By Peter Zablocki
The fog that descended over the Westerplatte peninsula in the Bay of the Free City of Danzig, Poland, on August 31, 1939, refused to lift as if trying to stop the night from making way for a new day. At the small officers’ quarters building, Capt. Franciszek Dabrowski woke up from a nightmare, his body in a cold sweat; it was now September 1, 3:57 a.m. The 35-year-old officer had spent the past two years as the deputy commander of the Polish Military Depot at Westerplatte. Never had he felt as uneasy as he did that early morning. Dabrowski looked over at Maj. Henryk Sucharski; the commanding officer slept soundly. Perhaps he had accepted that they had done all they could to prepare for the worst.
The German pre-dreadnought battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein had moored in Danzig harbor just six days earlier under the pretense of a friendly visit. It now stood motionless fewer than 200 yards away on the other side of the Vistula River channel’s shallow waters. The Polish officers could not see the large ship through the thick fog, even if they tried. But they knew it was there.
The clock on the ship’s bridge soon showed 4:43 a.m. German Capt. Gustav Kleikamp, a veteran of the Great War and the Battle of Jutland, looked at the man by the controls and nodded—it was time. The 250 highly-trained SS Marines hiding in Schleswig-Holstein’s hull could hear the creaking of metal as the relic of another time turned its 11-inch guns toward the six-and-a-half-foot wall surrounding a handful of Westerplatte’s small structures. The booming guns spoke in unison—the second World War had begun.
Adolf Hitler had never hid his disdain for the post-World War I reestablishment of the Polish nation that was previously erased from the map by various 18th-century partitions. Apart from giving up land to Poland, the 1919 creation of the Polish Corridor was particularly troublesome for Germany.
The new territorial agreement between the Allied powers and Germany’s leaders called for providing the newly reconstructed Poland access to the Baltic Sea. The result was a thin strip of land that was 140 miles long and an average of 10 miles wide running from Danzig west to the border of East Prussia, the latter now separated from mainland Germany. The League of Nations granted Danzig, located at the mouth of the Vistula River on the Baltic coast and in the middle of the corridor, “Free City” status. Designated as such to address the city’s complex geopolitical and mixed German and Polish population, it became a semi-autonomous city-state serving as a neutral entity under the protection of the League.
The Führer initiated his Heim ins Reich, “Return to the Homeland,” policy in early 1938. With a claim of bringing ethnic Germans living in other countries back to the Greater German Reich, the Nazi Party, under the guidance of its Führer, first annexed Austria in 1938, then the Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia the year after. It was only a matter of time before Hitler would come for Poland.
When reports from March 1939 pointed out that an excess of 70 German divisions could at any point be deployed against Poland, which at best could only muster 37, the central European nation undertook a secret mobilization without the permission of its French and British allies. By late August, even they could not deny the intelligence reports of the Nazi war machine amassing 36 divisions within striking distance near the Polish and Czechoslovakian border.
Part of the Free City of Danzig but separated from it by a Vistula River, the usually lightly guarded Westerplatte peninsula was the gateway and protector of Danzig’s harbor. Prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles from arming itself past the existing 88 soldiers so as not to instigate nor alarm Germany, the commanding officer of the nation’s military ammo depot, Major Sucharski, had spent the past five months building up its forces to 200 men; this included one doctor and a handful of officers, who, like the other reinforcements, were all smuggled in wearing civilian clothing.
Armed with one 75mm field gun, two 37mm antitank guns, various rifles, grenades, and 18 heavy machine guns, Sucharski and Dabrowski established three lines of defense. Covered by cut brush and the tall trees overhead was a line of machine-gun outposts near the narrow entrance to the peninsula designed to hold the line long enough for the troops to mobilize near the second line of defense, the five guardhouses deeper past the depot’s walls that protected the barracks, storerooms, and officer quarters. The orders from the Army HQ were clear: do nothing, provoke no one, wait.
Dabrowski now raised his hands and shielded his eyes as shattered glass from the nearby window hit him with a powerful force. The Polish captain had slept in his full uniform, a precaution he and his men had taken since the arrival of the German battleship. Across the room, Major Sucharski was giving orders, although the men already knew what to do; they had been secretly preparing for this moment for months.
