Grzybowski gamely fought his corner, arguing with Potemkin and protesting against the Soviet Union’s unilateral actions. He explained desperately that the Polish government was still present in the country, and that the Polish army was still fighting. He argued that Poland’s difficulties had no bearing on its sovereignty. Did anyone question Russia’s existence, he asked, when Napoleon occupied Moscow? According to Potemkin, Grzybowski became so agitated that he ‘could hardly pronounce his words’.48 But it was all in vain. Though Grzybowski refused to accept the note, Potemkin ordered one of his aides to take it direct to the Polish Embassy. Hurrying back to his office, Grzybowski composed a telegram to the Polish Foreign Ministry – sent via Bucharest – explaining the sinister turn of events and declaring that he was ‘awaiting instructions’.49 By the time that despatch had been sent, the Red Army was already advancing on Poland’s eastern frontier.
The Soviet forces that moved off that morning had been organised into two fronts arranged to the north and south of the Pripyat River: the ‘Byelorussian Front’, under General Mikhail Kovalev, and the ‘Ukrainian Front’, under General Semyon Timoshenko. Together, they comprised nearly 500,000 combat troops, divided into twenty-eight rifle divisions, seven cavalry divisions, seven artillery regiments and ten armoured brigades, and assisted by 4,850 tanks, 5,500 armoured vehicles and 2,000 aircraft.50 Each front also boasted three mobile spearheads, made up of cavalry and tank brigades, which were to lead a swift advance into Poland, and were given ambitious targets: they were to capture Wilno, Grodno and Lwów within 48 hours.51 Clearly speed was of the essence – the Soviet commissar for defence, Kliment Voroshilov, even referred to the Soviet advance, without irony, as a ‘lightning strike’.52 The task of the invading armies, their battle orders informed them, was ‘to destroy and capture the armed forces of Poland’, with the forward units moving both to cut off the Wilno district in the north and to interrupt a general Polish retreat towards the south-east, the so-called Romanian bridgehead.53
So much for the theory. In truth, the Soviet advance was rather more chaotic. Having been eviscerated by Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s, when a huge proportion of the officer corps had been liquidated, the Red Army was far from fighting fit. Moreover, given that its mobilisation had been hurried by the urgent need to claim the territories promised to Stalin, its advance was characterised by logistical chaos and disorganisation. Initially at least, the two fronts lacked many of their component units, with many more deprived of personnel or material. According to Soviet records, the mobilisation had revealed a lack of uniforms and equipment, with supplies often having to be borrowed from reserve units.54 Others were not so lucky. The 21st Rifle Division, for instance, contained ‘400 men in its ranks who were not fully kitted out, of whom many were in bast shoes, barefoot, in civilian trousers and caps’.55 Such shortcomings did not go unnoticed. Observers in Poland would later recall the Red Army’s stunted ponies, dirty boots and shabby uniforms with dismay – so very different from the Polish image of the immaculate Uhlan, or even the elegant Wehrmacht officer.56 One eye-witness described how Soviet soldiers would buy out the shops wherever they stopped, and were astonished that they could have as much as they wanted – especially sweets and chocolate – without ration cards.57 Another described the Red Army as ‘an army of beggars … an emaciated ravenous crowd’. ‘This was Asia,’ he concluded. ‘Asia had invaded us.’58
Soviet military hardware could also be less than impressive. Armour, though numerous, was made up predominantly of two types: the BT-7, a lightly armoured ‘cruiser tank’, intended for swift advances; and the T-26, an older, slower infantry tank. Neither of them was especially modern, reliable or effective.59 In 1939, more Soviet tanks were lost to mechanical breakdown than to combat, and supply and maintenance crews often lagged far behind the advance columns, causing forward units to wait, or else take fuel or spare parts from other battalions.60 Arguably it was only the lack of adequate anti-tank weapons among the Polish forces facing them that prevented a more even fight. A similar situation pertained in the air, where many of the 2,000 or so aircraft available to support the Red Army advance were biplanes of an outdated design, such as the Polikarpov Po-2 or the Polikarpov I-15. As one Polish eye-witness recalled: ‘The planes were easy to recognise because they moved very slowly, compared to German Messerschmitts and even Polish PZLs. You could tell right away it was a different army.’61 Accidents, too, were common. The Soviet air ace Sergei Gritsevets, twice awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal, was killed on 16 September, when his I-15 collided with another aircraft outside Orsha, from where he was due to be deployed to the Polish front.62
