The Last Gasp: Bzura River, 1939

[Vrylakas]

The date was 9. September, 1939, nine days after the German invasion of Poland had begun. General Rydz-Smigly, head of all Polish forces, had just received from General Gamelin in France assurances that the French invasion of Germany underway would increase in volume and provide a serious distraction for the Wehrmacht to take some pressure off Poland. The Polish united front had been smashed over the past week + of fighting and now the Wehrmacht was threatening Warsaw. Kraków, the country’s second largest city, had already fallen three days before. With French assurances of a massive invasion of western Germany, Rydz-Smigly gave the go-ahead for a Polish offensive southwestwards from Warsaw to relieve pressure on the capital and buy some time before the French invasion of Germany that could save Poland. The Battle of Bzura River, the last offensive action taken by the 1939 Polish Army, was about to begin.

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Background

The German invasion of Poland came as a surprise to no one. Poland had been anticipating it for five years. Hitler had proclaimed both Poland and Czechoslovakia to be the “bastards of Versailles”, artificial creations in Hitler’s eyes who had illegally taken up historically German lands. Hitler’s Germany showed its true intentions towards the region, encouraged by the 1925 Treaty of Locarno, when in March 1939 the Germans broke their 1938 agreement with Britain and France over Czechoslovakia by occupying Bohemia and Moravia, and declaring Slovakia an independent (puppet) state. Immediately afterwards Hitler began to make demands on Poland for Gdansk (Danzig) and for a solution to the “Polish Corridor problem”.

In fact, even the pre-Hitlerite Weimar Republic rejected Poland’s existence, as the following excerpt from Hans von Seeckt, head of the Reichswehr in 1922, shows:

Poland’s existence is intolerable and incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany’s life. Poland must go and will go – as a result of her own internal weakness and of action by Russia – with our aid. […] The obliteration of Poland must be one of the fundamental drives of German policy…[and]…is attainable by means of, and with the help of, Russia.

(Shirer, 1969: pg. 415)

Finally realizing that Hitler could not be negotiated with, London and Paris gave public guarantees to Warsaw for Polish security on 31. March.

Some Western historians have taken the very odd approach that Poland could have negotiated its way out of World War II, that Hitler’s Germany could have been placated by some territorial concessions from Poland. The idea is that there are bigger and smaller countries, and the smaller ones just have to live with the reality that sometimes the bigger ones want more, and if the choice is between losing some real estate and ultimate survival, well, the land has to go. This is of course a major misjudgment of Hitler’s aims. Hitler did not only want Gdansk and a path to East Prussia through the Corridor, though these were his public demands; he wanted all of Poland for his Lebensraum. In Hitler’s Europe, as he made clear since 1934, there would be no Poland and no Czechoslovakia. Negotiation for Prague and Warsaw merely meant submission to annihilation. As early as 1936 Hitler had ordered plans for an invasion of Poland, and as early as April 1939 he was setting dates for that invasion, after he renounced the 1935 Polish-German Non-Aggression Pact. Though through the staged Gleiwitz incident Hitler tried to make the September invasion seem spontaneous and an outraged reaction to this false Polish provocation, this invasion was among the most planned ones in recent history.

In the final weeks before the invasion, two critical events shaped how the coming war would play out. The first was the 23. August 1939 Soviet-German pact (“Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”) which publically was a non-aggression pact and secretly was an agreement to divide Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR. The Polish invasion was a part of this carefully orchestrated division of the region into German and Soviet zones. The second was the British mutual-aid pact signed with Poland on 25. August, which is said to have taken Hitler by surprise and upset his invasion timeline.

The Invasion

The dates for the invasion had changed repeatedly throughout the summer of 1939 as political or technical issues forced postponement. In fact, at one point the date was set at 26. August and Hitler had even given the go-ahead early on the evening of 25. August but the British-Polish Pact forced him to delay. However, not all units got the postponement orders and some carried out their first mission attacks on 26. August; the Jablonka Pass was attacked by a Brandenburg unit as it tried to seize a critical rail station and tunnel, and Abwehr units launched incursions all along the German-Polish border. In any event, the invasion began in earnest on 01. September at 4.30 a.m. when Stukas began dive-bombing the Tczew bridge in Polish Pomerania, and the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Gdansk’s Westerplatte military base.

