no one fired. On 31 August German reconnaissance seaplanes found and followed them, and the group turned toward the Norwegian coast to lose them in the dark. At 09:25 on 1 September the ships learned that Germany had invaded Poland. At 12:58 they met the British destroyers HMS Wanderer and HMS Wallace, which put a liaison officer aboard, and at 17:37 that afternoon they tied up at Leith, the port of Edinburgh. They moved to the Rosyth naval base shortly afterward (Wikipedia, “Peking Plan” and “ORP Grom”). The Germans, who had expected to deal with them in the Baltic, had recalled the cruisers Nürnberg, Köln and Leipzig from the area on 30 August.

Operation Peking has been argued over ever since. In September 1939 many Poles saw it as running away. The officers and men who stayed behind, some of whom died on Wicher and Gryf within days, had prepared for years to fight in the Gulf of Danzig, and the departure of the three most powerful ships two days before the war, at Britain’s request, struck many as an abandonment of the coast. Later critics, especially in postwar communist Poland, used the episode to argue that the interwar state had wasted money on a seagoing navy that could not fight in the Baltic, when anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns were what the army had needed (Łydka, Polska Zbrojna).

The case for the plan rests on what happened to the ships that stayed. Wicher and Gryf were sunk in Hel harbor on 3 September by aircraft, without having engaged anything larger than two German destroyers. Had Grom and Błyskawica been there, they would almost certainly have shared that fate. Instead, the Polish government formed in France at the end of September had a navy to put into the Allied line, with three modern destroyers, joined by two submarines in September and October. Defenders of the plan, among them the author of the Polska Zbrojna article cited here, argue that it gave the government in exile real weight in the alliance; few deny that it was also a political decision tied to the British alliance, or that it was felt as a loss at the time (Łydka).

The Worek plan: submarines in a sack

The submarines stayed in the Baltic, under a plan called Worek, “the sack.” Its idea was that the five boats would wait submerged in sectors around the Gulf of Danzig and attack any German force that tried to land on the coast or bombard Hel. Orzeł, under Lt. Cdr. Henryk Kłoczkowski, had the innermost sector, from Jastarnia to the mouth of the Vistula, and was to attack the battleship Schleswig-Holstein if she left Danzig. Wilk (Lt. Cdr. Bogusław Krawczyk) took the entrance to the gulf, and Sęp (Lt. Cdr. Władysław Salamon), Żbik (Lt. Cdr. Michał Żebrowski) and Ryś (Lt. Cdr. Aleksander Grochowski) sectors farther north and west. Wilk, Ryś and Żbik also carried mines (Wikipedia, “Worek Plan” and “Polish Navy order of battle in 1939”).

The plan went wrong from the start because its premise was false. The Germans never intended to land on the Polish coast; they took it from the landward side. The submarines, crowded into shallow water close to their own bases, had few targets and were hunted constantly by German aircraft, minesweepers and destroyers. On 2 September Sęp fired a torpedo at the destroyer Friedrich Ihn, which missed, and was badly damaged by depth charges. German submarines fired at Sęp twice on the evening of 3 September, and missed. Orzeł was attacked and damaged by the minesweepers M3 and M4 and left her sector on 4 September (Wikipedia, “Worek Plan” and “ORP Sęp”). The mines laid by Wilk, Ryś and Żbik had one notable success, and a late one: on 1 October the German minesweeper M85 struck a mine from Żbik‘s field off Hel and sank with 24 men.

Historians have been severe on Worek. It was purely defensive, it kept the boats away from German shipping lanes, and Unrug rejected alternatives that would have sent the submarines to hunt between Świnoujście (Swinemünde) and East Prussia (Wikipedia, “Worek Plan,” citing Polish research). By 11 September the Naval Command had given up on it and ordered the submarines to make for Britain if they could, or to seek internment in a neutral port if they could not. No Polish submarine was sunk by the enemy in September, but none sank a German warship by torpedo either. Their fates, and the extraordinary voyage of Orzeł, are told below.

1 September: the battle of Danzig Bay

The coast’s war began at 04:45 on 1 September with the shelling of Westerplatte by Schleswig-Holstein, the story of Chapter 2. Within hours the Luftwaffe struck the naval bases. At Puck, the naval air station on the bay, most of the seaplanes were destroyed on the ground, and the squadron’s commander, Lt. Cdr. Edward Szystowski, was killed, often described as the first Allied naval officer to die in the war. At Oksywie, Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers of IV.(St)/LG 1 sank the old training ship Mazur, a former German torpedo boat, with heavy loss of life, and the diving tender Nurek (Wikipedia, “List of shipwrecks in September 1939”; Wikipedia, “Polish Navy order of battle in 1939”).

The navy’s main task that day was Operation Rurka, a plan to lay a defensive minefield across the approaches to the Gulf of Danzig. Gryf, loaded with around 300 mines, was to lay it with the minesweepers, escorted by Wicher and the two gunboats. The dive-bombers found the flotilla first. In two raids during the afternoon and early evening, the second at about 18:00, some 33 aircraft attacked. They scored no direct hits, but near misses and machine-gun fire jammed Gryf‘s rudder and damaged her machinery and instruments, disabled the minesweeper Mewa, and killed Gryf‘s captain, Cmdr. Stefan Kwiatkowski. His deputy, Lt. Cdr. Wiktor Łomidze, took command and, fearing another attack on a ship full of mines, ordered the defused mines jettisoned. Without mines and with a damaged ship, Rurka was called off (Wikipedia, “Battle of Danzig Bay” and “ORP Gryf”; uboat.net).

