Because the plan was to continue the war from behind the Vistula and the San, and if need be from the Romanian border, while Britain and France attacked in the west; a government and high command besieged in the capital could not have directed that war. Ministries began to leave on 4 September, the foreign missions were asked to follow on 5 September, and on the night of 6–7 September Rydz-Śmigły and the General Staff left for Brześć. The departure was badly handled. That same night Lt. Col. Roman Umiastowski broadcast an appeal on Polish Radio for all men fit for service to leave the city and go east, and crowds jammed the bridges and roads; Gen. Walerian Czuma, commander of the city’s defense, cancelled the appeal at 03:00 on 8 September. To many Varsovians it looked like flight, and it told the enemy that the high command did not expect to hold Warsaw (Rzeczpospolita; dzieje.pl).

Sources: Rzeczpospolita, “Alarm dla miasta Warszawy”; dzieje.pl (PAP); FRUS 1939, vol. II, doc. 621

Read more: Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw

The 4th Panzer Division reached Warsaw’s southwestern edge on the afternoon of 8 September, took Okęcie airfield and at about 17:00 sent an armored column up Grójecka Street into Ochota. It ran into the 41st Infantry Regiment and field guns firing down the street and pulled back; Berlin radio had already announced that German tanks were in the capital. At about 07:30 on 9 September the division attacked again in two columns and reached Wola, where it was stopped by 75 mm and 37 mm guns at close range, barricades, grenades and petrol bottles; at Redutowa Street soldiers of the 40th Infantry Regiment set turpentine alight in front of the tanks. Gen. Georg-Hans Reinhardt called off the attack at about 09:45. Tank losses are disputed, from the 42 claimed in the Polish communiqué to possibly half the division’s strength, many repaired later. Warsaw could not be taken by a mechanized raid (Wroniszewski; Jurga).

Sources: Wroniszewski, Ochota 1939–1945 (1976); Jurga, as summarized in Wikipedia, “Defense of Ochota and Wola”; Rzeczpospolita

Read more: Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw

It was the largest battle of the campaign. Armies Poznań and Pomorze, together about 200,000 to 225,000 men, had been bypassed in the west and by 8 September were concentrated around Kutno. Gen. Tadeusz Kutrzeba won permission to strike south into the flank of the German Eighth Army, which was marching past Łódź toward Warsaw, and on the evening of 9 September three of his divisions crossed the Bzura between Łęczyca and Łowicz. The surprise was complete: the German 30th Infantry Division was mauled and pushed back about 20 km, and the Poles reached the outskirts of Zgierz. Army Group South then turned the Tenth Army’s panzer divisions and the bombers of Luftflotte 4 against them. Driven into a pocket and pounded from the air, the Polish armies were destroyed between 16 and 22 September; about 30,000 men broke through the Kampinos Forest to Warsaw and Modlin. For about ten days the battle drew German strength away from the capital (LeMO; Zaloga).

Sources: German Historical Museum (LeMO), “Schlacht an der Bzura 1939”; Zaloga (2002); dzieje.pl

Read more: Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw

Not because its defenses were broken. After the Bzura pocket was destroyed the Germans turned their full strength on the city and chose bombardment over a costly street battle. On 23 September the power station and the water filtration plant were knocked out, silencing Polish Radio and leaving most districts without running water; without water the fire brigades could no longer fight fires. On Black Monday, 25 September, bombers under Wolfram von Richthofen attacked from 08:00 until dark, dropping about 560 tons of high explosive and 72 tons of incendiaries, while some 900 guns fired into the city. A general assault followed on 26 September. With ammunition short, civilians suffering and no relief possible after the Soviet invasion, Gen. Juliusz Rómmel’s council sought terms. A ceasefire began at noon on 27 September, and Kutrzeba and Gen. Johannes Blaskowitz signed the capitulation at 13:15 on 28 September at Rakowiec. Modlin surrendered the next day (Corum; Borkowski).

Sources: Corum, as cited in Wikipedia, “Bombing of Warsaw in World War II”; Julian Borkowski, Museum of Warsaw, in dzieje.pl (2025)

Read more: Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw

Estimates differ widely. The figure most often cited is about 25,000 civilians killed, residents and refugees, the estimate of Julian Borkowski of the Museum of Warsaw; the German Historical Museum gives about 26,000, the figure reported at the surrender, and English Wikipedia about 18,000. A range of roughly 18,000 to 26,000 covers most serious estimates. Borkowski estimates that about 10,000 died on 25 September alone. More than 6,000 Polish soldiers were killed and about 16,000 wounded, and between about 100,000 and 140,000 went into captivity. About 10 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed and about 40 percent heavily damaged, by Zaloga’s and Corum’s figures. That was a terrible toll, but the ruined Warsaw of the famous postwar photographs is the result of 1944, when German units demolished the city during and after the Warsaw Uprising, not of 1939 (Borkowski; LeMO; Zaloga).

Sources: Borkowski, in dzieje.pl (2025); German Historical Museum (LeMO); Zaloga (2002); Corum (2008)

Read more: Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw

It had about 400 combat aircraft in front-line units on 1 September: 392 by the Polish Air Force Memorial Committee’s count after Jerzy Cynk, 397 by E. R. Hooton, and 421 out of 771 on hand by the count of the chief of staff, Gen. Wacław Stachiewicz. They included about 159 fighters (109 PZL P.11c, 20 P.11a and 30 P.7a), 36 modern PZL.37 Łoś medium bombers, 114 PZL.23 Karaś light bombers and about 84 observation aircraft. The gull-winged P.11c had been one of the best fighters in the world in 1934; by 1939, with a fixed undercarriage, an open cockpit and a top speed of about 375–390 km/h, it was slower than some German bombers. Its intended replacement, the PZL.50 Jastrząb, never entered service, and fighters and bombers ordered from France and Britain never arrived. Against it the Luftwaffe sent about 1,400 to 1,500 combat aircraft in two air fleets, or 1,900 to 2,000 counting reconnaissance and naval types (Cynk; Hooton).

Sources: Cynk (1971, 1998); Hooton (2007); Polish Air Force Memorial Committee

Read more: Chapter 4: The Air War

The Pursuit Brigade (Brygada Pościgowa), formed in May 1939 under Col. Stefan Pawlikowski, was the commander in chief’s fighter reserve for the defense of Warsaw. It had 54 fighters in five escadrilles, among them the 111th “Kościuszko” Escadrille, and it flew from secret field airfields at Zielonka and Poniatów. On the morning of 1 September it met the first raid near Nieporęt, north of the city, and fought two more raids that day, claiming 14 German aircraft destroyed and 5 probably destroyed for 10 fighters destroyed and 24 damaged. In six days it was credited with 42 or 43 German aircraft and lost 38 of its 54 fighters. With its warning network broken and its supplies failing, it was withdrawn to the Lublin region on the night of 6–7 September with about 18 serviceable aircraft. Zaloga calls it the most successful Polish air unit of the campaign, and many of its pilots later flew with No. 303 Squadron (Zaloga; Pawlak).

