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Special Units · Invasion of Poland, 1939
The Border Protection Corps (KOP)
Raised in 1924 to guard Poland’s eastern frontier, the Border Protection Corps sent many of its best battalions west against Germany in 1939. What was left met the Red Army on 17 September and fought its way west to Szack and Wytyczno.
- Polish Army · Ministry of Internal Affairs
- Eastern frontier, Polesie and Volhynia
- 1924 – 1 October 1939
A corps for the frontier
The Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, the Border Protection Corps, was formed in 1924 to stop the armed raids from Soviet territory that plagued Poland’s eastern borderlands in the early 1920s. It was part of the army but answered to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It was organized in brigades and regiments, each responsible for a stretch of frontier, with cavalry squadrons for patrols, and its soldiers knew the forests, marshes and rivers of the borderlands better than anyone. By 1937 it had 32 infantry battalions and 21 cavalry squadrons (Chapter 8).
Sent west
Poland’s war plan of 1939 looked west. The KOP was mobilized on 30 August and was meant to supply cadres for reserve divisions against Germany, and most of its artillery and many of its best battalions left the eastern frontier in the summer. As a result KOP men fought the Germans long before they saw a Soviet soldier (Chapter 8).
In the Beskids, the KOP battalion “Berezwecz” under Maj. Kazimierz Czarkowski stood with the 151st Fortress Company at Węgierska Górka, where four half-finished bunkers held the Soła valley against the German 7th Infantry Division from 1 to 3 September. The fortress company’s commander, Capt. Tadeusz Semik, had himself commanded a KOP machine-gun company before the war. A little to the east, the 1st KOP Regiment fought beside Col. Stanisław Maczek’s 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade at Jordanów (Chapter 3).
On the Narew, the core of the garrison at Wizna was the 3rd Company of the heavy machine-gun battalion of the KOP regiment “Sarny,” under Capt. Władysław Raginis. From 7 to 10 September a few hundred men there held the crossings against Guderian’s corps; on 10 September, wounded and with his last positions out of ammunition, Raginis ordered his men to surrender and killed himself with a grenade. KOP sappers had also begun fortifying the Narew positions at Pułtusk in August (Chapter 5).
On the coast, the infantry of the Hel Fortified Region was the Hel battalion of the KOP, 1,197 officers and men under Maj. Jan Wiśniewski, later reinforced to about 1,840 by sailors. The peninsula held for 32 days and surrendered only on 1–2 October (Chapter 7).
17 September
What remained on the Soviet frontier on 17 September was about 25 battalions, perhaps 20,000 men, spread thinly over more than 1,400 km. Between about 03:00 and 06:00 that morning the Red Army’s Belorussian and Ukrainian Fronts crossed along the whole length of the border, with more tanks than the entire German invasion force had brought to Poland. Some KOP posts fought for hours at the frontier, until their ammunition ran out. Others were overrun before they knew what was happening. In several places local communist groups and armed bands attacked Polish officials, police and settlers ahead of the Red Army (Chapter 8).
That evening Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły ordered a general withdrawal to Romania and Hungary and told units not to fight the Soviets unless attacked or threatened with disarmament. The order reached many units late or not at all, and it left commanders unsure whether the Red Army was an enemy to be resisted or a force to be bargained with. Garrisons that laid down their arms usually found that Soviet promises were not kept.
Orlik-Rückemann’s march
The KOP’s war did not end at the frontier. Its commander, Brig. Gen. Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann, gathered the units of the Polesie and Volhynia sectors into a fighting group of 8,000 to 9,000 men and marched west through the Polesie marshes toward the Bug and Gen. Franciszek Kleeberg’s forces, fighting more than a dozen engagements on the way (Chapter 8).
He was an unusual man for the job. A Lwów engineering student who volunteered for the Polish Legions in 1914, he had become one of Poland’s first tank officers, commanding French FT-17 tanks in the Polish–Soviet War and then the 1st Tank Regiment. After study at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris he commanded the 9th Infantry Division and was promoted to brigadier general in 1933. He became deputy commander of the KOP in December 1938 and its commander in August 1939, on the 8th or the 30th by different sources.
The largest of those engagements came at Szack, in northern Volhynia near the Bug, on 28 September, the day Warsaw capitulated. About 4,000 men of the group met the Soviet 52nd Rifle Division under Ivan Russiyanov. Soviet tanks attacked at about 8 a.m. The KOP gun crews held their fire until the tanks were about 500 m away and stopped them; against the 15 to 20 mm armor of the Soviet T-26 and BT, the 37 mm Bofors was deadly at that range. 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 they found orders to “clean up” the area east of the Bug of “bands of Polish officers.” When Soviet reserves arrived in the afternoon, the group withdrew into the forests and continued toward the Bug.
