First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  For those on the political left, the invasion was particularly discomfiting, as it damaged the perceived credibility and moral standing of the Soviet Union. The veteran socialist Beatrice Webb – who had once described the USSR as ‘a new civilisation’ – was horrified. ‘Satan has won,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Stalin and Molotov have become the villains of the piece’ and their invasion of Poland was ‘a monument to international immorality’. The Kremlin’s squandering of what she called its ‘moral prestige’ was ‘the blackest tragedy in human history’.127 For the socialist writer Naomi Mitchison, the Soviet Union’s actions were ‘knocking the bottom out of what one has been working for all these years’.128 She was right. It was difficult to sell the idea of the USSR as a bastion of anti-fascism, when it so publicly colluded with fascists.

  The British Communist Party was completely wrong-footed by the invasion. Dutifully following the Comintern line at the time, the party leader, Harry Pollitt, had published a pamphlet on 14 September, entitled How to Win the War, which stressed that the Polish people were ‘right to fight against the Nazi invasion’, and argued that for the United Kingdom to ‘stand aside from this conflict … would be a betrayal of everything our forebears have fought to achieve in the … struggle against capitalism’.129 However, even as his pamphlet hit the streets, Pollitt learned that the Kremlin’s instructions had changed. Now, all ‘fraternal’ Communist parties were to ‘correct’ their policies. ‘Tactics must be changed,’ it proclaimed. ‘Under no circumstances may the international working class defend fascist Poland.’ Having stopped referring to Nazi Germany as ‘fascist’, the Soviets were now deploying the adjective with an elasticity that few would previously have believed. Humiliated and isolated by the shift, Pollitt was forced to resign and Rajani Palme Dutt – a rather arid, Oxford-educated Leninist, who had previously lauded the ‘clarity’ of the old position – succeeded him as party general secretary.130

  For those bemused by such contortions, The Times’ editorial on 18 September provided a clear-eyed assessment. It juxtaposed Poland’s twin aggressors and suggested that the only people to be disappointed by Soviet actions were those who had clung to the naïve belief that the USSR was in some way distinct from ‘her Nazi neighbour’. ‘Public opinion here’, it went on, ‘is revolted … by these cynical exercises in lower diplomacy. Sympathy for Poland, which was warm and eager yesterday, is aflame today.’131

  Sadly for Poland, that sympathy barely flickered in the Portland stone courtyards of Whitehall. To some in the Foreign Office, the Red Army’s attack on Poland was not unexpected, but neither did it do much to change the general, lethargic thrust of Allied policy. Certainly, questions were asked as to whether the Soviet invasion would provoke a declaration of war – in accordance with the Anglo-Polish Agreement – just as the German invasion had some two weeks previously. The Polish ambassador, Count Edward Raczyński, was certainly keen to push this line and delivered a note to the Foreign Office, stating that ‘the Polish government reserves the right to invoke the obligations of its allies arising out of the treaties now in force’.132 In response, both to the ambassador and to the British politicians and civil servants raising the same question, Viscount Halifax was clear: though the Anglo-Polish Agreement had only spoken vaguely of aggression by ‘a European power’, the Secret Protocol to the agreement had specified that it meant Germany. Moreover, both the British and the French felt that it would be ‘a mistake’ to declare war on the USSR, the foreign secretary stated. Instead, the British government offered a rather insipid statement to the effect that, in spite of the Soviet invasion, Britain’s ‘obligations to Poland’ would remain unaffected.133

  Britain’s understanding of those obligations might have been surmised from listening to an official radio broadcast, sent from London to Warsaw on 19 September:

  This is a message from the people of Britain to the city of Warsaw. All the world is admiring your courage. Once again, Poland has fallen victim to the aggressive designs of her neighbours. Once again, she has by her heroic defiance of the invader become the standard-bearer of liberty in Europe. We, your allies, intend to continue the struggle for the restoration of your liberties.134

  For Varsovians, suffering a third week of German air raids and artillery shelling, it was thin gruel.

