17 September: The Soviet Invasion and the Last Battles

In the early hours of 17 September 1939, with the Polish Army still fighting the Germans on the Bzura, at Warsaw, at Modlin, at Lwów and on the Hel peninsula, the Soviet Union sent two army groups across Poland’s undefended eastern frontier. Moscow called it a mission to protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians of a state that had “ceased to exist.” Within a day the Polish president, government and commander in chief had crossed into Romania and been interned, and Poland’s last plan for a defensive bridgehead in the southeast was gone. This chapter follows the Soviet invasion and the last battles of the campaign, from Grodno and Lwów to the Border Protection Corps at Szack and Wytyczno, General Kleeberg’s surrender at Kock on 6 October, and the major who would not surrender at all.

Why it mattered

The Polish plan for the war with Germany assumed that the Soviet Union would stay out of it, at least for a while. The plan was to fight the Wehrmacht along the frontier, fall back toward the great rivers, and hold out in the southeast, close to the Romanian border and the railway to the Black Sea ports, until Britain and France attacked in the west and Allied supplies arrived. By mid-September the first part had failed and the second had become the whole strategy. The Soviet invasion of 17 September destroyed it in a single day. It cut off the southeastern corner of Poland from the east and north, put a second enemy behind every Polish unit still fighting, and ended any hope that the government could stay on Polish soil.

It also changed what the war in Poland meant. The German–Soviet pact of 23 August 1939, described in Chapter 1, had looked to the world like a non-aggression treaty. Its secret protocol, which divided Eastern Europe into spheres of interest along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers, was now carried out in the open. The Soviet Union never declared war, and for half a century Soviet histories called the operation a “liberation campaign” to protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians of eastern Poland. For the Poles of the eastern provinces it was the beginning of arrests, deportations and executions that would include the murder of about 22,000 officers, policemen and others in the Katyn massacres of 1940.

Militarily, the eighteen days from 17 September to 6 October were a series of last stands. Some were sieges, like Lwów, which the Germans attacked from 12 September and which surrendered to the Red Army on 22 September. Some were improvised street battles, like Grodno, where soldiers, policemen and schoolboys fought Soviet tanks with gasoline bottles. Some were the work of small, determined commanders: the Border Protection Corps fighting its way west at Szack and Wytyczno, and Kleeberg’s group, which fought the Red Army at the end of September and the Germans at Kock until its ammunition ran out. And one, Major Henryk Dobrzański’s detachment, simply refused to stop. The last regular battle of the campaign ended on 5 October; Dobrzański’s detachment fought on, in uniform, until he was killed in April 1940.

The note of 17 September

From the first days of September, Berlin pressed Moscow to move. On 3 September Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop instructed the German ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, to ask whether the Soviet Union would send its forces against the Polish army in the Soviet sphere; the telegrams, captured after the war, were published by the U.S. State Department in 1948 in Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941. Stalin waited. The Red Army had begun a secret mobilization on 3 September and was concentrating troops on the Polish frontier (Materski, via PAP/dzieje.pl), but it was also fighting Japan on the Mongolian border at Khalkhin Gol, and Moscow wanted to see whether Britain and France would fight in earnest. A Soviet–Japanese ceasefire was agreed in Moscow on 15 September. Two days later the Red Army moved.

At 3:00 a.m. Moscow time on 17 September (1:00 a.m. in Poland), the Polish ambassador, Wacław Grzybowski, was summoned to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. The deputy commissar, Vladimir Potemkin, read him a note whose text had been agreed with Berlin. It said that the war had revealed the “internal bankruptcy” of the Polish state, that Warsaw no longer existed as a capital, and that the government had disintegrated. The Soviet Union therefore regarded its treaties with Poland, including the non-aggression pact of 1932, as void, could not remain neutral, and had ordered the Red Army to cross the frontier and take under its protection the population of “Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia.” Grzybowski refused to accept the note (PAP/dzieje.pl; Wikipedia, “Soviet invasion of Poland”). Molotov repeated the argument in a radio address the same day.

In their words

…the Polish State and its Government have, in fact, ceased to exist.

Every claim in the note was false or misleading. The Polish government had left Warsaw on 5–6 September and was in the southeast, in contact with the army and with the Allied embassies. Warsaw itself was under siege but still held, and would hold until 28 September, as told in Chapter 6. The army was still fighting the largest battle of the campaign on the Bzura. And the “protection” of Ukrainians and Belarusians was a political formula: the Soviet leadership had already agreed with Germany, in the secret protocol of 23 August, where the line between their spheres would run. The note also did not say that the Soviet Union was at war with Poland. Neither side issued a formal declaration of war, and Poland, for reasons described below, did not declare war on the Soviet Union.

Two fronts cross the border

Soviet troops crossed along the whole length of the eastern frontier, about 1,400 km, between about 3:00 and 6:00 a.m. on 17 September (PAP/dzieje.pl). They were organized in two fronts, the wartime name for army groups. In the north, the Belorussian Front under Komandarm 2nd rank Mikhail Kovalyov advanced from the Minsk region toward Wilno (Vilnius), Grodno, Białystok and Brześć (Brest). In the south, the Ukrainian Front under Komandarm 1st rank Semyon Timoshenko advanced from the Kiev region toward Równe, Tarnopol, Lwów and the Romanian border. Fast mobile groups of cavalry and tanks led the way. Their first objectives were the large towns and the river crossings, and in the south, the roads to Romania and Hungary along which the Polish government and army were trying to withdraw.

