The invasion of Poland was won or lost, in its essentials, in the first six days. Between dawn on 1 September and the night of 6–7 September 1939, German armies attacking from Pomerania, East Prussia, Silesia, Moravia and Slovakia met a Polish army deployed forward along almost the whole of a very long frontier. The Poles fought hard at Mokra, Mława, Węgierska Górka and in the hills around Jordanów, and in places held for days; but the Corridor was cut, the Silesian front was given up, the panzers broke through at Piotrków, and Kraków was abandoned. This chapter follows those frontier battles, the bombing of Wieluń, the cavalry action at Krojanty and the myth that grew from it, and the killings at Bydgoszcz and the reprisals that followed.
Invasion of Poland · Chapter 3 of 9
- Dates
- 1–7 September 1939, from the first German attacks at dawn on 1 September to Marshal Rydz-Śmigły’s decision of 6 September to withdraw behind the Vistula and his departure from Warsaw on 7 September
- Where
- The Polish frontier with Germany, East Prussia and Slovakia: the Corridor and the Tuchola Forest (Bory Tucholskie), Chojnice and Krojanty, Bydgoszcz, Grudziądz, the Mazovian plain north of Warsaw at Mława, the Warta and the approaches to Łódź, Wieluń, Mokra near Częstochowa, Piotrków Trybunalski, Polish Upper Silesia and Katowice, and the Beskid mountains at Węgierska Górka and Jordanów
- Polish forces
- Seven armies and an operational group deployed forward under Plan West (Plan “Zachód”): Modlin, Pomorze, Poznań, Łódź, Kraków and Karpaty, with Army Prusy in reserve and the Narew Operational Group on the East Prussian front. In all, 39 infantry divisions and 16 brigades, about 900,000 to 1 million men under arms, many still mobilizing
- German forces
- Army Group North (Bock: Third and Fourth Armies) and Army Group South (Rundstedt: Eighth, Tenth and Fourteenth Armies), with a Slovak field army: about 60 divisions and nearly 1.5 million men, with about 2,500–2,700 tanks
- Leaders
- Polish: Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły (commander in chief); army commanders Bortnowski, Krukowicz-Przedrzymirski, Kutrzeba, Rómmel, Szylling, Fabrycy, Dąb-Biernacki. German: Brauchitsch and Halder (army high command); Bock, Rundstedt; Küchler, Kluge, Blaskowitz, Reichenau, List; Guderian (XIX Corps)
- Outcome
- The border battles cost the Germans heavily in places but did not stop them. By 6 September the Corridor was in German hands, Upper Silesia and Kraków had been given up, the Tenth Army’s armor had broken through toward Warsaw, and the Polish high command ordered a general withdrawal to the line of the Vistula, Narew and San
Why it mattered
Most Americans who know anything about September 1939 know two images: German tanks pouring across an open plain, and Polish cavalrymen charging those tanks with lances. The first is roughly right. The second is a myth, born on the evening of the first day near a Pomeranian village called Krojanty and spread by German propaganda, an Italian newspaper and, for decades afterward, by writers in Britain and the United States who should have known better. Between those two images lies the real story of the frontier battles: a Polish army that was outnumbered, outgunned and badly placed, but that fought far more effectively and more stubbornly than the legend allows.
The first week decided the shape of the campaign. Poland’s plan was to fight on the frontier to protect its western industry and its mobilization, then fall back on prepared river lines while Britain and France attacked Germany in the west. The Germans planned to break the frontier armies in a few days and encircle what was left west of the Vistula. By the night of 6 September the first half of the German plan had largely worked. The Polish armies had not been destroyed, but almost everywhere they were retreating, and the line they now hoped to hold ran through the heart of the country, not along its borders.
The first week also set the moral character of the war. The bombing of the undefended market town of Wieluń at dawn on 1 September, the shooting of Silesian insurgents and scouts at Katowice, and the hostage executions in Bydgoszcz after the town fell on 5 September were early signs that this would not be a war fought only between soldiers. On the other side, the killing of ethnic German civilians in Bydgoszcz on 3 and 4 September gave Joseph Goebbels a story that Nazi propaganda would inflate, multiply and use to justify far greater crimes. Telling those events accurately, with the numbers historians have actually established, is part of the work of this chapter.
Case White and Plan West
Hitler’s directive for Case White (Fall Weiss), the attack on Poland, was issued in April 1939, and the army high command under Col. Gen. Walther von Brauchitsch and Gen. Franz Halder drew up the plan (see Chapter 1). It used geography to the full. Since March 1939, with Bohemia and Moravia occupied and Slovakia a German client state, German territory wrapped around Poland on three sides, and a frontier that ran for well over 2,000 km could be attacked from almost any direction.
Two army groups would converge on Warsaw. Army Group North (Col. Gen. Fedor von Bock) would cut the Polish Corridor, the strip of Polish territory between Germany and East Prussia, with the Fourth Army (Gen. Günther von Kluge) attacking from Pomerania, while the Third Army (Gen. Georg von Küchler) struck south from East Prussia toward the Narew and Warsaw. Army Group South (Col. Gen. Gerd von Rundstedt) was the stronger: its Eighth Army (Gen. Johannes Blaskowitz) would advance on Łódź, its Tenth Army (Gen. Walter von Reichenau), with most of the armor, would drive from Upper Silesia straight for Warsaw, and its Fourteenth Army (Gen. Wilhelm List) would attack from Upper Silesia, Moravia and Slovakia toward Kraków and the San. A Slovak field army of three divisions, “Bernolák,” under Gen. Ferdinand Čatloš, joined from the south (Zaloga; Forczyk).
The German army was not the all-mechanized force of legend. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum summarizes it as 60 divisions and nearly 1.5 million men with more than 2,000 tanks (USHMM). Most of the infantry walked and its supplies moved by horse. The striking power lay in six panzer divisions, four light divisions, four motorized divisions and the improvised Panzer Division Kempf, concentrated at a few decisive points, and in the Luftwaffe. More than three-quarters of the tanks were light Panzer Is and IIs; the Panzer IIIs and IVs numbered fewer than 300 (Panzerworld, after Jentz).
Poland’s answer was Plan West (Plan “Zachód”), drafted by the General Staff from March 1939. Its central decision, and its most criticized one, was to fight forward. Polish Upper Silesia, the Łódź textile region and the Corridor were too valuable, economically and politically, to give up without a battle; Polish planners also feared that if the army withdrew to the river lines, Germany might seize the border regions and then offer peace, leaving the Western allies with no reason to fight. So the Polish armies stood close to the frontier, intending to fight a delaying battle, protect mobilization and then fall back on the Vistula and San while France attacked in the west (Kochanski; Zaloga).