German forces surged into Poland all along the Polish-German western frontier, and from East Prussia as well. The Germans invaded Poland with 559 infantry divisions (against 376 Polish), 5805 field artillery pieces (against 2065 Polish), 4019 anti-tank guns (against 774 Polish) and 2511 tanks (against 475 Polish). As well, the Luftwaffe deployed some 2085 military aircraft in the invasion of Poland, while Poland only had 313 military aircraft. To boot, while the German forces were fully mobilized for the invasion, Western concern about a Polish provocation led to a confused and delayed Polish mobilization, so that not all Polish forces were ready and concentrated where they needed to be. Finally of course, the critical aspect that defined the German invasion of Poland was the Blitzkrieg, a strategy of pushing for high mobility and deepest penetration of the enemy’s lines, by-passing areas of strong resistance and cutting deep to their rear to isolate them. This contrasted sharply with previous military doctrine which called for a strong coordination of all military movements, which in practice meant that when one part of a front became bogged down, the entire line of advancement had to halt and wait – in other words, a front could only advance as fast as its slowest part. Polish forces, steeped (especially in the 1920s) in French military doctrine, were wholly unprepared for what came in September 1939.

However, the Polish military establishment was keenly aware of this and had commissioned studies of the likely effects of a German invasion, all of which saw little chance of Polish survival. The only chance lay in alliances with the West, to threaten Germany with an imminent invasion in the Rheinland if it tried any eastern adventures. Such an alliance was very distasteful to Warsaw, as in Poland’s eyes the West had shown itself uninterested in Eastern Europe’s fate immediately after World War I and in particular had sent no help aside from a few aged generals when the Soviets invaded Poland in the summer of 1920. This deep distrust of the West was strengthened by London’s and Paris’ amazing attempt to negotiate with Hitler over the Südetenland in 1938, and complete inaction when Hitler broke even that feeble agreement and dismantled Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Czechoslovakia had, unlike Poland, belonged to the Little Entente French alliance system since 1920, and had several military aid treaties with France and other powers; none of them saved Czechoslovakia. Still, Poland had no other chance to survive German aggression, so it signed treaties with France and Britain in the hopes that Hitler would be deterred.

Despite heroic fighting throughout Poland in the first week, by 6. September the hope of maintaining a unified military front had already begun to collapse. Kraków fell on this day, and the disastrous battle of Piotrków had ended with the Germans achieving a breakthrough and were surging towards Warsaw. The Poles were desperately trying to salvage their forces by getting them over to the right bank of the Wisla/Vistula River. This was the situation when on 6. September, General Tadeusz Kutrzeba suggested launching an attack against the Germans near the town of Piatek on the River Bzura to shield the withdrawal of Polish forces, to protect Warsaw and to buy some time before the heavily-anticipated French invasion of Germany started. At first Kutrzeba was denied permission because it was feared that a premature attack might needlessly expose Polish forces to destruction before the French attack, but with the increasingly worsening situation and General Gamelin’s assurances that the French invasion would get serious soon, Polish commander Rydz-Smigly decided on 9. September to give Kutrzeba the go-ahead for his attack.

The Battle

The Battle of River Bzura is a fairly unique battle in the September campaign in many ways. The most startling is that it is the only major battle of the campaign where local Polish forces outnumbered the Germans’; the Poles had three times as much infantry as the Germans, two times as much artillery and 66 tankettes and armored cars in a sector where the Germans had no Panzers. Another interesting aspect of the battle was of course that as a counter-offensive, it was one of the few major battles that involved a Polish attack against German forces. There had of course been many Polish counter-attacks in the campaign and even a few offensives – including one minor incursion into East Prussia on the night of 2.-3. September by the Podlaska Cavalry Brigade in which they dispersed some Prussian Landwehr reserve units – but none took place on the scale of the Battle of Bzura River.

Kutrzeba launched the attack on the evening of 9. September using Army Poznan against General Johannes Blaskowitz’s Eighth Army, which was quickly routed. By the morning of 10. September, the German Eight Army was in disorderly retreat westward and the Poles began capturing prisoners by the thousands. For two more days the Polish forces surged forward, rolling up prisoners and creating a bulging pocket in the German lines. By the end of 12. September however, German resistance began to stiffen and the Polish attacks began to bog down, and more ominously something else began to happen that would have a critical impact on Polish fortunes and the larger World War to come.

