The defence of Westerplatte begins

At dawn on 1 September 1939 the old German training battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had been lying in the port of Gdańsk (Danzig) for a week on a supposedly friendly visit, opened fire from a range of a few hundred metres on the Polish Military Transit Depot (PL) on the Westerplatte peninsula. A few minutes later an assault company of German marines went into the attack, supported by Danzig policemen and SS men. A handful of Polish soldiers under Major Henryk Sucharski and Captain Franciszek Dąbrowski beat off this attack, and a second one before noon. In Polish memory the salvoes of the Schleswig-Holstein became the symbolic first shot of the Second World War, and Westerplatte, which according to the plans was to hold out for twelve hours or so, held out until 7 September.

The battleship opened fire at 4.45 a.m., and the German attack was repulsed. The time, however, needs some explanation. Orders set 4.45 as the start of the war with Poland, and this was also the time Sucharski himself reported. Yet the sources also give 4.47 and 4.48. Polish researchers explain the discrepancy by saying that 4.45 was the planned time, that the ship’s captain gave the order at about 4.47, and that the guns fired roughly a minute later. Nor was Westerplatte the only place where the war began that morning: a quarter of an hour or so earlier German dive-bombers attacked Polish positions at the bridge at Tczew; according to some studies the first bombs fell on Wieluń a few minutes before the battleship’s salvo; and at about the same time Wehrmacht units were crossing the frontier from Pomerania to the Carpathians.

A Polish outpost in the Free City

Westerplatte was a small, wooded peninsula at the entrance to the harbour canal of the Free City of Danzig, on the site of a former bathing resort. In 1924 the Council of the League of Nations granted Poland the right to establish a depot there for ammunition transhipped in the port, and from January 1926 a Polish guard detachment was stationed there. The League limited its strength to eighty-eight men: two officers, twenty NCOs and sixty-six privates. From the outset Danzig protested against the presence of Polish troops on its territory, and in March 1933, after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, Józef Piłsudski pointedly reinforced the garrison with a naval battalion. Less than a year later, however, Poland and Germany concluded the declaration of non-aggression, and the dispute over Danzig died down for several years. The reinforcement soon had to be withdrawn, but in the years that followed the Poles quietly rebuilt the depot. Five reinforced-concrete guardhouses were built, with cellars adapted as machine-gun positions, as well as modern barracks that could serve as a last point of resistance.

From the spring of 1939, when Germany demanded Danzig and weapons began to be stockpiled and armed units formed in the city itself, the garrison was quietly enlarged by replacing departing civilians with uniformed soldiers. During the summer field fortifications, barbed-wire entanglements and tree barricades were built, and the undergrowth was thinned to give a better field of fire. Exactly how many men were on Westerplatte on 1 September is still debated. Older studies speak of 182 soldiers; newer rolls count about 205–210, including a dozen or so mobilised civilian workers; and some researchers give as many as 220–240. The commandant of the depot since December 1938 had been Major Henryk Sucharski, and his deputy and commander of the guard detachment was Captain Franciszek Dąbrowski. The armament was modest: one 75 mm field gun, two 37 mm anti-tank guns, four 81 mm mortars, about forty machine guns, about 160 rifles and a supply of grenades. Under its orders the garrison was to hold out for twelve hours, until relief arrived from Pomerania. In the last days of August, however, it became clear that there would be no such relief, as the war plans did not provide for Polish divisions to enter Danzig.

A battleship in the harbour canal

On 25 August, the day the Polish-British alliance treaty was signed in London, the Schleswig-Holstein sailed into Gdańsk under the command of Captain Gustav Kleikamp. Officially she was a training ship on a courtesy visit notified to the Polish port authorities. Below decks, however, was hidden a Kriegsmarine assault company of about 225 men under Lieutenant Wilhelm Henningsen, transferred to the ship on the open sea so that no one would notice them embarking. The battleship moored in the harbour canal opposite Westerplatte; her task was to take the depot at the start of the war, then fixed for dawn on 26 August. On the evening of 25 August Hitler called off the attack, and the ship had to wait another six days. The Polish garrison, alarmed by the battleship’s repositioning, remained on alert the whole time.

On land the Danzig forces were commanded by General Friedrich-Georg Eberhardt, a Wehrmacht officer who since the spring had been forming regular military units out of the Danzig state police. Danzig police units and the local SS-Heimwehr Danzig were also assigned to the attack on Westerplatte. The Germans had little knowledge of the Polish fortifications and estimated the garrison at no more than a hundred men. The Danzig police assured Kleikamp that Westerplatte would be taken in a few minutes; Eberhardt, more cautious, spoke of a few hours. On 31 August the order came: attack on 1 September at 4.45 a.m. During the night the marines of the assault company went ashore near the Wisłoujście Fortress and took up positions by the wall separating the depot from the rest of the peninsula, while sappers laid charges to blow breaches in it. At about 4 a.m. the battleship cast off and moved to a position with a better field of fire.

