In mid-September 1939, Poland still had about 650,000 soldiers under arms. About half of which were to the east or south-east of the Bug River. The troops in the east of the country consisted of freshly called up reservists, units withdrawing after fighting the Germans in the west and north, and finally groups of soldiers looking for their units or a new assignment. The compact units were mainly city defenders, regiments and brigade groups ordered to withdraw towards Romania and units of the Border Protection Corps (KOP).

The High Command, in the face of the German blitzkrieg and – above all – the abatement of the Polish Army’s initiative in the Battle of the Bzura, decided to organise the last point of resistance on the so-called Romanian Bridgehead. South of Stanisławów, just over the border, the decision was made to hold the line as long as possible, until French and English troops arrive through Romania and – should they not – at the last moment to cross the border of a country considered an ally, from where to cross to France.

Early in the morning of 17 September, the Red Army crossed the full length of the Soviet Union’s border with the Second Polish Republic. The Polish Government and Commander-in-Chief were then in Kolomyia and in the afternoon in Kuty on the Romanian border itself.

Churchill: “the Russian armies should stand on this line”

The government and the command seemed to have forgotten about the non-aggression pact concluded between the Third Reich and the USSR on 23 August. Worse still, no one in Poland knew about the secret protocol to this pact, but they suspected something. The true nature of the pact, that is, the provision for the partition of Eastern Europe, was known or suspected by Western diplomats accredited in Poland. And on 14 September, such suspicions were raised by the English newspaper The Daily Telegraph. English newspapers were not read at the Bridgehead for obvious reasons, and the disastrous state of government and military radio communications made it impossible for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to contact foreign missions.

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  Very soon, news reached the High Command and Commander-in-Chief Śmigły-Rydz himself that the Red Army had entered Polish territory. It was reported from the northern part of the border with the Soviets that the KOP had begun fighting the Bolsheviks, and from areas closer to the Romanian border that the Soviets were not attacking, and that those they met were behaving in a friendly manner. The Commander-in-Chief wondered who the Polish Army was dealing with – allies perhaps?

According to the book “Agresja 17 września” [Aggression of 17 September] (published underground in 1979) by Professor Jerzy Łojek, Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz should concentrate all available units of the Polish Army in the east under his direct command and fight the Bolsheviks to the end. Łojek saw nothing reprehensible in the crossing of the border by the Government and the President, while the army, by fighting, was to bear witness and ensure that Poland did not lose the interest of Europe for as long as possible. And, of course, war had to be declared on the Soviet Union. It should have been clear to Europe that the USSR was in alliance with Hitler, which, without a vigorous defence of the last bastion of Poland, may not have been so obvious.

In the middle of the night of 12-13 September, Polish Ambassador Wacław Grzybowski was summoned to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Soviet Foreign Ministry), where a note was read out to him:

“The German-Polish war revealed the internal bankruptcy of the Polish state. Within ten days of war operations, Poland lost all its industrial regions and cultural centres. Warsaw ceased to exist as the capital of Poland. The Polish government disintegrated and showed no signs of life. This means that the Polish state and its government have effectively ceased to exist. As a result, the treaties concluded between the USSR and Poland have lost their force. Left to itself and deprived of its leadership, Poland became a convenient field for any actions and surprise attempts that might threaten the USSR. Therefore, the Soviet government, which had hitherto maintained neutrality, could no longer remain neutral in the face of these facts.

Nor can the Soviet government remain indifferent at a time when brothers of the same blood, Ukrainians and Belarusians, living on Polish territory and left to their fate, find themselves without any defence.”

Warsaw was still defending itself and the government was in the country, the state existed and the treaty with the USSR was in force. The note, signed by People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov and not accepted by Polish Ambassador Wacław Grzybowski, contained the main theses of Soviet propaganda, which were initially accepted in good faith by the West. Perhaps not exactly as something of a humanitarian mission to the stranded civilians, but Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, told the BBC:

“We could have wished that the Russian armies should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland instead of as invaders. But that the Russian armies should stand on this line, was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace. In any case, the line is there and an eastern front was established which Nazi Germany will not dare to invade.”

“A stab in the back”, however, wrote The Times about the Soviet invasion of Poland as early as 18 September.

Trust ended for Polish officers with bullets in the back of their heads

The humanitarian mission, i.e. the defence of the Belorussian and Ukrainian populations, was in force in the historiography and school teaching of the communist Poland (PRL) until its end. The Polish state was no longer to exist and the Red Army had allegedly entered a political and legal vacuum. Bolshevik Russia made numerous efforts not to be considered an ally of Hitler. According to many historians, Poland’s failure to declare war on the Soviets made it easier for it to do so internationally.

After the Russians entered the borders of Poland, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły initially considered staying in the country and continuing to fight, also against the Soviets. According to Professor Jerzy Łojek, Rydz was driven to cross the border into Romania on the evening of 17 September by personal ambitions. He was to become the successor to President Ignacy Mościcki, i.e. to be obtainable at the time of the transfer of power. The Commander-in-Chief’s abandonment of Poland, while the fighting was still going on, was met with civilians’ outrage – including those crossing the border at the time and, later, in broad Polish opinion. Perhaps it was the desire, detached from reality, to play a historical role of a president that dictated Rydz-Śmigły’s notorious general directive, issued on the afternoon of 17 September:

“The Soviets have entered. I order a general withdrawal to Romania and Hungary by the shortest routes. Do not fight the Bolsheviks, except in case of an attack from their side or an attempt to disarm the troops. The task of Warsaw and the cities that were to defend themselves against the Germans – unchanged. The cities approached by the Bolsheviks should negotiate with them on the exit of garrisons to Hungary or Romania.”