Sources: Zaloga (2002), pp. 51–52; Pawlak, Brygada Pościgowa – Alarm! (1977)

Read more: Chapter 4: The Air War

Second Lt. Władysław Gnyś of the 121st Fighter Escadrille is generally credited with it. A little before 07:00 on 1 September, near Kraków, Ju 87s of I./StG 2 returning from a raid shot down his commander, Capt. Mieczysław Medwecki, who is regarded as the first Allied airman killed in the war. Minutes later Gnyś attacked two Dornier Do 17 bombers of KG 77 near Olkusz; both crashed at Żurada, and all six crewmen died. The German researcher Marius Emmerling, using German records, concluded that the bombers collided after one was hit by anti-aircraft fire; the Polish historian Jerzy Cynk, using Gnyś’s report and witnesses on the ground, concluded that Gnyś brought both down. Gnyś crossed into Romania on 18 September, flew in France and in the Battle of Britain with No. 302 Squadron, was shot down over France in 1944 and escaped, and died in Canada in 2000 (Cynk; Emmerling; Polish Aviation Museum).

Sources: Cynk (2000), pp. 157–159; Emmerling, Lotnictwo Wojskowe 5/2002; Polish Aviation Museum, Kraków

Read more: Chapter 4: The Air War

The best German figure is the Luftwaffe’s own: a quartermaster report of 28 September 1939 lists 285 aircraft lost to all causes in Poland and 279 more damaged 10 percent or more, with 189 aircrew dead, 126 wounded and 224 missing. Lower totals, such as 246, count only combat losses. Polish fighter pilots were officially credited with 126 German aircraft; another tally gives 134, and the popular figure of over 170 probably includes anti-aircraft claims and duplicates. Poland lost about 330 aircraft (333 or 327 in different counts), many of them trainers, reserves and machines wrecked on rough fields rather than victims of German fighters; of about 120 Karaś bombers destroyed, only 67 were lost to enemy action. About 98 to 100 aircraft flew to Romania on 17–18 September and were interned. The trained men mattered more than the machines: over 9,000 Polish air force personnel reached the West by mid-1940 (Hooton; Cynk).

Sources: Luftwaffe Quartermaster General’s report (28 September 1939), via Hooton; Cynk (1998); Polish Air Force Memorial Committee

Read more: Chapter 4: The Air War

It was the evacuation of Poland’s three most modern destroyers to Britain before the war began, urged by the British and accepted by the Polish high command. Rear Adm. Józef Unrug signed the order on 26 August, and the code word “Peking” was hoisted at Oksywie at 12:55 on 30 August (some English accounts say 29 August). At about 14:15 Błyskawica, Burza and Grom sailed, passed a German cruiser and destroyer in the Øresund without a shot, learned of the invasion at sea on 1 September and tied up at Leith, the port of Edinburgh, at 17:37 that day. Many Poles saw it as running away. Its defenders point to the fate of the ships that stayed, sunk at Hel within days, and to the navy the government in exile could put into the Allied line. Grom was lost off Narvik on 4 May 1940; Burza shared in sinking U-606 with the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Campbell in 1943; Błyskawica is a museum ship at Gdynia (Łydka; uboat.net).

Sources: Andrzej Łydka, Polska Zbrojna; uboat.net; Wikipedia, “Peking Plan”

Read more: Chapter 7: The Coast and the Navy

ORP Orzeł, Poland’s newest submarine, put into neutral Tallinn on the night of 14 September with a sick captain. Under German pressure the Estonians interned her on 15 September, took her charts and logbook and began removing her weapons; the torpedo hoist cable parted, apparently with the crew’s help, leaving five or six torpedoes aboard. In the early hours of 18 September, under Lt. Cdr. Jan Grudziński, the crew overpowered their two guards without violence, cut the moorings and broke out under fire, briefly running aground at the harbor mouth. Without charts, the navigator, 2nd Lt. Marian Mokrski, drew the Baltic and the Danish straits from memory. The crew put the guards ashore near Gotland with food, clothing and money, slipped through the shallow Drogden channel of the Øresund on 8 October and reached Rosyth on 14 October. Moscow used the escape as a pretext to press Estonia into the bases treaty of 28 September (Santi Odnaleźć Orła; ERR).

Sources: Santi Odnaleźć Orła expedition timeline; ERR (Estonian Public Broadcasting); uboat.net

Read more: Chapter 7: The Coast and the Navy · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

Far longer than planned. The Land Coastal Defense under Col. Stanisław Dąbek, about 15,000 marine riflemen, reservists, police and volunteers, was cut off once the Corridor fell. It raided German lines by night from 1 to 8 September and then faced the main German offensive of about 38,000 to 39,000 men. Rather than fight among Gdynia’s civilians, Dąbek withdrew on 12 September to the Kępa Oksywska heights above the naval port; the Germans entered the city on 14 September. About 9,000 to 10,000 men held the heights until 19 September, when the wounded Dąbek ordered the fighting stopped and shot himself at Babie Doły. The Hel peninsula, only a few hundred meters wide at its root and guarded at its tip by the four 152.4 mm guns of the Laskowski battery, held for 32 days with about 2,800 to 3,000 men. Rear Adm. Unrug sought a ceasefire on 1 October, after Warsaw and Modlin had fallen, and German troops entered Hel on 2 October (dzieje.pl; hela.com.pl).

Sources: dzieje.pl (PAP, 2024); hela.com.pl; Wikipedia, “Battle of Gdynia” and “Battle of Hel”; Polska Zbrojna

Read more: Chapter 7: The Coast and the Navy

To claim the share of Poland assigned to it by the secret protocol of 23 August. Berlin pressed Moscow from 3 September to move against the Polish army, but Stalin waited until the Red Army’s fighting with Japan at Khalkhin Gol ended in a ceasefire agreed on 15 September, and until it was clear that Britain and France would not attack Germany in earnest. At 03:00 Moscow time on 17 September the Polish ambassador, Wacław Grzybowski, was read a note saying that the Polish state and its government had ceased to exist and that the Red Army would take the Ukrainians and Belarusians of eastern Poland under its protection. He refused to accept it. Every claim was false or misleading: the government was on Polish soil in contact with the army, Warsaw still held and the army was fighting on the Bzura. Soviet histories called the operation a “liberation campaign” for half a century, and the Great Russian Encyclopedia still does (PAP/dzieje.pl; Nazi-Soviet Relations).