Accounts of the casualties vary. One summary counts 52 Polish killed and wounded in all; Mewa is said to have lost 22 men killed or wounded, and Gryf 29 wounded besides her captain, while another account puts Gryf‘s dead at 22. The Germans lost between seven and ten aircraft destroyed or damaged by the same reckoning (Wikipedia, “Battle of Danzig Bay,” infobox and text; Wikipedia, “ORP Gryf”). The action is sometimes called the first sea-air battle of the war. It decided the fate of the Polish surface fleet: the ships could not live under German air power, and from that night Gryf and Wicher lay at Hel, used mainly as floating anti-aircraft batteries.

Wicher herself had a frustrating night. Her captain, Cmdr. Stefan de Walden, never received the order canceling Rurka and took her to the patrol line. At about 22:00 she sighted two German destroyers about 4,500 m away, and later what her lookouts took for a cruiser, but her orders allowed her to engage only if the enemy found Gryf, and she held her fire (uboat.net, “ORP Wicher”). On 2 September the passenger ships Gdynia and Gdańsk, taken into naval service as auxiliaries, were sunk by dive-bombers in the bay.

3 September: destroyers off Hel, bombers over the harbor

On the morning of 3 September, the day Britain and France declared war, two German destroyers, Leberecht Maass (Z1) and Wolfgang Zenker (Z9), came up the gulf toward Hel. Aboard Leberecht Maass was Rear Adm. Günther Lütjens, then commanding the German destroyer force, who would go down with the battleship Bismarck in May 1941. At about 07:00, from long range, they opened fire on the harbor. Wicher and Gryf, moored inside, returned fire within minutes, supported by the Laskowski coastal battery of four 152 mm guns at the tip of the peninsula, which fired 28 rounds (uboat.net, “ORP Gryf” and “ORP Wicher”; Wikipedia, “Heliodor Laskowski’s Artillery Battery No. 31”).

Leberecht Maass was hit, with four killed and four wounded, and the German ships laid smoke and withdrew. Polish accounts credit Gryf with the hit; the battery’s history records a shell striking the destroyer’s gun shield. Gryf was hit once or twice herself. The short action was the only real surface engagement of the Polish campaign (Wikipedia, “ORP Gryf” and “Battle of Hel”; hela.com.pl). German accounts describe the damage to Maass as moderate; some Polish ones call it heavy. What is not disputed is that two German destroyers came to bombard Hel and were driven off.

The Luftwaffe came back the same day. At 09:10 eleven Ju 87s attacked the harbor; a bomb hit Gryf‘s bow, and fire reached her anti-aircraft ammunition. In the early afternoon, about 14:00 by uboat.net’s reconstruction and about 15:00 by others, a larger raid with 250 kg bombs struck both ships. Wicher took four hits or damaging near misses and sank at her moorings; one man was killed and 22 wounded. Gryf was hit again, settled on the bottom and burned for two days. Heinkel He 59 seaplanes of the naval air groups attacked the wreck again that evening. The minesweeper Mewa was also sunk in the harbor that day (uboat.net, “ORP Gryf”; Wikipedia, “ORP Wicher”). Gryf‘s total losses in the first three days are given as 21 or 22 dead.

The fleet’s sailors did not stop fighting when their ships went down. Gryf‘s two stern 120 mm turrets were lifted off the wreck and set up ashore between Hel and Jurata as Battery No. 34, though they were not ready until 30 September. Two guns from Generał Haller, damaged on 3 September and sunk by bombers at Hel on 6 September, became Battery No. 44 near Góra Szwedów. The minesweepers that survived worked as gunboats and minelayers in the bay until 14 September, when dive-bombers sank Jaskółka and Czapla at Jastarnia; the survey ship Pomorzanin was sunk there the same day (Wikipedia, “ORP Gryf”; hela.com.pl; Wikipedia, “List of shipwrecks in September 1939”).

The Land Coastal Defense

If the fleet’s war was short, the army’s war on the coast was long. Defending Gdynia and its hinterland was the job of the Land Coastal Defense, Lądowa Obrona Wybrzeża, or LOW, a mixed force that grew from about 5,000 men in early summer to about 15,000 by 1 September (Wikipedia, “Battle of Gdynia” and “Land Coastal Defence”). Its core was two regiments of Marine Rifles (Morski Pułk Strzelców), which despite the name were army infantry raised in the coastal region: the 1st Regiment with the Wejherowo detachment under Lt. Col. Kazimierz Pruszkowski, covering the west, and the 2nd Regiment with the Redłowo detachment under Lt. Col. Ignacy Szpunar, facing Danzig from the south. National Defense (Obrona Narodowa) battalions from Gdynia, Puck and Kartuzy, a reserve infantry battalion, two anti-aircraft battalions with 14 75 mm and 14 40 mm guns, mobilized police, border guards and volunteers made up the rest. LOW had about 40 guns of 40 to 105 mm, about 400 machine guns and an improvised armored train (Wikipedia, “Land Coastal Defence” and “Battle of Gdynia”).

Its commander from 23 July 1939 was Col. Stanisław Dąbek, a 47-year-old infantry officer from Nisko in Galicia. Dąbek had served as an Austrian officer in the First World War, been seriously wounded in the Carpathians and fought in Italy, then joined the Polish Army at the end of 1918 and fought against the Ukrainians and the Soviets. Between the wars he commanded the 7th Legions Infantry Regiment at Chełm and, from 1937, the 52nd Infantry Regiment at Złoczów (Wikipedia, “Stanisław Dąbek”). He had six weeks to prepare. He used them to dig and wire positions around Gdynia, organize volunteers and press for more guns, and he planned not a passive defense but a series of night raids and local counterattacks.