Facing the Red Army along the 1,400-kilometre frontier were disparate Polish forces, consisting primarily of the Border Defence Corps (Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, or KOP). They were lightly armed, with little artillery or armour, and numbered around 12,000 men, spread across some eighteen battalions. In addition, eastern Poland contained around 300,000 regular troops, in varying states of readiness: either reserve units that were still being formed and trained, or those that had withdrawn eastward after facing the Germans.63 Though largely lacking air support and sufficient artillery, these Polish forces in the east still possessed some advantages. One was the static network of defences that had been constructed around Sarny, north of Równe (Rivne). The Sarny Fortified Area, though incomplete, still encompassed some 170 kilometres of bunkers, trenches and earthworks along either side of the river Słucz (Sluch). In addition to that, two Polish armoured trains were stationed in the eastern provinces: the Pierwszy Marszałek, close to Sarny itself; and, defending the fortress at Brest, the Bartosz Głowacki, which, incidentally, was named after the peasant hero of the Battle of Racławice of 1794, a notable Polish victory against the Russians.
Yet, it was the border guards of the KOP that bore the brunt of the initial Soviet advance. Formed in 1924, the KOP’s task had been to control the long and somewhat lawless frontier with the Soviet Union and prevent communist infiltration. The prospect of a full-scale Red Army invasion was rather beyond its remit, however, and the Polish commander-in-chief, Edward Śmigły-Rydz, would in due course give the order that the KOP was not to engage the Soviets. ‘except in the event of attack’. In truth, many border guard units did not have the luxury of a choice.
The confusion of those first hours of the Soviet invasion was typified by an exchange between the KOP regiment commander in Czortków (Chortkiv), Colonel Marceli Kotarba, and the General Staff. When he was asked to send an emissary to the Soviets to discover their intentions, Kotarba replied that ‘all my battalions are fighting and two Soviet tanks have been destroyed. I doubt whether I will be able to fulfil the order regarding the envoy.’ Undeterred, the General Staff officer insisted that an emissary be sent, to which Kotarba responded curtly: ‘Soviet planes over Czortków.’ A further demand that talks with the Soviets be opened was met with the answer ‘Air raid. I must go.’ The next question neatly encapsulated Poland’s predicament: ‘Is this raid by German or Soviet planes?’ the staff officer asked.64
For all the confusion, the men of the KOP did not lack determination. As one commander instructed his men, they were to stand their ground, ‘turn their faces to the east, and fight’.65 At Dzisna, in the far north-eastern corner of Poland, close to the border with Latvia, soldiers of the KOP ‘Głębokie’ Regiment teamed up with local police and volunteers, including students, to defend their district from attack by a combination of local irregulars and Red Army forces. The fact that one KOP battalion lost fully 50 per cent of its men is proof of the ferocity of the fighting. In another engagement, near Husiatyn, a KOP regiment accounted for over 200 Soviet dead in a firefight with the invaders.66
One of the most remarkable KOP actions in the opening days of the Soviet invasion was the defence of the fortifications at Sarny, where border guards held off the hugely superior Soviet 60th Rifle Division, despite the risk of being surrounded. One of those KOP commanders was Lieutenant
Jan Bołbott, whose fifty or so men held their positions against strong enemy forces – including tanks, sappers and infantry with flamethrowers – for more than two days. At one point Bołbott pleaded with his superiors, ‘Please send a counter-strike or we will all die’, but they were powerless to oblige. On the morning of 21 September, his position was finally overwhelmed after the Red Army managed to get close enough to block the outside of the bunkers with flammable material and ignite it. Along with his surviving comrades, Bołbott was burned alive.67
For all these sacrifices, many KOP units, acutely aware of their own military shortcomings, followed their orders not to engage the Soviets. On the Ukrainian Front, the Soviet 5th Army reported that ‘the enemy has not rendered significant resistance at the state border and is retreating westward’.68 To the north of that, much of the Sarny garrison was evacuated westward early on in the invasion to avoid being encircled.69 Some border guards saw little military logic in resisting against such insuperable odds. ‘I wondered about the sense of taking up arms in a doomed fight when we had no anti-tank weapons,’ one officer recalled. ‘Should we provide the tanks with cannon-fodder just to make a statement? Wouldn’t that be madness? Should we not instead avoid unnecessary losses?’ Petitioning his captain, and then the regimental command, he received permission to withdraw: ‘Secret documents were destroyed. Border posts were recalled … We set off for the nearest forest in a long column.’70 Far from disappearing, however, many of those men would later resurface alongside Polish army units, or join one of the many nascent Polish resistance organisations.