From north to south, the Polish deployment ran as follows. Facing East Prussia, Army Modlin (Gen. Emil Krukowicz-Przedrzymirski) held the Mława position, with the Narew Operational Group (Gen. Czesław Młot-Fijałkowski) on its right. Army Pomorze (Gen. Władysław Bortnowski) held the Corridor from the Tuchola Forest to Bydgoszcz, Toruń and Grudziądz; the coast had a separate command. Army Poznań (Gen. Tadeusz Kutrzeba) held the western salient, Army Łódź (Gen. Juliusz Rómmel) the Warta in front of Łódź and Wieluń, Army Kraków (Gen. Antoni Szylling) Upper Silesia and the approaches to Kraków, and Army Karpaty (Gen. Kazimierz Fabrycy) the mountain frontier with Slovakia. The reserve Army Prusy (Gen. Stefan Dąb-Biernacki) was still assembling around Piotrków and Tomaszów Mazowiecki. The commander in chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, was in Warsaw.
On paper Poland had 39 infantry divisions, 11 cavalry brigades, three mountain brigades, the 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade and an armored-motorized brigade forming in Warsaw. But mobilization, ordered on 29 August, had been cancelled the same day at British and French urging and reissued for 31 August, and on 1 September many units were still on trains. Estimates of the men under arms range from about 900,000 to 1 million (Wikipedia, citing Polish official figures). Polish armor amounted to some 210 light tanks, mostly the good 7TP, and about 670 TK-3 and TKS tankettes, small two-man machine-gun carriers.
Tanks on 1 September 1939
German tanks fielded for the invasion, by type, and Polish tanks and tankettes in service
The cavalry deserves a word, because it is so misunderstood. A Polish cavalry brigade of 1939 was mobile infantry that rode to battle and fought on foot, with 37 mm Bofors anti-tank guns, 75 mm horse artillery, machine guns, tankettes and the excellent wz. 35 anti-tank rifle, a weapon so secret that it was issued in sealed crates. Its men carried sabers and still trained for the mounted charge, but used it only against infantry or cavalry caught in the open.
Dawn, 1 September: the frontier and Wieluń
The war began, in the official German account, at 04:45, when the old battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish depot at Westerplatte in Danzig (Gdańsk), the subject of Chapter 2. In fact the first bombs had already fallen. At about 04:34 Ju 87 dive bombers attacked the approaches to the Vistula bridges at Tczew, trying to stop Polish sappers from blowing them, and within minutes, by the usual Polish reckoning, other Stukas were over Wieluń, a market town of about 16,000 people some 20 km from the German border in the Łódź region (Zaloga; dzieje.pl). Along the whole frontier German infantry, engineers and armor crossed between about 04:45 and 05:00, often after a short artillery bombardment, frequently in fog. Propaganda photographers were with them, and some of the best-known photographs of the morning, German soldiers tearing down a Polish frontier barrier, were posed for the camera.
Wieluń had no military significance worth the name. The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which investigated the bombing and published its findings in 2004, found no Polish military units in or near the town on 1 September or the day before (Wikipedia, “Bombing of Wieluń,” citing IPN). Nevertheless the town was attacked by Ju 87B dive bombers of I. Gruppe of Stukageschwader 76 under Hauptmann Walter Sigel, flying from Nieder-Ellguth in German Silesia. The first wave of 29 aircraft dropped 29 bombs of 500 kg and 112 of 50 kg. More waves followed during the day, including aircraft of StG 2 under Maj. Oskar Dinort and some 60 Ju 87s of StG 77 around 14:00. Over the day about 380 bombs, roughly 46 tonnes, fell on the town (Wikipedia, citing Trenkner, Bębnik and Piątkowski; dzieje.pl).
Among the first buildings hit was the All Saints Hospital (Szpital Wszystkich Świętych), which carried a Red Cross marking on its roof. Thirty-two people were killed there, 26 of them patients; survivors later said that patients escaping from the burning building were machine-gunned from the air. The Gothic parish church, the synagogue and much of the old town were destroyed. About 70 percent of the town’s buildings, and about 90 percent of the center, were wrecked, by the estimate of the principal modern study; others give 75 percent (Wikipedia, “Bombing of Wieluń”).
Two things about Wieluń are genuinely disputed. The first is the time. Most Polish accounts give 04:40, an average of eyewitness statements collected after the war; some witnesses recalled bombs as early as 04:30. German flight records give take-off at 05:02, the attack at 05:40 and landing at 06:05. Joachim Trenkner and some Polish historians explained the gap by a difference between German and Polish clocks, but Grzegorz Bębnik of the IPN, and the IPN investigation itself, found no such difference and concluded that the attack came at 05:40. Bębnik suggests that eyewitnesses interviewed in 1961 may have been influenced by a memorial plaque that already gave 04:40 (Wikipedia, citing Bębnik and IPN 2004; dzieje.pl). If the later time is right, Wieluń was not “the first act of the Second World War”; but it remains one of the first, and the hour does not change what happened.
The second dispute is the death toll, compared in the chart below. The IPN concluded that “several hundred” people were probably killed, of whom only 127 could be identified beyond doubt; the often-quoted figure of about 1,200 probably covers the whole of Wieluń County (Wikipedia, citing IPN and Piątkowski). Historians also differ on intent. Timothy Snyder and others see the population as the target; Rolf-Dieter Müller points to poor visibility and faulty intelligence, since some crews reported cavalry nearby; Jochen Böhler and Hans-Erich Volkmann see a test of Stuka tactics against a target that could not fight back, and Volkmann still calls it a war crime. West German prosecutors closed the case in 1978 and 1983, accepting the pilots’ claim that fog hid the hospital.
How many died at Wieluń?
Published estimates of the dead in the bombing of 1 September 1939. The IPN’s own conclusion was “several hundred,” of whom 127 were identified beyond doubt
Wieluń has an American footnote. At about 3 a.m. Washington time on 1 September, a call from Ambassador William C. Bullitt in Paris, relaying news from Ambassador Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr. in Warsaw, woke President Roosevelt with word that Germany was bombing Polish cities (National Archives). That day Roosevelt appealed to Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Poland not to bomb civilians or unfortified cities. Germany replied, through The Hague, that it would limit air attacks to military objectives if Poland did the same; Foreign Minister Józef Beck agreed at once, noting that German bombs had already fallen on open towns (FRUS 1939, vol. I, doc. 574). On 3 September a German bomber dropped six heavy bombs on the diplomatic villas at Konstancin outside Warsaw, damaging Biddle’s own residence; Biddle reported that the manner of the attack “leads to the belief that bombing of villas was deliberate” (FRUS 1939, vol. I, doc. 577).
the ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population
Mokra: cavalry against the panzers
About 40 km southeast of Wieluń, north of Kłobuck and northwest of Częstochowa, the right wing of Army Łódź was held by the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade (Wołyńska Brygada Kawalerii) under Col. Julian Filipowicz. Its sector lay squarely across the path of the German Tenth Army’s main thrust. Facing it was the 4th Panzer Division under Gen. Georg-Hans Reinhardt, part of Gen. Erich Hoepner’s XVI Corps, with the 1st Panzer Division on its right. The brigade had dug in around the villages of Mokra, Wilkowiecko and Izbiska, with its regiments in line along a railway embankment and in woods and farmsteads, its anti-tank guns placed to fire into the flanks of anything crossing the open fields.
