German Invasion of Poland 1939 — Part 1
Nobody quite understands what is happening. In London, the phone rings in Downing Street. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler is already awake. He has been planning this morning for months. In a thousand Polish towns and villages along a frontier stretching 1,900 km from the Baltic coast in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south, the same thing is happening simultaneously. German bombs are falling. German tanks are moving.
And the Second World War, the conflict that will kill 70 million people and reshape the entire world, has begun. Not with a declaration. Not with a warning. In the darkness, before breakfast, while most of Europe is still asleep. To understand why German bombs are falling on Poland this September morning, you need to go back just a few years.
Not decades, not generations, just a few years. In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, a country humiliated by defeat in the First World War, crushed by the economic terms of the Versail Treaty, desperate for someone who promised to restore what had been lost. Hitler promised exactly that. And he delivered.
At first, the economy recovered, the military was rebuilt, lost territories were reclaimed one by one. Austria in 1938, Czechoslovakia’s Sudatan land the same year, then the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Each time Britain and France protested, each time they did nothing. Hitler drew a simple conclusion from this pattern. The Western democracies would not fight.
Poland was different for one reason. It had a formal military guarantee from Britain and France. If Germany attacked, they would declare war. Hitler didn’t believe them. He had made one other move before giving the order to attack.
In August 1939, just one week before the invasion, his foreign minister, Ribentrop, flew to Moscow and signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. The two men who hated each other most in the world had made a deal. Germany would take Western Poland. The Soviet Union would take the East. Poland, the country being divided, was not consulted. With his eastern flank secured, Hitler gave the order. Fall vice case white. The invasion of Poland.
1 and a2 million German soldiers, 2,700 tanks, 2,000 aircraft against a Polish army that was brave, determined, and facing the most modern military force on birth with weapons and tactics that belonged to a different era. What happened next lasted 35 days and changed the world forever. At Wester Plate, the first shells from the Schleswick Holstein have turned the Polish barracks into rubble.
Major Henrik Sukarsski, commander of the garrison, crawls through the smoke to assess what is left of his defenses. He has 182 men. He has food for 7 days. He has orders to hold for 12 hours, just long enough to signal to Poland and the world that the country will resist. 12 hours. That is all anyone expects of them.
Sakarsski looks at what the German shells have done to his position in the first 60 seconds of the war. He looks at the Schleswick Holstein sitting 400 m offshore, its guns already reloading. He looks at the German infantry beginning to move toward the perimeter through the trees and he gives the order to fight. Meanwhile, 500 km to the south, the men of the German 10th Army are crossing the Polish border in the pre-dawn darkness near the city of Cheshova.
Among them are the tanks of the first Panzer Division, the leading edge of a new kind of warfare that the world has never seen before. These are not the slow, heavily armored machines of the First World War. These are fast, coordinated, radio equipped units that work together with aircraft overhead and motorized infantry alongside. They don’t stop at obstacles. They go around them. They don’t wait for orders from headquarters.
They move on their own initiative faster than the enemy can respond. The Poles defending the border have never faced anything like this. The border guards of the Polish Border Protection Corps, the Corpus Okroni Pogranicha, are the first to encounter the German advance. These are not elite troops.
They are lightly armed men spread thinly along a frontier that stretches for hundreds of kilome. Their job in peace time is to prevent smuggling and illegal crossings. Now they are the first line of defense against the most powerful military force in Europe. They fight anyway. In dozens of small engagements along the frontier, Polish border guards hold their positions against overwhelming odds, buying hours, sometimes just minutes, for the units behind them to organize.
Most of them die where they stand. In the skies above, the situation is equally desperate. The Polish Air Force, the Lnitzvo, has approximately 400 combat aircraft. They are outnumbered 4 to1 by the Luftvafa. Their planes, the PZL P11 fighters that form the backbone of Polish air defenses, are already obsolete.