How large these forces were depends on who is counting and when. The Great Russian Encyclopedia, following the Russian historian Mikhail Meltyukhov, gives the two fronts at the start of the operation as 21 rifle and 13 cavalry divisions and 16 tank and 2 motorized brigades, about 617,600 men, 4,900 guns, 4,700 tanks and 3,300 aircraft, with another 16,500 NKVD border troops. A Polish summary of the same sources gives “at least 620,000” men (PAP/dzieje.pl), and the IPN historian Leon Popek speaks of about half a million on the first day, growing later. Other estimates for the invasion as a whole run from about 450,000 to over 800,000, the higher figures counting the reinforcements that poured in after 17 September (Wikipedia, “Soviet invasion of Poland,” summarizing the literature). Whatever the exact figure, the Red Army sent more tanks into eastern Poland than the entire German invasion force had.

Facing them there was, in effect, no army. Before the war the Border Protection Corps (Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, KOP) guarded the Soviet frontier, but most of its artillery and many of its best battalions had been sent west in the summer of 1939 to help form reserve divisions against Germany. What remained on the frontier on 17 September was about 25 battalions, perhaps 20,000 men, spread thinly over more than 1,400 km (Wikipedia, “Border Protection Corps”). Behind them were depots, training units, march battalions, police, and soldiers and refugees who had fled east from the German front. Some KOP posts fought for hours at the frontier. Others were overrun before they knew what was happening. In several places, local communist groups and armed bands, some of them Ukrainian or Belarusian, attacked Polish officials, police and settlers ahead of the Red Army. In Grodno a communist sabotage attempt on 17 September was quickly suppressed, and a pro-Soviet rising in the nearby town of Skidel was put down by Polish troops and police (Wikipedia, “Battle of Grodno (1939)”).

“Do not fight the Bolsheviks”

Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły learned of the invasion at his headquarters in Kołomyja, in southeastern Poland near the Romanian border. His staff and the government had been moving east and south for ten days: from Warsaw to Brześć, then to Włodzimierz Wołyński, Młynów, and finally to Kołomyja, Kosów and Kuty. With the government’s agreement he decided that the Polish Army could not fight two enemies at once, and that whatever could be saved of it must be got out of the country to fight again in France. On the evening of 17 September his headquarters, by then at Kuty on the Czeremosz River, issued what Polish historians call the “general directive” (PAP/dzieje.pl).

In their words

Sowiety wkroczyły. Nakazuję ogólne wycofanie na Rumunię i Węgry najkrótszymi drogami. Z bolszewikami nie walczyć, chyba w razie natarcia z ich strony albo próby rozbrojenia oddziałów.

The directive went on, in substance, to say that Warsaw and the other cities preparing to defend themselves against the Germans should continue to do so, and that cities approached by the Red Army should negotiate with the Soviets for the withdrawal of their garrisons to Hungary or Romania. It was a realistic order in one sense. The Polish units in the east were far too weak to stop the Red Army, and an open war with the Soviet Union would have cost lives without changing the outcome. But it reached many units late or not at all, it was contradicted by other orders, and it left commanders uncertain whether the Soviets were enemies to be resisted or a force to be bargained with. Some officers believed it was a provocation. The historian Paweł Wieczorkiewicz argued that it caused confusion and weakened the defense of the eastern provinces (PAP/dzieje.pl). Garrisons that obeyed it and laid down their arms usually found that the Soviets did not honor the terms they offered.

The directive is also the reason Poland did not declare war on the Soviet Union. The Polish government protested the invasion and Polish troops fought the Red Army in dozens of engagements, but a declaration of war would have given the Soviets a legal pretext to treat the interned army and the Polish government as belligerents, and would have strained the British guarantee, which applied only to German aggression. That legal ambiguity followed Poland through the war.

The end of the Romanian bridgehead

The southeastern corner of Poland, the so-called Romanian bridgehead (przedmoście rumuńskie), had become the center of Polish strategy in the second week of the war. On 13 September Rydz-Śmigły ordered preparations for a retreat there (polonika.pl). The idea was to hold the region between the Dniester and Stryj rivers and the Carpathians, with Lwów as its northern bastion, and to supply the army through neutral Romania. Romania was Poland’s ally under a 1921 treaty directed against the Soviet Union, and its railways ran from the Black Sea port of Constanța to the Polish border at Śniatyn and Zaleszczyki. French and British shipments of aircraft and munitions were expected. Whether the bridgehead could have held for long against the Germans alone is doubtful; once the Red Army was advancing on it from the east, it could not be held at all.

On the night of 17–18 September the president, Ignacy Mościcki, the prime minister, Felicjan Sławoj-Składkowski, nearly the whole cabinet and several thousand soldiers and civilians crossed the road-and-rail bridge over the Czeremosz at Kuty into Romanian Bukovina, to the town of Vijnița (Wyżnica). Rydz-Śmigły, who had hesitated and considered going to the troops still fighting, crossed after them the same night (polonika.pl). Others crossed at Zaleszczyki on the Dniester and at Śniatyn. Kuty itself stayed in Polish hands until the morning of 21 September, when the last soldiers of Maj. Henryk Piątkowski’s covering detachment crossed (polonika.pl).

The Polish leaders expected to travel through Romania to France and carry on the war from there. Instead, under German pressure and conscious of its own exposure to the Soviet Union, the Romanian government interned them. Mościcki was held at Bicaz in the Carpathians; Rydz-Śmigły was held near Craiova and then at Dragoslavele; Foreign Minister Józef Beck and other ministers were held under guard in Brașov (dzieje.pl, citing Batin and others). The internment was a political blow, but the constitution of 1935 provided a way around it. On 30 September Mościcki, using his power to name a successor in wartime, resigned in favor of Władysław Raczkiewicz, who was already in Paris. Raczkiewicz appointed Gen. Władysław Sikorski prime minister, and in November Sikorski also became commander in chief. The Polish state continued, in exile, and the new government was recognized by Britain, France and the United States. Rydz-Śmigły escaped from Romania in December 1940, made his way through Hungary to occupied Warsaw in the autumn of 1941, and died there, under a false name, in December 1941. The government in exile’s story is told in Chapter 9.

