Poland 1939

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WRITING ABOUT A REGION WITH SHIFTING FRONTIERS AND MIXED populations can sometimes be a challenging task. For simplicity, in this book I have employed a policy of using names appropriate to the period under scrutiny. If the modern name differs from that, then it will be given in brackets at first mention.

So, to take the example of what is now the Ukrainian city of L’viv: in September 1939, it was the Polish city of Lwów, so it will be rendered here as Lwów (L’viv) at first mention, and simply as Lwów thereafter. No political statement is thereby intended.

In addition, where there is an accepted Anglicized form—such as Warsaw, Brest, or Moscow—then I have naturally used it throughout.

Polish words look complicated, but their pronunciation is consistent. All vowels are of even length, and their sound is best rendered by the English words “sum” (a), “ten” (e), “ease” (i), “lot” (o), “book” (u), and “sit” (y). Most consonants behave in the same way as in English, except for c, which is pronounced “ts”; j, which is soft, like the y in “yes”; and w, which is equivalent to an English v. The stress in Polish always falls on the penultimate syllable.

There are also a number of accented letters and combinations peculiar to Polish, such as:

PREFACE

THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE BEGAN AT DAWN ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939.

It shouldn’t need saying, of course, but the date of the start of the largest war in human history is a subject that is shrouded in confusion across the globe. Every combatant nation has its own narrative and chronology. In China and Japan, for instance, the war is held to have begun on July 7, 1937, when Japanese and Chinese forces engaged following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. For Americans, the war started on December 7, 1941, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; everything before that date is merely a curious, far-off prelude to the main event. Sometimes, such dissenting views are entirely justifiable, dictated by geography and convention; sometimes they are more mendacious. In the Soviet Union (and in its successor state, Russia), for example, the fiction has long been maintained that the Second World War began only with the German attack on June 22, 1941. Stalin’s earlier invasions of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States have been skillfully airbrushed from the popular narrative.

Even the British and the French—and their respective former empires—are less than entirely clear on the issue. Though both countries declared war on Hitler’s Germany on September 3, 1939, after the Germans’ failure to withdraw from Poland, they did nothing to aid their ally, shamefully leaving Poland to its fate. Thereafter, for the people of Britain and France, nothing much happened until German forces smashed westward across the French border in May 1940. The British called that intervening period the “Phoney War”; the French, the “Drôle de Guerre”—the “funny war.”

But there was nothing funny—or phony—about the war that Poland fought in the autumn of 1939. As the sun rose on September 1, Hitler’s forces crossed the Polish frontier from the north, west, and south, hurtling forward in their tanks and trucks and on foot, while the Luftwaffe scoured the skies, bombing and strafing seemingly with impunity. After little more than two weeks, with Polish armies in disarray and lacking any assistance from their Western allies, the coup de grâce was delivered by Hitler’s new confederate, Stalin, and the Red Army invaded from the east on September 17. As German and Soviet forces met on Polish soil and declared their eternal brotherhood—conveniently forgetting the preceding years of rabid antipathy—Poland entered a new totalitarian dark age: a world of persecution, misery, and death. By the end of the Second World War, one in five Poles would be dead.

Poland, then, was—in that neat slogan devised by its wartime propagandists—“First to Fight.” Its defensive campaign in September 1939 opened the Second World War in Europe: a five-week struggle that prefaced nearly 300 weeks of slaughter. It cost as many as 200,000 lives on all sides and showcased many of the brutal practices that would feature so strongly in the later conflict: the targeting of civilian populations, indiscriminate aerial bombing, and mass killings.

Invaded and occupied by Europe’s two preeminent totalitarian powers, Poland would be exposed to every horror that modern conflict could devise. Just as the Wehrmacht unleashed a race war against the Poles in the west, so the Red Army imported class war in the east. Poland’s citizens would be sifted and sorted, with those deemed undesirable subjected to arrest and deportation if they were lucky, state-sanctioned murder if they were not.

The Polish campaign also had a significance well beyond that country’s frontiers: it brought Britain and France into the war. The two Western allies had guaranteed Poland’s territorial integrity in the spring of 1939 in a vain attempt to halt German expansion. Consequently, it was this defense of Poland—however nominally interpreted—that transformed the war from a Central European squabble into a conflict of worldwide significance.