How did a participant in the Polish-Bolshevik war imagine the two armies meeting when they were not fighting? We will never know. Throughout the inter-war period, the Polish Army practised repelling Soviet aggression, paying much less attention to the German threat. And then, suddenly, everyone was to hand cigarettes round, cross-armies, except in the event of an attack or attempted disarmament.

Trickery was used by the Red Army and thousands of Polish soldiers were taken prisoner without a fight. The Russians said they were going after the Germans and at the right moment surrounded the Poles and disarmed them. Whole railway transports withdrawing from central Poland thus fell into Soviet hands at Brest-on-the-Bug. Rydz’s directive created a turmoil, but in the memoirs and testimonies of those years, one can read that for many soldiers and officers the Russian incursion itself, and, above all, its purpose, was surprising.

In Ternopil, a Polish force of several thousand simply allowed itself to be disarmed. After a ten-day defence of Lviv against the Germans, General Władysław Langner surrendered the city – as he said – to the Slavs, who were more trustworthy. Trust in these and other cases ended for Polish officers with bullets in the back of their heads.

Not all units received Marshal Rydz-Śmigły’s order; some ignored it. The Border Protection Corps (KOP) did not wait for the directive and went into battle. General Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann managed to regroup troops scattered along the border. Under his command, the KOP undertook two battles: at Szack and Wytyczno (2 October). Grodno was heroically defended against the Bolsheviks, with the “Wołkowysk” Cavalry Reserve Brigade holding off the enemy’s armoured approaches on its outskirts. The lancers of General Władysław Anders’ Cavalry Operations Group fought their way south-east. The Special Operations Group “Polesie” also clashed with the Red Army before it fought its last battle with the Germans at Kock in early October.

Edward Rydz-Śmigły could be accused of depriving Poland of arguments for the future by his withdrawal across the border bridge over the Cheremosh River, eliminating the concept of defence on the Romanian Bridgehead. The units that were forcing their way to the border lost sight of their main objective – to fight. Before 17 September, there was a plan to gather what we could and fight – perhaps the Allies would come to the rescue?

The cost of (un)necessary evil

On 12 September, an Anglo-French conference took place at the highest level in Abbeville, where it was decided not to take any action. The Polish government was not informed of the arrangements. Even long before Abbeville, General Louis Faury, head of the French military mission in Warsaw, had spoken to the commanders, French Generals Alphons Georges and Maurice Gamelin, on 22 August in Paris, which he recorded as follows:

“I next raise a question which has not given me peace... If Poland becomes the object of aggression, only an offensive by French troops will be able to force the Germans to relax their suffocating grip. At what date will this offensive begin? Silence. General Georges then goes on to make it clear that the French army is not capable of taking the offensive and that there is no possibility of setting a date when it will be ready for large-scale action. Until then, only defensive or limited offensive actions can come into play. When I cannot hide my disappointment, General Gamelin simply adds these few words: «It is necessary for Poland to last»...”

It is difficult to suppose that if Rydz-Śmigły had defended himself on the Romanian Bridgehead for two or three weeks, the attitude of the military and the French and British governments would have changed. As for the charge of not declaring war, we did not declare war on the Third Reich either, nor did the Third Reich declare war on Poland. Hitler, furious after Poland accepted British guarantees, terminated a non-violent pact in one of his speeches, but that is not quite the same thing.

Instead, England and France declared war on the Third Reich as formally as possible on 3 September 1939; it quickly acquired the name drôle de guerre, the Phoney War – in Polish historical literature: “an odd war”, though the literal translation would be „a funny war”. The temperature of the actions on the Western Front, or the Franco-German border until May 1940, is more bluntly explained by the German term Sitzkrieg (a sit-down war). And everything was as formally communicated and registered in accordance with international law.

The government of the Second Polish Republic at home did not declare war on the USSR. In Romania, which turned out to be a neutral state instead of an Allied one, the government was interned under German pressure. The émigré government in France, which was formed two weeks later, also did not formally declare war, because it was already too late, the fighting was over. However, in many documents – correspondence with the Allies – the government-in-exile portrays what happened in Poland as aggression and a state of war with two states. Did it matter?

There are historians who say that a formal declaration of war against the USSR in September 1939 would have strengthened Poland’s diplomatic position later on. They say nothing about a formal declaration of war against the Third Reich. It was obvious that it was war, an unprovoked aggression, and no formalities were needed. For in the West’s view during and long after the war, only Hitler was the aggressor and the criminal – Stalin was the good uncle. That’s the cost of (un)neccessary evil – well, a trifling territory of half of Europe.

Suppose Britain is persuaded to sign the Sikorski-Majski pact restoring diplomatic relations with Poland, which is at war with the USSR, after a bloody defence to the end of the Romanian Bridgehead. Would they not induce their esteemed ally to conclude a pact with its most important ally without raising the question of Vilnius and Lviv?

The war would have probably been concluded with some round sentences, and if there had been intransigent resistance, Władysław Sikorski might have heard from Churchill what Władysław Anders heard later, after the Yalta Conference: “you can take your divisions away, we’ll do without them”. Especially as the Anders Army, the most numerous in the Polish Armed Forces in the West, was not yet in place.

Poland formally declared war on only one country in the 20th century, the Empire of Japan, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbour. The war lasted on paper until 1957.

– Krzysztof Zwoliński

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

– Translated by jz