Americans watched this part of the war closely, because the U.S. ambassador was in the middle of it. Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr. had left Warsaw with the diplomatic corps at the Polish government’s request and followed it to Krzemieniec and then toward the Romanian frontier; he and his party crossed into Romania in mid-September (Walser, Foreign Service Journal, September 2019). His reports to Washington, later published, are an important eyewitness source on the government’s flight. When the Polish state’s legal existence was challenged, Secretary of State Cordell Hull answered that the United States would continue to recognize the Polish government, noting that “mere seizure of territory” did not extinguish a government’s legal existence (as quoted by Walser). Washington did not, however, treat the Soviet Union as a belligerent; the Roosevelt administration did not apply the Neutrality Act to it, and the U.S. reaction to 17 September was limited to statements.

Timeline

From the Soviet note to the last surrender

1. 12 Sep 1939Advance units of the German 1st Mountain Division reach the outskirts of Lwów; the siege begins.
2. 13 SepRydz-Śmigły orders preparations for a retreat to the Romanian bridgehead.
3. 15 SepSoviet–Japanese ceasefire on the Mongolian border agreed in Moscow.
4. 17 Sep, 03:00 Moscow timePotemkin reads the Soviet note to Ambassador Grzybowski, who refuses it.
5. 17 Sep, c. 03:00–06:00The Belorussian and Ukrainian Fronts cross the frontier.
6. 17 Sep, eveningRydz-Śmigły’s general directive: withdraw to Romania and Hungary; do not fight the Soviets unless attacked.
7. 17–18 Sep, nightPresident, government and commander in chief cross into Romania at Kuty; they are interned.
8. 18–19 SepBattle of Wilno; the city falls on 19 September.
9. 17–20 SepFirst battle of Tomaszów Lubelski; Gen. Piskor surrenders Armies Kraków and Lublin on 20 September.
10. 19 SepSoviet armor reaches Lwów; Maczek’s brigade is ordered into Hungary about this date.
11. 20–22 SepDefense of Grodno.
12. 22 SepLwów surrenders to the Red Army; Gen. Olszyna-Wilczyński murdered near Sopoćkinie; German–Soviet handovers at Brześć and Białystok.
13. 21–26 SepSecond battle of Tomaszów Lubelski.
14. 28 SepWarsaw capitulates; German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty signed in Moscow; KOP victory at Szack.
15. 29–30 SepPolesie group fights the Red Army at Jabłoń and Milanów.
16. 30 SepMościcki resigns; Raczkiewicz becomes president in Paris.
17. 1 OctBattle of Wytyczno, the KOP’s last fight.
18. 2–5 OctBattle of Kock against the German XIV Motorized Corps.
19. 6 OctKleeberg surrenders Independent Operational Group Polesie.
20. 30 Apr 1940Maj. Henryk Dobrzański “Hubal” killed near Anielin.

Lwów between two armies

Lwów (Lviv), the largest city of southeastern Poland and the intended northern anchor of the Romanian bridgehead, was the first great city to face both invaders. Gen. Władysław Langner, commander of Corps District VI, began organizing its defense on 7 September. On 12 September the first German motorized units of the 1st Mountain Division under Col. Ferdinand Schörner, having taken Sambor about 66 km away, reached the western outskirts and were driven back; the next day Schörner’s main force briefly broke into the city center before being thrown out again (Wikipedia, “Battle of Lwów (1939),” citing Włodarkiewicz and Leinwand). From 12 September Gen. Franciszek Sikorski commanded the city’s defense. The garrison, built from about eleven infantry battalions, five batteries, a cavalry unit and soldiers who had fallen back into the city, was reinforced on 18 September by two armored trains from Kowel. Gen. Kazimierz Sosnkowski tried to break through to the city from the west with the remnants of several divisions, fighting in the forests near Janów, but could not reach it. Gen. Stanisław Maczek’s 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade, the “Black Brigade” of Chapter 3, helped retake the suburb of Zboiska.

On 19 September the first Soviet armored units reached the eastern outskirts and the suburb of Łyczaków, and Soviet envoys began negotiations that morning. Overnight the Soviets completed the encirclement of the city from the east, linking with the Germans to the west. For a day or two the city’s defenders had German troops on one side and Soviet troops on the other, and there were incidents in which German and Soviet units fired on each other. On 20 September Hitler ordered his commanders to leave Lwów to the Soviets, and the German attack planned for 21 September was cancelled. The German 1st Mountain Division had lost 484 killed, 918 wounded and 608 sick in the fighting for the city (Wikipedia, citing Polish and German unit sources).

Sikorski and Langner concluded on 21 September that further defense was hopeless, and that the city would be better off in Soviet hands than taken by storm. The surrender was signed on the morning of 22 September in the suburb of Winniki. By the Polish account, the Soviet commanders accepted all of Langner’s conditions: privates and NCOs would leave the city, register with the Soviet authorities and go home; officers would keep their personal belongings and be free to leave Poland for any country that would accept them (Wikipedia, citing Langner’s own account and Leinwand). A Soviet count put the garrison that laid down its arms at about 28,000 (Great Russian Encyclopedia).

The terms lasted a few hours. Shortly after noon, the NKVD began arresting Polish officers. They were marched to Tarnopol and sent to Soviet camps, most of them to Starobielsk in eastern Ukraine. In the spring of 1940 the Starobielsk prisoners were shot by the NKVD in Kharkiv and buried in pits outside the city, one of the sites of what is collectively called the Katyn massacre. Gen. Franciszek Sikorski was among them. Langner escaped from Soviet custody, reached Romania and then France. A widely reproduced Soviet-period photograph of a last barricade on Gródecka Street, dated 23 September, shows how the city looked on the day after the surrender.

