First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  We bid a sad farewell to our mounts. To me personally, it was very difficult, leaving my racehorse, the mare Cysterna, whom I had ridden at the Polish Army Championship in Lwów in 1938, and who was like a second fiancée to me. I unsaddled and unbridled her, kissed her, and let her loose with hundreds of other horses. She was free from her faithful service.93

  While Bąkowski would escape the German noose, navigating his way, on foot, through the German lines to Warsaw, others were not so lucky. Czesław Szczepaniak, an artillery lieutenant, witnessed the aftermath of a German assault on the village of Budy Iłowskie, close to the Vistula, on 16 September, where a horse-drawn artillery battery had been destroyed by enemy tanks while attempting to manoeuvre to new positions. ‘A terrible sight!’ he wrote.

  Some of the riders’ bodies seemed frozen on the backs of their dead horses. With a gun or whip still in their hands, with fear in their eyes or a mouth contorted with pain, with faces covered with dried sweat and blood. Other bodies, fallen or kneeling at the guns, lying next to their faithful horses, next to wagons and ammunition, and further on, bodies mangled by tanks, the ground mixed with blood.94

  Such images would have been familiar to the Italian war correspondent Indro Montanelli. Accompanying German forces, he was brought to the Bzura battlefields and shown the corpses of Polish cavalrymen and their horses as they were being cleared. He duly penned an article for the Corriere della Sera, entitled ‘Cavalli contro autoblindo’, or ‘Horses against armoured cars’, in which he wrote of war’s ‘cruel grimacing face’ and of the streets where ‘dead horses marked the senseless route of the Polish cavalry’, which, he said, had been ‘launched in desperation against the wall of armoured German units’. He went on to imagine – quite inaccurately – how the scene might have unfolded, waxing lyrical about ‘four furious charges’ by the Polish cavalrymen, ‘with heads down and lance in hand, like a tournament of centuries ago’:

  Wild charges of horses launched themselves into the blockade of German fire, dashing into this line of fire, wave after wave of horses falling and rotting in a chaotic, bloody tangle, reminiscent of the ditches of Waterloo, of bullfights, of seething nets of tuna. Then, as the dust and earth torn up by the bombing settled, horses without riders and riders without horses could be seen wandering the arid wasteland.

  ‘Horses against armoured vehicles,’ Montanelli concluded, ‘it’s the leitmotiv of this war.’95 Some days later, his words were duly reported by the German magazine Die Wehrmacht, and from there – mixed with stories of the engagement at Krojanty on the opening day of the war – they became a staple ingredient of German propaganda. Even the otherwise sensible American radio correspondent William Shirer was taken in by the story. Visiting the former Polish Corridor on 18 September, he wrote in his diary: ‘In the woods in the Corridor, the sickening sweet smell of dead horses and the sweeter smell of dead men. Here, the Germans say, a whole division of Polish cavalry charged against hundreds of tanks and was annihilated.’ ‘Against tanks the Poles used cavalry,’ he told listeners in a broadcast two days later, ‘and the result was terrible – for the cavalry.’96 With that, a myth was born, which would run until the present day.97

  Of the many lies and inaccuracies of Montanelli’s article, perhaps the most egregious was the contention that the Germans fought their enemy in a chivalrous manner, aiming their guns low to avoid unnecessary casualties. This was so far from the truth that one must wonder whether Montanelli visited the front lines at all. Chivalry was little in evidence on the German side. Instead, there were numerous atrocities; affecting Polish soldiers and civilians alike. Already at the very beginning of the fighting on the Bzura, German soldiers in the villages threatened by the Polish advance, north of Zgierz, began rounding up male civilians. As they withdrew, their captives were corralled into barns, which were then set on fire. Those that tried to escape the inferno were machine-gunned. Similar actions occurred all along the front line. At Łowicz, men of the 31st Infantry Division moved from street to street blindly throwing hand grenades into houses.98 At Piątek, seventy Poles were rounded up and shot on 14 September. Three days later a further seventy-six were slaughtered at Henryków, north-west of Sochaczew.99

