How long did the defense of Hel last?
Thirty-two days. The fortified Hel Peninsula on Poland's Baltic coast held out from 1 September to 2 October 1939. About 3,000 sailors and soldiers of coastal artillery, anti-aircraft and border troops, under Captain Włodzimierz Steyer and the coastal commander Rear Admiral Józef Unrug, were cut off from the mainland on 12 September, bombed from the air and shelled from 21 September by the German battleships Schlesien and Schleswig-Holstein. They capitulated only on 1 to 2 October, the last Polish position on the coast to lay down its arms.3
When the war began on the Westerplatte, a Polish naval base lay across the bay on a narrow sandbar called Hel. Its defenders held out for more than a month, long after every other Polish position on the coast had fallen. “Everyone capitulates in September,” their commander told a council of war. “We will hold out until October.”4
The fortress on the sand
The Hel Peninsula is a long, narrow sandbar that curls into the Bay of Gdańsk. In the 1930s Poland turned its tip into a fortified base for its small navy. The Hel Fortified Region, created in 1936, had an underground power plant, ammunition bunkers, mine and torpedo stores and underground fuel tanks.5
Its pride was the battery at the tip of the peninsula. Built in 1935 and numbered 31 from 1 January 1937, it was named after Commander Heliodor Laskowski, whose insistence had led Poland to buy four modern 152.4 mm Bofors guns from Sweden instead of old French pieces. The guns stood on top of reinforced concrete shelters holding their magazines. But fire control had been neglected: in 1939 the rangefinders sat on makeshift wooden towers, and each gun had 186 shells, enough for about thirty minutes of continuous fire.6
The defenders
On 24 August 1939 Rear Admiral Józef Unrug was appointed Commander of Coastal Defense, answering directly to Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, and he set up his headquarters on Hel. Born Joseph von Unruh near Berlin, the son of a Prussian general, he had commanded German submarines in World War I before joining the new Polish state in 1919 and building its navy. The land defense of the peninsula was led by Captain Włodzimierz Steyer.7
Steyer had about 3,000 sailors and soldiers: a coastal artillery battalion, the 2nd Naval Anti-Aircraft Battalion and a battalion of the Border Protection Corps. Besides the Laskowski battery they had two field batteries of 105 mm guns, three anti-landing batteries of 75 mm guns, six 75 mm and eight 40 mm anti-aircraft guns, and the concrete bunkers of the Jastarnia strongpoint facing the land. The most modern ships of the fleet were not there: at the end of August they had been sent to Britain in Operation Peking.8
The first weeks
At about 1:30 in the afternoon on 1 September German aircraft attacked the port and the Laskowski battery. On 3 September the Luftwaffe sank the destroyer Wicher and the minelayer Gryf in the port of Hel, and the same day the battery fired on German destroyers; it later supported the defenders of the Oksywie heights near Gdynia. Most of the Polish ships left in port were lost in the first days.9
Cut off
On 8 September German troops began to probe the land approaches. Once they had taken Swarzewo and Władysławowo at the base of the peninsula, Hel was cut off from the mainland on 12 September, and from then on it was attacked from land as well as from the air and the sea. After the defenders of the Oksywie heights capitulated on 19 September, Hel was the last Polish stronghold on the coast, and the Germans turned their full weight against it.10› Battle of Westerplatte, 1939
Duel with the battleships
From 21 September the old battleships Schlesien and Schleswig-Holstein, the second of which had opened the war at Westerplatte, joined the bombardment from the sea. Their main target was the Laskowski battery. By the regional tourist board's count, the German ships fired 476 shells of 280 mm and 440 of 150 mm at the Polish positions and scored two direct hits on the gun positions, without lasting damage.11
How much the Polish gunners hit in return is disputed. Polish accounts long held that on 25 September the battery damaged both battleships and drove them off; the Germans reportedly searched the peninsula afterwards for heavy guns, unable to believe that 152 mm pieces could have done it. The history of the battery published by Pomorskie Travel is more sober: in duels at about 15,000 meters on 24 and 27 September the battery fired some 400 to 500 shells and scored a single hit. Either way, a battery with half an hour's worth of ammunition per gun kept two battleships at a distance.12
The barrier at Chałupy
On 27 and 28 September a telegram from General Juliusz Rómmel brought news that Warsaw had capitulated. Rómmel left the decision on Hel to Unrug, adding that “unnecessary bloodshed is undesirable”. Steyer advised the admiral not to answer German calls to surrender. On 30 September German troops took the Polish positions at Chałupy, and on Steyer's order the retreating sappers blew up a barrier of mines and torpedo warheads buried across the peninsula. The blast did not cut Hel off from the mainland as had been hoped, but it halted the German attack.13
The garrison lost about 50 men killed and some 150 wounded in the defense, according to Polska Zbrojna. German losses ran to dozens killed and wounded, and the German minesweeper M 85 sank after hitting a Polish mine.14
Capitulation
By 1 October Warsaw and Modlin had fallen, food and ammunition were running out, and the Germans were preparing a landing. That day Unrug, Steyer and the senior officers decided to capitulate. Years later, in a broadcast in 1964, Unrug explained that they had become just an island, the only Polish territory left, and that further fighting was hopeless.15
The act of capitulation was signed at the Grand Hotel in Sopot; Polska Zbrojna names Captain Marian Majewski and Captain Antoni Kasztelan as the Polish signatories, though accounts of who signed differ, and sources date the signing to 1 or 2 October. During the night the defenders wrecked and sank their weapons and burned documents and ciphers; Unrug's order to destroy all papers has made the defense hard to study ever since. On 2 October Steyer said farewell to his men: “Be prepared for a long captivity, but remember that Poland is a great thing.” At 11 o'clock German troops entered the peninsula, and the defenders went into the prisoner-of-war camps.16
Fates of the commanders
Unrug spent the rest of the war in German officer camps, from 1941 at Oflag VII A Murnau. He claimed to have forgotten German on 1 September, dealt with the camp authorities only in Polish, and refused to fight for the Kriegsmarine. After the war he stayed in exile, refused a British pension so as not to be better off than other Polish soldiers, and died in France on 28 February 1973. On 2 October 2018 he was reburied with full honors at the Naval Cemetery in Gdynia.17
Steyer, too, spent the war in officer camps. Lieutenant Commander Zbigniew Przybyszewski, who had commanded the Laskowski battery, returned to the navy in 1945, only to be arrested by the communist authorities on false charges. After the so-called trial of the commanders he was shot in Warsaw's Mokotów prison on 16 December 1952. All the officers convicted in the trial were rehabilitated in 1956, and his remains, found by the IPN in the Łączka quarter of Powązki Military Cemetery, were identified in 2014.18› Battle of Kock, 1939
Visiting Hel today
The Museum of Coastal Defence, opened on 1 May 2006 in the buildings of a former German 406 mm battery in the town of Hel, tells the story of the 32-day defense and of the Polish navy, and is dedicated to Przybyszewski. The Laskowski battery itself is a separate part of the museum. Its gun positions are linked by a trail; the first has been swallowed by the sea through coastal erosion, while position No. 4, which now holds a postwar Soviet 130 mm gun, houses an exhibition about Przybyszewski, and visitors can go inside the concrete shelters to see the magazines.19
