History of War – October 2019

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taken near Wytyczno, for example, was locked
in the local town hall and denied medical
assistance. By the time help arrived, the
following day, all of them had bled to death.
Though there are numerous examples of such
atrocities, the true scale of Soviet persecution
of Polish prisoners and civilians in their zone of
occupation in 1939 is unknown. The Kremlin’s
propaganda and its rigid control of the media
and of memory meant that many accounts would
have died with the surviving witnesses, in Polish
prisons or in the Gulags of Siberia.
Yet, the political intention and the scale of the
ambition behind it can be gauged by recalling
the Katyn massacres of the following year. The
murder of some 22,000 Polish officers taken
prisoner during the September Campaign, who
were systematically executed by their Soviet
captors, demonstrated that the Soviets aimed at
nothing less than a social revolution.
The Katyn victims represented the Polish
elite – army officers, doctors, lawyers,
intellectuals, indeed all those who were seen

as the best able to foster resistance against

Soviet rule. Their wholesale elimination was, to

the revolutionaries in the Kremlin, an essential

precondition for the successful communisation

of Polish society. Murder was not carried out in

a haphazard manner, or in the heat of battle, it

was an ideologically driven necessity.

As Poland collapsed under the combined

weight of Nazi and Soviet barbarism, and

her armed forces attempted to escape the

maelstrom to be able to fight another day, the

battle for Poland disintegrated into a number

of protracted sieges, at Warsaw, Modlin and on

the peninsula at Hel on the Baltic coast.

All three would be subjected to protracted

aerial and land assaults in a bid to force their

surrender, with artillery strikes and Stuka

divebombers wreaking a hideous toll on the

men and machinery on the ground. The worst

experiences were endured in the Polish capital,

Warsaw, where a German attempt to force a

surrender resulted in so-called Black Monday,

25 September, when over 500 tons of bombs

were dropped on the city’s residential districts,

killing an estimated 10,000 Varsovians. As one

Polish colonel lamented, “The Germans have

decided to take the city by terror.”

In the circumstances, senior military

personnel convened the following day to

discuss a possible surrender of the capital,

which was negotiated with the Germans on 28

September. The following day, the fortress at

Modlin – to the north of the capital – followed

suit, but not before Wehrmacht soldiers

avenged themselves on the defenders,

massacring some 600 civilians and POWs in

the town of Zakroczym. The last siege, of the

fortified area of the Hel peninsula, lasted a

few more days, with the Polish garrison finally

submitting on 2 October.

The final engagement of the Polish Campaign

took place between 2 and 5 October, when

an amalgam of troops under the command of

General Franciszek Kleeberg was engaged by

the Germans near Kock to the southeast of

Warsaw. The Poles again gave a good account

of themselves, but given that the rest of the

country was now in the hands of their enemies,

continued resistance was futile, and Kleeberg’s

men opted to surrender. The first military

campaign of World War II was over.

“WHILE THE GERMANS BROUGHT RACE WAR TO WESTERN

POLAND, THE SOVIETS IMPORTED CLASS WAR TO THE EAST”

DEFENDING AGAINST THE BLITZKRIEG