Wilno and Grodno

In the north, the Belorussian Front’s first objective was Wilno (Vilnius). The city’s military commander, Col. Jarosław Okulicz-Kozaryn, had about 14,000 soldiers and volunteers on 17 September, of whom only about 6,500 had weapons, and he decided not to defend the city. Some of his officers did. Under Lt. Col. Podwysocki, about ten battalions with some 18–22 guns fought Soviet cavalry and tank brigades in the city on 18 and 19 September. Wilno fell on 19 September. Soviet records give their own losses as 13 killed and 24 wounded, with five BT tanks and an armored car destroyed (Wikipedia, “Battle of Wilno (1939)”). Many of the defenders retreated toward the Lithuanian border, which was only a few hours away. In October the Soviet Union transferred Wilno to Lithuania under a mutual assistance treaty, as a step toward absorbing Lithuania itself in 1940.

Grodno (Hrodna), on the Niemen about 150 km southwest, became the scene of the fiercest street fighting of the Soviet invasion. The city had been stripped of its garrison: on 1 September German bombers destroyed its main military depots at Karolin, and on 10 September the operational group based there, about 7,000 men, was disbanded and its best troops sent south to Lwów. What remained was organized by the city’s acting mayor, Roman Sawicki, and the district corps commander, Gen. Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński, who arrived from Pińsk on 18 September. Gen. Wacław Przeździecki led the improvised Grodno defense group. The defenders were march battalions, police, reserve soldiers, remnants of the Wołkowysk Reserve Cavalry Brigade and the 32nd Armored Reconnaissance Group, and a large number of volunteers: gymnasium students, Boy Scouts and townspeople. They had almost no antitank guns. They built barricades and obstacles and fought tanks with rifles, grenades and bottles of gasoline (Wikipedia, “Battle of Grodno (1939),” citing Magnuski and Kolomiets; IPN).

The tanks of the Soviet 15th Tank Corps reached the outskirts on 20 September. The battle lasted three days. Soviet official figures give their losses as 57 killed and 159 wounded; the Polish historians Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert and Zygmunt Walkowski estimate about 800 Soviet killed, missing and wounded, with 19 tanks and four armored cars destroyed. Soviet records claim 644 Poles killed and 1,543 captured (Wikipedia, citing Soviet documents and Polish historians). On 22 September the remaining Polish forces withdrew north toward the Lithuanian border. North of the city, at Kodziowce on the night of 21–22 September, the 101st Reserve Uhlan Regiment fought a rearguard action against Soviet armor in which, by Polish accounts, 22 tanks were destroyed (PAP/dzieje.pl).

The best-known episode of the defense concerns a boy. Tadeusz Jasiński, usually described as 13 years old, was caught trying to set fire to a Soviet tank with a bottle of gasoline. The tank crew tied him to the front of the tank as a human shield. Polish defenders cut him loose, but he had been hit too many times to save, and he died on 21 September. The story rests mainly on the memoir of Grażyna Lipińska, who lived in Grodno and tried with a friend to untie him; it was published in Paris in 1988. Archival records in Belarus confirm that he existed, and Polish researchers and the IPN accept the core of the account, though his age (accounts range from 13 to 15) and the details of his death vary (Wikipedia, “Tadeusz Jasiński”; IPN historian Jan Jerzy Milewski, quoted by PAP). He was posthumously awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 2009.

Polonia Restituta

The defenders of Grodno

On 14 September 2009, seventy years after the battle, the president of Poland posthumously awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta to Tadeusz Jasiński, the boy tied to a Soviet tank in Grodno. Streets are named after him in Wrocław, Sochaczew, Kędzierzyn-Koźle and Białystok, and a symbolic grave stands in Warsaw. He stands for a defense in which, by the IPN’s account, gymnasium students, Scouts, policemen and reservists held the city against Soviet tanks for three days, and in which about 300 of the defenders were murdered after the fighting ended (Wikipedia; PAP/dzieje.pl).

When the Soviets took control of Grodno, they took revenge. About 300 defenders, soldiers, students and civilians, were shot after the fighting ended; some were executed on the spot, others after summary proceedings by Soviet military tribunals for “resisting the Red Army” (PAP/dzieje.pl; IPN investigation). General Olszyna-Wilczyński had left the city on 21 September with his wife, his driver and his adjutant, Capt. Mieczysław Strzemeski, heading for the Lithuanian border. On 22 September near Sopoćkinie a Soviet tank and artillery group under a Major Chuvakin stopped their car. After a brief interrogation the general and his adjutant were shot; his wife and the driver were allowed to go. The IPN opened an investigation in 2002, identified the Soviet unit from Polish and former Soviet archives, and asked Russia in 2003 to prosecute it as a war crime. Russia’s military prosecutors called it a common crime subject to the statute of limitations, and the investigation was closed in 2004 (Wikipedia, “Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński,” citing IPN).

Prisoners and massacres

Grodno and Sopoćkinie were not isolated cases. Polish investigators and historians have documented a pattern of killings of prisoners, policemen, officials and landowners during and immediately after the Soviet advance. At Mokrany, in Polesie, about 150 sailors of the Pinsk River Flotilla who had surrendered were shot (IPN historian Jan Jerzy Milewski, quoted by PAP). After the battle of Szack on 28 September, officers and NCOs of the Border Protection Corps captured in night fighting were killed at Mielniki on 29 September (dzieje.pl, citing IPN historian Leon Popek). At Grabowiec near Zamość, on 24 or 25 September, Soviet troops killed wounded Polish prisoners, including officers, an episode remembered locally as “Little Katyn”; the sources disagree on the date and the number of victims (Wikipedia, “Grabowiec,” citing IPN and Piotrowski). Near Lwów, hundreds of policemen were executed, and near Łuniniec officers and NCOs were shot (Wikipedia, “Soviet invasion of Poland”). Military settlers, veterans of the 1920 war who had been given land in the east, were murdered in at least 34 settlements, mainly by local revolutionary committees and armed bands rather than by Red Army units (PAP/dzieje.pl).