Within 10 minutes, the German ship would rain five metric tons of shells on the Polish depot’s eastern perimeter near their machine-gun nests in an attempt to breach its outer wall. Apart from Schleswig-Holstein’s eight salvos from its main guns, 59 shells would come from its medium batteries and more than 600 rounds from its 20 mm flak guns.
Schleswig-Holstein’s projectiles continued falling as a young rifleman, Konstanty Jezierski, shielded himself in one of the peninsula’s five guardhouses as something crashed through the window. The first soldier to die in World War II never saw the explosion that claimed his life.
The second phase of the German invasion of Westerplatte began at 4:55 a.m. The marines from Schleswig-Holstein emerged from the smoke at the base of the peninsula and through the protective wall at a spot damaged by the battleship’s barrage.
Supplied with old maps, the SS marines were unaware of the secret changes to Westerplatte’s defenses instituted by Sucharski and Dabrowski in the months leading up to the inevitable attack. The men of the foremost gun emplacement codenamed Prom (Ferry) could easily pick out the enemy through the smoke, their off-white rucksacks draped over their shoulders making a stark contrast against the dark German uniforms. The SS unit, led by Lt. Wilhelm Henningsen, crept forward unaware of the hidden machine gun emplacements.
“We didn’t have to strain our eyes,” a Polish soldier later recalled, “because we let them come as close as [one hundred feet] before we opened fire.” The machine guns from Prom came to life simultaneously, with the other nearby outposts instantly meeting their ferocity. German soldiers, unable to see Polish positions through the thick trees, fired their rifles and submachine guns in all directions but the right one.
The invaders finally retreated after the third attempt, convinced that the Poles had built an elaborate system of trenches, tunnels, and defensive positions when, in reality, they faced but four hastily built bunkers. As the smoke settled, a Polish soldier at Prom looked up from his hot machine gun at the slaughter before him. Dead bodies lay seemingly everywhere, some twitching with the last involuntary movements before going still. The initial attack had cost the Germans 13 lives and led to 58 men being injured in less than an hour.
The second and more intense bombardment of Westerplatte began at 7:30 a.m. When it was over, 50 tons of munitions had fallen on the military depot’s westernmost outposts. “A hail of shrapnel, splinters, tree branches, and entire treetops rained down from the skies,” a Polish lieutenant would write years later.
The barrage had hardly ended when Henningsen’s German SS marines resumed their attack around 9 a.m. Anticipating the move, the outposts’ commanders set up mortars to repel the advance. The Poles were now facing a larger attack force, reinforced by 60 SS-Heimwehr Danzig troops. Referring to themselves as a home defense army and made up of Danzig’s fanatical Germans, the SS-Heimwehr existed as an independent unit responsible for conducting police actions in and around Danzig in the name of protecting the German-speaking peoples from Polish retribution.
Major Sucharski, having also been made aware of renewed German sniper fire from machine-gun nests set up on the roofs of warehouses in the Danzig port across the channel, alleviated some of the pressure on Pajak’s position by shifting Westerplatte’s main artillery to fire across the Vistula. The Polish barrage successfully quelled the German positions, then turned its attention to the Schleswig-Holstein and nearly knocked out the battleship’s command post. However, Captain Kleikamp’s swift retaliation ensured Sucharski no longer had much artillery to speak of.
By noon, the Marines frantically radioed the battleship, “Verluste zu Groß, gehen zuruck!” (“Heavy losses, we’re leaving!”). SS commander Henningsen was mortally wounded, and there was no hope of piercing the Polish defenses. Unknown to the Germans, the combination of the ongoing Schleswig-Holstein barrage and three hours of continued SS assaults on the Polish position had destroyed the majority of the defending outposts, taken the lives of five garrison members, and wounded numerous others.
With their power supply knocked out by the German attack, Major Sucharski and Captain Dabrowski now agreed to move the soldiers back past the wooded area and to the guardhouses of the second line of defense about halfway up the peninsula. The new positions, while allowing the enemy to gain a foothold on Westerplatte, were laid out in a way that established interlocking lines of machine-gun fire and would make any advance up the strip of land nearly impossible.