The fighting began early. German motorcycle reconnaissance troops made contact at about 06:30, and from 08:00 the Germans attacked the 19th Uhlans and then, around 10:00, the brigade’s northern flank. The Poles fought dismounted. The 37 mm Bofors guns and the wz. 35 anti-tank rifles were deadly against the thin armor of the Panzer I and II at the ranges of a farm field, and the brigade’s 75 mm horse artillery fired over open sights. The Polish armored train no. 53, Śmiały (“Bold”), ran up and down the railway through the battlefield and at one point stopped in the middle of a German column, firing its two 75 mm guns and its machine guns at point-blank range; later it engaged German tanks from about 2.5 km, beyond the effective range of their guns. In the afternoon the Germans made a frontal assault with what Polish accounts describe as nearly 180 tanks from the direction of Wilkowiecko, and broke into Mokra itself, but by about 17:00 the attack had been beaten off (Wikipedia, “Battle of Mokra,” citing the Sikorski Institute and Neumann).
Some uhlans did mount and ride across the fields during the day, to change position rather than to attack tanks, but most of the work was done by the guns. Losses are uncertain. Figures compiled by the Sikorski Institute’s official history and by Joachim Neumann’s history of the 4th Panzer Division put the division’s losses at about 800 men and between 100 and 160 armored vehicles, including at least 50 tanks, many later recovered. The Volhynian Brigade lost about 500 men killed and wounded and some 300 horses (Wikipedia, “Battle of Mokra”). Overnight, learning that the 1st Panzer Division had taken Kłobuck on his flank, Filipowicz pulled the brigade back about 12 km.
Mokra did not change the course of the campaign. Its importance was in what it showed. Well-handled Polish troops with modern anti-tank weapons could stop German armor, and the panzer divisions of 1939, built around light tanks, were vulnerable. The difficulty was that the Polish army had too few such weapons, too little artillery and almost no reserves to exploit a success. North of the Volhynian Brigade, the Germans found the seams between Polish formations. By 2 September the Kraków Cavalry Brigade on Army Kraków’s right had fallen back, and on 3 September the Polish 7th Infantry Division near Częstochowa was surrounded at Janów and destroyed; its commander, Gen. Janusz Gąsiorowski, was captured (Wikipedia, “Kraków Army”). Through that gap the Tenth Army’s armor drove toward Radomsko and Piotrków.
Mława: the fortified line north of Warsaw
The shortest road from East Prussia to Warsaw runs south through Mława, about 120 km from the capital. Polish planners knew it, and from the spring of 1939 Army Modlin built a fortified position across that road, on a ridge north of the town, between the marshy valley of the Mławka and the villages to the east. It was the only Polish frontier position of the campaign built on anything like a system of permanent fortifications. Plans called for 68 concrete bunkers in the western sector and 25 in the eastern, with trenches, wire and a deep anti-tank ditch, but many of the bunkers were unfinished in September (Wikipedia, “Battle of Mława”).
The position was held by the 20th Infantry Division under Col. Wilhelm Liszka-Lawicz, with the Mazovian Cavalry Brigade (Col. Jan Karcz) on the eastern flank and the 8th Infantry Division in reserve. Against it came the German Third Army: I Corps, with Panzer Division Kempf, an improvised formation built around the 7th Panzer Regiment and the SS regiment “Deutschland,” and the 11th and 61st Infantry Divisions, attacking from the north; and the “Wodrig” Corps, with the 1st and 12th Infantry Divisions and the 1st Cavalry Brigade, swinging around the eastern flank (Wikipedia, “Battle of Mława”). On 1 September the Kempf division’s tanks ran into the anti-tank ditch, about 6 m wide, and into the Polish anti-tank guns behind it, and the attack failed with heavy losses; the SS infantry, attacking across open ground, fared no better. The Germans attacked again on 2 and 3 September and again were held at the main position.
Mława fell to the flank. East of the fortifications the Wodrig Corps pushed back the Mazovian Cavalry Brigade near Chorzele and broke through the 79th Infantry Regiment late on 3 September. The Polish 8th Infantry Division, sent forward to counterattack, was caught in the confusion of a night march and broken up. With Germans moving into his rear, Krukowicz-Przedrzymirski ordered the 20th Division out, and it withdrew early on 4 September toward Modlin (Wikipedia, “Battle of Mława”). Polish accounts put German losses at about 1,800 killed and 72 tanks destroyed and Polish losses at about 1,200 killed; neither figure has been confirmed against German records. The retreat opened the road to the Narew, where the story continues in Chapter 5.
The Corridor and the Tuchola Forest
The Polish Corridor was a political necessity and a military trap. It gave Poland its access to the sea at Gdynia and contained a large Polish population, so it had to be defended. But it was a strip of land about 30 to 90 km wide, with Germany on one side and East Prussia on the other, and any force inside it could be cut off by attacks from both directions at once. Gen. Władysław Bortnowski, commander of Army Pomorze, opposed placing large forces in the Corridor; he was overruled (Wikipedia, “Battle of Tuchola Forest”). In the northern Corridor stood the Czersk Operational Group under Gen. Stanisław Grzmot-Skotnicki, including the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade (Col. Adam Zakrzewski), with the 9th Infantry Division (Col. Józef Werobej) and the 27th Infantry Division (Gen. Juliusz Drapella) around and south of the Tuchola Forest, the great pine woods of the Bory Tucholskie. The 15th Infantry Division held Bydgoszcz; the 4th and 16th Divisions of Gen. Mikołaj Bołtuć’s Operational Group East faced East Prussia around Toruń and Grudziądz.
Against this the Fourth Army threw its main armored force, Gen. Heinz Guderian’s XIX Corps, with the 3rd Panzer Division and the 2nd and 20th Motorized Infantry Divisions, supported by II Corps (Gen. Adolf Strauss) and III Corps. Guderian had a personal connection to the ground. He had been born in 1888 in Kulm (Chełmno), on the Vistula at the southern edge of the Corridor, and in his memoirs he recalled that the fighting passed the estate of Gross Klonia (Wielka Klonia), which had once belonged to his family. His orders were to drive east across the Corridor to the Vistula, then turn north and east to cover the Third Army.
The 3rd Panzer Division crossed the Brda on 1 September, its motorcyclists paddling over in rubber boats, and pushed into the forest. The Polish 9th Division and the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade counterattacked on 2 September, but the armor was already through, and by 3 September German divisions had reached the Vistula near Świecie and closed a ring around the Polish forces in the forest (Wikipedia, “XIX Army Corps”). The 9th and 27th Divisions and the Czersk group fought two more days to break out; some units reached Bydgoszcz and Toruń, many did not. By the end of 3 September the Germans counted about 4,000 prisoners. Polish losses in the Tuchola fighting are given as about 1,600 killed and 750 wounded, plus the captured, and German losses as 506 killed and 743 wounded (Wikipedia, “Battle of Tuchola Forest”). Grudziądz, farther east, was abandoned on 3 September.