At the beginning of the battle, as mentioned previously, Polish forces had outnumbered German forces locally but by the end of 12. September, that was no longer true. The German-to-Polish forces ratio now stood at 1.3:1 in infantry, 2.4:1 in artillery and most critically 4:1 in armor. What had happened? Blitzkrieg had happened. A part of the doctrine of Blitzkrieg incorporated high mobility and high operational flexibility. Just because a unit was engaged here in an attack did not mean that should the need arise, it can’t be used over there after rapid re-deployment. The Germans were able, when the emergency of Eighth Army’s situation became apparent, to pull units from all across Poland and concentrate them to devastating effect in only three days. This utterly blew away the old doctrines everyone in Europe, including the Poles, were relying on that made quick transport and concentration almost impossible. Though their situation still looked rosy despite some setbacks on the evening of 12. September, the Polish forces engaged in the Battle of Bzura River were in reality doomed.

On that evening General Kutrzeba ordered a general withdrawal behind the Bzura and a re-grouping, but this turned out to be a tactical error as it allowed the Germans to concentrate further forces. The Germans decided to try to envelop the Polish pocket that had formed, which led Kutrzeba to re-direct Polish attacks from southwestward to eastward, to achieve a breakout before Polish forces were completely surrounded. By 16. September, Kutrzeba’s full resources were concentrated on trying to save the enveloped Polish forces, a hopeless task. Polish ammunition was running out, the Luftwaffe had joined in the attacks against the pocket, and the Wehrmacht pounded away. Some small units did manage to filter back to Warsaw, but most of Army Poznan’s forces were caught in the pocket when the Polish lines collapsed on 18. September. By 21. September the Germans had crushed the Polish forces in the area, capturing over 100,000 prisoners, destroying nearly a quarter of Poland’s army.

 

[Vrylakas]

Part II:

Consequences

The Battle of Bzura River was indeed the last independent gasp of pre-war Poland’s military forces. Just as the Battle of Saratoga in 1778 galvanized Americans and convinced the French to enter the war against Britain, so too did the futility of the Battle of Bzura River lead to the collapse of Polish resistance and more ominously, as the Polish situation looked fatally desperate by 16. September, it encouraged Stalin to finally join Hitler in the dismemberment of Poland. Soviet forces invaded Poland from the east the next day, on 17. September. Warsaw would fall on 27. September, and the last major army group would surrender finally on 05. October, a mere five weeks after the campaign began. Many historians since World War II have questioned whether the Battle of Bzura River should have happened at all, whether it was a fatal romantic gamble that needlessly wasted forces that could have been used to prolong resistance later, or more effectively organize the underground resistance when defeat did come. I think Steven Zaloga and Victor Madej answer this fairly well in their book on the September campaign, so I’ll quote them here:

The roots of the Polish defeat are not particularly difficult to trace, though they have often been distorted. The outcome of the campaign was a foregone conclusion before it began – so long as France and Britain had no serious intention of directly intervening on the Western Front. Without Allied military intervention, the Wehrmacht could take the risk of committing the vast bulk of its strength against its much smaller Polish adversary. Although Western historians have been especially critical of Polish strategic deployment, the fact remains that the Polish Army could not have resisted the Wehrmacht single-handedly even under the most favorable circumstances. The task was even more hopeless after intervention of the Red Army on 17 September. Correcting the shortcomings in Polish command decisions, troop dispositions, and tactical doctrine might have caused higher German casualties or prolonged the fighting by a few days or weeks, but it could not have substantially altered the outcome.

(Zaloga/Madej, 1991: pg. 157)

Hey – weren’t there supposed to be French in this story?

Yes, there were. By a string of agreements stretching back to 1921, France was bound to aid Poland in case of attack by either Germany or Russia, while conversely Poland was forced to aid France in case of a German attack. These agreements were confirmed through a string of treaties, the latest coming on 19. May 1939 which compelled France to attack Germany “with the bulk of her forces” in the event of a German attack on Poland. So what happened? The Battle of Bzura took place against the background of a Polish assumption (confirmed through repeated French promises) that France was about to launch a major invasion of Germany.