Behind the frontier, many Poles were simply confused by the events that were unfolding. ‘Various most fantastic rumours became facts for us, around which we spun interpretations and forecast the future,’ Anna Gimzewska recalled.
When, one misty September morning on the Moscow–Warsaw road, tanks, armoured cars, cavalry and infantry in combat gear appeared moving westward, we suddenly faced a number of questions for which we had no answers. Where was this grey army decorated with stars going? Was it bringing us assistance or final defeat? What was the meaning of all of this?71
For some, it was immediately clear what was afoot. At Niżniów (Nyzhniv), east of Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk), retreating Polish troops urged the civilian population to flee with them. ‘Run! Run for your lives, good people!’ they shouted. ‘Hide anywhere you can for they are showing no mercy. Hurry! The Russians are coming!’72 As one eye-witness recalled, the result was panic. ‘People ran in all directions, unable to find time or places in which to hide. I stood aghast as one small boy, frightened and confused, stopped to stare at an approaching tank. They simply machine-gunned him down.’73
Elsewhere, local populations believed that the Soviets were coming in peace; that they were ‘fellow Slavs’ who would do them no harm.74 One Pole remembered the Soviet soldiers as being ‘very friendly, very peaceful … they had such an excellent attitude. They came as friends, they embraced us, they kept saying that they had come to liberate us, liberate us from capitalism, from the bourgeoisie.’75 In Tarnopol (Ternopil), the city authorities urged the population to welcome the invaders, and in Równe local officials rode to meet the Red Army, thanking Soviet officers for bringing help in the fight against the Germans. Even where they were welcomed, however, Red Army units sometimes could not conceal their belligerent intentions. At Złoczów (Zolochiv), east of Lwów, the mayor greeted a Soviet cavalry unit with bread and salt, only to be kicked to the ground by the Red Army commander. Not long after, he was executed.76
The resulting confusion was not aided by the contradictory messages emanating from Soviet forces themselves. It may have been Polish wishful thinking to imagine that the Red Army was coming to help them fight the Germans, but it was also quite evident that some Soviet soldiers themselves were confused as to the purpose of their marching into Poland. As the Red Army’s own records show, despite the propaganda offensive, some ‘incorrect opinions’ were still very much in evidence. ‘We haven’t been attacked. We don’t want an inch of someone else’s land, so why are we on the march?’ asked a soldier from the 13th Rifle Corps. Another wondered: ‘Don’t we pursue a policy of peace? So why have we crossed the Polish border?’ A soldier of the 4th Tank Brigade went further, complaining that they had not been informed who they were going to fight against. He added disapprovingly that ‘this is against the teachings of Lenin and Stalin’. Another aired the heretical idea that the USSR was little better than Hitler’s Third Reich: ‘Germany is seizing Poland’s land’, he said, ‘and we are doing the same.’77 In such circumstances, it was perhaps not surprising that the Polish experience of encountering the Red Army in 1939 varied so widely, from amicable to murderous.