LOW’s orders were to hold Gdynia and Oksywie for eight to ten days, until a Polish counteroffensive could relieve it. That counteroffensive never came. By 5 September the German Fourth Army had destroyed most of the Polish forces in the Corridor in the battle of the Tuchola Forest, and German forces from Pomerania and East Prussia had joined hands (Chapter 3). From then on LOW was alone: a pocket on the coast with the sea at its back, no hope of reinforcement and supplies only of what was already in Gdynia’s warehouses (Wikipedia, “Land Coastal Defence”).

Gdynia, 1–14 September

The first German attack came from the south, out of the Sopot (Zoppot) area of the Free City, on the first day, and was thrown back by the 2nd Marine Rifle Regiment. Skirmishing along the Gdynia–Sopot boundary went on until 11 September. Meanwhile German forces from Pomerania, including the newly formed 207th Infantry Division, pushed into the Kashubian lake country west of the city, and there was heavy fighting near Kartuzy on 5 September (Wikipedia, “Battle of Gdynia”). Dąbek answered with raids. His troops attacked on the nights of 1–2 and 3–4 September, and again on 6–7 and 7–8 September, to keep the Germans off balance (Wikipedia, “Stanisław Dąbek”).

The main German offensive began on 8 September, with attacks from the west toward Wejherowo and from the north toward Puck. The German force was by then about 38,000 to 39,000 men by most counts, with over 300 guns and support from the Luftwaffe and from the guns of Schleswig-Holstein, which shelled Polish positions around Gdynia and Hel after Westerplatte surrendered on 7 September (Wikipedia, “Battle of Gdynia” and “Battle of Hel”). Its commander was Lt. Gen. Leonhard Kaupisch, an air force general who would become military governor of the region and lead the occupation of Denmark in April 1940. Puck fell on 9 September. On 10 September the Germans took Swarzewo and Władysławowo at the root of the Hel peninsula, cutting Hel off from the mainland, and moved on Reda and Rumia, the gaps in the hills west of Gdynia (hela.com.pl; Wikipedia, “Battle of Kępa Oksywska”).

Dąbek faced a choice. Gdynia lay in a low basin between the hills of Redłowo to the south and the Kępa Oksywska, the Oksywie heights, to the north. To defend the city itself would mean street fighting among tens of thousands of civilians, with German guns on the surrounding hills. The heights, by contrast, were a natural redoubt bounded by the sea, the harbor and the low valley of the Chylonka, with the naval port and its stores at their foot. On 10 September, by one account, he decided in principle to give up the city. On 11 and 12 September his troops fought a two-day battle around Mechlinki and a counterattack toward Zagórze and Reda, which failed. On 12 September he ordered the withdrawal from Gdynia to the Kępa (Wikipedia, “Battle of Gdynia” and “Stanisław Dąbek”).

The Germans entered Gdynia on 14 September. There was no battle for the city center. Its fate in German hands began at once. The Wehrmacht’s war diary recorded on 20 September that Hitler had ordered the civilian population of Gdynia cleared “as quickly as possible.” The city was renamed Gotenhafen. Between 12 and 26 October the German police expelled 12,271 people by order, and about 38,000 more left without waiting for the order; by December the population of the city district was less than half what it had been in June. Thousands more were deported in 1940, and the Germans settled about 2,800 ethnic Germans in their place (Wikipedia, “Expulsion of Poles from Gdańsk Pomerania,” citing Polish and German records). Teachers, officials, priests and community leaders arrested in Gdynia were among the victims of the mass shootings in the Piaśnica forest that autumn and winter, described in Chapter 9.

The Kosynierzy of Gdynia

One unit of the Gdynia defense became a legend, and the legend has outgrown the record. In the first week of September, Gdynia’s workers, many from the port and the shipyards and factories, volunteered to dig fortifications, and some wanted to fight. The army had no rifles to give them. The solution, as the story is usually told, was the weapon of the peasant insurgents of 1794 who had fought for Kościuszko at Racławice: the war scythe, a scythe blade straightened and mounted on a pole. Scythes were fitted to shafts in the workshops of the Żegluga Polska shipping line and in private workshops in the city, and workshops also forged steel spikes on long poles. The men who carried them were called the Kosynierzy Gdyńscy, the Gdynia scythemen (wielkahistoria.pl, citing Kosiarz, 1976, and Milewski’s memoir).

The details are disputed. One version, drawn from Edmund Kosiarz’s 1976 history of the defense of Gdynia, credits the idea to Kazimierz Rusinek, a socialist activist and reserve officer, who offered his volunteers to Dąbek on 8 September; recruitment opened on 10 September at 98 Morska Street; and the battalion grew to about 700 men in four companies, commanded by Lt. Col. Stanisław Wężyk. Another, from a 2006 account by Małgorzata Sokołowska for the city’s history portal, describes a single company of scythemen under 2nd Lt. Józef Kąkolewski, reported ready for combat to Dąbek on 8 September with 1 officer, 9 NCOs and 128 men, and says that Rusinek, who claimed after the war to have founded and led the unit, was not even a member (gdyniawsieci.pl). Rusinek became a prominent official in communist Poland, and his account was the one promoted there; postwar verification in 1946 called the men the “Red Scythemen.”

What remains after the arguments is a picture of a city that wanted to fight. Some accounts include scouts and students among the volunteers; the sources reviewed here name workers above all. The photograph below, of a father and son, Andrzej and Jan Skibiński, was published in Adam Bałaban’s Kosynierzy w świetle prawdy (“The Scythemen in the Light of Truth”), an émigré account published in New York in 1979.