  Such actions cannot be excused by the ‘heat of battle’, as many of these massacres occurred long after the fighting had ceased. At Jasieniec, on 16 September, for example, German tanks shelled a Polish field hospital, which was clearly marked with the Red Cross sign, killing fifty wounded soldiers.100 After the fall of Kutno, around 6,000 men were rounded up in the town centre; among them were soldiers and other ‘suspicious elements’, many of whom were shot.101 As ever, Jews were especially targeted. At Błonie, for instance, on 18 September, members of the SS-Leibstandarte massacred some fifty Jews who had been detained earlier by the Wehrmacht.102

  Amid this catalogue of barbarism, one of the worst examples occurred at Śladów, close to the Vistula, on 18 September. There, advancing German armoured units used civilians as ‘human shields’ to face down remaining elements of Polish cavalry. When the fighting was finished, they were ordered to bury the dead, and told that they would be freed afterwards. However, events soon took an even more sinister turn. As a survivor remembered:

  The officer gave an order to lead us over to the embankment, and assembled us at the edge of the river, along with all the seriously wounded soldiers. Unable to walk, they had been carried there. Some soldiers hidden in the reeds came out of hiding and … were shot on the spot. At the sight of this, all of those arrested began to plead for mercy. The Germans laughed and called us ‘Polish dogs’. They lined us up in two rows, on the right flank about 150 Polish soldiers, on the left civilians between 15 and 75 years old, also around 150 in number. There was one man who had his 4-year-old son with him; the Germans took the boy away, but he kept crying for his father, so they got angry and brought the child back.

  When the machine guns began firing, the Poles jumped into the river to escape the slaughter, but were shot by the soldiers ‘like wild ducks’. The only survivors were two men who managed to hide under the river bank, before swimming away to safety under cover of darkness.103 The massacre at Śladów claimed 358 lives.

  Of course many managed to surrender and survive. Once their positions were overrun, or escape was impossible, most laid down their weapons and hoped that they would be treated decently. Count von Kielmansegg found it remarkable ‘how quickly and completely the Polish attack … collapsed’. ‘The enemy does not withdraw,’ he recalled with a whiff of contempt, ‘he doesn’t flee. No, he surrenders, on the spot, where he meets the counter-attack. They surrender in their thousands.’104 In the village of Sanniki, advancing Germans approached the church – the only building left standing – and were surprised to find a company of Polish soldiers inside, praying by candlelight. As the Germans entered, the Poles simply stood up, laid their guns on the floor and silently surrendered.105

  In due course, prisoners would be taken to a Dulag – a Durchgangslager or ‘transit camp’, often a Polish army barracks or similar site, where they would be registered and sorted, by rank, residence and usefulness for physical labour. Thereafter, privates and NCOs would be sent to a Stalag, where they would be employed as labourers, while officers would be despatched to an Oflag, where they were not required to work.106 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, large numbers of Polish prisoners were unimpressed by the prospect of a life of hard labour in a prisoner-of-war camp, and so many tried to abscond from the Dulags or assembly camps before their fate was sealed. Submerging into Polish society, such fugitives would form the vanguard of the later Polish Underground.

  Others avoided surrender altogether, slipping through German lines as the ring closed around the remnants of the Poznań and Pomeranian Armies in the Bzura pocket. One officer recalled running with his unit past German positions at night, with wild firing chasing their progress. Regrouping at sunrise, he ordered his men to split up: ‘Knowing that we could no longer move as a unit, I told the men to make
their way to Warsaw on their own. Through fields and pastures, keeping away from the roads, the last soldiers of the 8th Mounted Rifles Regiment headed in towards the capital.’107 They were joining a ragged mass: the remnants of armies that – if not already defeated – were exhausted and gravely damaged by their experiences. As Colonel Ludwik Czyżewski noted, the tide of travelling troops was ‘moving at a pace of no more than 2 kilometres per hour’ and presented an easy target to the enemy:

  Had an organised and disciplined German unit appeared at that time and opened fire on this packed mass of soldiers, a devastating panic would have broken out. For nobody was thinking of any kind of reconnaissance or protection for the marching troops. All anyone had on their mind was to reach Warsaw as fast as possible.108

  Such were the ravages of war, however, that the city that they were heading for was already scarcely recognisable.