Moreover, it is clear that there was a policy of deliberate disinformation on the part of the invading army, which was masking its real intentions by proclaiming that it was indeed riding to Poland’s aid. Jan Karski, who was retreating eastward towards Tarnopol when news of the Soviet invasion broke, described the scene when his men came across a Red Army truck equipped with a loudhailer. The voice addressed the Polish soldiers in a thick Russian accent, as they milled around the truck in confusion:
Hey you, are you with us or are you not? We aren’t going to stand here in the middle of the road the whole day waiting for you to make up your minds. There’s nothing to be frightened about. We are Slavs like yourselves, not Germans. We are not your enemies.78
Such disinformation – a time-worn Soviet strategy – paid dividends. When Red Army forces crossed the Polish frontier east of Równe that morning, men of the KOP ‘Hoszcza’ Battalion assumed – as others did – that they were coming to their aid. This assumption was seemingly reinforced by a call from headquarters requesting that a formal reception should be prepared for their new allies. But, when the KOP officers, in full dress uniform, greeted their Soviet counterparts outside their barracks later that day, they were shocked to be ordered to surrender their weapons.79
Official Red Army leaflets carried the same lie. Though some contained such mangled Polish as to be scarcely legible, others were eloquently mendacious. An example carrying the signature of General Timoshenko announced: ‘Only the Red Army will deliver the Polish nation from this unhappy war and give you a chance to begin a peaceful life. Trust us – the Red Army and the Soviet Union – we are your only friend.’80 Official announcements were abetted by local ruses. Near Ostróg (Ostroh), in a deliberate attempt to fool the Poles into quiescence, arriving Soviet forces were accompanied by a military band playing the patriotic Polish song ‘March of the First Brigade’.81 In such circumstances, it is unsurprising that the rumour that the Soviets were arriving as allies would spread so swiftly across what remained of Poland. Some Polish military units evidently attempted to counter the confusion by announcing that the Red Army was coming to assist the Germans, and that it was disarming and interning Polish troops.82 As so often, however, hope trumped truth.
Despite the chaos, the Polish army, alongside disbanded elements of the KOP, was still able to offer sustained resistance to the Soviet invasion. In the northern city of Wilno, for instance, a garrison augmented by thousands of volunteers awaited the Soviet advance. As elsewhere, the defence was marked by a degree of disorganisation. The garrison’s commander, Colonel Jarosław Okulicz-Kozaryn, who had fought in the Russian army during the First World War, initially foresaw a fighting retreat towards the Lithuanian frontier, but changed his mind after the first Soviet units arrived, and ordered a more determined defence, despite the fact that few preparations had been made. The reaction of Konstanty Peszyński, a major in an anti-tank unit, was perhaps typical. He received the news of the Soviet invasion ‘like a thunderbolt’, and, joining a makeshift defence corps armed with just his rifle, vowed that he would never surrender ‘to those Bolshevik scoundrels’.83
That makeshift defence of Wilno comprised around 7,000 soldiers, ranging from volunteers to trained cadres, as well as some fifteen artillery pieces a
nd several dozen machine guns. Lacking mortars or anti-tank rifles, the defenders were forced to improvise, deploying petrol bombs and exploiting the urban environment. Firing positions on the Hill of Three Crosses, in the heart of the city, were manned by a group of student volunteers. Elsewhere, the men of the Polish 1st Light Artillery Regiment were in the thick of the fight. ‘Suddenly we found ourselves in the line of fire,’ Warrant Officer Adolf Koc wrote. ‘We had our guns set on the road … and we walked straight into the Russians, like a dumb ox. Thankfully they didn’t see us. We went through a yard, aimed our guns at the Russians … and fired.’ After initially withdrawing, the Soviet troops soon reappeared, and Koc’s men opened fire again, before adopting an ingenious method to deal with the tanks: ‘One of my chaps from Lwów said: “Let me have those hand grenades. I’ll go up there, what’s there to fear?” He took them, walked up to the tanks through a narrow ditch and threw them. One of the tanks exploded. The crew were stunned. The other withdrew.’84 The men of the 6th Legions Infantry Regiment were equally effective. As one eye-witness recalled: ‘The tanks were followed by infantry. They cried “Hurrah! For Stalin! For the Motherland! Hurrah!” I will never forget those cries. But we took them with flanking fire.’ Yet, the defenders were impressed by the determination of the Red Army troops. ‘One falls, another comes after him, is hit, and another comes. A whole heap of corpses grew – and not a small one…. We fought until evening, and I saw the tanks catch fire one after another, our chaps throwing bottles with petrol.’85 Officially, the Red Army registered twenty-four of its soldiers killed in the capture of Wilno.86 It is almost certainly an underestimate.
First to Fight Page 22