Bearing all of this in mind, it would be fair to expect that Poland’s brave, brief war of 1939 might be well known. But it is not—it has been all but forgotten outside Poland. Despite our collective obsession with all aspects of the Second World War, the “September campaign” always seems somehow to fall through the cracks, ignored or passed over in a few sentences. Consequently, it is barely known or understood in the English-speaking historiography.

A glance at some of the most popular history books of the past few years should serve to illustrate the point. Whereas enthusiastic readers can peruse competing volumes on the Ardennes campaign, Dunkirk, or D-Day, they would search in vain for much modern scholarship on Poland’s war of 1939. Aside from a couple of specialist military studies, the last book devoted to the subject, Nicholas Bethell’s The War Hitler Won, was published in 1972.

General works are little better. An examination of popular histories of the Second World War reveals the scale of the problem. On average, out of some 700 pages of text, they devote just 16 to the defense of Poland in 1939, which often include the wider matter of the entry into the war of Britain and France. Some ignore the subject entirely or are almost comically Anglocentric, describing the outbreak of the war by referring solely to Whitehall politics while making no mention of the very real battles then being fought on Polish soil. Moreover, those that examine the subject in anything more than a cursory manner tend to rely almost entirely on German sources: the usually self-serving memoirs of those who participated in the invasion, and the often turgid regimental histories of the German army that tend to make nonmilitary historians’ eyes bleed. The results are predictably myopic: historians repeat Nazi propaganda tropes almost verbatim, ignore the Soviet invasion entirely, and shamefully write the Poles out of their own history.

Yet the real problem is more profound. History, as we know, is written primarily by the winners. As Hitler pithily put it on the very eve of the Polish campaign, “The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.” And, in the case of Poland, none of the victors had any interest in telling the true story. The Germans spun their narrative of the September campaign as best they could in the early years of the war and produced a host of memoirs, coffee-table books, and pseudo-histories that lauded their victory, extolled the brilliance of the Blitzkrieg, and emphasized the innate inferiority of the enemy. After the war, meanwhile, when the extent of German crimes was known to the world, the invasion of Poland became a quaint overture to the murderous main act. Aside from a few postwar memoirs and the work of a small number of historians, few Germans care to remember the campaign today.

The Soviets, meanwhile, did everything they could to pretend they did not invade Poland in 1939. The postwar narrative, which showed the Soviet Union and its people as the foremost victims of the war, could not permit an acknowledgment that Stalin had facilitated Hitler in starting the conflict, or that he had then assisted his newfound ally in invading, partitioning, and destroying Poland. Consequently, the Red Army’s invasion was dressed up as a humanitarian intervention, and any mention of it as anything else was effectively suppressed, both in the Soviet Union and in postwar Communist Poland. That denial continues to our present moment. As recently as 2016, a Russian blogger was prosecuted for sharing a text about German–Soviet collaboration in the invasion of Poland. His alleged crime was the “circulation of false information.”

Although not an active suppression of the facts, Britain’s own heroic wartime narrative left little popular appetite for, or interest in, its humiliating betrayal of its Polish ally. Even though many Polish veterans of 1939 made their homes in the United Kingdom after their nation’s defeat, and after Poland fell to Communist control in 1945, their stories were scarcely heard. The memoirs and histories written by veterans residing in the United Kingdom—such as Władysław Anders, Klemens Rudnicki, and Józef Garliński—failed to puncture the established Western narrative of the war.

In the end, it was left to the Poles themselves to tell the story of the two invasions of 1939. In the immediate postwar years, Communist Poland was not interested in publicizing those events, except to reflexively damn the “German fascists” and the prewar regime for its supposed foolhardiness. By the 1960s, when a more nationalistic communism prevailed, a new narrative emerged. This narrative, based loosely (and not wholly inaccurately) upon the idea of the ordinary Polish soldier being betrayed by the ineptitude of his superiors and the duplicity of his capitalist allies, vehemently denied any belligerent role for the Red Army. Only after the Communist system collapsed in 1989 were those aspects of Polish history finally open to objective examination, and only then could the story of Poland’s war be told in its entirety.