On 5 September Hitler, traveling in his special train with Heinrich Himmler and the commander of his escort, Erwin Rommel, visited Guderian’s corps on the Corridor battlefield. He asked about losses. Guderian told him that his four divisions had lost 150 killed and 700 wounded, and Hitler, who remembered the casualty lists of the First World War, was astonished at how low the figures were (Guderian, Panzer Leader; Wikipedia, “XIX Army Corps”). The Corridor was in German hands. Army Pomorze had lost much of its northern wing, and its surviving divisions were falling back southeast along the Vistula toward Toruń and Kutno, where they would join Army Poznań for the Battle of the Bzura (Chapter 6). The Polish forces on the coast at Gdynia, Oksywie and Hel were now cut off; their story is in Chapter 7.
Krojanty, the evening of 1 September
The action that produced the most famous myth of the campaign took place on the western edge of the Corridor, near Chojnice, on the evening of the first day. Chojnice lay just inside Poland, on the railway from Germany to the Corridor, and it was defended by part of the Czersk group, including the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans (18 Pułk Ułanów Pomorskich), a regiment from Grudziądz commanded by Col. Kazimierz Mastalerz. The Germans attacked at about 05:00, and through the day the uhlans and the infantry beside them were forced back by the 20th Motorized Infantry Division under Lt. Gen. Mauritz von Wiktorin (Wikipedia, “18th Pomeranian Uhlan Regiment”).
Late in the afternoon the Polish command ordered a counterattack to slow the German advance and cover the withdrawal of the 1st Rifle Battalion and the rest of the Czersk group. Near Krojanty, a few miles northeast of Chojnice, Polish patrols found a battalion of the German 76th Infantry Regiment (Col. Hans Gollnick) halted in a clearing at the edge of the woods. The regiment’s 1st and 2nd Squadrons, about 250 men, mounted and charged at about 19:00. The surprise was complete. The German infantry, caught in the open by mounted men with drawn sabers, broke and scattered (Wikipedia, “Charge at Krojanty”).
Then German armored reconnaissance vehicles, probably of the 20th Motorized Division’s reconnaissance battalion, came out of the trees and opened fire with machine guns and 20 mm cannon. The uhlans had nowhere to go but back across the open field. Rotmistrz (Cavalry Captain) Eugeniusz Świeściak, commanding the 1st Squadron, was killed, and Mastalerz, who rode forward to rescue him, was killed beside him. Polish losses are given as 19 to 25 killed and 40 to 50 wounded, about a third of the force; German losses as 11 killed and 9 wounded (Wikipedia, “Charge at Krojanty”). The survivors regrouped, and the German advance was held up for several hours. Guderian’s memoirs describe a moment of real alarm at his headquarters that evening, with staff officers in steel helmets and an anti-tank gun brought up against a cavalry attack that never came.
The next day, 2 September, German war correspondents and two Italian journalists were taken to the field. They saw dead uhlans and horses and, by then, German tanks that had arrived after the fight, and they put the pieces together in the way that suited them. The Italian journalist Indro Montanelli wrote a dispatch describing Polish cavalry charging German tanks with sabers and lances. German propaganda took up the image with enthusiasm. The magazine Die Wehrmacht reported the “charge” on 13 September, and the story appeared in Hitler Youth publications and in newsreels as evidence of Polish backwardness and folly (Wikipedia, “Charge at Krojanty”; The Second World War, “Charge at Krojanty”). Guderian himself repeated it in his memoirs, writing that the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade, “in ignorance of the nature of our tanks, had charged them with swords and lances” (quoted in Citino, HistoryNet).
On the first day of the war, Polish cavalry armed with lances and sabers charged German tanks, believing them to be made of cardboard or simply not understanding what a tank was, and were massacred. The story was told as a parable of Polish courage and backwardness alike.
At Krojanty on the evening of 1 September about 250 men of the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans charged a German infantry battalion caught in the open and scattered it. German armored cars then drove them off; about 20 uhlans and their colonel were killed. No tanks were present during the charge. Correspondents brought to the field the next day saw dead horses and German tanks that had arrived afterward. When Polish cavalry fought tanks, as at Mokra, it did so dismounted, with anti-tank guns and rifles (Wikipedia, “Charge at Krojanty”; Citino, HistoryNet).
The myth had a long life outside Germany. The American correspondent William L. Shirer was among the writers who described the Pomeranian fighting in sensational terms, and lances against tanks passed into British and American popular histories and textbooks (Citino, HistoryNet). The Soviet Union and the Polish communist regime used it as a picture of a brave but hopelessly romantic prewar officer class, and Andrzej Wajda’s film Lotna (1959) showed uhlans attacking tanks. As late as 2011 the Guardian printed a correction admitting that it had “repeated a myth of the second world war, fostered by Nazi propagandists” (History News Network).
A general’s cross for a regiment
On 2 September 1939, the day after Krojanty, Gen. Stanisław Grzmot-Skotnicki, commander of the Czersk Operational Group, awarded his own Virtuti Militari cross to the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans (Wikipedia, “Charge at Krojanty”). Founded in 1792, the Virtuti Militari is Poland’s highest decoration for valor in war. Among the men of this chapter, Mastalerz received its Gold Cross posthumously, Filipowicz held the Gold and Silver Crosses, Semik was awarded it, and Maczek eventually held the Knight’s, Gold and Silver Crosses. Grzmot-Skotnicki was mortally wounded on the Bzura later that month.
Jordanów, Wysoka and the Black Brigade
In the south, the Fourteenth Army attacked out of Slovakia and Moravia through the passes of the Beskids. Its XVIII Corps (Gen. Eugen Beyer), with the 2nd Panzer Division, the 4th Light Division and the 3rd Mountain Division, aimed to come down the valleys from the Orawa region toward Nowy Targ, Jordanów and Myślenice and then Kraków, turning the southern flank of Army Kraków (Wikipedia, “Battle of Jordanów”). Waiting for it, on the hills around Jordanów, was the most modern formation in the Polish army: the 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade (10 Brygada Kawalerii) under Col. Stanisław Maczek, with the 10th Mounted Rifles and 24th Uhlans, both carried in trucks, supported by the 1st Regiment of the Border Protection Corps (KOP) and volunteer and National Defense units.
The brigade had about 5,000 men, a few dozen light tanks and tankettes and 16 field guns; the German forces against it were roughly ten times as strong (Wikipedia, “Battle of Jordanów”). The decisive ground was the ridge of Wysoka above the village of the same name, south of Jordanów, held by the 24th Uhlans under Col. Kazimierz Dworak. The Germans assaulted it three times on 2 September and took it only in the late evening, after which the Poles withdrew under the guns of an armored train (Wikipedia, “Battle of Jordanów”). Jordanów fell, but the brigade was not broken. Over the next days Maczek fought a series of rearguard actions, ambushes and counterattacks, falling back by bounds and never letting the Germans advance more than about 10 km a day in his sector (Wikipedia, “10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade”).
