The sinking of Wicher and Gryf

On 3 September 1939, the third day of the war, German aircraft sank the destroyer ORP Wicher and the minelayer ORP Gryf in the naval port of Hel. They were the two largest surface warships the Polish Navy (PL) still had in the Baltic. That morning both, immobilised in harbour as floating batteries, had joined the coastal artillery in beating off an attack by two German destroyers. In the afternoon and evening Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers finished the job. From then on all that remained of the Polish surface fleet that was to defend the Gulf of Gdańsk were minesweepers, gunboats and auxiliary vessels.

In popular chronologies of the war Wicher and Gryf are sometimes presented as the first warships sunk in the Second World War. This is not accurate. As early as about 2 p.m. on 1 September German dive bombers had sunk the old torpedo boat ORP Mazur, used as a gunnery training ship, in the naval port at Oksywie, and in further raids on 1 and 2 September smaller auxiliary vessels went to the bottom as well. The sinking of Wicher and Gryf was, however, the first loss of major combat ships in this war, and Wicher was very probably the first destroyer to be sunk in it.

The ships that stayed behind

The Polish fleet was small in 1939: four destroyers, a modern minelayer, five submarines, six minesweepers, two gunboats and a dozen or so auxiliary vessels. In view of German superiority in the Baltic, the Polish command had no illusions that it could fight for command of the sea. That is why it was decided as early as the spring that, in the event of war, the most valuable destroyers would leave for Great Britain. Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły and the British Admiralty gave their consent in May, and from the time of the alliance of 25 August the ships were to fight there alongside the Royal Navy. The Commander of the Fleet, Rear Admiral Józef Unrug, issued a special order in sealed envelopes on 26 August, and at noon on 30 August the signal “Beijing” was sent. A few minutes after 2 p.m. ORP Burza, Błyskawica and Grom, under the command of Commander Roman Stankiewicz, sailed from Gdynia. Although they were spotted on the way by German ships and aircraft, they passed through the Danish straits and on the afternoon of 1 September, with the war already under way, dropped anchor in the Firth of Forth. The operation went down in history as the Peking Plan. Some servicemen and part of the public regarded it at the time as flight, but it allowed the Polish Navy to fight without interruption throughout the war.

The two largest ships stayed behind. Wicher, built in France and commissioned in 1930, was the first modern warship of reborn Poland and for years its flagship. It was she that in 1931 brought Józef Piłsudski back from Madeira, and in June 1932 the resolute stance of her commander during a visit to Gdańsk helped force the authorities of the Free City to restore the Polish fleet’s right to use the port there. In the spring of 1939 she needed a thorough overhaul of her machinery, and the Peking Plan did not include her: her task was to cover the minelaying. From 18 March, when after the seizure of Memel (Klaipėda) a similar coup against Gdańsk was feared, the whole destroyer division had been kept at a heightened state of readiness. Her commander was Commander Stefan de Walden.

Gryf, built in France and commissioned in 1938, was the largest combat ship of the Polish Navy. She could carry some 300 mines and mounted six 120 mm guns. Under the plan for the operation codenamed Rurka (PL), immediately after the outbreak of war she was to close the Gulf of Gdańsk with a minefield running from Hel towards Sopot, within range of the guns of the Hel headland battery, which was to protect the mines from being swept.

The failure of Operation Rurka

On the morning of 1 September, a few hours after the attack on Westerplatte, Gryf left Oksywie and loaded mines from barges in the Bay of Puck. At around 4 p.m. she received the order to carry out the operation, which the Commander-in-Chief had reserved for his own decision. Shortly before 6 p.m. the group made up of Gryf, Wicher, minesweepers and gunboats was attacked on its way to Hel by 32 or 33 Ju 87 dive bombers of IV.(St)/LG 1. In the fight, which lasted some twenty minutes and was the first battle of the war between ships and aircraft, the Germans scored no direct hits, but bombs bursting close alongside Gryf damaged her steering gear, and splinters killed several sailors (sources give three to five dead), among them her commander, Lieutenant Commander Stefan Kwiatkowski.

Command passed to his second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Wiktor Łomidze, a Georgian contract officer in Polish service. He had the mines damaged by the blasts thrown overboard and, once permission to enter the port of Hel had been obtained, all the rest as well, unarmed. According to Polish reports, 278 mines went into the sea. He feared that a single hit on the unarmoured mine magazines would blow the ship sky-high. Historians still judge his decision in different ways, but most regard it as a mistake. Operation Rurka collapsed, and no one informed Wicher, which sailed during the night to her assigned position off Pillau. There she sighted German destroyers but, bound by her orders to cover the minelaying, did not open fire, and on the morning of 2 September she returned to Hel.