They are slower than the German bombers they are trying to intercept, let alone the German fighters escorting them. But the Polish pilots are extraordinary. Captain Miacheslav Medwitzki, commander of the 111th Fighter Squadron, is airborne within minutes of the first German crossing. He and his pilots climb into skies already thick with German aircraft and begin fighting with everything they have. The odds are impossible. They attack anyway.
And in Warsaw, the bombs are already falling. The Luftvafa’s bombing campaign against the Polish capital begins in the first hours of September 1st. The targets are military airfields, railway junctions, military depots. But in a city of 1.3 million people, bombs do not always find their intended targets. Civilians run through the streets as explosions walk across the city.
Buildings that stood for centuries collapse in seconds. Fires start in residential neighborhoods. The air fills with dust and smoke. And the sound of aircraft engines that never seem to stop. A city that woke up that morning in peace time is ending the day in ruins. And it is only the first day.
By the end of the first day, the situation for Poland is already critical. But Poland is not broken. Not yet. Across the entire length of the front, from the Baltic coast to the Carpathian Mountains, Polish soldiers are fighting with a ferocity that surprises even their German attackers. These are not men who have given up.
These are men who understand exactly what is at stake, their country, their families, their entire way of life, and who have decided that if they are going to lose, they will make the Germans pay for every kilometer. At Westerplot, Major Sukarski’s 82 men are still holding. The Germans have thrown everything at them. Naval gunfire from the Schlesvig Holstein. Bombing runs by Junker’s Ju87 Stooka dive bombers.
The screaming aircraft that have become the symbol of German air power. Infantry assaults through the trees and across the open grounds surrounding the garrison. Every assault is repelled. The Germans attacking Westerplot are not poorly trained conscripts. They are SSH Heimler Danzic, experienced, welle equipped troops who expected to overwhelm the Polish position in a matter of hours.
Instead, they are being stopped by men armed with rifles, machine guns, and an unwillingness to quit that defies military logic. The 12 hours Sukarski was asked to hold have come and gone. He keeps fighting. Further south along the main line of the German advance, something is happening that will become one of the most misunderstood episodes of the entire Polish campaign.
The charge of the cavalry. The image that much of the world would later carry of the Polish military in 1939 is of cavalry. Men on horseback charging German tanks with sabers drawn. It is an image that became shorthand for hopeless backwardness. for a country so antiquated it didn’t understand what century it was fighting in. It is also largely a myth.
The Polish cavalry, the Briada Cavalieri, were not the obsolete relics of a previous era that German propaganda would later portray them as. They were highly mobile infantry who used horses for transportation, not for charging machine guns. They were trained to dismount and fight on foot, to move faster than any motorized unit through difficult terrain, to strike and disappear before the enemy could respond.
They were by any objective measure among the finestlike infantry in Europe. On September 1st, near the town of Croanti in the Pomeranian corridor, a squadron of the 18th Pomeranian Oolons, Polish cavalry, encountered a German infantry unit resting in a forest clearing. Their commander, Colonel Kazimmier Masttoellair’s made a decision.
He ordered a charge not against tanks, against infantry in the open in exactly the situation cavalry had been designed for. The charge worked. The German infantry scattered in panic. And then German armored cars emerged from the treeine and opened fire. The squadron took heavy casualties. Colonel Master was killed. The Italian and German journalists who arrived shortly afterward saw the bodies of Polish cavalry and German tanks in the same field and drew a conclusion that fit perfectly with the story Germany wanted to tell.
The Poles had charged tanks with sabers. It was not what happened, but the image stuck. Meanwhile, the Polish army loads, one of the main defensive formations positioned to protect the industrial heartland of central Poland, is facing the full weight of the German 8th and 10th armies. General Ulius Ruml commands the army Luge. He is a capable officer dealing with an impossible situation.
His forces are spread across a front too wide to defend properly. Facing German armored units that don’t fight the way any previous enemy has fought. The German tanks don’t stop at the Polish defensive lines. They go around them. They penetrate deep behind Polish positions, cutting supply lines, surrounding units that thought they were defending against a frontal assault, appearing where nobody expected them to be.