The Germans soon had a name for Maczek’s men: die Schwarze Brigade, the Black Brigade, from the black leather jackets of its officers, NCOs, motorcyclists and armor crews (Wikipedia, citing Majka). The brigade fought on across southern Poland and, after the Soviet invasion, crossed into Hungary; its veterans became the core of the Polish 1st Armoured Division of 1944 (see Chapter 8).
Węgierska Górka: the Westerplatte of the south
West of Jordanów, the road and railway from Zwardoń and the Slovak frontier come down the narrow valley of the Soła toward Żywiec and Bielsko. At Węgierska Górka, where the valley is barely a kilometer wide, the Poles had begun building a fortified barrier in July 1939. By 1 September five reinforced-concrete bunkers were finished and about fifteen more were under construction. They had been given names beginning with W: Wędrowiec (“Wanderer”), Wąwóz (“Ravine”), Waligóra (a legendary giant), Włóczęga (“Vagabond”) and Wyrwidąb (another giant of folklore). Only the first four could be manned (The Second World War, “Węgierska Górka”; dzieje.pl).
Their crews came from the 151st Fortress Company “Węgierska Górka,” about 70 men, formed on 28 August under Capt. Tadeusz Semik. With the KOP battalion “Berezwecz” (Maj. Kazimierz Czarkowski), batteries of the 55th Light Artillery Regiment, National Defense troops and border guards, the defenders of the sector numbered roughly 1,200 men. They faced the Bavarian 7th Infantry Division of the German XVII Corps, about ten times their number, with heavy 150 mm artillery (Wikipedia, “Battle of Węgierska Górka”).
The Germans crossed the frontier near Milówka on 1 September and reached the main position on the morning of 2 September. Their first attacks were beaten off. They brought up artillery and aircraft and attacked again. The commander of the 1st Mountain Brigade, Col. Janusz Gaładyk, ordered a withdrawal, but the order did not reach most of the bunkers, which fought on through the night (The Second World War). Włóczęga ran out of ammunition and surrendered on the morning of 3 September. Wędrowiec held out until German infantry closed in with grenades and an anti-tank gun fired into its embrasures at close range; its last defenders surrendered at about 17:00 on 3 September, and Semik, badly wounded, was taken prisoner. Wąwóz was bypassed and its crew slipped away at night. Accounts of Waligóra differ: one Polish account has its crew withdrawing on 2 September, while others say that seven men stayed, fought with rifles until their ammunition ran out and were shot by the Germans after they surrendered (dzieje.pl; Wikipedia).
Polish dead are given as between 7 and 20, and German losses as anything from about 100 killed and wounded to about 200 killed (Wikipedia; The Second World War; dzieje.pl). What is not in doubt is that a handful of half-finished bunkers held a German division in the valley for two days. Poles remember it as the “Westerplatte of the South,” and the bunker Wędrowiec is now a museum.
Upper Silesia and Katowice, 3–4 September
Polish Upper Silesia, with its coal mines, steel mills and the city of Katowice, had come to Poland in 1922, after three Polish risings against German rule in 1919–1921 and a plebiscite. It was defended by a fortified area of bunkers along the border and by Army Kraków’s Operational Group “Śląsk” (Gen. Jan Jagmin-Sadowski), with the 23rd and 55th Infantry Divisions. The Germans did not try to storm the bunkers head-on. They attacked around them, north toward Częstochowa and south through Pszczyna and the Beskid valleys. On 2 September, with his flanks threatened by the collapse at Częstochowa and the breakthrough at Pszczyna, Szylling asked permission to withdraw from Upper Silesia. Rydz-Śmigły agreed, at 16:00 tentatively and at 18:30 finally, to a retreat to the Nida and Dunajec (Wikipedia, “Kraków Army”). The soldiers left the Silesian bunkers in good order. Some Polish historians have argued that the withdrawal was premature; others that it saved Army Kraków from encirclement.
Katowice was not given up entirely. Local volunteer militia, organized at the end of August and made up largely of former Silesian insurgents of 1919–1921 and Polish Boy and Girl Scouts, under Jan Faska, stayed in the city after the officials, police and regular troops had left by 2 September; some did not receive, or refused to obey, the order to withdraw. When German troops entered the city on the morning of 4 September they met fire from the Silesian Insurgents’ House, church towers, the Silesian Museum and the parachute training tower in Kościuszko Park. The resistance was over within a few hours. About 15 Germans and about 150 Poles were killed in the fighting and the executions that followed, and the Germans shot more than 80 prisoners, mostly men and boys wearing insurgent or scout uniforms (Wikipedia, “Defense of Katowice,” citing Komorowski, Krwawicz and IPN).
The defense of the parachute tower became a legend, and like many legends it has been questioned. Witness accounts suggest that at least ten defenders died there, but the details of the story, including the number of scouts involved and how they died, rest on later testimony, and an IPN investigation into the killings was discontinued in 2005 (Wikipedia, citing IPN and Histmag). What is certain is that the Germans treated the Silesian insurgents as a special enemy. Einsatzgruppen followed the army into Silesia with lists of former insurgents to be arrested and shot, and the killings continued for weeks. The Great Synagogue of Katowice was destroyed on 8 September. The memorial to the September scouts near the site of the tower was unveiled on 4 September 1983.
Bydgoszcz, 3 September, and the reprisals
No event of the first week is more contested than what happened in Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) on Sunday, 3 September. The city, an important rail junction on the Brda at the southern end of the Corridor, had about 143,000 inhabitants in 1938, of whom about 9,200, some 6.4 percent, were of German nationality (dzieje.pl, citing the IPN study). On 3 September Polish troops of Army Pomorze, including units of the 9th, 15th and 27th Infantry Divisions retreating from the Corridor, were moving through the city. Shooting broke out. Polish soldiers and witnesses reported being fired on from houses, church towers and gardens at several hundred locations over several hours. Polish troops and civilians hunted the snipers; men caught with weapons, or accused of shooting, were executed on the spot, and in the confusion a number of German civilians who had nothing to do with any shooting were killed by soldiers and mobs (dzieje.pl; Wikipedia, “Bloody Sunday (1939)”).
For decades Polish and German historians told incompatible stories. Polish historians, among them Czesław Madajczyk and Włodzimierz Jastrzębski, described an organized German “diversion” by Abwehr agents and members of the German minority, which was suppressed. German historians described a massacre of innocent ethnic Germans and denied any provocation. After 2000 the debate reopened: Günter Schubert argued in 2003 that German sabotage had in fact occurred, while Jastrzębski, after holding the opposite view for years, concluded that there had been no German diversion at all (dzieje.pl). Jochen Böhler wrote that newly found documents show Polish soldiers were attacked by Abwehr agents and members of the German minority (Wikipedia, citing Böhler).
