First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  He dug out all his old German vocabulary and stressed to us both that he was just an honest merchant and that we Germans were good people. He gesticulated with his hands and feet but all his play-acting left us with a sour taste in the mouth … I said to Alfred that we should make him disappear. He nodded, and we accompanied him into the kitchen. Alfred opened the cellar hatch – the cellar was three-quarters full with water – I gave ‘Isidor’ a kick and he splattered into the water. The hatch was slammed down and we swiftly pushed heavy furniture on top of it … As we left the house, on the other side of the road we saw a thick-set Jewess crying like a little baby … We warned ‘Rebecca’ not to try and let ‘Isidor’ out from his hopeless situation, otherwise she would find herself sharing the same fate.62

  Events such as these were not anomalies or isolated occurrences; they were commonplace, witnessed in almost every village and town. The statistics speak for themselves: on the day of the Końskie massacre alone – 12 September – there were twenty-nine other massacres and executions, with nearly 300 victims. And that day was far from exceptional. Throughout September, the German campaign in Poland saw at least 615 such mass killings, costing over 12,000 lives.63

  Barbarism penetrated every sphere of the war. From the outset the strafing of civilians from the air was routine, and columns of refugees were regular targets for German pilots. As the Polish air force disappeared from the skies, the Luftwaffe was left unchallenged and was able to bomb at will, hitting towns and villages with no air defences and no military significance. One of the most egregious examples of this occurred on the afternoon of 13 September, when German bombers of the Luftwaffe’s 8th Air Corps appeared in the skies above Frampol, a small town in southern Poland, west of Zamość. Far from the front lines, Frampol had already been bombed a couple of times, but that afternoon observers saw ‘at high altitude, four trios of German bombers … moving across the sky, symmetrically, evenly suspended in the air, more like a fly-past than an attack’. Within moments, the centre of the town was consumed in the flash of explosions: ‘Flames shoot into the sky and the hell on earth is crowned with a black cloud of smoke.’64 Then, as soon as they had arrived, the bombers departed, leaving Frampol ‘a sea of fire’. Although casualties on the ground were few, little of the town survived the inferno.

  The bombing of Frampol, which had no military presence or strategic significance, is thought to have been purely experimental. The town was built on a perfect geometric grid, converging on a central square with a town hall and church – and it was a layout which allowed Luftwaffe observers to photograph and measure the results of their actions. The town was destroyed, it appears, simply to give German pilots and bombardiers a chance to practise their nefarious art.65 Barbarism had become the new normality.

  Facing this threat to their existence, the Poles did everything they could to defend themselves. They even launched a counter-offensive. Though German advance formations had already reached the suburbs of Warsaw, due to their swift progress they had left considerable Polish forces in their wake – forces which might still constitute a threat. German intelligence about Polish forces was ‘truly wretched’, as one German staff officer lamented.66 Between Warsaw and Łódź eight Polish divisions were unaccounted for; some, certainly, had ceased to exist – their shattered remnants clogging the routes to the capital – but others were still very much present. Among the latter was the entire Poznań Army, which had been outflanked by the German invasion and was yet to see serious action. Its commander, Major General Tadeusz Kutrzeba, was a 53-year-old veteran who already had an eventful career behind him, having witnessed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 when serving as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and thereafter seeing action on the Balkan and Russian fronts in the First World War. Considered something of an intellectual, he had been appointed commander of the Polish Military Academy in 1928, in which capacity he oversaw a number of strategic studies and became an advocate of mechanisation.

  Yet Kutrzeba had been rather bypassed by the German invasion of 1939. Commanding the Poznań Army, his had been the most westerly of Polish military districts; centred in the natural salient of Wielkopolska, around the cities of Poznań and Gniezno. And, when the German advance focused on a swift assault on Warsaw, with the main thrusts coming from Silesia and East Prussia, his army had found itself sidelined, largely unengaged, and seemingly doomed to a dispiriting retreat eastward towards the capital.

