History of War – October 2019

Poland had re-emerged in 1918 following

the collapse of the Russian Empire and

the Central Powers – Germany and Austria-

Hungary – the three states that had

partitioned and occupied the country since the

late 18th century. Though the 1920s and 30s

were difficult, much progress was made and

by 1939, Poland’s armed forces were full of

confidence and vigour, boasting submarines,

destroyers, tanks and aircraft of a comparable

standard to many contemporaries.

On the ground the army was scarcely the

backward-looking, cavalry-centred anachronism

that German propaganda would portray. With

one million men under arms, across some 30

divisions of infantry and 11 cavalry brigades, it

was not inconsiderable.

Neither was it shy of innovation. Polish

armourers had developed the highly effective

wz.35 anti-tank rifle, as well as the excellent

wz.1928 machine-gun, and the Vis pistol – a

variant of the iconic Browning M1911 Colt –

which appeared in 1936, and is often described

as one of the best handguns of the era.

Neither were the Polish cavalry units a

military throwback. Fighting dismounted and

using their horses for speed and mobility, they

were equipped with the formidable Bofors

75mm field gun and represented the crème

de la crème of military service. Away from the

propaganda they would repeatedly prove their

worth in the conflict to come.

Nonetheless, economic and political

weakness in the years that followed

independence had starved the Polish military

of investment. Most grievously, Poland

could ill afford the huge costs demanded by

mechanisation. Polish military spending in

the five years to 1939, for example, was less

than three per cent of that of Hitler’s Germany

over the same period. What Germany spent

to equip a single armoured division in those

years exceeded the entire annual budget for

the Polish army. Financially it was David

going up against Goliath.

So, though the Polish army had around 700

tanks by 1939, only a minority of them – such

as the 98 examples of the ten-ton 7TP model

• might be expected to stand in comparison
  with the German Panzer II, then the mainstay
  of Wehrmacht armour. More seriously, Polish
  forces were grievously outnumbered, with only
  two motorised brigades, facing the Germans
  with seven armoured divisions and a numerical
  superiority in armoured vehicles of more than 5:1.
  The situation in the air was no more
  comforting for the Poles. Outnumbered, of
  course, with 400 or so serviceable combat
  aircraft facing around 2,500 machines of the
  Luftwaffe, they were also outgunned. Though
  they possessed some decent aircraft – such as
  the PZL P.7, an all-metal, high-wing monoplane
  fighter, and the PZL.37 Łos, a capable twin-
  engine light bomber – the rapid advances in
  aeronautical technology in the late 1930s
  meant that they would go to war in 1939
  with obsolete hardware.
  Poland, then, faced an almost impossible
  situation in 1939. As its totalitarian neighbours
  grew more aggressive and, crucially, found
  common cause following the Nazi-Soviet Pact
  of August 1939, Poland was internationally
  isolated and exposed. Acutely aware of their
  predicament, the country’s military and political
  leaders knew that any coming war had to be
  a collective effort. Poland could not afford to
  fight her enemies alone and so urgently needed
  to secure reliable allies. This, they believed,
  was achieved with the signing of the Franco-
  Polish Alliance and the Anglo-Polish Mutual
  Assistance Agreement.
  Yet the German threat still had to be faced
  down, and in doing so Polish military planners
  envisaged a rather complex balancing act. Their
  ‘Plan Zachód’ or ‘West’ correctly anticipated a
  German attack from three general directions:

eastward from Pomerania into the so-called

‘Polish Corridor’, north-eastward from Silesia

in the direction of Warsaw, and southward from

East Prussia, also directed at the Polish capital.

Given the German preponderance in men

and materiel, simply flooding those largely

indefensible border regions with Polish troops

made little strategic sense. Yet the Poles did

not want to be accused of a lack of will that

might have compromised any Anglo-French

commitment to their defence, so Polish armies

were ordered to engage any invasion, thereby

giving time for deeper-lying defence lines to

be developed and reserves to be mobilised.

Poland’s main forces, then, were deployed

along the country’s western frontiers, with the

heaviest concentrations in those areas where

the German advance was expected.

That vigorous defence of the frontiers,

though strategically questionable, was

deemed politically necessary, to contradict

any suggestion on the part of its would-be

allies that Poland was unwilling to defend

itself. Once those international alliances had

been triggered, the logic ran, Polish forces

were to avoid being encircled and destroyed,

and, while inflicting maximum losses on the

enemy, to conduct a fighting withdrawal to more

defensible lines, such as the area east of the

River Vistula, which bisected the country north

to south. In the third phase there would be a

counter-offensive to coincide with the expected

entry into the war of Poland’s western allies.

So Poland’s strategic plan was predicated on

two principles: firstly that their forward forces

would be able to withdraw swiftly enough to

avoid encirclement and secondly that they

would receive assistance from the British and

the French. Sadly, both assumptions would

prove to be erroneous.

Hitler’s attack was preceded by an effort to

detach Poland from its international alliances

by casting the victim as the villain.

The German army entering Poland after attacking the

country on 1 September, using seven armoured divisions

and more than one million German soldiers

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defending against the blitzkrieg