The largest crime came later and was planned in Moscow. The Red Army took between about 230,000 and 450,000 Polish soldiers prisoner, depending on the count and on what is included; the Soviet fronts themselves reported about 454,700, the NKVD’s figure for prisoners actually held was much lower, and the IPN puts the number taken into captivity at about 250,000 (Great Russian Encyclopedia; Wikipedia, “Polish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union after 1939,” citing IPN). In October 1939 the Soviets released about 42,000 ordinary soldiers, mostly Ukrainians and Belarusians from the annexed territories, and handed about 43,000 men from German-occupied Poland over to the Germans. Officers, policemen, border guards and others thought dangerous were separated into three special camps: Kozelsk, Starobielsk and Ostashkov. On 5 March 1940 the Soviet Politburo approved Lavrenty Beria’s proposal to shoot them. In April and May 1940 the NKVD killed about 22,000 people, at Katyn forest near Smolensk, at Kharkiv, at Kalinin (Tver) and at other sites. Among them were most of the officers who had surrendered at Lwów on the promise that they could leave the country. That story, and the long struggle over the truth about Katyn, are told in Chapter 9.

The two armies meet

The Red Army’s advance took it in places well beyond the line of 23 August, and the Wehrmacht had already advanced in places well beyond it to the east. The two armies met at many points between 18 and 22 September, and their meetings were as a rule correct and sometimes friendly. Liaison officers worked out the handover of towns. On 22 September the German XIX Motorized Corps handed Brześć (Brest) and its fortress to the Soviet 29th Light Tank Brigade with a ceremony and a march-past, described in Chapter 5. The same day German troops handed over Białystok. On 23 September a joint communiqué fixed a provisional demarcation line along the Pissa, Narew, Vistula and San rivers, and German troops began pulling back west of it, sometimes abandoning ground they had paid for in blood (Great Russian Encyclopedia). Not every meeting went smoothly: there were clashes, including one near Widomla on 23 September, and German units around Lwów had exchanged fire with Soviet troops.

Tomaszów Lubelski: the last battles of the southern armies

While the Red Army moved west, the largest group of Polish troops still in the field south of Warsaw was trying to break through the Germans to reach the Romanian bridgehead. The remnants of Army Kraków under Gen. Antoni Szylling and Army Lublin under Gen. Tadeusz Piskor, with Piskor in overall command of what was called the Central Front, had retreated east across the Vistula and San and found the German Tenth and Fourteenth Armies across their path around Tomaszów Lubelski, south of Zamość. The first battle of Tomaszów Lubelski, which most sources date from 17 or 18 to 20 September, was one of the largest tank battles of the campaign. Col. Stefan Rowecki’s Warsaw Armored-Motorized Brigade, with its modern 7TP light tanks, attacked Tomaszów on 18, 19 and 20 September, and the infantry of the two armies made three attempts to break through. On 20 September, with ammunition gone and German forces closing from both sides, Piskor surrendered. About 11,000 soldiers went into captivity in his sector, and thousands more surrendered at Rawa Ruska and elsewhere (Wikipedia, “Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski”; Zaloga). Rowecki escaped to Warsaw and later commanded the Home Army.

A second battle followed from 21 to 26 September, when Gen. Stefan Dąb-Biernacki’s Northern Front, about 39,000 men with 225 guns, came south from the Lublin region and tried to break through the same area. Gen. Władysław Anders’s cavalry took Krasnystaw on 22 September, and Gen. Emil Przedrzymirski’s group attacked toward Krasnobród on 24 September, but the front could not break the German ring. Dąb-Biernacki ordered his officers to surrender and left for France; most of the remaining troops capitulated around 26–27 September. Anders tried to lead his cavalry south toward Hungary, was wounded, and was captured by the Soviets at the end of September. He would spend nearly two years in Soviet prisons before being released in 1941 to form the Polish army in the USSR. By the infobox count in the standard summary, Polish losses at Tomaszów were 870 killed and 700 wounded, and German losses 929 killed, 1,174 wounded and 36 tanks; the Polish dead are almost certainly undercounted (Wikipedia, “Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski”).

Across the borders: Hungary, Romania, Lithuania and Latvia

For tens of thousands of Polish soldiers, the order of 17 September meant a march to the nearest frontier. Maczek’s 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade, still fighting near Lwów, was ordered to cross into Hungary about two days after the Soviet invasion and did so in good order, losing about half its men along the way (Wikipedia, “10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade”). Hungary, although allied to Germany, was traditionally friendly to Poland; its government had refused a German request in September to send troops through Hungarian territory, and it interned the Polish soldiers in camps from which, with tacit Hungarian help, many slipped away to France. Romania interned the government, the high command and the troops that crossed its border, but it too allowed thousands to leave through its Black Sea ports and through Yugoslavia. Polish aircraft flew out to Romanian airfields; the Polish Air Force’s story is told in Chapter 4.

Estimates of the numbers vary, and civilians are counted differently from soldiers. A Polish summary of the research by Laurențiu Batin, Andrzej Przewoźnik and Wanda Krystyna Roman gives about 30,000 soldiers among 60,000–100,000 Polish refugees in Romania, about 35,000 soldiers among 50,000–140,000 refugees in Hungary, about 15,000 soldiers in Lithuania and about 1,300 in Latvia (dzieje.pl). Other counts put the soldiers in Hungary at 40,000 or more and those in Lithuania at about 14,000. Together, perhaps 80,000 Polish soldiers left the country in September and early October 1939. Those interned in Lithuania and Latvia were least fortunate: when the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states in June 1940, the NKVD took over the camps, and about 12,000 of the internees from Lithuania became Soviet prisoners in their turn (Wikipedia, “Polish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union after 1939”).