On 3. September, Britain and France declared war against Germany for its invasion of Poland, per their agreement with Poland. Their adherence to these agreements pretty much stopped there though. As William Shirer makes clear in his The Collapse of the Third Republic, General Gamelin had no intention of honoring the Franco-Polish agreement, despite his repeated assurances to the Poles that he would. In the first week of the war, the French shelled a few deserted German villages on the German side of the border and on the night of 7.-8. September Gamelin launched a minor incursion into Germany along a 15 mile front southwest of Saarbrücken in battalion strength that occupied a few more deserted villages before retiring back behind the Maginot Line. That was the entirety of French military efforts against the Germans in 1939. General Gamelin often openly lied to the Poles, telling them in a letter dated 9. September:

More than half of our active divisions on the northeast front are engaged in combat….

(Shirer, 1969: pg. 521)

The French had 85 fully armed divisions, only 15 of which according to Gamelin himself were engaged in any way with the German operations, and modern historians think the true number is 9. The Germans only had 34 in Germany, only 11 of which were regular army units. These German units all had serious deficiencies in training, ammunition, food and transport. Later Gamelin used the excuse that the surprisingly rapid defeat of the Poles necessitated that France keep its armies at home, since the Wehrmacht was likely to transfer westward and attack France next. This does not explain why Gamelin did not even make preparations to attack Germany in accordance with his treaty obligations to Poland, and why he repeatedly assured the Poles he was in the process of abiding by those treaties despite the reality that he was not. This obviously is a major bone of contention for modern Polish historians, who are left to wonder if September 1939 might not have turned out differently if France and Britain – whose only act of war prior to 1940 was to drop leaflets over Germany – had acted decisively.

Keep also in mind that in the 1940 German invasion of France, two Polish full infantry divisions and one armored brigade served with the French against the Wehrmacht, along with an assorted collection of partial divisions and individual Poles who had escaped Poland. In the 1944 liberation of France, a Polish armored division and a parachute division played critical roles, as well as assorted Polish infantry units. Could it be said that Poland lived up to its end of the bargain?

Selected Bibliography

Davies, Norman – God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Vol. II, 1795 to the Present; Columbia University Press, New York, 1982

Gross, Jan T. – Revolution From Abroad; Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ), 1988

Shirer, William L. – The Collapse of the Third Republic, An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940; Simon & Schuster, New York, 1969

Slaski, Jerzy – Polska walczaca, cz. I (“Fighting Poland, Vol. I”); Instytut Wydawniczy Pax Warszawa, Warsaw (Poland), 1990

Zaloga, Steven & Madej, Victor – The Polish Campaign, 1939; Hippocrene Books, Inc., New York, 1991

Photo:

The helmet on the bottom shelf is in the author's collection, and is a model 1935 Polish Army helmet recovered recently from the village of Piatek, undoubtedly connected to the Battle of Bzura River. this helmet was discontinued in use after the September 1939 campaign, as though a million Poles continued to serve the Allied cause throughout the war they usually wore the uniforms of the army they were connected to - i.e., American, British, Soviet., etc.

 

[andrewgprv]

nice read

 

[Stefan Haertel]

Sorry for digging up this old thread, but I just had to comment. This is a great article. It dignifies something that is very much forgotten nowadays. I'm really not the person for war memorials and veteran days and all that kind of stuff, but I think that this should be read by more people (one reason why I bumped it).

You are one of the finest historians I know of, Vrylakas!

 

[Mariusz]

Yes, that's a great article. Thanks for bumping it Stefan.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Links to all articles can be found in the History Articles list which is in my sig.

You can dig out all of Vry's other articles fr there as well.

 

[dgfred]

Really good article . Much stuff I did not know. First I have
heard of the outright lying about French invasion . The Poles fought
valiantly.

 

[Domen]

Very nice article but I noticed one major mistake:

(...) The Germans invaded Poland with 559 infantry divisions (against 376 Polish) (...)

Of course this is the number of infantry battalions - not divisions.

And this includes also motorized infantry battalions (of course Germans had much bigger percent of their infantry motorized than Poles).