As the long day turned into night, the men waited. Meanwhile, the military depot’s lone doctor, Mieczyslaw Slaby, worked tirelessly to help those in need with the little he had. For the overwhelmed surgeon, things would only get worse. Back at the entrance and the site of the morning battle, one could still hear cries—Wasser! “water” and Hilfe “help”—at first audible, but eventually low and then gone altogether.
As the men fought off attacks at Westerplatte, the rest of Poland put up a brave yet futile fight against one of the most powerful nations of the world. While a promised French and British offensive against Germany in the West would have alleviated some of the pressure, it never materialized; the Poles were alone.
The Greeks had Thermopylae, the Americans had a small mission in Texas, and the forces of Franco held the Alcazar in Toledo. It was now the Poles’ turn to have their isolated act of heroism. Western newspapers would call it the Polish “Battle of the Alamo.” It would be the start of the greatest conflict the world had ever seen.
With the Nazi forces pushing the Polish armies further inland and toward the Soviet border, where the Red Army prepared for its own invasion of September 17, updates on Sucharski and Dabrowski’s men dominated radio broadcasts. “Westerplatte fights on!” the announcers worldwide would proclaim, all unable to fathom how an outpost equipped and expected to hold on for 12 hours continued its heroic stand, eventually for days. The German high command, expecting the action to last only one hour, was just as shocked by Westerplatte’s resolve.
The 100 bombs dropped on Westerplatte by Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers on the second day of the fighting turned the peninsula into hell on earth. Naval petty officer Franciszek Bartoszak put his head between his knees and hid in the corner of one of the guardhouses. “We were deafened, blinded, shattered. They could have taken us that day,” he would later remember. But the Germans, sure that the bombardment had destroyed most, if not all, of Westerplatte’s defenders, instead chose to wait until the third day. By then, the peninsula had been turned into a moonscape, full of craters, knocked down trees, and incendiary bombs still aflame.
At one point, the men hiding from the descending death heard a terrible explosion followed by screams. A dive bomber had scored a direct hit on Guardhouse Five, killing the eight men inside. By the time the two consecutive air raids ended, the Poles at Westerplatte had also lost their kitchen, food supplies, radio station, and water pumps. On board the Schleswig-Holstein, a sailor would write in his diary, “This must be the end for Westerplatte.”
While the rest of the nation looked for updates on Westerplatte’s resolve, the morale of the troops of the entrenched garrison was coming apart. The latest bombardment led Major Sucharski to succumb to a nervous breakdown, which saw his second in command, Captain Dabrowski, effectively taking temporary control of the garrison on September 3. The military depot’s new commander quickly countermanded orders to capitulate that had been made under duress by Sucharski, and instead, after speaking with other officers and soldiers, concluded that the majority of the men wanted to continue the fight.
The SS units attacked the peninsula’s base on the evening of September 3. The guardhouse defenders could only hear shells buzzing around like bees. Bullets ripped the sandbags covering the windows, spilling their contents onto the ground. Yet the Poles’ machine-gun fire did enough to hold the second line. By now, the Germans had taken a foothold on the island and settled into Westerplatte’s outposts abandoned by its defenders the previous day. For Hitler, enough was enough. The symbol of Polish resistance had to fall. The declassified diary of the German Naval Staff Operations Division noted, “Order on personal instructions from the Führer: Order for an immediate assault on the Westerplatte together with Army reinforcements is given to Commanding Admiral, Baltic. During the general attack, destroyers are also to participate in the shelling of the Westerplatte.”
More German warships arrived on September 4, opening fire from the Baltic Sea, shelling the northern side of the peninsula as the Schleswig-Holstein renewed its attack from the south. By now, water and food were nearly gone, and Westerplatte’s ammunition stockpiles and medical supplies were dangerously low. Just that morning, the garrison’s only doctor used his nail scissors to clamp a stomach wound. But now, even such an act of desperation was no longer feasible as he was forced to leave them inside the patient to prevent further bleeding.
A Polish soldier inside one of the guardhouses looked through the darkness and the thick trees ahead of him, unable or unwilling to believe what he saw. The moon was high in the sky when, at 3 a.m. on September 6, the Germans renewed their attack. In their newest attempt at taking Westerplatte and hoping to cause an explosion and expose its defenses by burning down the trees around them, the Germans sent a burning train down the lone tracks that cut through the peninsula.