  The Poznań Army did not meekly accept its fate, however. ‘We were raging with the frustration of impotence’, one of its senior officers wrote, and in this situation, ‘we preferred to plunge into a deadly battle’.67 Echoing those sentiments, Kutrzeba petitioned the Polish commander-in-chief, Edward Śmigły-Rydz, to permit him to launch a flanking attack on the German 8th Army to his south. As he later wrote, his logic was simple: ‘Further marches with their physical and psychological burdens would weaken us without bringing any tactical advantages. We left [Wielkopolska] voluntarily, apparently without any desire to fight. Now battle was generally desired.’ He thought that attacking the German flank, where the 30th Infantry Division was spread out over some 25 kilometres – and was not expecting an attack from the north – promised ‘a real chance of success’.68

  Initially, then, Śmigły-Rydz was unimpressed by Kutrzeba’s proposal to attack – believing that his general harboured some overly optimistic assumptions about Polish martial spirit – and reiterated the order that his forces were to march towards Warsaw.69 But, in the chaos of the High Command’s evacuation, communications temporarily broke down, and Kutrzeba, seeing an opportunity to relieve the capital and enable some of those forces still west of Warsaw to withdraw eastward, decided to go it alone. On the afternoon of 9 September, his forces – including the 14th, 17th and 25th infantry divisions – struck southward on a broad 20-kilometre front, across the river Bzura, and into the German flank.

  The first target that day was Łęczyca, a historic little town astride the Bzura, which had been captured by the Germans a few days before. In his zeal, the local Polish commander – Brigadier-General Edmund Knoll-Kownacki – launched the assault earlier than ordered, thereby alerting the Germans to the Polish threat. Nonetheless, Knoll-Kownacki’s men were successful, spurred by the desire to prove themselves. As one artilleryman recalled, the men of his battery, ‘tired of the 9-day retreat, at last began shelling the enemy. And you should have seen them bustle about their guns!’ The cavalry, too, had their tails up. ‘When we reached Łęczyca’, an officer of the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade wrote, ‘I experienced a very happy moment for the first time in the September campaign: we were no longer retreating.’70

  Roles were being reversed: it was the Germans now who were fleeing in chaos. Łęczyca erupted in a popular uprising. ‘Suddenly the town is full of people, emerging from cellars and tunnels,’ one chronicler wrote. ‘They are armed, they attack retreating wounded and individual combat vehicles, destroy telephone lines and light signals close to the command post.’ That night the German 46th Infantry Regiment made a number of desperate appeals to its superiors for reinforcements, describing their situation as ‘hopeless’.71 Their losses in Łęczyca were substantial. As a Polish cavalryman recalled: ‘That night, the streets were strewn with the corpses of so many men that we had great difficulty getting through the blood-stained town. Even our mounts snorted with displeasure as they stepped over the dead.’72

  A similar story unfolded the next day near Piątek, 10 kilometres to the east, where Polish forces again demonstrated their mettle. The brutal engagement was described by a soldier in a Sturmabteilung (SA) detachment, who was defending the town against repeated Polish attacks. The fourth assault, he recalled, was the most determined:

  From all directions came machine gun fire. And … while the machine guns strafed our foxholes from both flanks and close in front … hand grenades and mortars crashed into our positions every few minutes. Our sector was being pounded systemat
ically, and with astounding accuracy, from both left and right sides. The men could neither move nor establish the enemy’s firing positions. Already in the first volley, two men in their foxhole were thoroughly peppered by shrapnel. They were killed outright.73

  A Polish officer with the 58th Infantry Regiment witnessed what happened next:

  The men were quickened with new energy and strength when – what we could not hear, but could guess – an order ran along the lines: ‘Fix bayonets, grenades at the ready’ … The whole advance line throws grenades, then drops to the ground for a moment and after 5–7 seconds the German positions are engulfed in a powerful rumble of explosions. At the same time, under the cover of dust and smoke from the grenades, our infantrymen fall on the Germans, stabbing with their bayonets those who had not escaped, clubbing them with the butts of their rifles, wreaking havoc and terror in the German lines.74

  Further east at Łowicz, the fighting was just as intense. The town was initially liberated by units of the 64th Infantry Division at dawn on 12 September. As a reconnaissance officer recalled, the Germans did not give up lightly, fighting for every inch, but the Poles prevailed. ‘The town is now quiet,’ he wrote.