  In fact, the thinking of those in and around the British government was still remarkably muddled, in part because the precise nature and intention of the Soviet invasion was still far from clear. Some perceived in the Kremlin’s actions an anti-German motive: a pre-emptive move to face down a potential opponent. It was a sentiment encouraged by Moscow’s strenuous profession of neutrality towards the war’s other combatant nations. Churchill was among those thus misled. In his famed ‘Enigma’ speech, broadcast on 1 October 1939, he praised Poland’s ‘indestructible soul’, and rightly noted that the Kremlin was motivated primarily by Russian national interest. But he was wrong when he described the new German–Soviet frontier through Poland as an ‘eastern front’ that Hitler ‘does not dare assail’.135 His erroneous assumption – which was shared by many – was that it had been German–Soviet tensions which had brought the Red Army into Poland. In truth, it was the very opposite. It was merely the first manifestation of the cosy division of spoils agreed to in the Secret Protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact.

  Others argued that the presence of a new German–Soviet frontier, and the removal of the ‘buffer’ of Poland, would do a good job of fostering a ‘desirable friction’, which would sooner or later lead to a confrontation between the two totalitarian states. In such circumstances, they asked, was it not better to refrain from any precipitate action and instead cautiously observe events? In both schools of thought, Poland was effectively abandoned. As one historian of the period glumly concluded, many British politicians of the time seemed to feel ‘they had a God-given right to dispose of Poland as circumstances dictated’.136

  That final disposal took place in the English seaside town of Hove, on 22 September, at the second meeting of the Anglo-French Supreme War Council, where Chamberlain and Halifax again met with Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and the commander-in-chief of the French armed forces, General Maurice Gamelin. The visit owed something to British farce. According to Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, who travelled with the British party from London that morning, their arrival in Hove was a surprise to the locals, who had been told only to expect a meeting of ‘government officials’. Consequently, Cadogan recalled, they wandered around the ‘passages of an awful Victorian building, hung with the Victorian pictures of dead aldermen’, until a functionary asked Halifax if he was a government official. Answering in the affirmative, he and his companions were then ushered around to the front door, where the prime minister was duly recognised with a cry of ‘Chamberlain! Cor Blimey!’ Then, while waiting for the French delegation to arrive, the group was greeted by the town mayor, ‘the local butcher’, Cadogan assumed, ‘but quite nice’.137

  The discussions that followed were thorough and wide-ranging. Daladier espoused the sending of a ‘token force’ to the eastern Mediterranean – either Salonika or Istanbul – to strengthen the resolve of the Balkan nations to resist further German expansion. The positions of Italy and Romania were raised, and Chamberlain wondered whether either one might be persuaded to resist joining Germany in its nefarious endeavour. Turkey, too, would be sounded out, and a Balkan federation was mooted.138 After lunch – ‘not too bad’, according to Cadogan139 – the talks resumed, concentrating on the desirability of Anglo-French collaboration in armaments production, before moving on to a discussion of German and Allied dispositions on the ‘Western Front’. Both sides declared themselves satisfied with the progress made and approved a joint communiqué to be released to the press that was as anodyne as it was brief.140

  Poland – the cause for which both countries had declared war, barely two weeks before – was mentioned twice in the two and a half hours o
f talks: once to bemoan the fact that ‘the front in Poland no longer existed’, and then again in reference to that country’s ‘defeat’. The communiqué did not mention Poland once. In Allied eyes, it seemed, Poland was already a lost cause.

  The people of Warsaw, suffering the horrors of a German siege, were unaware that they had been abandoned. Many wondered about the whereabouts of the promised British and French assistance, but most Varsovians reacted with stoic faith in their foreign saviours. ‘You know the British,’ one air-raid warden told the diarist Alexander Polonius. ‘They are slow in making up their minds, but they are definitely coming. They can easily land their planes in the fortress at Modlin where there are considerable supplies of petrol, and we shall soon see them over Warsaw.’ As Polonius recalled, there was a temporary outpouring of optimism, with rumours that Polish anti-aircraft gunners had been warned to avoid ‘friendly fire’ against Allied aircraft. Even Polonius himself was cheered: ‘We are not forgotten,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘On the contrary, effective help is on the way.’141 Tragically, he could not have been more wrong.

  7

  Into the Arms of Death

  While Poland was fighting for its life, and her Western allies were sitting on their hands, Hitler was busy consolidating his gains. On 19 September, he had arrived in the Pomeranian resort of Zoppot, just along the coast from Gdynia in the Bay of Danzig, where the elegant Kasino Hotel had been cleared to serve as his headquarters.

  That afternoon, Hitler climbed into his Mercedes once again for the journey to the centre of Danzig, where he arrived around 5 p.m. Heading into the old town, he drove through the elaborate Golden Gate, which was festooned with swastika flags, and was mobbed by flag-waving Danzigers, who were barely restrained by a thin cordon of police. Banners had been strung across the Long Market, declaring ‘Danzig Greets Its Führer!’ and ‘One People, One Reich, One Führer!’ in Gothic script. According to his valet, Heinz Linge, the welcome that Hitler received in Danzig that day ‘exceeded everything he had ever known previously, including the triumphant entries into Linz and Vienna’. Standing up in the car, Linge recalled, Hitler saluted the population thronging the streets and pavements, who, ‘drunk with joy, bombarded him with bouquets of flowers and posies’. The emotion of the moment was palpable, Linge wrote: ‘Everybody – except Hitler – was fighting back his tears.’1

  When he finally arrived at his destination, the elegant seventeenth-century Artushof (Artus Court), Hitler was met by his most senior lieutenants: foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, party secretary Martin Bormann, commander-in-chief General Wilhelm Keitel, and the Gauleiter for the Danzig region, Albert Forster. As that guest list suggests, this was an important visit. Indeed, it was highly symbolic. Just as Hitler had addressed the German people by radio on the first day of the campaign, so he spoke to them now, from Danzig: the city which, for many Germans, had symbolised German suffering and whose conquest provided retrospective justification for the war.

  He began rather quietly and hesitantly, declaring that he was well aware of ‘the greatness of the hour’, and stressing that Danzig had always been German. He repeated his now well-practised account of the circumstances that had led to this point: the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles, the martyrdom of the German minority, and the foolishness of the Poles – whom he damned as culturally inferior and dictatorially ruled by a ‘consumptive upper class’ – to reject his reasonable suggestions for a solution.2 Instead, he summarised, the Poles ‘chose struggle’, goaded by the perfidious British. In the battles that followed, he conceded, the lower ranks had ‘fought courageously’, but ‘the middle-rank leadership lacked intelligence and the upper-echelon leadership was bad beyond criticism’. In its organisation, he quipped, the army was ‘Polish’, using the pejorative German synonym for chaos, and drawing a prolonged round of laughter and applause from his audience. He boasted:

  As I am speaking to you now, our troops are arrayed along a long line stretching from Lemberg [Lwów] to Brest and northwards. Since yesterday afternoon, endless columns of the badly beaten Polish army have been marching from the Kutno area as prisoners of war. Yesterday morning, they numbered 20,000; there were 50,000 last night; 70,000 this morning. I do not know how great their numbers are at present, but there is one thing I do know: whatever remains of this Polish army west of this line will capitulate within a few days and lay down its arms, or it will be smashed!3

  Hitler went on to contrast the ‘humane manner’ in which his forces had conducted the war with the bestiality of the Poles – the ‘dirtiest deeds committed throughout the past centuries’; the ‘thousands of slaughtered ethnic Germans, the brutishly butchered women, girls and children … massacred, mutilated, with their eyes gouged out’. Speaking of his new ally, Stalin, he told his audience that the Red Army’s invasion had been motivated by the need to ‘safeguard the interests’ of Poland’s Byelorussian and Ukrainian minorities. Moreover, he suggested that the Red Army’s actions had had no military significance, and that German forces alone had defeated the Poles ‘in scarcely eighteen days’.4 Stalin would have been delighted.

  Contrary to his claim that the Polish campaign was over, however, Hitler was well aware that fighting was still raging within earshot of the centre of Danzig. When Heinz Linge later questioned him about it, ‘when he was in a good mood’, Hitler told him that ‘for political and propaganda purposes’ the Soviets did not wish to ‘bask in any of the glory of victory’; so the fiction was proclaimed that the war had already been brought to a successful end.5 The truth was that, even within the district of Danzig itself, pockets of Polish resistance were still holding out.

  At Oksywie, for instance, north of the port of Gdynia and barely 15 kilometres from Danzig, the Polish defence of an area of forested high ground – the Oksywie Heights – had degenerated into a conflict resembling the conditions of the Great War, with the defenders manning hastily dug trenches, while the Germans were forced to attack across flooded marshland. To those engaged in the fighting, that sense of anachronism would only have been heightened by the presence, on the Polish side, of a volunteer company of scythemen, raised from a local workers’ union, which fought in one of the initial skirmishes before being withdrawn and armed with captured rifles.6

  By the time that the local Polish commander, Colonel Stanisław Dąbek, withdrew the remainder of his forces to the Oksywie Heights on 12 September, the garrison – a melange of militia, marines and artillerymen – numbered around 9,000 men, armed with 140 heavy machine guns and two dozen pieces of artillery, all in an area of less than 4 square kilometres.7 Dąbek was said to have steeled his men by proclaiming ‘I will show you how a Pole fights and dies’ – words that would later be emblazoned upon his grave.8 Facing him were German forces under the command of Luftwaffe General Leonhard Kaupisch, including elements of the SS-Heimwehr Danzig, which had brutally ended the siege at the Polish Post Office on the first day of the war, and had committed the massacre of some thirty-three Poles in the village of Książki just a few days before.9 According to one Polish account, the men of the SS unit were clearly rather better suited to ‘combat’ with unarmed civilians. Now, assailed by flanking fire during their advance, one German battalion was all but wiped out: ‘The swamps resounded with screams, as was always the case with defeated Germans. Surprised in open terrain, they fled in panic across the marsh, leaving behind their wounded and killed.’10 Having been engaged at the Westerplatte, it was the second time that men of the SS-Heimwehr Danzig had been forced into an ignominious retreat. Nonetheless, they were later cheered in the streets of Danzig, their pockets stuffed with sweets and cigarettes by grateful civilians.11

  Over the week that followed, the battle for Oksywie would develop into one of the bitterest and most costly of the entire campaign. Surrounded on three sides, with their backs to the Bay of Danzig, the Polish defenders would endure incessant skirmishing as well as air raids and artillery fire from the Schleswig-Holstein, moor
ed close to the Westerplatte. As an account by one Stuka pilot relates, the raids spared nothing and no one:

  Our goal was to carry out an attack on batteries and bunkers, signal lights, trenches and artillery positions … I flew in combat order and dived. The bombs fell right next to the houses, blowing off the roofs. After a while I saw people running out and, as I pulled up, another plane came down, strafing the scattering Poles. The third strike was aimed at the roads leading down to the water, where we caught up with the fleeing Poles again.12

  As the Oksywie pocket was gradually reduced, casualty rates soared; some 2,000 of the defenders were killed. On 18 September, Dąbek sent a telegram to his superior, Rear-Admiral Józef Unrug, outlining how the territory they defended had shrunk, how the guns had been destroyed by air raids, and how the garrison was running dangerously short of ammunition and food. He asked for a decision on whether the defence should be continued, expressing his willingness to do so, if ordered. In reply, Unrug wrote: ‘I leave that decision to you, Colonel, but please know that I want no massacres.’ He repeated: ‘I want no massacres.’13

  Realising that he could not hold the positions for much longer, on the afternoon of 19 September Colonel Dąbek evacuated some of his remaining troops to the Hel peninsula, across the bay. He then gathered his staff officers. ‘Our role as commanders is over’, he told them, ‘but we have not ceased to be soldiers, and our duty as soldiers we will fulfil until the end.’14 Soon after, he led his men on a last foray towards the Germans, engaging the enemy with a crackle of gunfire and inviting a hail of artillery shells in response. Later that evening, just as Hitler was beginning his address to the German people in nearby Danzig, Colonel Dąbek recognised the insuperable odds that his men faced and gave an order to end the fight. He then took out his service pistol and shot himself.15 As a mark of respect for the defenders, the Germans allowed Dąbek to be buried with military honours, and with four Wehrmacht officers in attendance.16