The Border Protection Corps fights its way west

The Border Protection Corps was the formation that had been built for exactly this moment, and the one least able to meet it. Created in 1924, fifteen years almost to the day before the Soviet invasion, it guarded the eastern frontier against raids by Soviet-sponsored partisans and smugglers, and it was organized as a military force under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Its soldiers knew the forests, marshes and rivers of the borderlands better than anyone. But in 1939 its artillery and many of its battalions had been sent west to form reserve divisions; KOP units fought the Germans at Węgierska Górka in the south, as told in Chapter 3. On 17 September it was a screen of posts along the frontier, not an army.

The battle of Szack, in northern Volhynia near the Bug, began on the morning of 28 September. The KOP group, about 4,000 men with artillery at this stage, met the Soviet 52nd Rifle Division under Ivan Russiyanov. Soviet tanks attacked at about 8 a.m.; Polish antitank guns opened fire at about 500 m and stopped them, and the Poles then attacked the town, captured the Soviet division’s headquarters and drove its units out, leaving several T-26 tanks behind. In the headquarters, the Poles found orders to “clean up” the area east of the Bug of “bands of Polish officers.” When Soviet reserves arrived in the afternoon, the Poles withdrew into the forests and continued toward the Bug, with fighting continuing into the night and the next day (Wikipedia, “Battle of Szack”; dzieje.pl). The losses are disputed. Soviet archives record 81 dead, 184 wounded and seven tanks lost; Polish accounts claim several hundred Soviet dead and many more tanks. The KOP Polesie Brigade’s supply column, caught by Soviet armor near Mielniki, was destroyed, and some 18 prisoners were executed there on 29 September.

The group crossed the Bug on 30 September into the Lublin region, now designated as part of the German zone, still hoping to reach Kleeberg. On 1 October near Wytyczno, close to Włodawa, it was attacked by the Soviet 45th Rifle Division with tanks. By now Orlik-Rückemann had about 2,000–3,000 men and 13 guns. The battle lasted about 15 hours. By one tally, the Soviets lost 80 killed, 102 wounded and four tanks and the Poles about 200 killed and 467 wounded; Orlik-Rückemann later claimed 25–27 Soviet tanks destroyed (Wikipedia, “Battle of Wytyczno,” citing Seidner). With his ammunition nearly gone, he split the group into small detachments and ordered them to make their way to Kleeberg, and many did. Wytyczno was one of the last battles between the Polish Army and the Red Army in 1939.

The treaty of 28 September

On 27 September Ribbentrop flew to Moscow for a second round of negotiations, and on 28 September, the day Warsaw capitulated, he and Molotov signed the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, with secret protocols. It moved the line between the two zones east, from the Vistula to the Bug. Germany received the Lublin region and the eastern part of the Warsaw province, which the Wehrmacht had largely conquered anyway; in exchange, Lithuania, which the August protocol had placed in the German sphere, was transferred to the Soviet sphere. The new frontier ran along the Pissa, Narew, Bug and San rivers, roughly the ethnographic line proposed by the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon in 1919–1920, a coincidence Soviet diplomacy would later use to its advantage (Great Russian Encyclopedia; PAP/dzieje.pl). The two governments also agreed, in a secret supplementary protocol, to suppress any Polish resistance that might affect the other’s territory.

In their words

Both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories of the other party.

The Soviet troops that had advanced west of the new line began withdrawing to it on 5 October and completed the move by 12 October (Great Russian Encyclopedia). In the territory it kept, the Soviet Union organized elections on 22 October to “people’s assemblies” in Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, which asked to join the Soviet Union; the Supreme Soviet annexed the territories on 1–2 November. Moscow had taken about 196,000 km², roughly half of prewar Poland, with about 13 million people. Germany annexed western Poland outright and turned the rest into the General Government. On the map, Poland had disappeared for the fourth time in its history.

Kock: the last battle

Gen. Franciszek Kleeberg, commander of Corps District IX at Brześć, had been ordered on 9 September to organize the defense of Polesie, the vast wooded marshland of eastern Poland, from depot units and the reserve centers of four divisions. His improvised force held a sector of about 250 km. When the Red Army came, he refused to be evacuated from Pińsk, gathered his units, and marched west toward Warsaw, hoping to relieve the capital or at least to reach the arms depots at Dęblin. On 28 September, as Warsaw fell, he declined an offer to assume the post of commander in chief and reorganized his troops as Independent Operational Group Polesie (Samodzielna Grupa Operacyjna “Polesie”). It had about 17,000–18,000 men: the 50th Infantry Division “Brzoza” under Col. Ludwik Brzoza-Brzezina, the 60th Infantry Division “Kobryń” under Col. Adam Epler, Gen. Zygmunt Podhorski’s cavalry division “Zaza,” the Podlaska Cavalry Brigade, an air squadron and services (dzieje.pl; Wikipedia, “Battle of Kock (1939)”). On 29–30 September it fought and beat Soviet units near Jabłoń and Milanów.

On 2 October, near Kock, a small town north of Lublin, the Polesie group ran into the German XIV Motorized Corps under Gen. Gustav von Wietersheim, which was moving east to occupy the territory assigned to Germany under the new treaty. The battle, fought around Kock, Serokomla, Krzywda, Wojcieszków, Adamów, Radoryż Kościelny, Helenów and Wola Gułowska, lasted four days. The German 13th Motorized Infantry Division under Gen. Paul Otto bore the brunt at first, and the 29th Motorized Infantry Division under Gen. Joachim Lemelsen joined on 4 October. The Poles held their ground and on 5 October took the strongly defended church and Carmelite monastery in Kock and the cemetery. That afternoon the quartermaster reported that the ammunition was exhausted (dzieje.pl).