The fullest modern study is the IPN’s. From 2003 a team of about a dozen historians re-examined the evidence, and their findings were published in 2008 as Bydgoszcz 3–4 września 1939, edited by Tomasz Chinciński and Paweł Machcewicz. They concluded that a German diversionary action did take place and was suppressed, and that it was followed by revenge killings in which innocent Germans also died. No document has been found proving that the action was organized from the Reich, but comparable records from other regions suggest that Bydgoszcz was not excluded from such preparations. The study counted 365 dead in the city on 3 and 4 September, 33 of them unidentified; of the identified dead registered in Bydgoszcz, 254 were Protestants, 86 Catholics and 25 of unknown denomination, and the authors warned against simply equating Protestants with Germans and Catholics with Poles. About 20 Polish soldiers were killed (dzieje.pl, summarizing the IPN study). Other estimates of German civilian dead in the city run from 103 (Jastrzębski) through about 300 (Madajczyk) and 366 (Peter Aurich) to at least 415 (Hugo Rasmus) (Wikipedia, “Bloody Sunday (1939)”).
What Nazi propaganda made of these events is not in dispute. The term “Bromberger Blutsonntag,” Bromberg Bloody Sunday, was coined by the Propaganda Ministry, and a press directive ordered that it become a permanent term. In November 1939 the German government claimed that 5,400 ethnic Germans had been murdered in Poland; in February 1940 the figure was multiplied about tenfold, to 58,000. The most reliable estimate for the whole of Poland, cited by Ian Kershaw, is about 4,000 ethnic German dead, a figure that includes those killed in the fighting and on the forced marches of interned Germans in the first days of the war (Wikipedia, “Bloody Sunday (1939)”). The inflated figures became a standing justification for German policy in occupied Poland.
German troops entered Bydgoszcz on 5 September with Einsatzkommando 1/IV under Helmut Bischoff. On 8 September Maj. Gen. Walter Braemer became military commander and ordered house-by-house searches of the Polish districts; men found with weapons were shot on the spot. On 9 September 20 people were publicly executed on the Old Market Square, and after a German soldier was shot that night Braemer ordered 20 more hostages shot there. About 1,400 people were held in the barracks of the 15th Light Artillery Regiment, and in Braemer’s few days about 370 Poles were killed in the city. On 11 September the army high command told the Fourth Army that Hitler had ordered Himmler to take 500 hostages and carry out summary executions (Wikipedia, “German repressions against the people of Bydgoszcz,” citing Böhler and Jastrzębski).
This was only the first phase. From October the killings around Bydgoszcz became part of the systematic murder of the Polish elite of Pomerania; in the “Valley of Death” at Fordon alone, probably 1,200 to 1,400 people were shot in October and November. By the end of 1939 the Germans had killed up to 5,000 people from Bydgoszcz and its district, about 1,500 to 1,900 of them from the city (Wikipedia, citing Schenk and Jastrzębski). A secret decree signed by Hitler on 4 October amnestied German crimes committed in Poland since 1 September. The occupation is the subject of Chapter 9.
Piotrków and the breakthrough, 5–6 September
On 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany, Britain at 11:00 and France at 17:00. In Warsaw crowds gathered outside the British and French embassies to cheer. For the soldiers at the front the declarations changed nothing. France’s promised offensive in the west was limited to a small advance into the Saar, and German strength in Poland was not reduced.
The decisive blow fell in the center. Army Łódź, fighting on the Warta and the Widawka, was being pushed back by the Eighth Army and the left wing of the Tenth, and the gap between it and Army Kraków, opened by the destruction of the 7th Division, was widening. Into that gap drove Hoepner’s XVI Corps with the 1st and 4th Panzer Divisions. Ahead of them lay Piotrków Trybunalski, where the northern group of Army Prusy under Dąb-Biernacki, with the 19th and 29th Infantry Divisions and the Wilno Cavalry Brigade, was still assembling, joined by units of Army Łódź under Gen. Wiktor Thommée, including the 2nd Light Tank Battalion with its 7TPs and elements of the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade (Wikipedia, “Battle of Piotrków Trybunalski”).
On 5 September the 1st Panzer Division attacked toward Piotrków at about 10:00, and after an artillery preparation it attacked again around 14:00. The Polish line broke, and the Germans were in the city by evening. Two battalions of the 19th Division lost more than 80 percent of their men. The Polish tanks fought several sharp actions against German armor; Polish losses in tanks were light, and German losses were given as 17 tanks, two self-propelled guns and 14 armored cars (Wikipedia, citing Zaloga and Forczyk). At midnight Dąb-Biernacki ordered a counterattack for 6 September with the 29th Division and four battalions of the 19th. It never took place; instead the troops withdrew northward, and Army Prusy’s northern group came apart (Wikipedia, “Battle of Piotrków Trybunalski”). On 6 September Tomaszów Mazowiecki fell, and the road to Warsaw lay open. The 4th Panzer Division reached the southwestern edge of the capital on 8 September; the siege that followed is in Chapter 6.
Kraków abandoned and the decision to withdraw
In the south, Army Kraków was retreating eastward. On 5 September German forces broke through near Pcim and took Myślenice, Bochnia and Wiśnicz, threatening the rear of Gen. Mieczysław Boruta-Spiechowicz’s group, and on 6 September the Polish forces abandoned Kraków, the old royal capital (Wikipedia, “Kraków Army”). German troops entered the city on 6 September without a fight. Wawel Castle, the cathedral and the old town were undamaged; within two months Kraków would be the seat of Hans Frank’s General Government.
By then the Polish high command had concluded that the frontier battle was lost. On 6 September Rydz-Śmigły decided to withdraw all units west of the Vistula behind the river. The aim, as the IPN describes it, was a continuous front along the Narew, the Biebrza and the middle Vistula, with its southern section on the Dunajec and then the San (IPN, “Defending the line of the San River”). The government had already left Warsaw, reaching the Lublin region by 6 September. On the night of 6–7 September Col. Roman Umiastowski, head of the high command’s propaganda department, broadcast an appeal on Warsaw radio calling on all men able to bear arms to leave the city and go east to join the army on the new line; tens of thousands took to the roads, which were already jammed with refugees and retreating units (Wikipedia, “Roman Umiastowski”). On 7 September Rydz-Śmigły and the high command left Warsaw for Brześć (Brest) on the Bug. The same day, far to the north, the garrison of Westerplatte surrendered.