This book, therefore, is an attempt to embrace some of that new Polish historiography, and so to rebalance the wonky Western narrative of the Second World War’s opening campaign. It tells a story that is still little known to English-speaking readers—a story of heroism, of suffering, and of a gallant fight against ruthless and superior enemies. And it is an attempt to wrest the story free from the dark shadow of totalitarian propaganda—from the Nazi mythology of an easy Blitzkrieg victory to the Soviet lie that the Red Army never invaded at all. As such, Polish voices—from memoirs, diaries, and archival accounts—are finally brought into the story. One can only hope that future historians will no longer render the Poles as nameless, voiceless victims, bit-part players in their own narrative.

OF COURSE, ANY WORK OF SCALE AND AMBITION REQUIRES COLLABORATORS, and though the words on the page are mine, a huge number of debts were accrued in their preparation that must be acknowledged. Many colleagues and friends were kind enough to share their knowledge, including Grzegorz Bębnik, Sławomir Dębski, Richard Hargreaves, Tomasz Kuba Kozłowski, Wojciech Łukaszun, Dmitriy Panto, Bill Russ, Ian Sayer, Rob Schäfer, Ben H. Shepherd, Andrzej Suchcitz, Jacek Tebinka, and Anna Zygalska-Cannon.

Others were on hand to give help and advice as I traveled across Poland to visit archives, museums, and the sites where the events I was describing took place, such as Mokra, Wizna, the Bzura battlefields, or Mława. They include Krzysztof Mroczkowski and Jakub Link-Lenczowski at the Muzeum Lotnictwa Polskiego in Kraków, Katarzyna Tomiczek of the Ośrodek Promocji Gminy Węgierska Górka, Emil Makles of the Izba Pamięci Bitwy pod Mokrą, Kazimierz Śwircz at the Muzeum Bitwy nad Bzurą in Kutno, Marcin Sochoń and Dariusz Szymanowski of the Stowarzyszenie “Wizna 1939,” Ludwik Zalewski in Nowogród, Wojciech Śleszyński and Łukasz Radulski in Białystok, Katarzyna Myszkowska and Krzysztof Bojarczuk in Sulejów, Andrzej Jarczewski and Mikołaj Ratka at the Radiostacja Gliwice in Gliwice, Tomasz Chinciński at the Muzeum II Wojny Światowej in Gdańsk, Karol Szejko at the Muzeum Westerplatte i Wojny 1939 r. in Gdańsk, Marek Adamkowicz at the Muzeum Poczty Polskiej in Gdańsk, Jan Tymiński and Jacek Waryszak at the Muzeum Marynarki Wojennej in Gdynia, Radosław Wiecki in Tczew, Wojciech Krajewski and Janusz Wesołowski at the Muzeum Wojska Polskiego in Warsaw, Władysław Szarski at the Muzeum Obrony Wybrzeża on Hel, Marcin Owsiński at the Muzeum Stutthof in Sztutowo, and Jacek Wilamowski and Katarzyna Skourpa-Malińska at the Muzeum Ziemi Zawkrzeńskiej in Mława.

In addition, a few people generously gave their linguistic or research help, including Jess Bennett, Will Hobden, Jadwiga Kowalska, Philipp Rauh, Saskia Smellie, Alex Standen, Lyuba Vinogradova, and Axel von Wittenberg at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London. Thanks, too, to Bill Donohoe for the cartography. My agent, Georgina Capel, was as stoic and supportive as a writer could wish, notwithstanding the myriad crises that I inflicted upon her. My UK editor, Jörg Hensgen, was similarly brilliant, as insightful and deft of editorial touch as ever. Special thanks must also go to my outrageously gifted and indefatigable research assistant Anastazja Pindor, without whom this book would scarcely have been possible. For everything else, I must thank my wife, Melissa, and my children, Oscar and Amelia, and their daily reminders of what really matters.

Lastly, I would like to dedicate this book to someone whose passion for the subject inspired my interest in Polish history nearly three decades ago—my former professor, coauthor, and most esteemed colleague, Norman Davies.

Tring, 2019