Occupation of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 by Lonio17 for Wikipedia “Occupation of Poland (1939-1945)” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

(6) FOURTH PARTITION OF POLAND / POLISH WAR

(1 SEPTEMBER 1939 – 8 MAY 1945)

The invasion and partition of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union – in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which as popular historian Paul Johnson pointed out was something of a misnomer for what was more accurately a Nazi-Soviet aggression pact against Poland.

Speaking of Paul Johnson, he records an interesting vignette of how easy it was to forget Poland as casus belli of the European war. One guest swept his arm around at a London society wedding on 10 January 1946 to exclaim “After all, this is what we have been fighting for”, only for a female guest to retort “What, are they all Poles?”

And indeed, the invasion of Poland by Germany on 1 September 1939 was the commencement of the Second World War in Europe. The Soviet invasion followed on 17 September 1939, effectively to claim the Polish territory assigned to it under the Pact which in turn reclaimed the territory lost to Poland in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. But for the Pact, Germany could readily have occupied all of pre-war Poland. As it was, Poland ceased to exist as a state – and alone among the states occupied by Germany, did not have its own collaborationist government but instead the German-administered General Government.

The title of Fourth Partition of Poland is used by some historians in reference to the Three Polish Partitions – the three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1772 to 1795 by Russia, Prussia and Austria that progressively reduced the Commonwealth until it was eliminated as a state altogether by the third partition and completely divided up among the three partitioning parties.

However, other historians have pointed out that it might well be reckoned the sixth or even higher numbered partition – depending on how one reckons the subsequent restoration of Poland under Napoleon in 1807 and its partitions in 1815 (Congress of Vienna), 1832, 1846, 1848, and 1918 (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk).

I have classed the Fourth Partition of Poland as one of my top ten Second World Wars – indeed in top tier – as the German (and Soviet) war against Poland continued throughout the Second World War, albeit behind other active fronts, particularly in Poland itself behind the Eastern Front.

Active military fronts that is – Poland itself was the front line (or ground zero) of the war Germany fought against the populations of the nations it occupied, above all the Holocaust with it mostly occurring in camps in Poland and Polish Jews representing about half the tally for the Jewish population of Europe killed.

Of course, the most active part of the German war against Poland was its original campaign in September 1939 – which one book title christened as The War Hitler Won, and as H.P. Willmott observed in The Great Crusade, was a war Germany won before a single shot was fired due to its material and positional superiority over Polish forces.

The German victory still surprised observers at the time as being a matter of weeks rather than months. Poland might have had better prospects if weather – General Mud – had been more on its side, if its defense had been better planned or timed, and above all if Britain and France had properly planned or coordinated an offensive against Germany on the Western Front. The failure of the last has been considered as part of the larger Western Betrayal argued by Poles and Czechs from Munich to Yalta.

Even so, Polish forces defended Poland impressively – notably inflicting a similar proportion of casualties (for German personnel killed in action) as the French did in far better defensive circumstances the following year. That was despite the Soviet invasion on 17 September transforming the Polish situation from hopeless to completely hopeless – although as H.P. Willmott points out, it did little to change the military situation in reality other than to remove the Polish option of holding out in the so-called Romanian Bridgehead. As it was, some Polish forces held out even after the fall of Warsaw on 28 September, enduring until the last of them surrendered on 6 October, while others fled or escaped.

However, the war did not end there, either for Polish armed forces or in Poland itself.

With respect to the former, those Polish armed forces that managed to escape or flee continued fighting in Allied forces elsewhere (or in resistance within Poland), particularly as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, led by the Polish government-in-exile based first in France and then in Britain. Indeed, “Polish armed forces were the fourth largest Allied forces in Europe after the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain”, albeit reliant on arms and supplies from other allies.

Among the western allies, Poles served with distinction – perhaps the most famous examples being Polish airmen in the Battle of Britain and the Poles as the Allied “shock troops” in the Battle of Monte Cassino. The Polish navy and merchant marine also fought in the Polish Armed Forces in the West.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets either released Polish personnel to serve in the Polish Armed Forces in the West or had them raise the Polish Armed Forces in the East, the latter more to Soviet ideological taste.

Arguably even more impactful was the Polish contribution to Allied intelligence. Apparently almost half “of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in between 1939 and 1945 came from Polish sources” – and the Polish intelligence network described as “the only allied intelligence assets on the Continent” (after the French surrender).

Most impactful of all was the vital Polish intelligence contribution towards the decryption of the German Enigma codes, delivered to the western allies only five weeks before the war, and which underlay the British decryption known as ULTRA. Polish intelligence didn’t end there but also provided the Allies with key intelligence about the German camps, V-1 and V-2 rockets, and submarines, as well as an intelligence network for north Africa.

The Polish intelligence contribution to Allied victory has been described as “disproportionately large” and much more effective “than subversive or guerilla activities”.

Speaking of subversive or guerilla activities, finally there was the war in Poland itself – or rather the war on Poland itself. The German campaign may have ended but if anything that only represented an escalation in the German war on Poland – with far more Polish casualties from occupation than the military campaign in 1939. Poland has one of the highest casualties in absolute terms for those killed in the war – approximately 6 million, almost all civilians and over half of which were Polish Jews – and the highest as a proportion of its population, approximately 17%.

Of course, that wasn’t all the German occupation – a small proportion was from the Soviet occupation, most infamously the captured Polish soldiers killed by the Soviets at Katyn.

That prompted Polish resistance movements and the Polish Underground State, with an overall strength that was the largest or one of the largest resistance movements in Europe – in which the largest Polish resistance organization was the Home Army (Army Krajowa or AK), although there was a plethora of other organizations.

The Polish resistance fought two famous uprisings in Warsaw – firstly, the Warsaw Ghetto Rising by the Jews against deportation to the camps in April 1943, and secondly (even more famously and on a larger scale), the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944 as Soviet forces advanced on the city. Equally as famously, those Soviet forces sat it out while the Germans crushed the Uprising, destroying Warsaw far more thoroughly than the German campaign in 1939 did. The Soviet forces were at the limits of their supply and logistic chains, but they were also not inclined to do too much to address that (or otherwise assist the western Allied air forces to drop aid to the Poles), given the convenience of Germany destroying the non-communist Polish resistance.

H.P. Willmott observed the irony that Germany treated Poland atrociously and France leniently, while the reverse might have better suited Germany’s purpose. I have observed that I do not understand why Germany crushed the Warsaw Uprising, when it might have suited Germany better to withdraw to another defensive line, leaving it intact as a potential thorn in the side for the Soviets.

I’ve left the end date of this entry as the surrender of Germany but in effect part of the Polish resistance or underground war and indeed of the partition of Poland continued afterwards with respect to the Soviets – with the latter continuing to this day and onwards, as Poland never retained the loss of its territory from the Soviet part of the Pact.

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)