The decision was sound in principle and very hard in practice. Withdrawing armies already in contact with a faster enemy, on few good roads, under an air force that owned the sky, meant that many units reached the new line late or without their heavy equipment, and communications between Brześć and the armies were poor. But the Polish army of 7 September was battered, not destroyed. Armies Poznań and Pomorze, largely intact west of Warsaw, were about to strike the strongest Polish counterblow of the campaign, on the Bzura.
| Date | Place | Polish forces | German forces | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Sep | Wieluń | None in or near the town (IPN) | I./StG 76, StG 2, StG 77 (Ju 87) | About 70% of the town destroyed; 127 identified dead, estimates to about 1,200 or more |
| 1 Sep | Mokra | Volhynian Cavalry Brigade (Filipowicz), armored train no. 53 | 4th Panzer Division (Reinhardt), XVI Corps | German attacks held for the day; brigade withdrew about 12 km overnight |
| 1 Sep | Krojanty, near Chojnice | 18th Pomeranian Uhlans (Mastalerz), 1st and 2nd Squadrons | Battalion of the 76th Infantry Regiment and armored cars, 20th Motorized Division | German infantry scattered; uhlans driven off; Mastalerz killed; advance delayed several hours |
| 1–3 Sep | Mława | 20th Infantry Division (Liszka-Lawicz), Mazovian Cavalry Brigade; 8th Infantry Division | Third Army: I Corps (Panzer Division Kempf, 11th and 61st Infantry Divisions), Wodrig Corps | Frontal attacks repulsed; position outflanked to the east and evacuated on 4 Sep |
| 1–5 Sep | Tuchola Forest and the Corridor | Army Pomorze: 9th and 27th Infantry Divisions, Czersk Operational Group, Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade | Fourth Army: XIX Corps (Guderian: 3rd Panzer, 2nd and 20th Motorized Divisions), II and III Corps | Corridor cut by 3 Sep; Polish divisions encircled and largely destroyed |
| 1–3 Sep | Jordanów and Wysoka | 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade (Maczek), 1st KOP Regiment, volunteer units | XVIII Corps (2nd Panzer, 4th Light, 3rd Mountain Divisions) | Wysoka lost late on 2 Sep after three assaults; brigade withdrew intact |
| 1–3 Sep | Węgierska Górka | 151st Fortress Company (Semik), KOP battalion “Berezwecz,” artillery; about 1,200 men | 7th Infantry Division, XVII Corps | Bunkers held two days; Wędrowiec surrendered about 17:00 on 3 Sep |
| 3–4 Sep | Bydgoszcz | Retreating units of the 9th, 15th and 27th Infantry Divisions | German diversionary groups and armed local Germans (IPN) | 365 dead in the city (IPN); German reprisals from 5 Sep |
| 4 Sep | Katowice | Volunteer militia of Silesian insurgents and scouts (Faska) | 239th Infantry Division and other units | City taken in a few hours; more than 80 prisoners shot |
| 5–6 Sep | Piotrków Trybunalski | Army Prusy northern group (19th and 29th Infantry Divisions, Wilno Cavalry Brigade), 2nd Light Tank Battalion | XVI Corps (1st and 4th Panzer Divisions) | City taken on the evening of 5 Sep; Polish counterattack canceled; road to Warsaw opened |
| 6 Sep | Kraków | Army Kraków (withdrawn) | Fourteenth Army | Abandoned and occupied without a fight |
Sources: Zaloga (2002); Forczyk (2019); IPN; Wikipedia articles on the individual battles, which summarize Polish and German official histories. Loss figures for these actions are disputed; see “Losses and uncertainty.”
The frontier battles, 1–10 September 1939
- Ju 87s attack the approaches to the Vistula bridges at Tczew.
- Stukas of I./StG 76 bomb Wieluń; the All Saints Hospital is among the first buildings hit.
- Schleswig-Holstein opens fire on Westerplatte; German armies cross the frontier between about 04:45 and 05:00.
- Mokra: the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade holds the 4th Panzer Division; Mława: the 20th Division repulses Panzer Division Kempf; Roosevelt appeals against the bombing of civilians.
- The 18th Pomeranian Uhlans charge at Krojanty; Col. Mastalerz is killed.
- Journalists visit Krojanty; Grzmot-Skotnicki gives his Virtuti Militari to the 18th Uhlans. Rydz-Śmigły approves Army Kraków’s withdrawal from Upper Silesia (16:00 and 18:30). Wysoka falls late in the evening.
- Britain (11:00) and France (17:00) declare war. Shooting and killings in Bydgoszcz. The Tuchola Forest pocket is closed; the 7th Division is destroyed near Częstochowa; Grudziądz is abandoned; Wędrowiec surrenders about 17:00. Bombs damage the U.S. ambassador’s villa at Konstancin.
- The 20th Division leaves the Mława position. German troops enter Katowice; more than 80 defenders are shot.
- Hitler visits Guderian’s corps in the Corridor. German troops enter Bydgoszcz. The 1st Panzer Division takes Piotrków Trybunalski.
- Kraków is abandoned and occupied. Rydz-Śmigły decides to withdraw all forces behind the Vistula, Narew and San.
- Col. Umiastowski’s radio appeal sends tens of thousands of men out of Warsaw to the east.
- The high command leaves Warsaw for Brześć; Westerplatte surrenders.
- Public executions of Polish hostages on the Old Market Square in Bydgoszcz.
People
Edward Rydz-Śmigły (1886–1941), Marshal of Poland and commander in chief, approved Plan West’s forward deployment, the withdrawal from Silesia on 2 September and the general withdrawal behind the Vistula on 6 September. Władysław Bortnowski (1891–1966), commander of Army Pomorze, had opposed defending the Corridor in strength and later led his surviving divisions into the Bzura battle. Stanisław Grzmot-Skotnicki (1894–1939), who gave his own Virtuti Militari to the 18th Uhlans, was mortally wounded on the Bzura. Antoni Szylling (1884–1971) led Army Kraków out of Silesia and east to Tomaszów Lubelski; Juliusz Rómmel (1881–1967) of Army Łódź later commanded the defense of Warsaw.
Losses and uncertainty
Almost every number in this chapter comes with a range. Many Polish units were destroyed or dispersed and kept no records after the first days; German divisions reported tanks “lost” that were later repaired; and both sides’ postwar histories had reasons to enlarge the enemy’s losses and reduce their own. The main disagreements are these.
Wieluń: 04:40 or 05:40 for the first attack, and from 127 identified dead to about 1,200 or more. Armor: German losses claimed at Mokra (100 to 160 vehicles) and Mława (72 tanks) come largely from Polish accounts and divisional histories and include vehicles later recovered; across the campaign about 236 German tanks were total write-offs (Panzerworld). Krojanty: about 250 charged, 19 to 25 were killed, and no tanks were present. Bydgoszcz: 365 dead on 3–4 September by the IPN count, with German civilian dead estimated at 103 to at least 415; Nazi propaganda’s 58,000 for all Poland compares with Kershaw’s estimate of about 4,000. The armies: 60 to 66 German divisions with 2,500 to 2,750 tanks, depending on what is counted, and 900,000 to 1 million Polish soldiers under arms of 1.35 million planned.
Questions readers ask
Did Polish cavalry really charge German tanks?