Sources: PAP/dzieje.pl (2025); U.S. Department of State, Nazi-Soviet Relations (1948); Great Russian Encyclopedia

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September

On the evening of 17 September Marshal Rydz-Śmigły, at Kuty near the Romanian border, issued a general directive: the Soviets had entered; all units were to withdraw to Romania and Hungary by the shortest routes; and they were not to fight the Bolsheviks except if attacked or if the Soviets tried to disarm them. Cities defending themselves against the Germans were to fight on, while those approached by the Red Army were to negotiate for their garrisons to leave for Hungary or Romania. The reasoning was realistic, since the units in the east could not stop the Red Army, but the order reached many units late or not at all, contradicted other orders and left commanders unsure whether the Soviets were enemies or a force to bargain with; the historian Paweł Wieczorkiewicz argued that it weakened the defense of the east. Garrisons that laid down their arms on Soviet terms usually found the terms dishonored. Poland protested the invasion but did not declare war (PAP/dzieje.pl).

Sources: PAP/dzieje.pl, “86 lat temu ZSRR dokonał agresji na Polskę” (2025)

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September

Lwów (Lviv), the intended northern anchor of the Romanian bridgehead, was the first great city to face both invaders. German mountain troops under Col. Ferdinand Schörner reached its western outskirts on 12 September and were driven back, and Gen. Władysław Langner and Gen. Franciszek Sikorski held the city for ten days. On 19 September Soviet armor arrived from the east, and for a day or two the defenders faced Germans on one side and Soviets on the other; on 20 September Hitler ordered his troops to leave the city to the Soviets. Judging further defense hopeless, Langner surrendered to the Red Army at Winniki on the morning of 22 September on terms that allowed officers to leave Poland. Within hours the NKVD began arresting the officers. Most were sent to Starobielsk and shot at Kharkiv in the spring of 1940, Gen. Sikorski among them; Langner escaped to Romania and France (Langner; Leinwand).

Sources: Langner, Ostatnie dni obrony Lwowa 1939 (1979); Leinwand and Włodarkiewicz, as summarized in Wikipedia, “Battle of Lwów (1939)”

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September

Grodno, on the Niemen, saw the fiercest street fighting of the Soviet invasion. Stripped of most of its garrison, it was defended from 20 to 22 September by march battalions, police, reservists, cavalry remnants and many volunteers, among them gymnasium students and Scouts, organized by the acting mayor, Roman Sawicki, and Gens. Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński and Wacław Przeździecki. With almost no anti-tank guns they fought the Soviet 15th Tank Corps with rifles, grenades and bottles of gasoline. Soviet official figures give 57 Soviet killed; the Polish historians Kunert and Walkowski estimate about 800 Soviet casualties and 19 tanks destroyed. About 300 defenders were shot after the fighting, and Olszyna-Wilczyński was stopped and shot near Sopoćkinie on 22 September. The best-known victim is Tadeusz Jasiński, a boy of about 13 tied to a Soviet tank as a human shield; his story rests mainly on a memoir, and the IPN accepts its core (IPN; Kunert and Walkowski).

Sources: IPN (Jan Jerzy Milewski, via PAP); Magnuski and Kolomiets (1994); Kunert and Walkowski, as cited in Wikipedia, “Battle of Grodno (1939)”

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September

On the night of 17–18 September President Ignacy Mościcki, Prime Minister Felicjan Sławoj-Składkowski, nearly the whole cabinet and Marshal Rydz-Śmigły crossed the bridge over the Czeremosz at Kuty into Romanian Bukovina with several thousand soldiers and civilians; others crossed at Zaleszczyki and Śniatyn. They expected to travel on to France. Instead Romania, Poland’s ally since 1921 but under German pressure and fearful of the Soviet Union, interned them: Mościcki at Bicaz, Rydz-Śmigły near Craiova, Beck at Brașov. The constitution of 1935 provided a way out. On 30 September Mościcki resigned in favor of Władysław Raczkiewicz, already in Paris, who appointed Sikorski prime minister; in November Sikorski also became commander in chief. Rydz-Śmigły escaped in December 1940, reached occupied Warsaw in the autumn of 1941 and died there under a false name that December. The U.S. ambassador, Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr., followed the government to the border (polonika.pl; dzieje.pl; Walser).

Sources: polonika.pl; dzieje.pl (citing Batin and others); Walser, Foreign Service Journal (2019)

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

On 28 September 1939, the day Warsaw capitulated, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty in Moscow. It moved the line through Poland east from the Vistula to the Bug: Germany received the Lublin region and the eastern part of the Warsaw province, which its army had largely conquered anyway, and in exchange Lithuania passed into the Soviet sphere. The frontier ran along the Pissa, Narew, Bug and San, roughly the line proposed by Lord Curzon in 1919–20. A secret supplementary protocol bound both powers to tolerate “no Polish agitation” affecting the other’s territory. The Soviet Union kept about 200,000 km², just over half of prewar Poland, with 13.2 to 13.5 million people, and annexed it on 1–2 November after staged elections. Poles call it the fourth partition, after those of 1772, 1793 and 1795 (Nazi-Soviet Relations; Gross).

Sources: U.S. Department of State, Nazi-Soviet Relations (1948), via the Avalon Project; Gross, Revolution from Abroad (1988)

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

They were the last battles of the Border Protection Corps (KOP) against the Red Army. Its commander, Gen. Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann, gathered the KOP units of Polesie and Volhynia into a group of 8,000 to 9,000 men and marched west through the marshes toward the Bug. At Szack on 28 September about 4,000 of them stopped a Soviet tank attack with anti-tank guns firing at about 500 m, then took the town and the headquarters of the Soviet 52nd Rifle Division. Soviet archives record 81 dead; Polish accounts claim several hundred. KOP prisoners were shot at Mielniki on 29 September. The group crossed the Bug on 30 September, and on 1 October near Wytyczno, now about 2,000 to 3,000 men with 13 guns, it fought the Soviet 45th Rifle Division for about 15 hours. Short of ammunition, Orlik-Rückemann broke it into small detachments to make for Kleeberg’s forces, and many did. He himself escaped through Lithuania (dzieje.pl; Seidner).