That evening Kleeberg sent envoys to the Germans. A ceasefire was agreed until 6:00 a.m. on 6 October to allow surrender talks; during the night the soldiers were paid and some weapons were buried to keep them from the enemy. On the morning of 6 October, at 10:00 by most English-language accounts and 11:00 by a detailed Polish one, Kleeberg formally surrendered in front of the Jabłonowski Palace in Kock. His officers kept their sidearms. The Germans took 16,860 prisoners, including 1,255 officers and four generals (Kleeberg, Podhorski, Kmicic-Skrzyński and Młot-Fijałkowski), along with about 10,200 rifles, 205 heavy machine guns, 20 guns and about 5,000 horses (dzieje.pl; Wikipedia gives about 17,000 captured). Casualties in the battle itself were relatively light: by the usual estimates, 250–300 on the Polish side and 300–500 on the German. Independent Operational Group Polesie was the last major unit of the Polish Army to lay down its arms.

In their words

Przywilejem dowódcy jest brać odpowiedzialność na siebie. … Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła. I nie zginie!

Hubal: the major who would not surrender

One Polish officer did not accept that the campaign was over. Maj. Henryk Dobrzański, a cavalryman and well-known show jumper of the 1920s, was deputy commander of the 110th Reserve Uhlan Regiment, formed on mobilization in northeastern Poland in September 1939. When the regiment’s commander ordered it disbanded after the Soviet invasion, Dobrzański led about 180 volunteers toward Warsaw to help the capital. They were still on the way when Warsaw capitulated on 28 September. About 50 of his men chose to fight on. Dobrzański, who took the pseudonym “Hubal,” had already begun calling his column the Detached Unit of the Polish Army (Oddział Wydzielony Wojska Polskiego); the name is first recorded on 24 September near Woźnawieś in Podlasie (Wikipedia, “Detached Unit of the Polish Army”). It crossed the Vistula on 1 October and on 2 October ambushed a German convoy.

Through the winter of 1939–40 Hubal’s men lived in the forests and villages of the Kielce and Radom regions, in uniform, with their horses, as soldiers rather than as an underground. Their strength rose and fell, from a few dozen in late 1939 to more than 300 in March 1940. The new Polish underground, the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ), regarded the unit as a hazard that drew German reprisals on the civilian population, and its commanders asked Hubal to disband or limit his operations; he declined. In late March 1940 the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, concentrated about 5,000 SS men, police and soldiers against him. On the night of 29–30 March, about 100 of Hubal’s men fought a German force of several hundred at Hucisko, losing 11 killed and 10 wounded and inflicting perhaps 100 casualties (Wikipedia).

The Germans answered with the “Hubal pacifications” of 30 March to 11 April 1940, in which they burned villages and shot their men in the Końskie, Kielce and Opoczno counties. The most careful count, by the Polish Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation, gives 712 civilians murdered in 31 villages; at Skłoby alone 265 men were killed on 10–11 April (other estimates range from 215 to 228), and the village was almost entirely burned. Some older accounts put the total at over 1,200 (Wikipedia, “Hubal pacifications” and “Detached Unit of the Polish Army”). On 30 April 1940 the Germans surprised Hubal’s camp in a ravine near Anielin, near Opoczno, and he was killed. The Germans displayed his body in nearby villages and then took it to Tomaszów Mazowiecki, where it was burned or buried in a place that has never been found. The remnants of his unit disbanded on 24–25 June 1940.

The last battles at a glance

Counting the cost

The numbers for the Soviet invasion are less certain than those for the German campaign, because the fighting was scattered, many Polish units were improvised, and the Soviet figures were for decades the only official ones. For Polish losses in fighting the Red Army, the most common estimates are about 2,500 killed and about 20,000 wounded (PAP/dzieje.pl), with a wider range of 3,000–7,000 killed or missing in other summaries (Wikipedia). These figures do not include the prisoners murdered after capture or the victims of the occupation that followed.

Soviet losses have been revised several times. In October 1939 Molotov told the Supreme Soviet that the Red Army had lost 737 dead and 1,862 wounded. The figures now given by the Great Russian Encyclopedia are 1,084 killed, 185 missing and 2,002 wounded among Red Army and NKVD troops, with 17 tanks and 6 aircraft lost; G. F. Krivosheev’s statistical study of Soviet losses gives 1,475 killed or missing and 2,383 wounded. Polish historians, counting the evidence from individual battles, have estimated about 3,000 Soviet dead and 6,000–10,000 wounded (PAP/dzieje.pl; Wikipedia, citing Sanford). Equipment losses in Soviet records, 17 tanks for the whole campaign, are hard to reconcile with the evidence from Grodno, Kodziowce and Szack alone; they probably count only tanks written off, not those damaged and recovered.