The last stand on Kępa Oksywska

By 14 September Dąbek had about 9,000 to 10,000 men left on the Oksywie heights, with up to 140 heavy machine guns, 14 mortars and 23 guns, as well as many civilian refugees who had followed the troops out of Gdynia (Wikipedia, “Battle of Kępa Oksywska” and “Stanisław Dąbek”). The position was strong by nature but small and exposed. German artillery on the hills around Gdynia, Schleswig-Holstein in the gulf and the Luftwaffe above could reach every part of it, and there was nowhere to put the wounded out of range.

For five days the Germans closed in from the west and south, across the Chylonka valley. The Polish defenders counterattacked repeatedly. Wikipedia’s article on the battle speaks of more than a hundred engagements, a figure it cannot source, but every account describes heavy close fighting, short of food and ammunition, under constant bombardment. By the morning of 19 September the remaining Polish troops were penned into the northern edge of the heights above the sea, around the ravines of Babie Doły (Wikipedia, “Battle of Kępa Oksywska”; dzieje.pl).

On 19 September a final Polish counterattack failed. Dąbek, wounded, ordered the fighting to stop. He then shot himself, at Babie Doły, rather than go into captivity (Wikipedia, “Stanisław Dąbek” and “Battle of Gdynia”). The sources reviewed here do not give an exact hour, and the circumstances are known only from the recollections of survivors. Some of the Kępa’s defenders are said to have reached Hel across the bay to continue the fight there. The rest went into German captivity. A German photograph of the time, below, shows the ground the Germans called the Oxhöfter Kämpe.

The cost was high. Polish historians cited by the Polish Press Agency put the losses at Kępa Oksywska at 1,500 to 2,000 killed and 3,000 to 3,500 wounded (dzieje.pl, 2024); English-language summaries give about 2,000 killed and 3,000 wounded for LOW as a whole, roughly a third of its original strength, and estimate that LOW suffered about 95 percent of all Polish casualties on the coast (Wikipedia, “Land Coastal Defence”). The German losses are not known with any precision. A figure of about 3,000 German dead appears in some summaries, but it is not well sourced and should be treated with caution. The search for the fallen continues: in May 2023 the IPN’s search and identification office recovered the remains of an unknown soldier on the Kępa, buried with military honors at Kosakowo in September 2024 (dzieje.pl).

The Hel Fortified Region

Hel was the navy’s own fortress. The peninsula is a sandspit about 35 km long that curves southeast from the mainland at Władysławowo, enclosing the Bay of Puck. At its root it is only a few hundred meters wide; at its tip, by the town of Hel, it widens into a low wooded headland. In the 1930s the navy built a fortified region there, Rejon Umocniony Hel, with a naval harbor, coastal and anti-aircraft batteries, bunkers and a railway. In 1939 it was commanded by Cmdr. Włodzimierz Steyer (his rank, komandor, corresponds to a navy captain), with Unrug’s Fleet headquarters alongside him from 31 August (Wikipedia, “Battle of Hel”; hela.com.pl).

The garrison numbered about 2,800 to 3,000 men by most accounts (Wikipedia, “Battle of Hel”; Polska Zbrojna). Its infantry was the Hel battalion of the Border Protection Corps (KOP), 1,197 officers and men under Maj. Jan Wiśniewski, later reinforced to about 1,840 by sailors from the naval air station at Puck and others. The 2nd Naval Anti-Aircraft Artillery Division had about 1,000 men, with six 75 mm guns and eight 40 mm Bofors, and the coastal artillery division 162. Besides the Laskowski battery there were older batteries of 105 mm and 75 mm guns, and in September the navy added the guns salvaged from Gryf and Generał Haller and the crews of the sunken ships (Wikipedia, “Battle of Hel”; hela.com.pl).

The pride of the region was Battery No. 31, named in 1937 after Heliodor Laskowski, a naval officer who had died young in 1936. Its four 152.4 mm Bofors guns, ordered from Sweden in December 1933 and installed in 1935–36, were the heaviest coastal guns Poland had. Each fired a 47 kg shell at 920 m per second to a range of 22.4 to 26 km, depending on the shell, at up to six rounds a minute (Wikipedia, “Heliodor Laskowski’s Artillery Battery No. 31”). In 1939 the battery was commanded by Capt. Zbigniew Przybyszewski, aged 32. Its guns could reach across the gulf toward Danzig and the approaches to Gdynia, and they were the reason the German battleships kept their distance from Hel throughout September.

The peninsula’s land defense depended on its narrowness. Any German attack from the mainland had to come straight down the spit, past the fishing villages of Chałupy, Kuźnica and Jastarnia, along a front of a few hundred meters that a few bunkers and machine guns could cover. The bunkers at Jastarnia, a line of small concrete works built across the peninsula before the war, were the main barrier. After 10 September, when the Germans reached Władysławowo, the land front settled down for almost two weeks into a stalemate of patrols and shelling at Chałupy (hela.com.pl). The Fleet Command had a further idea for the narrow neck, described in the Engineer’s eye below.

Thirty-two days at Hel

Hel was attacked from the air from the first day. After the fleet was sunk on 3 September, the Luftwaffe kept bombing the harbor and the batteries, and after Westerplatte fell on 7 September Schleswig-Holstein turned her guns on Hel and on Redłowo near Gdynia, shelling until 13 September. On 19 September, during heavy bombardment, Steyer had the Hel lighthouse blown up so that German gunners could not use it as an aiming point. Schlesien joined the bombardment of Jastarnia and Hel from 21 September, and Schleswig-Holstein returned between 25 and 27 September (Wikipedia, “Battle of Hel”; hela.com.pl).