Sources: dzieje.pl (Leon Popek, IPN); Seidner (1978), as cited in Wikipedia, “Battle of Wytyczno”; Grzelak (2002)

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September

Kock, north of Lublin, on 2–5 October 1939. Gen. Franciszek Kleeberg, given the task of defending Polesie on 9 September, built Independent Operational Group Polesie, about 17,000 to 18,000 men, from depots, reservists, border troops, river sailors and stragglers, and led it west after the Soviet invasion, defeating Soviet units at Jabłoń and Milanów on 29–30 September. On 2 October it ran into the German XIV Motorized Corps, which was moving east to occupy the territory assigned to Germany by the new treaty. In four days of fighting the Poles held their ground and on 5 October took the church and monastery at Kock, but that afternoon the ammunition was exhausted. Kleeberg surrendered on the morning of 6 October; the Germans took 16,860 prisoners, including 1,255 officers. His last order said it was the commander’s privilege to take the responsibility. He died in German captivity in 1941 and since 1969 has lain at Kock among his soldiers (dzieje.pl; Wróblewski).

Sources: dzieje.pl, “Bitwa pod Kockiem – ostatni bój kampanii 1939 roku”; Wróblewski (1989)

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September

Three young mathematicians of the Polish Cipher Bureau, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, recruited from a secret cryptology course at Poznań in 1929. In December 1932 Rejewski, using the theory of permutations and key tables supplied by French intelligence, reconstructed the wiring of the German military Enigma, and the Bureau read German traffic, with interruptions, for nearly seven years. Różycki devised the “clock” method, Zygalski his perforated sheets, and Rejewski the cyclometer and the electromechanical bomba. When the German changes of late 1938 outran Polish resources, the General Staff decided to share everything. At Pyry, outside Warsaw, on 25–26 July 1939, the Poles showed British and French codebreakers their methods and promised each delegation a Polish-built Enigma. GCHQ has said that the knowledge gained in Poland transformed its approach to Enigma. In 2014 the U.S. National Security Agency inducted Rejewski into its Cryptologic Hall of Honor (Kozaczuk; Rejewski; GCHQ).

Sources: Kozaczuk, Enigma (1984); Rejewski (1981); GCHQ (4 July 2014); NSA (2014)

Read more: Chapter 1: The Road to September · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

The mayor (city president) of Warsaw from 1934, a Legions veteran and former deputy treasury minister, Starzyński refused to leave when the government went in September 1939. On 8 September he became civil commissar of the Warsaw Defense Command and ran the besieged city: food and water, the Civic Guard that replaced the departed police, the fire brigades, the refugees, the burial of the dead and the rescue of the Royal Castle’s collections. His almost daily radio broadcasts helped hold the city together until the power failed on 23 September, the day of his last address, in which he said he had wanted Warsaw to be great and believed it would be. He stayed at his post after the capitulation. The Gestapo arrested him on 27 October 1939. For decades he was thought to have died in Dachau; in 2014 the IPN concluded that he was shot between 21 and 23 December 1939, though his grave has never been found (dzieje.pl; IPN).

Sources: dzieje.pl (PAP), “Stefan Starzyński”; IPN (2014), as cited in Wikipedia

Read more: Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw

Col. Stanisław Maczek commanded the 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade, Poland’s only fully motorized large unit in 1939: two truck-borne cavalry regiments, a few dozen light tanks and tankettes and motorized support, about 5,000 men. From the first day it held the German XVIII Corps in the Beskid hills around Jordanów, where the 24th Uhlans held the Wysoka ridge against three assaults on 2 September, and then it fought a long withdrawal, never letting the Germans advance more than about 10 km a day in its sector. The Germans called it the Black Brigade, after the black leather jackets of its officers and crews. After the Soviet invasion it crossed into Hungary in good order. Maczek went on to form the Polish 1st Armoured Division, which helped close the Falaise pocket in August 1944 and liberated Breda. Denied a British general’s pension, he worked for years as a barman in an Edinburgh hotel, and he died in Edinburgh in 1994, aged 102 (Majka; Maczek).

Sources: Wikipedia, “10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade” (citing Majka) and “Stanisław Maczek”; Maczek, Od podwody do czołgu (1961)

Read more: Chapter 3: The Frontier Battles · Chapter 8: 17 September

The Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza was formed in 1924 to stop the armed raids from Soviet territory that plagued Poland’s eastern borderlands. It was part of the army but answered to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and its soldiers knew the forests and marshes of the frontier better than anyone. In 1939 many of its battalions and most of its artillery were sent west to help form reserve divisions, so KOP men fought the Germans too: Capt. Władysław Raginis at Wizna commanded a KOP machine-gun company, a KOP battalion fought at Węgierska Górka, and another held Hel. On 17 September the posts left on the Soviet frontier, about 25 battalions, were overrun in hours, some fighting until their ammunition ran out. Its commander, Gen. Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann, then led a group of 8,000 to 9,000 men west to fight at Szack and Wytyczno. He reached Britain by the end of October 1939 and died in Ottawa in 1986 (Wikipedia, “Border Protection Corps”).

Sources: Wikipedia, “Border Protection Corps” and “Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann”; dzieje.pl

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September · Chapter 5: Wizna, Brest and the Narew

Maj. Henryk Dobrzański, a cavalry officer and one of Poland’s best-known show jumpers of the 1920s, was deputy commander of the 110th Reserve Uhlan Regiment. When the regiment was disbanded after the Soviet invasion he led about 180 volunteers toward Warsaw; after the city fell, about 50 chose to fight on. Under the pseudonym “Hubal” he kept his Detached Unit of the Polish Army in uniform, with its horses, in the forests of the Kielce and Radom regions through the winter, at times more than 300 strong. The new underground saw the unit as a danger that drew reprisals on civilians and asked him to disband; he declined. In the German “Hubal pacifications” of 30 March to 11 April 1940, 712 civilians were murdered in 31 villages by the most careful count. Hubal was killed near Anielin on 30 April 1940, and the Germans displayed his body in nearby villages; his grave has never been found (Wikipedia, citing the Main Commission).

Sources: Wikipedia, “Henryk Dobrzański,” “Detached Unit of the Polish Army” and “Hubal pacifications”

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September

No. At Krojanty near Chojnice, at about 19:00 on 1 September, about 250 men of the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans charged a battalion of the German 76th Infantry Regiment caught in the open and scattered it. German armored cars then came out of the woods and drove the uhlans off; 19 to 25 were killed, among them the regiment’s commander, Col. Kazimierz Mastalerz. No tanks were present during the charge. The next day German and Italian journalists were shown dead horses and German tanks that had arrived afterward, and the Italian Indro Montanelli wrote of cavalry charging tanks with sabers and lances. German propaganda spread the image, and Western popular histories and the communist authorities later repeated it. When Polish cavalry fought tanks, as at Mokra the same day, it fought dismounted, with anti-tank guns and rifles. As late as 2011 the Guardian printed a correction for repeating the story (Citino, HistoryNet).