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 on 29 September some 18 prisoners, KOP officers and NCOs captured in the night fighting, were executed there (Chapter 8, citing the IPN historian Leon Popek).
The group crossed the Bug on 30 September into the Lublin region, now assigned to the German zone, still hoping to reach Kleeberg. On 1 October near Wytyczno, close to Włodawa, the Soviet 45th Rifle Division attacked it with tanks. Orlik-Rückemann now had about 2,000 to 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 to 27 Soviet tanks destroyed. 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.
After the corps
Orlik-Rückemann evaded capture, crossed into Lithuania and reached Britain through Sweden by the end of October 1939. He served on staffs of the Polish Army in exile, was stripped of his citizenship by the postwar communist government, lived in London until 1972 and died in Ottawa on 18 October 1986, aged 92. Poland’s Border Guard has since named a training center after him. Some KOP officers who stayed went on to found an underground organization, the Komenda Obrońców Polski, in 1940 (Chapter 8).
Many others went into Soviet captivity. Officers, policemen, border guards and others the Soviets thought dangerous were separated into special camps, and in April and May 1940 the NKVD shot about 22,000 people at Katyn and other sites (Chapter 9). The KOP’s dead lie in scattered graves. Wytyczno has a memorial and a small cemetery; at Szack and Mielniki, now in Ukraine, Polish and Ukrainian teams have searched for KOP graves and reburied the remains of KOP soldiers in a war cemetery at Mielniki (dzieje.pl).
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem.
Timeline
- The Border Protection Corps is formed to guard the eastern frontier.
- It numbers 32 infantry battalions and 21 cavalry squadrons.
- Brig. Gen. Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann takes command; on 30 August the corps is mobilized and many units go west.
- The KOP battalion “Berezwecz” fights at Węgierska Górka; the 1st KOP Regiment fights at Jordanów.
- Capt. Raginis’s KOP machine-gun company holds Wizna on the Narew.
- The Red Army crosses the frontier; KOP posts are overrun within hours.
- At Szack the KOP group defeats the Soviet 52nd Rifle Division.
- KOP prisoners are executed at Mielniki.
- The group crosses the Bug into the Lublin region.
- Battle of Wytyczno; the group breaks up into small detachments.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- 17 September: The Soviet Invasion and the Last Battles (Chapter 8)
- Chapter 3: The Frontier Battles: Wieluń, Mokra, Mława, Krojanty and the Corridor
- Chapter 5: Wizna, Brest and the Narew: Holding the Northern Front
- Chapter 7: The Coast and the Navy: Gdynia, Oksywie, Hel and the Escape of the Orzeł
- Invasion of Poland: questions readers ask
- The Invasion of Poland collection and atlas
By the numbers
The Border Protection Corps by the numbers
From the frontier to Wytyczno
KOP strength in the east, 17 September to 1 October 1939 (approximate; ranges drawn at their midpoint)
Source: Chapter 8; Czesław Grzelak, Szack–Wytyczno 1939 (2002)
Wytyczno, 1 October 1939: the cost
Killed and wounded by one tally; Orlik-Rückemann later claimed 25 to 27 Soviet tanks destroyed; the same tally gives four
Source: Chapter 8
Szack, 28 September 1939: the Soviet record
Losses of the Soviet 52nd Rifle Division in Soviet archives; Polish accounts claim several hundred dead
Source: Chapter 8; Mikhail Meltyukhov, Sovetsko-pol’skie voiny (2001)
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- Steven J. Zaloga, Poland 1939: The Birth of Blitzkrieg (Osprey, 2002); Roger Moorhouse, First to Fight: The Polish War 1939 (2019); Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed (2012).
- Czesław Grzelak, Szack–Wytyczno 1939 (Bellona, 2002); Stanley S. Seidner, Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz and the Defense of Poland (1978).
- PAP / dzieje.pl: “86 lat temu ZSRR dokonał agresji na Polskę”; article on KOP graves at Szack and Mielniki (Leon Popek, IPN) (in Polish).
- Great Russian Encyclopedia, “Pol’skii pokhod Krasnoi armii 1939” (the official Russian view); Mikhail Meltyukhov, Sovetsko-pol’skie voiny (2001).
- Wikipedia: “Border Protection Corps,” “Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann,” “Battle of Szack,” “Battle of Wytyczno,” “Battle of Węgierska Górka,” “Władysław Raginis,” “Battle of Hel.”
- Further reading: Polskie Siły Zbrojne w drugiej wojnie światowej, vol. 1, part 3 (Sikorski Institute, London).