  Enemy survivors, lost and marauding in our rear, have been eliminated. German troops who had been trying to hold the south-east end of the town have retreated. The morning, sunny after a misty dawn, floods the liberated town with happy sunlight. The townspeople fill the streets, expressing their joy in every way they can. There are flowers, buckets of hot and cold drinks, bread, sweets, fruit and no end of joyful cheers.75

  The Polish offensive was bringing some genuine success. All along the line, south of the Bzura, German forces were in retreat, and countless villages and towns were being liberated. For the Germans, after the rapid advances of the previous ten days, such setbacks came as a shock. As one staff officer recalled: ‘There was bad news followed by more bad news, raining down on us like blows from a club.’76 For the Poles, however, these were heady days. ‘We stayed hard on their heels reclaiming one town after another,’ one cavalryman wrote. ‘We pursued the enemy for almost three days and villagers we met along the way greeted us affectionately as their deliverers, weeping and kissing our boots. I will never forget the feelings that I experienced then.’77 Such enthusiasm proved infectious. When Śmigły-Rydz belatedly made contact with Kutrzeba to give the Bzura operations his retrospective blessing, he advised that the general should continue his advance in the direction of Radom, over 100 kilometres away from his current positions.78 In New York, meanwhile, the Associated Press reported, erroneously, that Łódź had been liberated.79

  The thrill of liberation would not last, however. Already on 10 September, with the Bzura campaign barely under way, Army Group South was preparing a German counter-attack concentrating on the area immediately to the west of Warsaw, so as to cut off any Polish attempt to withdraw to the capital.80 Moreover, the Poznań Army’s successes on the Bzura had largely been attained by exploiting the element of surprise, and by moving troops at night, so as to negate German air superiority. It remained to be seen whether such tactics would continue to be as effective. Most crucially, while the German line on the Bzura had buckled, and the Wehrmacht had been forced to cede territory, it had not broken. Polish victories there had been dearly won – paid for, as Kutrzeba put it, ‘with too much blood’81 – and some units were already at the end of their strength. The inevitable German counter-attack would test their resolve and morale all over again.

  It was at the height of the Polish offensive on the Bzura that Hitler decided to visit his commanders in nearby Łódź. Arriving by air on the morning of 13 September, he proceeded to a briefing with General Kurt von Briesen, commander of the 30th Infantry Division, which had been so mauled by the Poles over the preceding days. Briesen greeted Hitler at his field headquarters, a schoolhouse well within range of Polish artillery. With his right arm in plaster and suspended in a sling, due to shrapnel injuries he had sustained during the defence of Piątek three days earlier, the general evidently made a favourable impression. Asked about his injury, Briesen informed his commander-in-chief that he had led his last reserve battalion into action in spite of his wounds. Turning to his liaison officer, Hitler swooned: ‘That’s how I imagined a Prussian general to be when I was a child.’82 Later, Hitler was even more effusive in his admiration when talking to General Keitel: ‘You can’t have enough soldiers like that. He’s a man after my own heart.’83

  When it came, the German counter-attack was ferocious. Despite pushing back all along the line, its focus was the eastern end of the front, around Łowicz and Sochaczew, which would become a pinch point in the Polish attempt to withdraw towards Warsaw. If the Germans could cut off that line of retreat, they would encircle all of those Polish forces fighting on the Bzura. As Count Johann von Kielmansegg noted: ‘The Pole must realise what is at stake. If he is defeated, then his fate will finally be sealed.’84