Sources: Robert M. Citino, “Polish Cavalry Charges Tanks?” (HistoryNet); Wikipedia, “Charge at Krojanty”; History News Network

Read more: Chapter 3: The Frontier Battles · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

No. The combat squadrons left their peacetime bases for secret field airfields from about 27 August, and the Luftwaffe’s first-day raids on Okęcie, Rakowice, Ławica, Dęblin and other bases destroyed hangars, workshops and mostly training, reserve and unserviceable aircraft. By the account of Michael Alfred Peszke and other historians, none of the front-line combat aircraft were destroyed on the ground in the first days of the war. Polish fighters were in action over Kraków and Warsaw within hours, the Bomber Brigade attacked German columns from 2 September, and Polish units flew until 17 September, when about 100 surviving aircraft were ordered to Romania. Polish fighter pilots were credited with 126 German aircraft. What ended the air war was attrition, the loss of fuel, spare parts and communications as the Germans overran depots and cut telephone lines, not a single surprise blow. The story began with German announcements in the first days of the war (Peszke; Cynk).

Sources: Peszke, in Military Affairs; Cynk (1998); Polish Air Force Memorial Committee; IPN

Read more: Chapter 4: The Air War · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

No. The campaign lasted five weeks, and Poland fought it alone against two great powers attacking from four directions. Warsaw held until 28 September, Modlin until 29 September, Hel until 2 October and Kleeberg’s group until 6 October. France, with a larger army, the Maginot Line and British, Belgian and Dutch allies, asked for an armistice on 17 June 1940, six weeks after the German offensive began on 10 May. The comparison is not meant to diminish the French, but it shows how misleading the image of an instant collapse is. Poland’s frontiers were outflanked from the start by German territory in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Slovakia, the Soviet invasion struck the region where the last stand had been planned, and the German army itself was still mostly infantry on foot with horse-drawn supply. The historian Karl-Heinz Frieser has shown that “blitzkrieg” was a journalists’ word, not a German doctrine (Frieser; Zaloga).

Sources: Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend (2005); Zaloga (2002)

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

Not in the sense usually meant. About 40,000 was the strength of Guderian’s whole XIX Corps, which passed through the area; the units that attacked the bunkers were chiefly the 10th Panzer Division and the “Lötzen” Brigade, and the 3rd Panzer Division arrived as the fighting ended. The figure of 720 defenders comes from Krzysztof Komorowski’s guide of 2009; other historians count between about 350 and 650. The heaviest fighting lasted from 8 or 9 September to midday on 10 September, and German losses, poorly documented, were in the dozens or low hundreds, not thousands; popular claims of hundreds of German aircraft have no traceable source. None of this diminishes the defense. A few hundred reservists and border troops with almost no anti-tank weapons held a vital crossing against the leading division of Germany’s strongest mobile corps for two to three days, and their commander kept his oath not to leave his post alive (Sztama; Wesołowski).

Sources: Sztama (IPN, 2025); Komorowski (2009); Wesołowski and Śleszyński, via PAP/dzieje.pl (2011, 2015)

Read more: Chapter 5: Wizna, Brest and the Narew

No, although the directive of 17 September told units to avoid battle unless attacked. Polish units fought the Red Army at Wilno, Grodno, Kodziowce, Lwów, Szack, Wytyczno, Jabłoń and elsewhere, and Soviet official figures alone admit 1,084 killed and 185 missing; Polish historians estimate about 3,000 Soviet dead. Polish losses fighting the Red Army are usually put at about 2,500 killed, with a wider range of 3,000 to 7,000 killed or missing, not counting prisoners murdered after capture. Some Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews in the eastern provinces did welcome the Red Army, out of grievance against Polish rule or fear of the Germans, and some joined attacks on Polish officials and settlers. Many others did not, and within two years the Soviet occupation had arrested, deported or killed hundreds of thousands of people of every nationality in the region (Great Russian Encyclopedia; PAP/dzieje.pl).

Sources: Great Russian Encyclopedia; PAP/dzieje.pl; Krivosheev (1997); Sanford (2005)

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September

Partly. In the first week of September Gdynia workers volunteered to fight, and with no rifles to give them, the defenders armed some with war scythes and pikes made in the city’s workshops, a deliberate echo of Kościuszko’s peasant scythemen of 1794. They fought near Łężyce, west of Gdynia, around 10–11 September, where the historian Apoloniusz Zawilski records 15 killed and 20 wounded, and replaced their scythes with captured rifles within days. Their size and leadership are disputed: accounts range from one company of about 130 to a battalion of about 700, and the postwar claim of Kazimierz Rusinek, later a prominent official in communist Poland, to have founded and led them has been challenged. A 2021 study by Tomasz Miegń and Aleksander Goska concludes that commanders avoided committing the men until they had firearms and that their military effect was small, while honoring their courage (wielkahistoria.pl; gdyniawsieci.pl).

Sources: WielkaHistoria.pl (citing Kosiarz, 1976); Sokołowska, Gdynia w sieci (2006); Miegń and Goska (2021)

Read more: Chapter 7: The Coast and the Navy

The standard estimate, from the Polish official history and repeated by most modern writers, is about 66,000 Polish soldiers killed, with some estimates reaching 70,000 or more, and about 133,700 wounded. Of the dead, somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 fell fighting the Red Army after 17 September; a Polish summary gives about 2,500. The higher totals include men who died of wounds and soldiers murdered after capture, more than 3,000 of them in German hands in September alone. The figures are uncertain because many units were destroyed or dispersed with their records, and the occupations that followed made a careful count impossible for years. Individual battles carry wide ranges of their own: 14,000 to 20,000 Polish dead on the Bzura, for example, and more than 6,000 soldiers in the defense of Warsaw (PSZ, vol. 1; Zaloga; Kochanski).

Sources: Polskie Siły Zbrojne w II Wojnie Światowej, vol. 1; Zaloga (2002); Kochanski (2012)

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory · Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw

Hitler told the Reichstag on 6 October 1939 that the German armed forces had lost 10,572 killed, 30,322 wounded and 3,404 missing up to 30 September. Later German research, counting men who died of wounds and missing men later found dead, raised the toll to about 16,000; the figure of 16,343 killed is widely cited. The army lost about 236 tanks as total write-offs, with many more damaged and repaired, and the Luftwaffe 285 aircraft to all causes. The Slovak army lost 37 killed. Soviet losses are the most disputed: Molotov announced 737 dead in October 1939; the Great Russian Encyclopedia now gives 1,084 killed and 185 missing, and G. F. Krivosheev’s statistical study 1,475 killed or missing; Polish historians estimate about 3,000 dead. For comparison, the Wehrmacht lost about 27,000 dead in its six-week campaign in the West in 1940 (Hitler, 6 October 1939; Zaloga; Krivosheev).

