Inferno - Max Hastings [13]
Exhaustion among men and horses soon posed the main threat to the headlong German advance. Cavalryman Lance-Corporal Hornes found his mount Herzog repeatedly stumbling: “I called out to the section commander—‘Herzog’s had as much as he can take!’ I had scarcely got the words out when the poor beast fell to his knees. We’d gone 70km on the first day, then 60 on the second. And on top of that, we’d had the trek over the mountains with the advance patrol galloping … That meant we’d gone nearly 200km in three days without any proper rest! Night had long fallen, and we were still riding.”
The horrors of blitzkrieg mounted: while Warsaw Radio played Chopin’s Military Polonaise, German bombing of the capital was now accompanied by the fire of a thousand guns, delivering 30,000 shells a day, which pounded its magnificent buildings into rubble. “The lovely Polish autumn [is] coming,” the fighter pilot Wiroslaw Feric wrote in his diary, recoiling from the irony. “Damn and blast its loveliness.” A pall of grey smoke and dust settled over the capital; the royal castle, opera house, national theatre, cathedral and scores of public buildings, together with thousands of homes, were reduced to ruins. Unburied bodies and makeshift graves lay everywhere on the boulevards and in the parks; food supplies, water and electricity were cut off; with almost every window shattered, glass fragments carpeted pavements. By 7 September the city and its 120,000 defenders were surrounded, as the Polish army reeled back eastwards. Its chief of staff, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, had fled Warsaw with the rest of the government on the second day of war; the army’s supply system and communications collapsed. Cracow fell almost without resistance on 6 September; Gdynia followed on the thirteenth, though its naval base held out for a further week.
A counterattack on 10 September by eight Polish divisions, across the Bzura River west of Warsaw, briefly disrupted the German offensive and took 1,500 prisoners. Kurt Meyer of the SS Leibstandarte Regiment acknowledged with mingled admiration and condescension: “The Poles attack with enormous tenacity, proving over and over again that they really know how to die.” Contrary to legend, on only two occasions did Polish horsemen engage German tanks. One such episode took place on the night of 11 September, when a squadron hurled itself at full gallop at the village of Kałuszyn, strongly held by the Germans. Out of eighty-five horsemen who attacked, only thirty-three afterwards rallied. The invaders used their own cavalry to provide reconnaissance and mobility, rather than for assaults: Lance-Corporal Hornes’s unit advanced in column, while two men rode ahead: “They would hurry at a gallop from one hill to the next, then wave the troop on. As another precaution, lone horsemen were sent out alongside us on the ridges of the hills. Suddenly, we saw new unfamiliar contours emerging from the thick dust-cloud: small, agile horses with bobbing heads, ridden by Polish Uhlans in their khaki uniforms, long lances held with one end in the stirrup leather and the other slung from the shoulder. Their shining tips bobbed up and down in time with the horses’ hooves. At the same moment, our machine-guns opened fire.”
The Wehrmacht was vastly better armed and armoured than its enemies. Poland was a poor country, with only a few thousand military and civilian trucks; its national budget was smaller than that of the city of Berlin. Given the poor quality and small number of Polish planes compared with those of the Luftwaffe, it is remarkable that the campaign cost Germany 560 aircraft. Lt. Piotr Tarczsynski’s artillery battery came under intense shellfire a mile from the river Warta. Tarczsynski, a forward observer, found his telephones dead; linesmen sent to investigate never returned. Without having summoned a single salvo,