At the same time that the young Pole realized what he was looking at, his commanding officers had discovered the ploy and ordered all concentrated fire on the approaching train. With thousands of bullets ricocheting off this bomb on wheels, the panicked driver decoupled long before the train reached its destination and the train exploded closer to the German positions than the Polish. As the sky illuminated, Polish gunfire rained down on the SS unit, which had advanced past its defensive positions and was now out in the open with its troops nowhere to go but to their deaths. As darkness gave way to another day, the Germans tried sending another train with much the same results. Casualties aside, Westerplatte bought itself another day.
The failed assaults at Westerplatte were followed by countless hours of on-and-off mortar and artillery fire. Corp. Bronislaw Grudzinski, in Guardhouse Two, waited and hoped another ground attack was not forthcoming, for he knew there would not be much he could do about it. “Our machine guns are bent and twisted; it is quiet outside,” he said of the ordeal.
Over at the barracks building, the lone doctor could no longer supply his wounded men with anything but small sips of water. By the evening of September 6, even that would have to stop, for whatever was left had to be rationed to those still fighting. “The wounded needed calm, but here, as if in mockery, booms, quakes, and explosions [came] from every angle,” Corporal Edmund Szamlewski, a veteran of Westerplatte, would later write. “Instead, they lay idly, listening to the moaning of their wounded comrades.” To make matters worse, the surgeon had another evil to contend with; gangrene began to spread among his patients.
The 4:30 a.m. German attack of September 7 began much in the same manner as the one that started the war the week before. By now, the German armies had overtaken most of Poland, yet the radio stations continued reporting that Westerplatte fought on. This time, the major barrage from the Schleswig-Holstein was more successful than the two on September 1. Before sunrise, the projectiles from the battleship obliterated Guardhouses One, Two, and Four beyond repair. The German ground attack resumed with a renewed ferocity, led by advancing flamethrower units. And while the Poles held their own until the enemy stopped to regroup, the men knew the next fight would have to end in hand-to-hand combat, for there was no more ammo or energy left to give.
With 17 dead and 79 wounded, no water, little food and ammunition left, and the painful realization that help was not forthcoming, Major Sucharski, this time with Captain Dabrowski’s blessing, ordered a white flag hung on one of the barracks’ windows. The men had met and exceeded their assignment to hold for 12 hours—seven days earlier. They could not hold any longer.
With Westerplatte silent, Sucharski and Dabrowski led the men, with the few wounded that could still walk in tow, out of the entrenched positions and toward the enemy lines at 11 a.m. The ragged, dirty, and wounded men marched proudly behind their leaders. Awaiting the Poles were the German ground detachment and officers from the Schleswig-Holstein. Sucharski handed his ceremonial sword to the recently arrived German commander, Maj.-Gen. Friedrich Eberhardt.
The SS man looked down at the saber. “Where are the rest of your men?” he demanded. The unflinching Polish major took his time to answer. “This is all that is left.” Eberhardt stood motionless for a moment, then handed Sucharski back his sword. The battle for Westerplatte was over.
As the Polish officers and troops marched off to prison camps where most would spend the rest of the war, their countrymen persisted in the futile struggle against the German blitzkrieg, which they continued long after the official capitulation to the Nazis and the Soviets on October 6, 1939. When the conflict ended, Poland’s death toll would exceed six million, the highest proportionately of any combatant nation—with three million of these being Jews.
Hitler walked in silence. It was exactly two weeks to the day when Major Sucharski surrendered Westerplatte. The evidence of battle was still apparent in the rubble and destruction surrounding the Führer. He walked around the shell holes and stepped over fallen trees. The Nazi leader remained quiet as the captain of the Schleswig-Holstein gave him a tour of the peninsula.
There was not much left to say. Captain Kleikamp knew better than to boast about persevering. It was clear Hitler was not pleased. In the context of Germany’s successful September 1939 campaign, Westerplatte was better left forgotten.
Peter Zablocki is an award-winning, New Jersey-based author, historian, and host of the History Shorts Podcast. For more information, visit www.peterzablocki.com.
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