Ruml’s forces are not being defeated in pitched battle, they are being made irrelevant. By the time Polish units understand where the German spearheads actually are, the situation has already changed. By the time orders arrive from headquarters, the orders are already out of date. By the time reinforcements are dispatched, the gap they were meant to fill has moved.
The Polish army is fighting hard, but it is fighting a war that has already moved on without it. And on the third day of the invasion, news arrives that changes the psychological picture entirely. Warsaw is being evacuated, not the military, the government. Polish President Ignasi Moschitzky and the cabinet are leaving the capital and moving southeast toward the Romanian border. The decision is militarily sound.
Keeping the government mobile and out of German reach is strategically correct. But for the soldiers fighting on the front lines, the news lands like a punch. If the government is leaving Warsaw, what exactly are they fighting for? The answer for most of them is the same answer it has always been. Poland. Not the government, not the politicians, not the borders drawn by Versailles, the country itself, the language, the people, the thing that had survived 123 years of partition and would survive this, too. They keep fighting. By September 7th, 1 week into the invasion, the shape of the catastrophe
is becoming clear. Not to the outside world, not yet. The newspapers in London and Paris are still reporting that Poland is holding, that the front is stabilizing, that the German advance is being slowed. It isn’t. The German Fourth Panzer Division has reached the outskirts of Warsaw.
One week from the German border to the gates of the Polish capital, a distance that military planners on both sides had assumed would take weeks to covered in 7 days. The men of the fourth Panzer Division are not stopping to admire their progress. Their commander, General George Hans Reinhardt, pushes them forward. The orders are clear. Get to Warsaw. Get inside. End this quickly. But Warsaw is not going to fall quietly.
The civilians of the city, those who haven’t fled, are already building barricades, digging trenches in the parks, passing sandbags handto hand along lines that stretch for city blocks. Men who have never held a rifle are being handed rifles. Women are carrying ammunition. Children are delivering messages between defensive positions. A city of 1.3 million people is preparing to fight.
The fourth Panzer Division hits the Warsaw defenses on September 8th. What happens next shocks the German commanders. The attack fails. Polish artillery positioned carefully in the streets and buildings of the city’s western suburbs opens fire on the advancing German armor with devastating accuracy. Anti-tank guns that the Germans didn’t know were there destroy vehicle after vehicle.
Infantry in prepared positions in the apartment buildings along the main approach roads pour fire onto the German columns from above and from the sides. General Reinhardt pulls his division back. Information Warsaw has held for now, but the news from the rest of the country is uniformly bad. In the north, the German third army driving south from East Prussia has broken through the Polish Mlin Army and is threatening to encircle the entire Polish force defending the corridor to the Baltic.
In the south, the German 14th Army is pushing through the Carpathian Mountains faster than anyone thought possible, threatening to outflank the entire Polish southern defensive line. And in the center, the place where the Polish high command had concentrated its strongest forces, the situation is collapsing in a way that is almost impossible to comprehend in real time.
General Tados Coutrea commands the Polish army Posnon. Approximately 230,000 men positioned in the Posnon region in western Poland. For the first week of the war, his army has been sitting largely intact. The German advance has gone around him. The Blitz Creek driving east so fast that the army Posnon has been bypassed, left behind, rendered temporarily irrelevant by the speed of the German movement.
Cutraba looks at his maps. He sees something extraordinary. The German forces driving east have left their northern flank exposed. The eighth army moving toward Warsaw is stretched thin, moving fast, not expecting an attack from the side. Cutraba proposes a counterattack. His superiors authorize it. On September 9th, 8 days into the invasion, the army Posnon turns south and strikes the exposed flank of the German 8th army on the Bzora River. The Germans are caught completely offg guard.
For two days, the battle of the Bazura goes in Poland’s favor. Polish infantry and cavalry push the German units back. Prisoners are taken. Ground is recaptured. For the first and only time in the entire campaign, a major Polish offensive achieves real tactical success.
