On 22 March 1939 the German government delivered an ultimatum to Poland demanding Danzig and the strip of Polish territory dividing East Prussia from the rest of Germany, the so-called ‘Polish Corridor’. The ultimatum was rejected. On 31 March Great Britain offered an unconditional guarantee of Polish territorial integrity, and a few weeks later a military alliance was signed by Britain, France and Poland.
There followed three months of uneasy calm. Optimists saw this as a sign that the situation had been contained and peace assured. In fact Germany was using the time to make final preparations. Hitler put pressure on Romania to rescind her defensive military alliance with Poland, and started negotiating with Stalin. In August, the foreign ministers of the two states, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Viacheslav Molotov, signed a secret protocol detailing a new partition of Poland.
On the evening of 31 August 1939 a dozen German convicts were dressed in Polish uniforms and ordered to attack a German radio station in Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. Early next morning, as the world awoke to the remarkable news that Poland had attacked the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland in defence of the threatened Fatherland. Two days later, on 3 September, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Two weeks after that, on 17 September, when it had become clear that they would do nothing further to help their ally, the Soviet Union also invaded Poland.
What followed was no ordinary war. It was a concerted and sustained effort by Germany and Russia to destroy not only the Polish state, but the Polish nation itself. And although full-blown military operations would end in 1945, it would not be over for Poland until September 1989, almost exactly fifty years after it began.
TWENTY
A new chapter in the history of warfare opened as Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg against Poland. On 1 September some 1.5 million German troops invaded from three sides: East Prussia in the north, Germany in the west, and Slovakia in the south. They were supported by 2,700 tanks, of which the Polish army boasted barely three hundred, and 1,900 aircraft, which quickly wrested control of the skies from the 392 planes of the Polish air force. The Polish defences were pierced by eight German spearheads, while the Luftwaffe bombed roads, railways, bridges and cities. The German units raced ahead without pausing, outflanking those Polish units which stood their ground.
The Poles had approximately one million men under arms, but since mobilisation had been delayed at the request of Britain and France in an attempt to reach a last-minute solution to the crisis, a large proportion of them were nowhere near the front line, and most units went into action a third below strength. This, combined with an inflexible plan of defence, meant that the full potential of the Polish army, navy and air force could not be brought to bear. The chaos induced by the relentless bombing was aggravated by soldiers trying to reach their units and by the activities of a German fifth column. By 6 September the Polish command had lost control of the situation; by 10 September the Germans had overrun most of northern and western Poland; on 14 September Warsaw was encircled.
Once the first shock had worn off, Polish commanders reacted with determination. The Pomeranian and Poznanian army groups under General Tadeusz Kutrzeba held off the Germans in a twoday battle at Kutno. They then fell back on the Vistula and Bzura rivers, whence, reinforced by other units, they launched a counterattack which threw the Germans back and won a breathing space for other retreating Polish units. In order to avoid encirclement, the Polish command had ordered a withdrawal to the region of Lwów, where a new line of defence was being organised, pivoting on the frontiers with supposedly neutral Russia and friendly Romania. In the more rural expanses of eastern Poland, where tanks and heavy artillery would be of less value, the Polish army would be able to face the Germans on a more equal footing. But on 17 September Russian armies invaded from the east, and it was revealed that Romania had, under German pressure, renounced its military alliance with Poland. Continued defence of this corner of Poland was impossible. The government, the general staff and those units within reach of it crossed the Romanian border in order to continue the fight from abroad, taking with them Poland’s gold reserves. Warsaw, besieged since 14 September, capitulated two weeks later; the garrison on the Hel peninsula off Gdańsk held out till 2 October; General Kleeberg’s Polesie Defence Group surrendered at Kock on 5 October after a week of fighting on two fronts against Germans and Russians. Smaller units continued to fight in various parts of the country until the spring of 1940, when their remnants went underground.