  6

  Of ‘Liberators’ and Absent Friends

  Warsaw in 1939 was one of the most impressive capitals of central Europe. Perched on an escarpment on the left bank of the Vistula, the city centre – clustered around a beautiful old town, often painted by Canaletto1 – had all the accoutrements of a modern metropolis: a university, an opera house and a concert hall, as well as numerous ministries and palaces, avenues and parks, churches and patrician residences. Little wonder, perhaps, that it was once known as the ‘Paris of the North’.

  By the third week of the war, however, Warsaw was already a battered shadow of its former self, bearing the scars not only of aerial assault, but by now also of artillery attack. Many of the city’s landmarks had already been hit, including the Citadel, the main railway station and the bridges spanning the Vistula. Arriving in the capital from the fortress at Modlin that week, Colonel Stanisław Sosabowski was quickly aware of ‘a cloud of dark smoke hanging lazily over the city’. Soon after, he would see the wounds of war. ‘Breasting a small rise,’ he wrote, ‘the silhouette of Warsaw was suddenly spread out before us. At once, we could see something was different – something was missing. Apart from the clouds of smoke, the smell of burning and the flickering orange flames, the outline of the town had changed. The towers and spires of the churches, the well-known landmarks, had toppled into piles of rubble.’2

  The city Sosabowski was entering was not yet under siege. Though German troops had arrived in the south-western suburbs on the evening of 8 September, their advance had been halted and then stalled thanks to the Polish counter-attack on the Bzura, which had necessitated the westward transfer of some of the German troops then close to Warsaw. Once the threat of a breakthrough on the Bzura had abated, however, the German pressure on the capital increased again. There were more air raids, more probing attacks in the south-west, and crucially, a fast-moving pincer advance deep into the city’s eastern hinterland. As one diarist noted with alarm on 15 September: ‘The Germans are attempting to surround Warsaw.’3

  Since the breakthrough on the Narew, General Guderian’s forces had raced southward aiming not only to cut off Warsaw, but also to block a possible Polish retreat towards Brest, and prevent the Poles from sabotaging vital infrastructure. Guderian himself was setting the fast pace of the advance. Colonel Hans-Karl von Esebeck encountered the general by the roadside, and was asked for his map.

  On my map-board I always have my map folded so that it displays the area we might cover in a good day’s march. ‘No, no,’ says the general, ‘unfold the whole map.’ Then, pointing at the map, now hanging down to the ground: ‘Can you see the bridge over the Bug down there? That’s the one I’ve got to have – by early tomorrow morning.’ I cannot believe my ears. A hundred kilometres as the crow flies … and it is already beginning to get dark.4

  Esebeck and his men achieved their objective, securing the crucial crossing over the river Bug, east of Sokołów, by dawn the next day. It was a perfect demonstration of the new art of war.

  The Germans did not have everything their own way, however. At Kałuszyn, 50 kilometres east of Warsaw, the southward advance of the 44th Infantry Regiment was dramatically halted on the night of 11–12 September. German forces had taken the town the previous day, dug in and herded the civilian population into the cemetery, so that no one could inform the nearby Polish troops of their presence. But those Polish units, including the 11th Uhlan Regiment, were well aware of the Germans’ arrival, and were determined to strike back before German reinforcements could secure the position. A plan was devised whereby a frontal cavalry assault would drive the Germans into an ambush set up along their likely line of retreat, the road east to Siedlce. The counter-attack began when the 4th Squadron of the 11th Uhlans thundered into the town under cover of darkness, scattering German infantrymen as they went. As their commander, Lieutenant Andrzej Żyliński, recalled:

  We entered the first gardens of Kałuszyn. There were more Germans here, they fled like rabbits over the fences, into the gardens and orchards. We couldn’t follow them, so we kept on, still shouting ‘Hurrah!’ We emerged into a road crossing … and empty German lorries. We kept on galloping towards the centre of Kałuszyn. The Germans fired flares: the place was as bright as day. In front of us a large group of Germans was running away, several dozen of them. A German officer tried to stop them, shouting.5