Those last days brought the only real duels between the Laskowski battery and the battleships. On 25 September the two old ships fired, by Polish count, 159 280 mm and 209 150 mm shells at the battery; it answered with more than 200 rounds and the ships withdrew behind smoke at 11:18. Polish accounts claim a hit on Schlesien that day. On 27 September, in a second duel, the battery hit Schleswig-Holstein on a starboard casemate, wounding 14 of her crew by the Polish count; the Wikipedia article describes the damage to the battleship as light (hela.com.pl; Wikipedia, “Battle of Hel”). Przybyszewski, wounded on the 25th, left the hospital against medical advice on the 28th and returned to his guns with his arm in a sling.

Hel had a famous neighbor that week. Hitler visited Danzig on 19 September and stayed at the Kasino Hotel in Sopot, across the gulf; Unrug’s biography records that he watched the bombardment of Hel from there on 20 September. A story often told in Poland says that Unrug forbade his gunners to fire on the hotel. It is not supported by any document (Wikipedia, “Józef Unrug”), and the hotel, about 23 km from the battery, was near the limit of its range in any case.

The end came because there was nothing left to wait for. Warsaw capitulated on 28 September and Modlin on 29 September (Chapter 6); the Red Army had occupied eastern Poland since 17 September (Chapter 8). On the night of 27–28 September Unrug received a telegram from Gen. Juliusz Rómmel in Warsaw. Ammunition and food were running low, and the Wikipedia account of the battle reports attempted mutinies on 29 and 30 September, which were put down. On 30 September the Germans broke into Chałupy and the torpedo barrier was blown. At 08:00 on 1 October Unrug radioed the German admiral commanding in the gulf to propose a cease-fire and negotiations (Polska Zbrojna; Wikipedia, “Battle of Hel”).

The Polish guns ceased firing at about 11:00 and the German side at about 16:00. Because every Polish naval vessel at Hel had been sunk, the two Polish negotiators were rowed out to a German fast boat in a fishing cutter. They were Cmdr. Marian Majewski, the Fleet chief of staff, and Capt. Antoni Kasztelan, the head of coastal counterintelligence, who served as interpreter. They signed the capitulation that evening at the Kasino Hotel in Sopot, the same hotel where Hitler had stayed (Polska Zbrojna; Wikipedia, “Józef Unrug”; hela.com.pl). During the night the garrison destroyed or sank its weapons and fire-control gear, threw two breechblocks of the Laskowski guns into the sea, burned codes and documents and released its prisoners. German troops entered Hel at about 10:00 to 11:00 on 2 October (accounts differ). About 3,600 men went into captivity, more than the original garrison because of the sailors, the men who had escaped from Oksywie and others who had reached Hel during the month.

The Orzeł in Tallinn

The most famous voyage of the Polish campaign began with a sick captain. Orzeł was the newest and largest boat in the fleet, built by De Schelde at Vlissingen in the Netherlands, launched in January 1938 and commissioned on 2 February 1939: 84 m long, 1,110 tons surfaced and 1,473 submerged, with 12 torpedo tubes, 20 torpedoes, a 105 mm deck gun and a crew of about 60 (Wikipedia, “ORP Orzeł”). She left Gdynia at 06:30 on 1 September for her Worek sector. After the attacks of 4 September she withdrew toward Gotland to repair damage, and her commander, Lt. Cdr. (komandor podporucznik) Henryk Kłoczkowski, fell ill. By 8 September he was seriously unwell. On 10 September he reported his illness to the Fleet commander, who advised landing him in a neutral port or approaching Hel, and Kłoczkowski chose Tallinn (Santi Odnaleźć Orła expedition timeline; Wikipedia, “Orzeł incident”).

Orzeł entered the roads of Tallinn, the capital of neutral Estonia, at about 21:30 on 14 September, leaking oil and with a compressor failure. Under the Hague Convention of 1907 a belligerent warship could stay in a neutral port for 24 hours. But a German merchant ship, the Thalatta, was in port, and the Estonians ruled that the Polish boat could not leave until 24 hours after her. On 15 September Kłoczkowski was taken to hospital, and that afternoon, under German pressure, the Estonian authorities declared the submarine and her crew interned. They took her logbook and charts. On 16 and 17 September they removed her guns’ breechblocks, ammunition and small arms and began hoisting out her torpedoes (Santi Odnaleźć Orła; Wikipedia, “Orzeł incident”).

Command passed to the first officer, Lt. Cdr. (kapitan marynarki) Jan Grudziński, aged 31. He and his officers decided to escape. The torpedo hoist cable parted before the Estonians had removed all the torpedoes, and the accounts agree that the crew had arranged it; between five and six torpedoes remained aboard, depending on the source. Boatswain Władysław Narkiewicz, posing as a fisherman, sounded the depth of the harbor exit (Wikipedia, “Orzeł incident” and “ORP Orzeł”).

The breakout came in the early hours of 18 September, about midnight by some accounts and about 03:00 by the expedition timeline compiled from the crew’s reports. The harbor lights failed, apparently with help from the crew. The two Estonian guards on board were overpowered without violence. The crew cut the telephone and electrical cables and the mooring lines, the latter with an axe, and started the engines. Estonian searchlights, machine guns and light artillery opened fire; the conning tower was hit, and the boat struck an obstacle at the harbor mouth and stuck. Grudziński blew the tanks, got her off and dived. She lay on the bottom of the Gulf of Finland until dark, then surfaced and headed west (Wikipedia, “Orzeł incident”; dailymare.com; Santi Odnaleźć Orła).