The first day of fighting

At dawn the guns of the Schleswig-Holstein, including her heavy 280 mm pieces, opened fire on the depot. The shells tore away the railway gate and blew breaches in the wall, but fire at such close range was not very effective: the heavy shells often had no time to arm and failed to explode, and the reinforced-concrete guardhouses held. A few minutes after the first salvo Sucharski reported to fleet command on Hel that the battleship was shelling Westerplatte with all her guns. Henningsen’s company went into the attack, while Danzig units opened fire from the landward side.

The Germans passed through the breaches in the wall and advanced into the woods, expecting an easy victory. They ran into the forward outposts, especially the “Prom” (Ferry) outpost of Lieutenant Leon Pająk, and came under crossfire from concealed positions they had not spotted beforehand. Barbed wire and tree barricades slowed their movements. At about 5.15 a.m. the Polish field gun, rolled out to a position near the power station, began firing at machine-gun nests set up on the warehouses across the canal, while the mortars shelled the attacking infantry. An attempt by a small detachment of Danzig police to land from the canal was also beaten off. In this phase of the fighting Staff Sergeant Wojciech Najsarek, a railwayman and reservist who served at the depot’s railway station, was killed. He is sometimes named as the first Polish soldier to fall at Westerplatte, and occasionally as the first soldier to fall in the whole war. At about 6.20 a.m. Henningsen reported heavy losses to the ship and withdrew his men. The first assault had failed.

The Germans prepared a second. From about 7.40 a.m. the battleship kept up a long bombardment, directed especially at the “Prom” outpost, and this time destroyed the Polish gun, which had managed to fire twenty-eight rounds. Lieutenant Pająk was badly wounded, and Warrant Officer Jan Gryczman (PL) took command. The second wave, supported by a platoon of the SS-Heimwehr Danzig attacking from the beach, forced the defenders of the forward outposts to fall back towards the guardhouses, but there it was stopped by machine-gun fire from guardhouses no. 1, 2 and 5 and by the mortars. At the same time the crew of the “Fort” outpost was beating off attacks by the SS men from the north. At about 12.30 p.m. the second assault finally collapsed. Henningsen was mortally wounded in the fighting. Eberhardt called for air support, but that day the weather prevented it.

The balance of the first day was humiliating for the Germans. According to German records, the assault company alone lost a dozen or so killed and several dozen wounded, and the attackers’ total losses are usually put at about twenty killed and more than a hundred wounded. On the Polish side four soldiers were killed and several wounded, three of them seriously. The German commanders concluded that the infantry would not take the depot until it had been smashed by artillery and air power. Studying aerial photographs, they now erred in the opposite direction, seeing on the peninsula underground fortifications and armoured cupolas that did not exist.

Gdańsk on 1 September

The attack on Westerplatte was part of a wider operation in Gdańsk. At almost the same time police and SS units attacked the Polish Post Office on Heweliusz Square, and Gauleiter Albert Forster, the self-appointed head of state since 23 August, proclaimed the incorporation of the Free City into the Reich. Polish activists, officials and railwaymen in Gdańsk were being arrested from the first hours of the war. What Chamberlain had warned against in the House of Commons in July had come to pass: Danzig had passed into the hands of the Reich by way of a fait accompli. Westerplatte became a Polish island in territory that Hitler had just annexed to Germany.

News that Westerplatte was holding out quickly spread across the country. Over the following days Polish Radio repeated the words “Westerplatte is still holding out”, which became one of the watchwords of September 1939.

Significance

On the first day the defenders of Westerplatte did more than their orders required. They beat off two assaults by picked marine infantry supported by the battleship’s guns, and forced the Germans to change their plans. In the following days the enemy no longer risked frontal attacks but bombed the peninsula instead. On 2 September some sixty Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers destroyed guardhouse no. 5, killing several of its defenders, as well as the mortars, the radio station and part of the supplies. According to many researchers, the raid led Major Sucharski to a breakdown and to a first attempt at surrender, which Captain Dąbrowski and other officers thwarted. The dispute over who really commanded the defence in the days that followed continues to this day. The garrison went on to withstand bombardment from the sea, attempts to set the woods on fire and several probing attacks. On the morning of 7 September, after another heavy bombardment and an attack with flamethrowers, Sucharski surrendered. In all some fifteen to twenty defenders were killed, while German losses are today most often estimated at several dozen dead.

The defence of Westerplatte had little operational significance. The fate of the campaign was being decided on the approaches to Warsaw, on the Bzura and in Lesser Poland, not in the port of Gdańsk. Its symbolic significance, however, was enormous. A handful of soldiers on a cut-off peninsula tied down several thousand Germans, a battleship and aircraft for a week, and showed that Poland would not give up without a fight anything Hitler had been claiming throughout 1939. As early as September Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński wrote a poem about the soldiers of Westerplatte, all of whom had supposedly fallen. This myth, like the later legends of the “seven days” and the “thirteen assaults”, long obscured the true story: a human one, full of dramatic choices, but no less heroic. Westerplatte became one of the most important places of Polish memory of the Second World War, and it is here that every year, on 1 September at 4.45 a.m., tribute is paid to the victims of the war.