Sources: Hitler, Reichstag speech of 6 October 1939; Zaloga (2002); Krivosheev (1997); Great Russian Encyclopedia; Frieser (2005)

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory · Chapter 8: 17 September

No exact figure exists. Estimates for Polish civilians killed during the campaign run from about 100,000 to between 150,000 and 200,000, most of them victims of bombing, shelling and shootings. Warsaw alone lost roughly 18,000 to 26,000 in the siege by the estimates compared in Chapter 6. Polish researchers have recorded 714 mass executions by German forces between 1 September and 25 October 1939, with about 16,000 victims, and by the end of 1939 about 47,000 people had been murdered in occupied Poland by the Einsatzgruppen or with their participation. About 1,250 ethnic German civilians in Poland also died, many in Bydgoszcz in the first days; the 58,000 later claimed by Nazi propaganda was a fabrication. The killing of civilians did not end with the campaign: it grew into the terror of the occupation and, for Polish Jews, the Holocaust (Datner; Böhler; Rossino).

Sources: Datner’s research and Brzoza and Sowa, as cited in Wikipedia; Böhler (2006); Rossino (2003)

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory · Chapter 3: The Frontier Battles · Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw

The Germans took about 400,000 to 420,000 Polish soldiers prisoner. The Red Army’s fronts reported about 454,700, but the NKVD held far fewer, and the IPN puts the number taken into Soviet captivity at about 250,000; totals for all prisoners usually run from about 660,000 to 694,000. Most enlisted men in German hands were eventually released or put to forced labor, and most officers spent the war in Oflags. The Soviets released about 42,000 in October 1939 and handed about 43,000 to the Germans, while officers and police were held for the Katyn killings. On the other side of the ledger, Polish research by Laurențiu Batin, Andrzej Przewoźnik and Wanda Roman counts about 30,000 soldiers interned in Romania, 35,000 to 40,000 in Hungary, about 15,000 in Lithuania and 1,300 in Latvia, perhaps 80,000 in all; broader estimates allow up to 120,000 crossing into Romania alone (dzieje.pl; IPN; Kochanski).

Sources: dzieje.pl (citing Batin, Przewoźnik and Roman); IPN (2004); Great Russian Encyclopedia; Kochanski (2012)

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

It divided its share in two. Western Poland was annexed to the Reich by Hitler’s decree of 8 October 1939, effective 26 October: the new Reichsgaue Danzig-West Prussia under Albert Forster and Posen, later Wartheland, under Arthur Greiser, with other districts added to East Prussia and Silesia. These lands, about 92,500 km² with about 10.5 million people, were to be made German: Polish was banned from public life, Polish schools were closed, towns were renamed, and at least 325,000 Poles were expelled by the end of 1940. The rest became the General Government under Hans Frank, seated in Kraków’s Wawel castle, a reservoir of labor whose Polish leadership was to be eliminated and whose universities and secondary schools were closed. On 6 November 1939, in Sonderaktion Krakau, 183 or 184 people, most of them Kraków academics, were arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen. Frank was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946; Greiser and Forster were tried and executed in Poland (IMT judgment; Kochanski).

Sources: International Military Tribunal, judgment; Kochanski (2012); Wikipedia, “General Government” and “Sonderaktion Krakau”

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

Two of the main killing grounds of the German campaign against Poland’s leaders, the Intelligenzaktion, which the IPN historian Maria Wardzyńska estimates killed about 100,000 people. In the Piaśnica forest near Wejherowo in Pomerania, Einsatzkommando 16, SS men from Danzig and members of the local ethnic German Selbstschutz shot an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 people from late October 1939 to the spring of 1940: mostly Polish teachers, priests, officials and community leaders from Gdańsk Pomerania and Gdynia, many with their families, along with Kashubians, Jews, Czechs and German psychiatric patients. At Palmiry, a clearing in the Kampinos Forest northwest of Warsaw, more than 1,700 Poles and Jews were shot between December 1939 and July 1941, among them the former Sejm marshal Maciej Rataj and Janusz Kusociński, the 10,000-meter champion of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, who had fought in the defense of Warsaw. Both sites are national memorials today (Wardzyńska).

Sources: Wardzyńska, Był rok 1939 (IPN, 2009); Wikipedia, “Piaśnica massacres” and “Palmiry massacre”

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

With the invasion itself. Poland had about 3.3 million Jews in 1939, the largest community in Europe. German soldiers and police beat, robbed and humiliated Jews, cut off religious men’s beards for the cameras and burned synagogues, and in some towns they killed hundreds; at Przemyśl on the San several hundred Jewish men were shot in mid-September. On 21 September Heydrich ordered the Einsatzgruppen to concentrate Jews in larger towns near railways. In the General Government, Frank’s decrees of 26 October imposed forced labor, and from 1 December 1939 all Jews over the age of ten had to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David. On 8 October 1939 the German commander at Piotrków Trybunalski ordered the first ghetto in occupied Europe. The Łódź ghetto was sealed in April 1940 and the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940. About three million Polish Jews, some 90 percent of the prewar community, were murdered in the Holocaust (USHMM; Rossino; Böhler).

Sources: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland (2003); Böhler (2006); Kochanski (2012)

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

After staged elections to “people’s assemblies” in late October 1939, the Supreme Soviet annexed eastern Poland to the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet republics on 1–2 November. Residents were declared Soviet citizens; land, businesses and savings were taken, and the NKVD arrested officials, police, judges, landowners, priests and political activists. Four mass deportations followed, each carried out in a night or a few days: about 140,000 people on 10 February 1940, mostly military settlers and foresters with their families; about 61,000 on 13 April, chiefly the families of men already arrested; about 78,000 in late June, mostly refugees from the German zone, many of them Jews; and tens of thousands more in May–June 1941. NKVD documents count about 320,000 to 330,000 people deported; wartime Polish estimates ran to a million or more. The IPN estimates that about 150,000 Polish citizens died as a result of Soviet actions in 1939–41 (Gross; Museum of Siberian Memory).

Sources: Gross, Revolution from Abroad (1988); Museum of Siberian Memory, Białystok; Kochanski (2012)

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

The murder of about 22,000 Polish prisoners by the Soviet NKVD in April and May 1940. Most enlisted men captured in September 1939 were released or handed to the Germans, but officers, many of them reservists from the professions, along with police, border guards and prison officers, were held in three camps at Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostashkov. On 5 March 1940 the Politburo, with Stalin’s signature heading the document, approved Lavrentiy Beria’s proposal to shoot them. By the NKVD’s own figures, 4,421 prisoners from Kozielsk were shot in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, 3,820 from Starobielsk at Kharkiv and 6,311 from Ostashkov at Kalinin (Tver), with 7,305 more from prisons elsewhere; a Soviet document of 1959 gives 21,857 in all. Germany announced the Katyn graves on 13 April 1943. Moscow blamed the Germans until 13 April 1990, when it admitted NKVD responsibility, and Boris Yeltsin gave Poland the documents in 1992 (Cienciala, Lebedeva and Materski).