  Anticipating this bottleneck on the eastern Bzura, Kutrzeba ordered his forces there to advance southward towards the town of Skierniewice, to relieve the pressure. Due to Polish exhaustion and German reinforcements, however, that advance was stillborn. Worse still, rather than hold their bridgehead on the southern bank of the Bzura, the local commander, General Władysław Bortnowski – seemingly fearful of approaching German armour – ordered his men to withdraw to the north bank of the river. Bortnowski, whose Pomeranian Army had been largely destroyed in the battles for the Polish Corridor, may well have been psychologically scarred by his experiences, leaving his decision-making fatally impaired. One of his colleagues, Brigadier-General Mikołaj Bołtuć, certainly thought so. He would later speak of finding Bortnowski on the road north of Sochaczew, having suffered a ‘complete nervous breakdown’, refusing to believe that the Bzura offensive could bring any success and ordering his men not to fire on the Germans, lest they provoke retaliation. Bołtuć was understandably furious at this evident dereliction of soldierly duty. ‘If I die, let everyone know that I died because of that son of a bitch,’ he said of Bortnowski.’85 Two days after uttering those words, Bołtuć was killed in battle outside Warsaw.

  If Bortnowski was indeed suffering from shell-shock, the days that followed would not have helped his mental state. Despite his defeatist instructions, his men fought valiantly at Łowicz and Sochaczew, holding out against German forces that had been reinforced by units drawn from the western suburbs of Warsaw, including elements of the 4th Panzer Division and Hitler’s elite SS-Leibstandarte. After three days of intense fighting, however, the Polish line finally gave way. At Sochaczew, the remaining Polish forces withdrew northward across the river early on 15 September. ‘The Germans were close,’ a Polish sergeant recalled. ‘We could see the flashes of heavy machine guns firing. Just before we reached the river, Lieutenant Skuza fell mortally wounded. Not one officer was left in our company.’86 Kurt Meyer, a Brigadeführer in the SS-Leibstandarte, had nothing but admiration for his opponents. ‘The Poles … proved repeatedly that they knew how to die,’ he later wrote. ‘It would be unjust to deny the courage of these Polish units. The fighting on the Bzura was desperate and intense. The best Polish blood was mixed with the river water. The Poles’ losses were terrifying.’87 At Łowicz, the scene was similar. There, Janusz Bardziński, a lieutenant in the 17th Regiment of the Wielkopolska Cavalry Brigade, which had been holding the bridge during the Polish withdrawal, sent a final message as the Germans approached: ‘Enemy infantry at assault range. I am under mortar and machine gun barrage. Most lancers killed or injured. I am lightly wounded. Still doing my duty, but it is too late for help. That’s all, Colonel. For Country and Regiment. This is my last report.’88

  While the German ground assault was harrowing enough, attacks from the air were, if anything, more devastating. Though the Poles had largely avoided the attentions of the Luftwaffe during their advance, once they had lost the initiative on the battlefield, they would soon feel the full effects of German air superior
ity, with wave after wave of enemy aircraft bombing and strafing the fleeing columns at will. ‘No one dared to part with Mother Earth!’ one officer wrote in his diary. ‘Whoever raised his head was hit with a burst of bullets from the planes, which, having completed their task of destroying fighting formations, went after individual people, wagons, riders, and even horses.’89 General Kutrzeba himself experienced the power of the Luftwaffe while crossing the Bzura at Witkowice: ‘Every movement, every grouping, all the routes of advance were subjected to a pounding from the air. Hell on earth had begun. The bridges were destroyed, the fords jammed, the columns waiting to cross destroyed by bombs.’ In a grimly symbolic scene, the commander of the Bzura offensive was forced to lie low in a copse, unable to cross the river until the air attack ceased.90

  The effect on Polish morale of such bombardments was considerable. One officer bemoaned the fact that his men had no anti-aircraft equipment, and so were ‘left with nothing but helpless anger’ at the resulting slaughter.91 Count von Kielmansegg recalled that, even after they had been taken prisoner, some Poles were ‘half mad with fear, and throw themselves to the ground when even the sound of aircraft engines can be heard’. The Polish officers, he noted, were ‘visibly shattered and constantly expressing the opinion, somewhat apologetically, that no one can withstand tanks and Stukas’.92

  As the Germans pushed north towards the Vistula, in an attempt to cut Polish forces off from an eastward retreat towards Warsaw, the battle degenerated into a slaughter, with remaining Polish units desperately attempting to hold the line to enable their fellows to escape. For some, it was an ignominious flight. One officer with the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade, Roman Bąkowski, was crushed by the order that his unit was to ford the Bzura on foot, and leave its horses behind: