Summary 3: The September Campaign

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Revisits the September Campaign, outlining Poland’s prewar diplomacy, the German and Soviet invasions, and the occupation that followed.

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Summary - The September Campaign

Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Summary Episode 3- The September Campaign. Summary episodes are where I talk an entire series of episodes and condense them down into a single episode to help bring important information back to the forefront before it is needed. In this case this episode is being released before the episodes on the Invasion of France. If you want to hear far more about this topic you can go back and listen to the original 20 episode series on the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Those episodes cover not just the German invasion but also the prewar actions that resulted in the invasion and then the aftermath of the invasion for the people of Poland. Poland was a nation created, as were so many others in Eastern Europe, after the First World War. It was constructed out of territories of the former Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires. Right from the very beginning there were tensions surrounding Poland. To the south there were disagreements with the newly created Czechoslovakia around where exactly the border should be set, with each nation pushing for more territory. To the north and west the transfer of the Danzig corridor from Germany to Poland would cause animosity that would run all the way into the Second World War in 1939. Finally, to the east the tension with the newly created Soviet Union would be so intense that the two new nations would go to war in 1919. The Soviet Red Army would invade Polish territory and would only be stopped at the gates of Warsaw before their armies were rolled back to the eventual borders. All of this tension and disagreement right from the very start of the nation would play a role in creating the structure and tenor of foreign relations for the Poles during the interwar years. To put it bluntly Poland was in a very bad position as tensions rose in Europe during the 1930s. To the west and east it was surrounded by much larger nations that both wanted at the very least a large piece of Polish territory. The relations between the Poles and those nations to the south were always a bit awkward, with long standing territorial disputes preventing full collaboration, and simple fear from the smaller nations of eastern Europe that if they got too tied up in Polish affairs it would only lead to them making much larger enemies.

The one nation that the Poles would maintain solid relations with was France. Poland and France were natural allies as they both wanted to find a way to distract Germany. For France Poland was just one part of a wider plan to build up an alliance of nations in Eastern Europe that would act as a counterbalance to the possible rise of German power during the 1920s and 1930s. This would remain a cornerstone of French policy all the way through the 1930s, although it could be claimed that it was sacrificed upon the alter of Munich when Czechoslovakia was bartered away for time. The agreement at Munich would play an important role in shaping the plans and expectations of Poland during the last year before the war. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Poland greatly feared being made to be another Czechoslovakia, slowly torn apart at a negotiating table that it was not even invited to. This would shape Poland’s political actions before the war, causing it to resist any possibility of a peace conference that it was not invited to, and it also shaped military plans. One of the key features of Poland military plans, particularly in the wake of Munich was to maintain strong forces near the border with Germany. These forces were maintained even in areas where the defense was clearly hopeless, like in the Danzig corridor, due to fears that Germany would take some territory and then sue for peace. In such a scenario Polish leaders feared that its allies in western Europe would take the opportunity to exit the war, leaving a weakened Poland to be later absorbed into Germany just like the Czechoslovak rump state after Munich. What Polish leaders could not know is that all of their defensive preparations would rendered useless due to the actions of Germany and the Soviet Union when they signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on August 23, 1939. The pact was primarily a diplomatic and economic agreement, and both sides would benefit economically from their relations with the other, but it also contained clauses in which both nations agreed to carve up Poland. Whatever hope Poland had in defending itself rested on the continued antagonism between Germany and the Soviet Union, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact reduced that antagonism, at least for awhile.

But in many ways the pact with the Soviet Union was one of the last German actions before the start of the war, because in the months leading up to the German invasion on September 1st they would begin to amplify anti-Polish rhetoric in speeches and in the German press. The general charge laid against the Polish government was discrimination against Germans in Polish territory and an unwillingness to negotiate a Danzig Corridor solution. The claim that the Polish government was persecuting ethnic Germans in Poland was a claim that had been the cornerstone of the German playbook in the months before the Munich Crisis, but it was used again against Poland as a way to explain the forthcoming Germany invasion. When the borders had been drawn after the First World War there were many ethnic Germans inside the new borders of Poland. By claiming that they were being mistreated in some way the Germans government hoped to cast their actions as some kind of heroic rescue mission, and even if nobody outside of Germany believed it, that story will played well in the domestic press. But none of the actions after the spring of 1939 were done by the German leaders for any reason other than setting up the future war. On May 23, 1939 Hitler would tell the military leaders of Germany that “There is, therefore, no question of sparing Poland, and we are left with the decision to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war.” Throughout the final weeks of peace the Polish government was always willing to negotiate, but always in the form of multilateral negotiations. What the German leaders wanted was for a single Polish representative to be sent to Berlin with full powers to agree to anything. With the goal of browbeating that representative to agree to the German terms. But really, it did not matter what Poland did or did not do, Germany was already going to start a war, it was really just a matter of how long it would take before they were forced to attack a nation.

The one benefit that Poland had over Czechoslovakia as the crisis escalated is that in London and Paris the appeasement spirit that had reached its zenith at Munich had been destroyed due to German actions in the months after the Munich Agreement was signed. The result of this would be a hardening of resolve among the French government to honor their military agreements with Poland which had been signed in 1921 and which committed both sides to military cooperation if either came under attack by Germany. On top of this was added a British and Polish agreement, announced to the world on April 6, 1939 but then not officially signed until August which committed Britain to coming to Poland’s aid if it was attacked by Germany. In theory both of these agreements were built around the belief that Hitler and the German leaders would be more hesitant to attack Poland if they knew that it would lead to a war with Britain and France. It was deterrence by collective security, but such deterrence was not going to work against the German leader. One of the reasons for this was the continued belief by some German leaders that when the chips were down Germany could call the bluff of the French and British leaders, and they would not really go to war for Poland or any nation in Eastern Europe. The Poles placed high hope on their diplomatic agreements with the British and French, and throughout 1939 they would seek to take advantage of them to purchase military equipment and take out loans for the purchase of more. The issue that the Polish government would encounter is that most of the military production capacity of Britain and France was tied up in their own rearmament initiatives, and so there was not very much equipment that could be exported. As part of the agreements that were signed the Polish military was assured that if Germany attacked into Poland, the British with their bombers and the French with their army would launch an attack against Germany to draw off German forces. The Polish leaders believed this because they were told that these things would happen by British and French leaders. These actions were in fact not going to happen, there were no real plans for some kind of grand French offensive into western Germany, and there were not any firm plans on how to use British air power to directly attack Germany. It was a lie, a lie that the Poles had no choice but to cling to as they were confronted with the full force of the German military.

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The German plan for the invasion was called Fall Weiss, or Case White, and it involved a multi-pronged attack into Poland along the entire length of the German border and by an army based in east Prussia. The overall structure of the attack was a giant pincer, with the northern edge of the pincer advancing out of Northern Germany and east Prussia while the southern, and stronger arm of the pincer advanced out of eastern Germany and through the area around Lodz. The general goal was for the two arms of the pincer to meet somewhere around Warsaw, cutting off any Polish troops that were still based in northwestern Poland. Along with these two pincers there would also be attacks that would be launched in other directions, from the south there would be an advance to the north east and from northern Germany an army would advance into the Danzig corridor. This was, in general, a completely logical plan that capitalized on the key advantages that Germany had: more armored and motorized troops, more men in general, and the perfect staging ground for an envelopment attack out of East Prussia. The general outline of the plan was also known to the Poles, mostly because it followed the logical path that most European armies would take given a similar set of circumstances. The fact that the Poles knew the basic outline of what might be about to happen is odd because when you look at Polish preparations it appears that they made some very critical mistakes before the invasion even began. The most important of these mistakes was the placement of a large percentage of total Polish manpower very close to the border, which they had a very small chance of holding, and in the Danzig corridor which was almost certain to be cut off very quickly when the invasion started. In both cases these military mistakes were driven by political and geographic imperatives. From a political perspective there was a desire to make the Germans fight for any Polish territory to prevent them from easily capturing some territory and then suing for peace, peace that Britain and France might accept. From a geographic perspective the defense of the borders was essential because of the positioning of Polish cities in western Poland. Some of the largest cities in the country where relatively close to the German border, places like Krakow, Lodz, etc. These cities contained large numbers of Poles, which the Polish military needed to mobilize, as well as a large amount of Polish industry. This made holding on to the territories around those cities important if Poland had any hopes of fighting a long war which was the only kind that they had any hope of winning.

At 12:40PM on August 31st 1939 Hitler would give the order for Fall Weiss to begin at dawn the next day. The first moves from the German military would be in the air with the Luftwaffe focusing on three targets: bridges, airfields, and Warsaw. The bridges over the Vistula and Tczew would be the first to be hit by German bombers, with Stuka dive bombers beginning their attacks at 4:30AM. The goal of the attack on the bridges was to limit the movement of Polish forces, either in the form of bringing more troops to the front or withdrawing from the German advances. Another major group of targets would be the Polish airfields, where the German pilots hoped to catch a large number of Polish aircraft on the ground, destroying them before they could even begin to answer. The airfields would prove to be far less populated than expected, mostly because the Polish Air Force had prepared for this exact form of attack and had dispersed their aircraft in the days before the attack began. This did not mean that the attacks achieved nothing though, as 180 Polish aircraft would be destroyed or heavily damaged during the opening hours of the German attack, reducing the ability of the already outnumbered Polish Air Force to respond to what the Luftwaffe was attempting to accomplish over the course of the campaign. The third type of target would be civilian targets, with the greatest focus being placed on the Polish capital of Warsaw. These were strictly terror bombing campaigns, with the general plan to drop bombs on the civilians of Warsaw, instead of any kind of focus on strictly military objectives. The first raid over the capital would be intercepted by Polish fighters, with the largest group of Polish fighters based near the capital to prevent it from being attacked, they would even destroy six German bombers, but the cost in Polish aircraft was high. Several bombing raids would be launched by the Germans during the first day of hostilities, with bombs dropped all over the city and half of the Polish fighters around the capital destroyed, generally in the air by German fighters. The German bombers would also visit other cities around Warsaw during the first day and then later in the campaign, for example German bombers would appear over Krakow just after 5AM. The Luftwaffe would also be present over the battlefields during the campaign, launching Close Air Support sorties to help support German ground forces as they rapidly began to push the Polish defenders back from their starting positions.

While the air attacks by the Luftwaffe would bring the war to Polish civilians just hours after the start of the war, the campaign would be won or lost on the ground. On the ground the German military vastly outclassed the Polish defenders, particularly in equipment, with the German forces have 3 times more artillery and 3 times more tanks. Even that does not tell the entire story though because much of the German equipment was also qualitatively superior to the older items that the Polish military possessed. In this summary I will not go over every area of fighting, but over the course of the first week of the campaign a few themes would be seen on many areas of the front. The first was that Polish forces, when properly prepared, were able to resist German attacks far better than the Germans expected. There were many areas in critical areas of Poland where prepared defensive positions had been created, often in strategic areas where the German attack was expected to pass through. The Germans would attack many of these areas, and they were frequently thrown back from those attacks with heavy losses. The problem for the Polish defenders of those positions was that the Germans would often completely invalidate this strong defensive effort by outflanking positions, either tactically on the scene or through divisions pushing forward on other areas of the front. There are countless examples throughout the Polish campaign of Polish units successfully defending an area only to then be forced to retreat due to German advances to their flanks. The next theme was that once the Polish retreat began, and the German armored and motorized units got rolling, it was very challenging to reach a point where they could be slowed. This would be a problem faced by many armies over the course of the Second World War, but the problem was simply that retreating troops could not retreat fast enough to reach a defensive line and recover their composure before the German forces forced them to once again retreat. What the Polish forces needed was a large group of reinforcements that could help repair the situation, but there were not enough reinforcements to go around for all of the areas that needed them. This put Polish commanders in a situation where they could either deploy a large number of troops to try and rescue a specific situation and be unable to respond to other emergencies, or parcel out their reinforcements to many areas, responding to many problems but never quite in ways that actually addressed the problems.

There would be essentially three phases to the campaign in Poland: the initial attack and retreat to Warsaw, the Polish attempt to man a defensive line along the Vistula, and then the absolutely disaster that would occur when the Soviet Union invaded from the east. During the initial phase there would be moments of heroic defenses by Polish troops, but they would be unable to re-establish a solid defensive front along the Vistula and the retreat would have to continue. This possibility had been part of Polish planning before the war, and the general plan was for the Polish Army, if Warsaw was lost or surrounded, to retreat towards the Romanian border. The goal with this retreat was to try and maintain some level of organization so that all remaining forces would hold on to the territory southeast of Lwow as long as possible, and then retreat over the border into Romania. This plan was put into action with Polish military and political leadership leaving the capital as German forces closed in to continue the defense southeast of Lwow. In an ideal world this plan would have resulted in at least a delay in the Polish defeat, simply due to the distance that German troops would have to travel, but then the Red Army crossed the border on September 17th. The official reason given by the Soviet government for this action was that the Polish state had collapsed and so it was the duty of the Soviet Union to protect its interests and the interests of the Ukrainian and Belarussian citizens of eastern Poland by invading Poland from the east to prevent the territory from falling to the Germans. Of course this was not the real reason, and the Soviet leaders had already agreed to a Polish partition during their negotiations with the Germans that led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. For the Poles, once the Red Army crossed the border, there was no question about the outcome of the campaign, and there was no possibility of even delaying that outcome. The only option was to try and get as many people out of country through Romania as possible as the two enemy armies advanced. Warsaw would hold out until September 27th, by which point those inside the city were starving and the city was slowly being demolished by German artillery and air attacks while German ground troops continued to take over more territory. Various units around Poland would surrender over the following days, with the last group being the defenders of the Hel peninsula near Gdynia in the Danzig Corridor. The German military would suffer around 50,000 casualties during the campaign, with 16,000 of those being killed. For the Poles, the numbers were drastically larger, with just under 700,000 either killed or captured by the Germans and then another 250,000 by the Soviet Union. It was a disaster for the Poles, and it was only the beginning of almost 6 years of further disasters, with somewhere around 1/5th of the total population of Poland in 1939 would be killed during the war, 5.5 million people.

After the German invasion began, news very quickly reached London and Paris that Poland was under attack, but it would take a few days before either nation would declare war, with those declarations being made on September 3rd only after the German government ignored some ultimatums. At that point the only thing that could have possibly delayed the Polish defeat was quick and decisive action by the British and French military leaders. Every ounce of their strength would need to be thrown at Germany to pull troops away from western Poland and to Western Germany to stop the Allied advance. Of course none of that would happen and in fact the only action by the French army was a rather tentative march into some undefended territory right along the border. When those units experienced any resistance they stopped moving and then even retreated from some of their small gains. At the same time the only actions on the British side were some leaflet dropping campaigns over Western Germany. While this was not at all what the Poles needed, and not really what they had been promised, it was in line with the British and French military planning that had occurred before the war. The British and French leaders were playing a long game, believing that they had the advantage in a long war, they would eventually be proven right I guess, but the first stages of that long war would not go as planned.

For the Poles, it was going to be an even longer war, because they would have to live under German occupation for over 5 years. As soon as the campaign of conquest was over the Germans and Soviets would divide Polish territory, with the Soviets just annexing all of their zone and the Germans splitting their zone into some territories that were absorbed into Germany while the rest was led by a new German led government called the General Government which was based in Krakow. There were two things that would occur in both of these regions starting immediately and then continuing for as long as they were under German control, economic exploitation and general atrocities. The Germans would seek to exploit the entire territory through the extraction of natural resources, food, and labor leaving barely enough for the Polish inhabitants to survive. At the same time countless Polish civilians would be either detained, deported to the General Government zone, or just outright killed. It would begin with the Jewish Prisoners of war, but would soon extend to all of those within Poland. In the Soviet territories there were also mass arrests as the Soviet Union asserted its control over the region. Some Polish forces would be able to escape through Romania and make their way west, proving themselves time and time again in the Allied armies throughout the war, including during the Invasion of France and the Battle of Britain. But in the end, the promises made to Poland would be fully betrayed at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 when the possibility of a restoration of the previous Polish government was sacrificed upon the alter of Allied solidarity. Poland’s greatest first in 1939 was that its future would be bartered away to Germany by Britain and France in an effort to maintain peace. At Tehran in 1943 the players were different, but the results were the same, with Poland’s future, and the future of the people that by some measures would suffer more than any other during the war, was used as a bargaining chip to ensure victory.