No. At Krojanty on the evening of 1 September two squadrons of the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans charged a German infantry battalion in the open and scattered it, and were then shot up by armored cars that came out of the woods. Italian and German journalists who saw the field the next day, with tanks that had arrived later, turned it into a charge against tanks, and German propaganda spread the story. When Polish cavalry fought tanks, as at Mokra the same day, they did it dismounted, with anti-tank guns and rifles.
Was Wieluń the first attack of the Second World War?
It may have been one of the first, but the claim depends on the time. If the bombing began at 04:40, as most Polish accounts say, it preceded the shelling of Westerplatte at 04:45 but followed the Stuka attack at Tczew at about 04:34. If it began at 05:40, as German flight records and the IPN indicate, it came an hour later. Either way it was among the first deliberate air attacks on an undefended town in the war.
How it connects
The diplomatic and military preparations that put these armies on the frontier are in Chapter 1: The Road to September, and the first shots in Danzig, at Westerplatte and the Polish Post Office, are in Chapter 2. The Stukas over Wieluń, Tczew and Mokra belonged to an air war fought at the same time, told in Chapter 4: The Air War, where the Polish Pursuit Brigade’s defense of Warsaw also appears.
The retreat from Mława leads to the Narew, Wizna and Guderian’s drive on Brześć in Chapter 5. Army Pomorze’s survivors and Army Poznań, almost untouched in the first week, struck south on the Bzura on 9 September, and the panzers that broke through at Piotrków reached Warsaw on 8 September; both stories are in Chapter 6. Maczek’s brigade and Filipowicz’s Volhynian Brigade fought on into the second half of September, when the Soviet invasion of 17 September ended any hope of a front in the southeast (Chapter 8). The reprisals in Bydgoszcz and Katowice were the beginning of the occupation described in Chapter 9.
Walking the ground today
Wieluń, about 90 km southwest of Łódź, holds its commemoration each 1 September beginning at 04:40, with wreaths at the stone marking the bombed parish church, at the monument to the destroyed synagogue and at the plaque to the victims of the All Saints Hospital, whose site is now occupied by a secondary school (dzieje.pl). In 2019, on the eightieth anniversary, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier came to Wieluń with President Andrzej Duda and asked forgiveness for the attack. The Museum of the Wieluń Region has displays on the bombing.
Mokra lies north of Kłobuck, off the road from Częstochowa to Wieluń; the battlefield has memorials to the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade and is the site of anniversary reenactments. Mława‘s fortified line can still be traced in the fields north of the town, where several concrete bunkers survive. The monument to the Krojanty charge stands beside the road from Chojnice to Czersk, where an annual commemoration with a mounted reenactment draws large crowds (dzieje.pl). In the Tuchola Forest there are war cemeteries and memorials to the 9th and 27th Divisions and the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade.
At Węgierska Górka the bunker Wędrowiec is a museum of the 1939 defense, and the other bunkers can be found along the valley; a footpath and display area were added in a Polish–Czech cross-border project around 2012 (dzieje.pl; Traces of War). In Katowice, the monument to the September scouts stands near the site of the parachute tower in Kościuszko Park. In Bydgoszcz, the Monument of Struggle and Martyrdom on the Old Market Square marks the place of the September executions, and the “Valley of Death” at Fordon is a memorial site.
Sources
- Steven J. Zaloga, Poland 1939: The Birth of Blitzkrieg (Osprey, Campaign 107, 2002).
- Robert Forczyk, Case White: The Invasion of Poland 1939 (Osprey, 2019).
- Roger Moorhouse, First to Fight: The Polish War 1939 (Bodley Head, 2019; U.S. edition Poland 1939, Basic Books, 2020); Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Allen Lane / Harvard University Press, 2012).
- Jochen Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg: Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939 (Fischer, 2006); Jochen Böhler, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Jürgen Matthäus, Einsatzgruppen in Polen (2008).
- Tomasz Chińciński and Paweł Machcewicz, eds., Bydgoszcz 3–4 września 1939 (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2008); Włodzimierz Jastrzębski, Terror i zbrodnia (Interpress, 1974); dzieje.pl, on the IPN study of Bydgoszcz 3–4 September 1939 (in Polish).
- Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), investigation of the bombing of Wieluń (2004), as summarized in Wikipedia; IPN, “Defending the line of the San River”.
- Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (Michael Joseph, 1952); Robert M. Citino, “Polish Cavalry Charges Tanks?”, HistoryNet.
- U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939, vol. I, ch. V, appeals of President Roosevelt against aerial bombardment, including Biddle’s telegrams of 2 September, 3 September and 4 September 1939; Franklin D. Roosevelt, appeal of 1 September 1939, The American Presidency Project; National Archives, Roosevelt’s bedside note (DocsTeach).
- U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Invasion of Poland, Fall 1939”, Holocaust Encyclopedia.
- Panzerworld, “Poland 1939: Tank Strength” (after Thomas L. Jentz, Panzertruppen, vol. 1, Schiffer, 1996).
- The Second World War (thesecondworldwar.org), “Charge at Krojanty” and “Węgierska Górka”; dzieje.pl (Polish History Museum and PAP), on Węgierska Górka, on the Wieluń commemoration and on the Krojanty commemoration (in Polish); Traces of War, “Wędrowiec”; History News Network, “Debunking Polish stereotypes” (reprinting the Guardian, 2011).
- Wikipedia: “Invasion of Poland”, “Bombing of Wieluń” (citing Trenkner, Bębnik, Piątkowski, IPN), “Battle of Mokra”, “Battle of Mława”, “Battle of Tuchola Forest”, “Battle of Grudziądz”, “XIX Army Corps”, “Charge at Krojanty”, “18th Pomeranian Uhlan Regiment”, “Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade”, “Battle of Jordanów”, “10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade”, “Battle of Węgierska Górka”, “Defense of Katowice”, “Kraków Army”, “Bloody Sunday (1939)”, “German repressions against the people of Bydgoszcz”, “Battle of Piotrków Trybunalski”, “7TP”, “Roman Umiastowski”, and biographies of Kazimierz Mastalerz, Julian Filipowicz, Stanisław Maczek and Tadeusz Semik.
- Further reading: Polskie Siły Zbrojne w drugiej wojnie światowej, vol. 1, Kampania wrześniowa 1939 (Instytut Polski i Muzeum im. gen. Sikorskiego, London, 1951–1986); Stanisław Maczek, Od podwody do czołgu (memoirs, 1961); Richard Hargreaves, Blitzkrieg Unleashed: The German Invasion of Poland, 1939 (Pen & Sword, 2008); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (Basic Books, 2010); Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane, 2000).
Photographs: Polish archival and press photographs of 1939 from the Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe and Polish publications, public domain; German photographs by Joachim Döhler (Archiv Döhler, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE); Roosevelt’s note from the U.S. National Archives, public domain; the 2007 photograph of Węgierska Górka by PeterPhoto (CC BY-SA 3.0); all via Wikimedia Commons. Insignia shown on hero and unit cards are original illustrations in the period style, not official emblems.
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