Sources: Cienciala, Lebedeva and Materski, eds., Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (2007); Wikipedia, “Katyn massacre”

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

Tens of thousands of soldiers and airmen slipped out of internment in Romania and Hungary and reached France, where the Polish Army numbered 84,461 by 15 June 1940. The Podhale Rifle Brigade fought at Narvik in May–June 1940 and Polish divisions fought in France; after the French armistice about 20,000 to 35,000 Poles were evacuated to Britain. There Maczek’s men became the core of the 1st Armoured Division, and 145 Polish fighter pilots flew in the Battle of Britain, the largest foreign contingent in Fighter Command. No. 303 (Kościuszko) Squadron claimed 126 German aircraft, the highest total of any squadron in the battle; postwar research puts its true score at about 55 to 60. The Peking destroyers and the submarines Orzeł and Wilk fought beside the Royal Navy. At home, Service for Poland’s Victory, founded in Warsaw on 27 September 1939, grew into the Home Army, more than 400,000 strong at its peak (Kochanski; Cynk).

Sources: Kochanski (2012); Cynk (1998); Wikipedia, “Polish Army in France” and “No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron” (citing Kutzner)

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory · Chapter 4: The Air War · Chapter 7: The Coast and the Navy

At about 3 a.m. Washington time on 1 September, Ambassador William C. Bullitt in Paris telephoned him with news relayed from Ambassador Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr. in Warsaw; Roosevelt’s pencil note, written in bed at 3:05 a.m., is in the National Archives. That day he appealed to Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Poland not to bomb civilians or unfortified cities, calling such bombing ruthless. The governments pledged to limit air attacks to military objectives, and Foreign Minister Beck agreed at once, noting that German bombs had already fallen on open towns. On 3 September German bombs damaged Biddle’s own villa at Konstancin outside Warsaw. A week before the war Roosevelt had urged Hitler and President Mościcki to settle their dispute peacefully; Mościcki accepted and Hitler did not reply. Beyond words the United States did not act: the Neutrality Acts required an arms embargo on all belligerents, and Congress had refused to repeal it in July 1939 (FRUS 1939, vol. I; National Archives).

Sources: FRUS 1939, vol. I, docs. 564, 574 and 577; National Archives (NAID 198127); American Presidency Project

Read more: Chapter 3: The Frontier Battles · Chapter 1: The Road to September · Chapter 4: The Air War

An American documentary filmmaker and lecturer from Titusville, Pennsylvania, a World War I ambulance driver and Princeton graduate, who reached Warsaw on 7 September 1939 just as the high command was leaving. Mayor Starzyński gave him a car, an interpreter and a permit to photograph anywhere. For two weeks Bryan filmed and photographed the siege, apparently the only foreign journalist there with a movie camera: bombed houses and hospitals, shelters, bread lines, barricades and the burning Royal Castle. His best-known photograph shows a girl, Kazimiera Mika, kneeling over the body of her older sister, killed by a German plane in a potato field. He left with the foreign community under a truce on 21 September and, by his own account, smuggled his negatives out of Königsberg. Life printed his pictures on 23 October 1939, and his ten-minute film Siege (1940) was nominated for an Academy Award and added to the National Film Registry in 2006. It is widely available online and contains images of the dead (Walser).

Sources: Wikipedia, “Julien Bryan” and “Siege (1940 film)”; Walser, Foreign Service Journal (2019); U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Read more: Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw

In 1919 Merian C. Cooper, a Florida-born American bomber pilot who had been shot down and captured in 1918, offered Józef Piłsudski a squadron of American volunteer pilots. Led by Maj. Cedric Fauntleroy, about twenty Americans joined the Polish 7th Air Escadrille at Lwów in October 1919 and named it for Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish officer who had fought in the American Revolution. In 1920 the escadrille flew more than 400 combat sorties against the Red Army; two Americans were killed, and Cooper was shot down, captured and escaped from Soviet captivity. One volunteer, Lt. Elliott Chess, designed its badge: the stripes and thirteen stars of the American flag with a Kraków peasant’s cap and crossed scythes. The badge passed to the 111th Fighter Escadrille, which fought over Warsaw in September 1939, and then to No. 303 Squadron in the Battle of Britain. Cooper later co-directed King Kong (1933) (IPN; Cisek; HistoryNet).

Sources: IPN, Przystanek Historia (“Scythes on planes”; Niestrawski, 2023); Cisek, Kosciuszko, We Are Here! (2002); HistoryNet

Read more: Chapter 4: The Air War · Chapter 1: The Road to September · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

Jan Kozielewski, born in Łódź in 1914, was a reserve artillery officer in September 1939. Captured by the Red Army, he hid his rank, was handed over to the Germans and escaped from their train in November. Under the name Karski he became a courier of the Polish Underground State; caught and tortured by the Gestapo in 1940, he was rescued from a hospital by the underground. In 1942, before carrying the underground’s reports to London, he was taken twice into the Warsaw Ghetto and, in disguise, into the transit camp at Izbica Lubelska, so that he could tell the Allies what he had seen. On 28 July 1943 he reported to President Roosevelt at the White House; the Polish record of the meeting shows that Roosevelt asked mostly about conditions in Poland, the underground and the Soviet question, and also about the fate of the Jews. Karski taught at Georgetown for some forty years and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2012 (Karski; Polish History Museum).

Sources: Karski, Story of a Secret State (1944); Polish History Museum, “Jan Karski: The Mission”

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

In May 1943 the Germans took a group of Allied prisoners of war to the Katyn graves, among them two American officers, Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr. and Capt. Donald B. Stewart, who concluded that the Soviets were responsible. Van Vliet’s 1945 report to Army intelligence vanished, and with the Soviet alliance coming first, Washington said nothing. In 1951, under pressure from Polish American organizations, the House of Representatives created a select committee chaired by Rep. Ray J. Madden of Indiana. It heard 81 witnesses in Washington, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Berlin and Naples, and its final report of 22 December 1952 found unanimously that the NKVD had committed the massacre and criticized officials who had ignored or suppressed evidence. The National Archives released about 1,000 declassified pages in 2012. In Jersey City, New Jersey, Andrzej Pityński’s Katyń Memorial has stood at Exchange Place since 1991, and in 2018 the city council voted that it would stay there (Madden Committee; Moscow Times).