By the numbers

The Soviet invasion: forces and prisoners

Soviet strength at the start, and Polish soldiers taken prisoner by the Red Army, by source (all figures approximate)

Soviet troops, 17 Sep (Meltyukhov/GRE)617,600

Polish prisoners, Soviet fronts’ count454,700

Polish prisoners, IPN estimate250,000

Prisoners held in NKVD camps125,400

Released, Oct 193942,400

Murdered in the Katyn massacres, 194022,000

By the numbers

Killed in battle and interned abroad

Estimated Polish soldiers interned in neighboring countries, and the dead of the Polish–Soviet fighting, September–October 1939

Interned in Hungary (35,000–40,000)35,000

Interned in Romania30,000

Interned in Lithuania (14,000–15,000)15,000

Interned in Latvia1,300

Polish dead fighting the Red Army (2,500–7,000)7,000

Soviet dead and missing (1,269–3,000)3,000

How 17 September was remembered

For most of the next fifty years, the history of 17 September could not be written honestly in Poland. The communist government installed in 1944–45 depended on Moscow, and official histories either passed over the Soviet invasion in silence or repeated the Soviet version: the Red Army had entered to protect the Ukrainian and Belarusian population after the collapse of the Polish state. The Katyn massacre was blamed on the Germans. Polish historians in exile, veterans’ organizations and the underground press of the 1970s and 1980s kept the other record alive. Only in 1989–90, when the Soviet government admitted NKVD responsibility for Katyn and Polish archives opened, did 17 September take its place in Polish public memory beside 1 September. Since 2013 the date has also been marked in Poland as Sybiraks’ Day, in memory of the hundreds of thousands deported to Siberia and Central Asia. In Russia, the Great Russian Encyclopedia still describes the operation as a “liberation campaign.”

There is an American chapter in that story too. In 1951–52 a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives under Rep. Ray J. Madden of Indiana investigated the Katyn massacre, took testimony from survivors and witnesses in the United States and Europe, and concluded that the NKVD had committed it. The committee’s hearings put on record, decades before Moscow admitted it, what had happened to the officers who surrendered at Lwów and elsewhere in September 1939. The U.S. State Department’s 1948 publication of the captured German documents, including the secret protocols of August and September 1939, had already done the same for the diplomacy that made the invasion possible.

For visitors, the sites of the last battles are scattered across three countries. Kock, in eastern Poland, has a cemetery where Kleeberg lies among his soldiers and a museum of the battle. Wytyczno has a memorial and a small cemetery. Szack and Mielniki are in Ukraine, where Polish and Ukrainian teams have searched for KOP graves and reburied the remains of KOP soldiers at a war cemetery in Mielniki (dzieje.pl). Grodno is in Belarus, where commemoration of the 1939 defense has been politically difficult in recent years; Lviv, in Ukraine, has the Lychakiv Cemetery with its Polish military sections. Kuty and Vijnița face each other across the Czeremosz on the Ukrainian–Romanian border, where the abutment of the bridge the government crossed can still be seen.

Sources

• Steven J. Zaloga, Poland 1939: The Birth of Blitzkrieg (Osprey, 2002).
• 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).
• PAP / dzieje.pl (Muzeum Historii Polski): “86 lat temu ZSRR dokonał agresji na Polskę” (the Soviet note, the general directive, Grodno, losses, with comments by Andrzej Garlicki, Wojciech Materski and Paweł Wieczorkiewicz); article on the defense of Grodno (Jan Jerzy Milewski, IPN Białystok); article on KOP graves at Szack and Mielniki (Leon Popek, IPN); “Bitwa pod Kockiem – ostatni bój kampanii 1939 roku”; article on Polish refugees and internees in Romania and Hungary (citing L. Batin, A. Przewoźnik, W. K. Roman and W. Roszkowski) (all in Polish).
• Polonika (National Institute of Polish Cultural Heritage Abroad), “Kuty nad Czeremoszem – pozostałości mostu i przejścia granicznego” (in Polish).
• Great Russian Encyclopedia (Bolshaya Rossiyskaya Entsiklopediya), “Pol’skii pokhod Krasnoi armii 1939” (Soviet strengths, losses and dates; in Russian, presenting the official Russian view); Mikhail Meltyukhov, Sovetsko-pol’skie voiny (Moscow, 2001); G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (Greenhill, 1997).
• U.S. Department of State, Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office, ed. Raymond J. Sontag and James S. Beddie (1948); Secret Supplementary Protocol of 28 September 1939, Avalon Project, Yale Law School; “Soviet Statement to Poland, 17 September 1939,” English translation as reprinted in document collections of the period.
• Ray Walser, “War Comes to Warsaw: September 1939,” The Foreign Service Journal (September 2019), on Ambassador Biddle and the U.S. response; U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre (Madden Committee), hearings and final report (1951–52).
• Wikipedia: “Soviet invasion of Poland,” “Battle of Lwów (1939),” “Battle of Wilno (1939),” “Battle of Grodno (1939)” (citing J. Magnuski and M. Kolomiets, Czerwony Blitzkrieg, 1994), “Tadeusz Jasiński,” “Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński,” “Grabowiec, Zamość County,” “Polish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union after 1939,” “Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski,” “10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade (Poland),” “Border Protection Corps,” “Battle of Szack,” “Battle of Wytyczno,” “Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann,” “Battle of Kock (1939)” (citing J. Wróblewski, Samodzielna Grupa Operacyjna “Polesie” 1939, 1989), “Franciszek Kleeberg,” “Henryk Dobrzański,” “Detached Unit of the Polish Army” and “Hubal pacifications.”
• Further reading: Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton University Press, 1988; expanded 2002); Czesław Grzelak, Szack–Wytyczno 1939 and Wilno–Grodno–Kodziowce 1939 (Bellona, 2002); Anita Prazmowska, Britain and Poland 1939–1943: The Betrayed Ally (Cambridge University Press, 1995); George Sanford, Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940 (Routledge, 2005); Stanley S. Seidner, Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz and the Defense of Poland (1978); Władysław Langner, Ostatnie dni obrony Lwowa 1939 (1979); Polskie Siły Zbrojne w drugiej wojnie światowej, vol. 1, part 3 (Sikorski Institute, London).

Photographs: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (NAC), Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Polona and other period photographs, public domain; Fortepan (CC BY-SA 3.0); Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz (CC BY 4.0); all via Wikimedia Commons. German and Soviet photographs of 1939 were taken for propaganda and their captions are noted where they are doubtful. Insignia badges are modern illustrations, not official emblems.