The boat had no charts. Her navigator, 2nd Lt. Marian Mokrski, drew charts of the Baltic and the Danish straits from memory, and the crew had a Swedish list of lighthouses. For about three weeks Orzeł patrolled the Baltic, hoping to find a German merchant ship to attack or to take charts from, and found none. On 21 September, near Gotland, the crew put the two Estonian guards ashore in a dinghy with food, clothing and, according to most accounts, 50 U.S. dollars each. German and Estonian propaganda had already reported that the Poles had murdered them (Wikipedia, “Orzeł incident”; Santi Odnaleźć Orła).

On 7 October Grudziński decided to try for Britain. The boat passed the Falsterbo light at the southern tip of Sweden on 8 October and slipped through the Drogden channel of the Øresund, the shallow and closely watched passage between Copenhagen and Malmö, partly on the surface at night, with Swedish and German patrols nearby. On 9 October she passed Helsingør and Helsingborg, on 10 October the Kattegat, on 11 October the Skagerrak. Her radio had been damaged at Tallinn and she could not identify herself. At 06:00 on 14 October, off the coast of Scotland, she transmitted a recognition signal and her position in English. About five hours later, some 30 nautical miles from the Isle of May, the destroyer HMS Valorous met her and led her into Rosyth (Santi Odnaleźć Orła; uboat.net, “Jan Grudziński”). She had been at sea for six weeks since leaving Gdynia.

The escape and Estonia

For Estonia the escape was a disaster. The day after, the commander of the Estonian naval forces, Capt. Valev Mere, and his chief of staff, Lt. Cdr. (kaptenmajor) Rudolf Linnuste, were dismissed. War Minister Paul Lill told a fellow minister that one foolish man could do great harm to the state (ERR, citing Küllo Arjakas and the diary of State Comptroller Karl Soonpää, 19 September 1939). At 13:00 on 19 September Foreign Minister Molotov summoned the Estonian envoy in Moscow, August Rei, accused the Estonian leadership of sympathy for Poland and announced that the Soviet navy would search for the submarine near Tallinn. The Soviet news agency TASS claimed that foreign submarines were hiding in Baltic ports with government help. Soviet warships left Kronstadt, and Soviet ships and aircraft began to violate Estonian waters and air space (ERR).

The pressure built for nine days. On 26 September the Soviets announced that the tanker Metallist had been sunk in Narva Bay, in Estonian waters, and blamed an unknown submarine, by implication the Polish one. No Polish submarine was anywhere near, and historians regard the incident as a Soviet provocation. On 28 September 1939, the same day Germany and the Soviet Union signed their Boundary and Friendship Treaty dividing Poland, Estonia signed a Mutual Assistance Pact allowing Soviet bases on its territory (Wikipedia, “Orzeł incident”). Lill resigned on 12 October in protest at the terms. In June 1940 the Red Army occupied the whole country. The Orzeł did not cause any of this; Stalin’s demands on the Baltic states followed from the secret protocol of the pact of 23 August. But the escape gave Moscow a pretext at exactly the moment it wanted one.

Wilk, Sęp, Ryś and Żbik

Only one other submarine reached Britain. Wilk laid her mines on 3 September, survived continuous depth-charge attacks on 4 and 5 September by lying on the bottom by day, and, after the order of 11 September, made for the Danish straits. On the night of 14–15 September she passed through the Øresund; German ships sighted her there, but by one account took her for a Swedish boat. She reached British waters on 20 September (Wikipedia, “ORP Wilk” and “Worek Plan”). It was the radio news of Wilk‘s welcome in Britain that, according to Wikipedia’s account of the escape, persuaded Orzeł‘s officers that they too could make it.

The other three boats were too damaged or too short of supplies. Sęp, still leaking from the depth charges of 2 September, appeared off Stockholm on 17 September and asked to enter port for repairs; when the Swedes made clear the work would take longer than international law allowed, her commander accepted internment. Ryś was interned on 18 September and Żbik, short of provisions, on 25 September (Wikipedia, “ORP Sęp” and “Worek Plan”). The Swedes kept all three, disarmed, until the end of the war. They were returned to Polish control in September 1945 and sailed home in October, to the navy of the new communist Poland.

Timeline

The coast and the navy, August–October 1939

1. 26 Aug 1939Unrug signs the Peking order; sealed envelopes go to the destroyer captains.
2. 30 Aug, 12:55Signal “Peking” hoisted at Oksywie; Błyskawica, Burza and Grom sail at about 14:15.
3. 31 AugUnrug moves the Fleet headquarters to Hel.
4. 1 Sep, 04:45Schleswig-Holstein opens fire on Westerplatte; dive-bombers strike Puck and Oksywie and sink Mazur.
5. 1 Sep, c. 18:00Gryf damaged and her captain killed; Operation Rurka canceled.
6. 1 Sep, 17:37The Peking destroyers tie up at Leith.
7. 3 Sep, c. 07:00Leberecht Maass and Wolfgang Zenker driven off from Hel; Maass hit.
8. 3 Sep, afternoonWicher and Gryf sunk by dive-bombers in Hel harbor.
9. 8 SepMain German offensive against Gdynia begins.
10. 10 SepGermans reach Władysławowo; Hel cut off by land; Kosynierzy recruited in Gdynia.
11. 12 SepDąbek orders the withdrawal from Gdynia to Kępa Oksywska.
12. 14 SepGermans enter Gdynia; Jaskółka and Czapla sunk at Jastarnia; Orzeł enters Tallinn about 21:30.
13. 15 SepOrzeł interned; Grudziński takes command.
14. 17 SepSęp interned in Sweden; the Red Army invades eastern Poland.
15. 18 Sep, nightOrzeł escapes from Tallinn.
16. 19 SepKępa Oksywska falls; Dąbek dies at Babie Doły.
17. 20 SepWilk reaches Britain.
18. 25 and 27 SepThe Laskowski battery duels with Schleswig-Holstein and Schlesien.
19. 28 SepEstonia signs the Mutual Assistance Pact with the USSR.
20. 30 Sep, c. 16:00Germans take Chałupy; the torpedo-warhead barrier is blown.
21. 1 OctCease-fire; capitulation signed in Sopot; M85 sunk by a Polish mine.
22. 2 OctGerman troops enter Hel.
23. 14 OctOrzeł reaches Rosyth.