Sources: Madden Committee, Final Report (H. Rept. 2505, 1952); East Carolina University; Moscow Times (10 September 2012)

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory · Chapter 8: 17 September

With three dates. On 1 September the invasion is marked at Westerplatte at 04:45 and at Wieluń at dawn, often with foreign leaders present; in 2019, for the 80th anniversary, Germany’s president asked forgiveness at Wieluń and Vice President Mike Pence attended the national ceremony in Warsaw. On 17 September Poland remembers the Soviet invasion, and since 2013 the day has also been Sybiraks’ Day, for the people deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. On 13 April, the anniversary of the German announcement of 1943, it observes the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Katyn Massacre, established by the Sejm in 2007. Under communism only the first could be marked freely: the Monument to the Defenders of the Coast was unveiled at Westerplatte in 1966, but the Soviet invasion and Katyn could not be discussed honestly until 1989–90. Since 2009 the European Union has marked 23 August, the date of the pact, as a day of remembrance for the victims of totalitarian regimes (dzieje.pl).

Sources: dzieje.pl (Polish History Museum); Museum of the Second World War

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory · Chapter 8: 17 September · Chapter 1: The Road to September

Yes. Both are in Gdańsk, a few kilometers apart. Westerplatte is about 7 km north of the old town at the mouth of the harbor channel, reached by city bus or, in summer, by tourist boat from the old town quays past the Bend of Five Whistles where the Schleswig-Holstein lay, the best way to understand the ground. A marked trail passes the shattered barracks, the outline of Guardhouse No. 5, Guardhouse No. 1 with its small museum, the cemeteries and the 25 m Monument to the Defenders of the Coast; the site is run by the Museum of the Second World War, whose own building, opened in 2017, stands near the Post Office and has one of the largest exhibitions on the war in Europe. The Post Office still stands on the Square of the Defenders of the Polish Post Office, a working post office with a museum of the defense inside and the 1979 monument outside. The executed defenders lie at the Zaspa cemetery. Check opening hours before you go.

Sources: Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk; Wikipedia, “Westerplatte” and “Museum of the Second World War”

Read more: Chapter 2: Westerplatte and the Polish Post Office · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

Many battlefields are marked. Wieluń holds its commemoration at 04:40 each 1 September. Mokra has memorials to the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade; a monument to the Krojanty charge stands on the road from Chojnice to Czersk; the bunker Wędrowiec at Węgierska Górka is a museum; and at Góra Strękowa near Wizna, Raginis and Brykalski lie in the ruined command bunker. In Warsaw the Royal Castle, rebuilt from 1971, set its clock going in 1974 from 11:15, the minute it stopped in 1939, and the Katyn Museum is in the Citadel; Palmiry and the Kampinos Forest lie northwest of the city, and Kock has Kleeberg’s grave and a museum. At Gdynia the destroyer Błyskawica is a museum ship, and at Hel the Coastal Defense Museum has restored a position of the Laskowski battery. Kraków’s Polish Aviation Museum holds the only surviving PZL P.11c. Brest, Grodno and Lviv are in Belarus and Ukraine and the Katyn cemeteries in Russia and Ukraine; check current U.S. State Department travel advice first.

Sources: The “Walking the ground today” sections of Chapters 2–9; dzieje.pl

Read more: Chapter 3: The Frontier Battles · Chapter 5: Wizna, Brest and the Narew · Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw · Chapter 7: The Coast and the Navy · Chapter 8: 17 September · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

Start with family papers and with the soldier’s full name, date and place of birth, since Polish records are organized by individual, and expect to write in Polish or English and to wait. The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, which holds archives of the government in exile and the Polish forces in the West and published the Polish official history of the 1939 campaign, offers a family-research guide that points to the main record holders. For service in the Polish Army before and during 1939 it directs inquiries to the Central Military Archives (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe) of the Military Historical Bureau in Warsaw-Rembertów, the archive from which many of the 1939 portraits in this collection originate. Many unit records were destroyed in the campaign itself, so a September soldier may survive in the documents only in later lists of prisoners, internees or the dead (Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum).

Sources: Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, “Family Research”

Read more: The collection

Most of the men who escaped in 1939 served afterward in the Polish Army in France and then under British command. The Sikorski Institute’s guide directs inquiries about service under British operational command, including that of 1939 veterans who later served with the British, to the UK Ministry of Defence, Army Personnel Centre, Disclosures 5 (Polish), at RAF Northolt, the airfield from which No. 303 Squadron flew in 1940. Men who served in the Polish Army in France in 1939–40 but not later under British command are traced through the French Service Historique de la Défense at Pau. Once the primary record is found, the Institute’s own archive in London may hold more. Many veterans of the Polish forces in the West never returned to communist Poland and settled in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia, so the trail can lead back to North America (Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum).

Sources: Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, “Family Research”; Wikipedia, “Polish Army in France”

Read more: Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory · Chapter 4: The Air War

For Polish prisoners of the Germans after the 1939 campaign, the Sikorski Institute’s guide points to the Central Museum of Prisoners of War at Łambinowice-Opole in Poland. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, which registered prisoners during the war, accepts requests for information about individuals detained in the Second World War. The Arolsen Archives in Germany hold records of Nazi persecution and forced labor, and the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) hosts electronic databases of victims of German repression obtained from Arolsen, along with the project “Personal Losses and Victims of Repression under German Occupation.” For prisoners and deportees of the Soviets, the IPN offers the Indeks Represjonowanych (Index of the Repressed), databases on Polish citizens repressed by the Soviet Union acquired from the KARTA Center Foundation, and the Katyn Museum in Warsaw documents the victims of 1940 (Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum; IPN; ICRC).

Sources: Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, “Family Research”; IPN, Archival Inventory, “Databases”; ICRC

Read more: Chapter 8: 17 September · Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory

In English, the best short military account is Steven Zaloga’s Poland 1939: The Birth of Blitzkrieg (Osprey, 2002), with Robert Forczyk’s Case White (2019) and Richard Hargreaves’s Blitzkrieg Unleashed (2008) for more detail. Roger Moorhouse’s First to Fight (2019; U.S. title Poland 1939, 2020) is the best modern narrative, and Halik Kochanski’s The Eagle Unbowed (2012) places the campaign in the whole of Poland’s war. For the air war see Jerzy Cynk’s official history; for the navy, Michael Alfred Peszke; for Enigma, Władysław Kozaczuk’s Enigma (1984), with Rejewski’s own appendices; for German crimes in 1939, Jochen Böhler and Alexander Rossino; for Katyn, the documentary collection edited by Anna Cienciala, Natalia Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The U.S. Army’s own study, Robert M. Kennedy’s The German Campaign in Poland (1956), is online at HyperWar. Each chapter of this collection ends with a full list of its sources.

Sources: The source lists of Chapters 1–9

Read more: Chapter 1: The Road to September · The collection