In Berlin, the news causes momentary alarm. German high command rushes reinforcements to the Bazora. Luftvafa units are redirected from other parts of the front. The full weight of German air power descends on the army posnan. Hundreds of aircraft attacking the Polish columns in the open on roads crossing rivers with no effective air defense to protect them.
General Cutraba’s counterattack, brilliant in conception, devastating in its initial execution, is slowly ground down by the sheer weight of German firepower. But his men keep fighting. For 10 days, the battle of the Bazora continues. The largest battle of the entire Polish campaign. The army Posnan fights not because it can win, but because fighting is the only alternative to surrender.
And these men are not ready to surrender. Some units break through towards Warsaw. Most don’t. Meanwhile, at Wester Plata, something remarkable is still happening. Major Sucharsski and his 182 men are on day seven. They were asked to hold for 12 hours. They have held for 7 days. The garrison is a ruin. The barracks are destroyed.
The defenders are exhausted, many of them wounded, surviving on dwindling food and ammunition in positions that have been pounded continuously by naval gunfire, dive bombers, and infantry assaults. On September 7th, Sucharsski makes his decision. He has done what he was asked to do. He has done far more than what was asked of him. Further resistance will accomplish nothing except the deaths of the men still capable of fighting. He raises the white flag.
The German commander who accepts the surrender, Lieutenant General Abberheart is so impressed by the defense of Wester Plata that he allows Sucharsski to keep his ceremonial sword. It is a gesture almost without precedent in the German conduct of the Polish campaign. A small dignity in the middle of a catastrophe.
As Sucharsski and his surviving men march into captivity, the German soldiers lining the road do something unexpected. They stand at attention. 182 men, 7 days against everything the German military could bring against them. It is not enough to change the outcome of the campaign. Nothing at this point can change the outcome of the campaign.
But it means something to the polls watching, to the world that will eventually hear the story, to the idea, stubborn, costly, sometimes seemingly suicidal, that some things are worth fighting for regardless of the odds. Poland is losing this war. But Poland has not stopped fighting. And it won’t. Not today. Not for the next 6 years.
September 7th, 1939. One week of war. And the picture that emerges from that first week tells two stories simultaneously. Stories that contradict each other and yet are both completely true. The first story is military. Germany is winning comprehensively, devastatingly. The Blitzkrieg has worked exactly as designed.
Polish defensive lines that were supposed to hold for weeks have been penetrated in days. The Polish air force, outgunned and outnumbered from the first hour, is being systematically destroyed on the ground and in the air. Supply lines are cut. Communications between Polish units are breaking down. The high command is losing the ability to coordinate a coherent response to an enemy that moves faster than any army in history.
By any objective military assessment, the campaign is already decided. Poland cannot win this war. The second story is human and it is something else entirely. At Westerplot, 182 men held for 7 days against everything the German military could bring against them and marched into captivity with their heads up and their commander sword at his side.
On the Buzzer River, General Cutraba turned his army into the flank of a force that was supposed to be unstoppable and for 10 days made the Germans genuinely afraid. In the skies over Poland, pilots flying obsolete aircraft that were slower than the bombers they were trying to intercept kept climbing into the fight every single day. In Warsaw, civilians who had never been soldiers picked up rifles and started building barricades before anyone asked them to. These are not the actions of a country that has given up.
These are the actions of a country that understands something very clearly. Losing a battle is not the same as losing a war. And losing a war is not the same as losing everything. In London and Paris, the governments that guaranteed Poland’s security are finally moving. On September 3rd, 2 days after the invasion began, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
The declaration changes very little on the ground in Poland right now. No British soldiers are crossing the channel. No French tanks are rolling toward the German border. The phony war, the strange static standoff on the Western Front is beginning. But the declaration means something larger.
It means that what started on September 1st on a narrow peninsula near Danzi is no longer just Poland’s war. It is the world’s war. And it is only just beginning. Next, the second week of the Polish campaign. Soviet tanks cross the eastern border. Poland finds itself fighting on two fronts simultaneously and the fate of an entire nation is decided in the ruins of its own capital. If this story moved you, share it.
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