Losses and uncertainty

The Land Coastal Defense. Estimates of LOW’s losses run from about 1,500 to 2,000 killed and 3,000 to 3,500 wounded (historians cited by PAP) to about 2,000 killed and 3,000 wounded, or about 5,000 casualties, a third of the force (Wikipedia). The Wikipedia article on Kępa Oksywska gives 2,000 killed and 7,000 wounded for that battle alone, a figure that would mean almost no Polish soldier there was unhurt, and its own footnote says the 2,000 includes men later used at Hel. The lower, Polish figures are more likely.

The German forces. The figure of about 38,000 to 39,000 German troops against the coast is widely repeated in Polish-derived summaries; it appears to count all the units that took part at one time or another rather than those present at any moment. German losses around Gdynia are not well documented. The “about 3,000 dead” sometimes quoted is not well sourced. At Hel, German army losses were a few dozen killed and wounded, plus four dead on Leberecht Maass and 24 on M85.

Hel. The garrison is given as about 2,800 (Wikipedia), about 3,000 (Polska Zbrojna) or, for the KOP battalion and attached sailors at peak, 1,843 men (hela.com.pl); prisoners as about 3,600. Polish killed are given as about 50 (Wikipedia, Polska Zbrojna) or about 80 (hela.com.pl). Claims of German aircraft shot down range from 15 to 53. The date of the torpedo-barrier demolition is given as 25 or 30 September; the 30th is better supported.

The ships. The time of the sinking of Wicher and Gryf on 3 September is given as about 13:00, 14:00 or 15:00; the hits on Leberecht Maass are credited to Gryf, the shore battery or both. Gryf‘s dead on 1 September are given as 22 by one account, while another puts 22 casualties on Mewa. For Orzeł, the escape is put at about midnight or about 03:00 on 18 September; the torpedoes left aboard at five or six; and her last patrol is counted as her sixth or seventh. The date of Operation Peking is 30 August in Polish sources and 29 August in some English ones.

What happened afterward

The ships that got away fought for six more years. Grom was lost off Narvik on 4 May 1940. Błyskawica served at Dunkirk, in the Mediterranean and in the battle off Ushant on the night of 8–9 June 1944, and came home to Gdynia in July 1947. Burza became an Atlantic convoy escort, and that is where the Polish destroyer met the U.S. Coast Guard. On 22 February 1943, during the long battle around the westbound convoy ON 166 in the North Atlantic, the cutter USCGC Campbell and Burza sank U-606; in the action Campbell collided with the surfaced submarine. Of U-606’s crew, 36 died and 11 were rescued (uboat.net, “U-606”). It was a shared American and Polish victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.

The men left behind had harder fates. The coast’s defenders went into German captivity; many of the Gdynia reservists and officers were later caught up in the occupation’s terror. Capt. Przybyszewski, the Laskowski battery’s commander, returned to Poland from the prisoner-of-war camps, served in the postwar navy and was arrested by military counterintelligence in 1952, tortured and executed after a fabricated trial; he was rehabilitated in 1956 (hela.com.pl). Orzeł‘s first captain, Kłoczkowski, reached Britain in 1942, was tried by a Polish naval court in June 1942 for leaving his ship and was reduced to the ranks and dismissed. He emigrated to the United States and died in Portsmouth, Virginia, on 1 October 1962 (uboat.net).

Unrug spent the war in German camps and the rest of his life in exile. In captivity at Colditz, the castle prison for persistent escapers and “dangerous” officers, he and Gen. Tadeusz Piskor led the Polish prisoners. Dąbek’s body was exhumed from Babie Doły in October 1946 and reburied at the Cemetery of the Defenders of the Coast in Redłowo. Unrug came home last of all, in 2018, buried at the naval cemetery at Oksywie on the 79th anniversary of the surrender of Hel.

Walking the ground today

The coast of 1939 is easy to visit from Gdańsk, which today has an international airport with flights from much of Europe. In Gdynia, the destroyer Błyskawica, a museum ship since May 1976 and the oldest preserved destroyer in the world, lies at the Southern Pier near the sailing ship Dar Pomorza. The Naval Museum (Muzeum Marynarki Wojennej) nearby shows one of the original Laskowski 152 mm guns in its open-air display; another is at the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw (Wikipedia, “ORP Błyskawica” and “Heliodor Laskowski’s Artillery Battery No. 31”). In the Redłowo district, the Cemetery of the Defenders of the Coast holds Dąbek’s grave, and at Oksywie, on the heights above the naval port, the naval cemetery holds Unrug’s. The plaque at Babie Doły where Dąbek died stands inside a naval air base and is not open to the public.

On the Hel peninsula, a train or the summer ferry from Gdynia takes you to the town of Hel. The Coastal Defense Museum (Muzeum Obrony Wybrzeża) has restored Position No. 4 of the Laskowski battery, opened to the public in 2008, and since 2014 the duel of September 1939 has been reenacted there each autumn (Wikipedia, “Heliodor Laskowski’s Artillery Battery No. 31”). The bunkers at Jastarnia, the memorial stone at the site of the torpedo-warhead barrier beyond Chałupy and the rebuilt lighthouse at Hel complete the tour. In Tallinn, the harbor from which Orzeł escaped is now the city’s busy passenger and cargo port.