The Fleet Command then concluded that the ships stood no chance on the open sea and decided to turn both into floating batteries defending the headland from the side of the Gulf of Gdańsk. Commander de Walden proposed an attempt to break out through the Danish straits, but the order was otherwise. Wicher’s torpedoes and depth charges were removed and her boilers shut down, while on Gryf only the gun crews were kept aboard and the rest of the ship’s company was sent to the land defences. The minelayer’s new commander was Commander Stanisław Hryniewiecki.

The duel with the destroyers

During the night of 2–3 September German seaplanes harassed Hel with air raids. At around 6.55 a.m. the destroyers Leberecht Maass and Wolfgang Zenker approached from the Gulf of Gdańsk. Aboard the former was the commander of the German torpedo forces, Rear Admiral Günther Lütjens. They opened fire at long range. Gryf and Wicher replied, and soon afterwards so did the four 152 mm guns of the Heliodor Laskowski battery on the headland. The Poles – most likely the gunners of Gryf or of the battery – hit Leberecht Maass on the shield of No. 2 gun. According to German sources, four sailors were killed and four wounded. The Germans laid a smokescreen and withdrew. Gryf too took two or three shells; six men were killed, among them Sub-Lieutenant Lech Dandelski, and a seventh later died of his wounds. It was the only engagement between surface warships in the September Campaign.

The air raids

At around 9 a.m. Ju 87s of 4.(St)/Trägergruppe 186, a squadron formed for the aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, then under construction, appeared over the port. Heavy anti-aircraft fire forced them to drop their bombs from a great height. Their main target was Gryf. A bomb hit her stern, two more sailors were killed, a fire broke out, and Commander Hryniewiecki ordered the after magazines to be flooded to keep them from blowing up. Wicher came through this raid, and the next one two hours later, without being hit.

The decisive attack came in the early afternoon. First seaplanes appeared over the headland, drawing the fire of the defences, and shortly after 3 p.m. the dive bombers struck, led by Hauptmann Erich Blattner. In a short space of time Wicher was hit by four bombs: on the forecastle, in the side and amidships. She capsized to starboard and sank alongside the quay in the shallow water of the harbour basin. One sailor, Edward Kwiatkowski, was killed and about twenty were wounded (accounts give between 17 and 22). According to some witnesses, the aircraft strafed the sailors as they tried to save themselves. In the same raid another bomb hit Gryf, which was still burning. At around 6 p.m. seaplanes finished her off: an explosion tore off a wall of the nearby floating dock, which pierced the minelayer’s side, and the leaking fuel was set alight by another bomb. The pumps could no longer be started, and exploding anti-aircraft ammunition kept rescuers at bay. The crew was evacuated, and the ship settled on the bottom and went on burning for another two days.

Guns on land

Most of the sailors from both ships who were still fit to fight joined the land defence of the Hel Peninsula. Once the fire on Gryf had died down, on the initiative of Lieutenant Edmund Pappelbaum, three after 120 mm guns were taken off the wreck, which stood out of the water, and set up on land as Battery No. 34. The guns of the sunken Mazur had been dealt with in the same way earlier. The battery was ready only towards the end of the defence; according to some studies it managed to fire just a few rounds, and before the capitulation the guns were destroyed by their own crews.

Place in the war

3 September showed how decisive command of the air was. Ships that could not be beaten in open combat with destroyers were helpless against dive bombers when immobilised in harbour without fighter cover. The Polish plan for the war at sea rested on mines and submarines; after the collapse of Operation Rurka and the loss of Gryf, the Gulf of Gdańsk lay open to German shipping, and the continuing fight at sea fell to the submarines and a few minesweepers. The fate of Wicher and Gryf also settled the dispute over the Peking Plan: the large ships left in the Baltic were lost on the third day of the war, while those that had gone to Great Britain fought on.

Hel, commanded by Captain Włodzimierz Steyer and since 31 August also the seat of Rear Admiral Unrug’s headquarters, held out for another four weeks, cut off from the mainland from mid-September and shelled by the old battleships Schleswig-Holstein and Schlesien. On 1 October the act of capitulation was signed in Sopot, and on 2 October the Germans entered the headland. It was the last outpost on the Polish coast still holding out. The Germans later raised both wrecks. Gryf’s served them as a navigation mark and a gunnery target, while Wicher’s was scuttled in the shallows beyond the breakwater of Hel harbour, where her remains lie to this day. Burza and Błyskawica survived the war alongside the Royal Navy and returned to Poland; Grom was sunk in May 1940 off Narvik.