  Z∙yliński’s cavalry charge may have been carried out in error, following a misunderstanding with his superior officer.6 Nevertheless the Polish cavalry seized the initiative, unseated the occupiers and enabled infantry detachments, among them elements of the 6th Legions Regiment, to rout the Germans. By dawn, Kałuszyn was again in Polish hands, an armoured counter-attack had been beaten back and the ambush on the Siedlce road had harassed the German retreat. But victory came at a heavy cost. Losses on both sides were considerable; numbering well into the hundreds and including some fifty of Z∙yliński’s horses, as well as a German battalion commander, Major Krawutschke, who was thought to have committed suicide.7 When the fighting was over, only 62 of the town’s 645 buildings were still standing and, as an eye-witness recalled, ‘the market square was covered with corpses in field-grey uniforms, ripped by cannons and mortars’.8

  The respite gained by the Polish victory at Kałuszyn could only be temporary, however. Just to the west, Brigadier-General Władysław Anders, one of the Polish army’s most gifted commanders, was ordered to attack with his Nowogródek Cavalry Brigade near Mińsk Mazowiecki, but despite making good progress, he was driven back and forced to disengage. It is testament to the chaos that engulfed the Polish High Command in the early weeks of September that Anders and his men were initially ordered to hold the line to the west of Warsaw, before being moved 50 kilometres eastward, across the Vistula, to engage German forces to the east of the capital. Withdrawing after the engagement, he passed through the town of Garwolin, where ‘there was nothing left but dying embers, for on the eve of our passage through the town, the German air force had burned it down. The many human corpses and dead horses on the streets bore witness to their visit.’9 With that, Anders continued south-eastward, heading for Lublin.

  Warsaw was being surrounded, and after the Polish counter-offensive faltered in the marshes of the Bzura, it found itself at the heart of a narrowing core of territory, ranging from the fortress of Modlin, 25 kilometres north of the capital, to the town of Otwock, a similar distance to the south. Modlin itself represented a formidable obstacle to the German advance. Here a vast complex of fortifications, some dating to Napoleonic times, guarded the confluence of the Vistula and the Narew, and with that the northern approaches to Warsaw. In September 1939, it already contained huge amounts of men and military materiel, including four infantry divisions – totalling some 15,000 men – ninety-six artillery pieces, seven tanks and Armoured Train No. 15, christened Śmierć or ‘Death’.10 Any army seeking to take Warsaw first had to neutralise Modlin.

  West of the capital, Polish-held territory included most of Kampinos Forest, where the remnants of General Kutrzeba’s Pomeranian and Poznań armies had found refuge.
Yet, as Kutrzeba himself explained, the forest was under constant German attack, particularly from the air. ‘It’s dreadful what’s happening in the Kampinos,’ he told General Wiktor Thommée. ‘I have never been through anything like that. It’s a nightmare. Hundreds killed and wounded, incessant fire, panic-stricken troops running in all directions without a purpose, always under enemy bombs. I don’t know how I got out of that hell …’11 As Thommée recalled, it took a long time for Kutrzeba to recover his composure.

  Some of the inhabitants of Warsaw would doubtless have shared Kutrzeba’s mental and physical exhaustion. Yet the two weeks of air attack had not yet dampened the upbeat mood. Returning to the city on 14 September, one Varsovian noted that despite the many elaborate barricades which had been hastily erected on the streets, ‘life seemed more or less normal’. While soldiers were ever present and civilians had to endure air raids and make do with dwindling supplies, ‘the general impression was one of restrained hope and optimism’.12 A sense of community and solidarity emerged, with countless volunteers assisting in preparing the city for the coming onslaught, or helping the many refugees that were already clogging its streets. So many people answered the call for help with digging defences, according to one of those present, that there were not enough spades to go around.13 Soldiers, exhausted by their days-long march to the capital, would have their feet washed at the roadside, in a ‘simple, humble contribution’ by Warsaw’s womenfolk.14 The pianist Władysław Szpilman, who had joined in the labour gangs digging trenches in the suburbs, described an elderly Jewish man – ‘a black whirlwind of kaftan and beard’ – working alongside him, hacking at the baked earth with ‘Biblical fervour’. When Szpilman tried to persuade the man to go home and rest, he was told: ‘I have a shop.’ The man then gave an anguished sob, and continued digging. It seems everyone had something to defend. Szpilman dug for two days straight.15