Questions readers ask

Did the Polish Navy run away in 1939?

Three destroyers left for Britain on 30 August under Operation Peking, on orders from the Polish high command and at British urging. Every other warship stayed and fought; the destroyer and minelayer at Hel were sunk on 3 September, and the sailors went on fighting ashore at Hel until 2 October. The evacuated destroyers fought for the rest of the war with the Allies.

How did the Orzeł navigate without charts?

The Estonians had taken her charts, so her navigator, 2nd Lt. Marian Mokrski, drew charts of the Baltic and the Danish straits from memory, and the crew used a Swedish list of lighthouses to fix their position along the coasts. She passed the Øresund through the shallow Drogden channel at night and reached Scotland on 14 October 1939.

Did the Orzeł kill the Estonian guards?

No. German and Estonian newspapers suggested it at the time, but the crew put the two guards ashore near Gotland on 21 September with food, clothing and money. The claim that the Orzeł sank the Soviet tanker Metallist on 26 September is also false; it served as a Soviet pretext for pressure on Estonia.

Why did Hel hold out so long?

Geography and guns. The peninsula is so narrow that a land attack had to come down a front of a few hundred meters, covered by bunkers at Jastarnia, and the Laskowski battery’s 152 mm guns kept the German battleships at a distance. The Germans also had little reason to pay a high price for a position that would fall once the rest of Poland did. It surrendered on 1–2 October, after Warsaw and Modlin.

Did the scythemen really charge with scythes?

Some did carry scythes and pikes into action, near Łężyce west of Gdynia around 10–11 September, and took losses. They replaced them with captured rifles within days. Accounts of mass scythe charges defeating German troops come from later, often politically shaped retellings.

How it connects

The coast’s war began at Westerplatte and the Polish Post Office in Danzig, told in Chapter 2, and it was decided by the battles in the Corridor and the Tuchola Forest in Chapter 3, which cut the coast off from the rest of Poland by 5 September. The dive-bombers that sank the fleet belonged to the air war described in Chapter 4. Hel’s surrender followed the fall of Warsaw and Modlin in Chapter 6 and came in the same days as the last battles in Chapter 8, which also tells how the Soviet invasion of 17 September sealed Poland’s fate. The expulsions from Gdynia, the murders at Piaśnica and the Polish Navy’s war in exile are part of Chapter 9. The convoy war in which Burza and Błyskawica later served is part of this site’s World War II collections.

Sources

• General histories and further reading: Michael Alfred Peszke, Poland’s Navy, 1918–1945 (Hippocrene, 1999); Steven J. Zaloga, Poland 1939: The Birth of Blitzkrieg (Osprey, 2002); Roger Moorhouse, Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic Books, 2020; UK title First to Fight); Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed (Allen Lane / Harvard, 2012).
• Polish works cited through secondary sources: Edmund Kosiarz, Obrona Gdyni 1939 (1976); Apoloniusz Zawilski, Bitwy polskiego września (1972; 1989 ed.); Tomasz Miegń and Aleksander Goska, Gdynia i Kępa Oksywska 1939 (Fundacja Historia i Kultura, 2021); Rafał Witkowski, Ostatnia reduta (1973); Jerzy Pertek, Wielkie dni małej floty (1976); Adam Bałaban, Kosynierzy w świetle prawdy (New York, 1979).
• Andrzej Łydka, “Peking, czyli marynarze szykują się na wojnę” and “Ostatni polski bastion”, Polska Zbrojna (Polish Ministry of National Defense magazine), in Polish.
• Polish Press Agency / dzieje.pl, report on the IPN recovery and burial of an unknown defender of Kępa Oksywska (18 September 2024), in Polish; for Dąbek’s career, the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) also publishes a biography in its Bohaterowie Niepodległej series.
• WielkaHistoria.pl, “Kosynierzy gdyńscy. Czy polscy robotnicy naprawdę szarżowali z kosami na Niemców?”; Małgorzata Sokołowska, “Gdyńscy Kosynierzy”, Gdynia w sieci (2006), both in Polish.
• Helska Tawerna local history site: “Hel – Kampania Wrześniowa 1939” and “Bateria H. Laskowskiego w Helu”; Helska Bliza (Friends of Hel), article on the 1939 torpedo-warhead barrier and the “island” myth, in Polish.
• Santi Odnaleźć Orła (search expedition for ORP Orzeł), “Time line”, compiled from the crew’s reports; ERR (Estonian Public Broadcasting), “Karl Soonpää päevik 19. septembril 1939. aastal”, with commentary by Küllo Arjakas, in Estonian.
• uboat.net: ORP Wicher, ORP Gryf, Jan Grudziński, Henryk Kłoczkowski, U-606; navypedia.org, General Haller-class gunboats.
• Wikipedia: “Peking Plan”, “Worek Plan”, “Battle of Danzig Bay”, “Battle of Gdynia”, “Battle of Kępa Oksywska”, “Land Coastal Defence”, “Battle of Hel”, “Heliodor Laskowski’s Artillery Battery No. 31”, “Orzeł incident”, “Polish Navy order of battle in 1939”, “List of shipwrecks in September 1939”, “Expulsion of Poles from Gdańsk Pomerania”; ship articles on ORP Błyskawica, Grom, Burza, Wicher, Gryf, Orzeł, Wilk and Sęp; biographies of Józef Unrug, Stanisław Dąbek, Jan Grudziński, Leonhard Kaupisch and Paul Lill.

Photographs: Polish prewar and wartime photographs from the Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (including work by Witold Pikiel), the Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, the Coastal Defense Museum at Hel and Polish books of 1973–1988; German wartime photographs from the National Library of Poland (Polona). All public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.