Who won the Battle of Kock?
The Battle of Kock, fought from 2 to 5 October 1939 with the surrender on 6 October, was the last battle of the regular Polish army in the September Campaign. General Franciszek Kleeberg's Independent Operational Group Polesie, about 17,000 to 18,000 men gathered from reservists, retreating units and the Pińsk river flotilla, fought the German XIV Motorized Corps and forced its 13th Motorized Division back. With its ammunition gone, the group laid down its arms. Tactically the Poles won; the campaign itself had long been lost.1
On 18 September 1939 three Polish bombers took off from the airfield at Pińsk for Romania. The airfield's commander offered General Franciszek Kleeberg a seat. He refused. The war is lost, he said, but a soldier's honor is not; he had soldiers under his command and would not leave them. Eighteen days later, near the little town of Kock, those soldiers fought the last battle of the Polish campaign, and were still advancing when the bullets ran out.2
A group made from fragments
Franciszek Kleeberg, born in Tarnopol in 1888, had served in the Polish Legions, fought for Lwów in 1918 and 1919 and become a general in 1928. In 1939 he commanded the military district at Brest on the Bug. On 9 September, as German armies crossed the Narew at Wizna and swung toward Brest, the high command ordered him to form an Operational Group Polesie from reserve and rear units to hold the line from Brest to Pińsk.3
It was a heavy task with little to carry it. From 13 to 16 September, Kowalski writes, the garrison of the Brest fortress held off Heinz Guderian's XIX Panzer Corps. Along the way the group took in cavalry, artillery, dismounted sailors of the Pińsk river flotilla and soldiers of the Border Protection Corps.4
Between two invaders
On 17 September the Red Army invaded Poland from the east with nearly half a million men in its first wave. Caught between two powers, the Polish campaign was lost. The Commander in Chief, Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz, and the government crossed into Romania; Kleeberg stayed with his men.5› Soviet invasion of Poland, 1939
Kleeberg first planned to gather his forces at Kowel and fight his way to Romania, but the Soviets took Kowel first. On 22 September, learning that the Commander in Chief had left the country, he turned west to help besieged Warsaw, asking what the nation would say if the Polish army stopped resisting before it had exhausted every possibility. When Warsaw fell, he turned again: south toward the arms and ammunition depot at Stawy near Dęblin, and then into the Holy Cross Mountains to carry on the fight as partisans.6
He explained to General Zygmunt Podhorski that it was not a desperate decision but a political one. The war had to be prolonged, to show the world that Hitler had not conquered Poland in eighteen days as he boasted.7
The road to Kock
The march west was dogged by Soviet columns and armed bands. On 29 and 30 September the group beat Soviet units at Jabłoń and Milanów, and the group crossed the Bug near Włodawa. By 1 October its headquarters stood at Serokomla and its units held the country around Suków, Radzyń and Kock, a landscape of woods and bad roads that favored Polish infantry and horsemen over German trucks.8
The group was by then an army in miniature: the 60th Infantry Division, the 50th Infantry Division Brzoza, General Podhorski's Zaza Cavalry Division and the Podlaska Cavalry Brigade, with very little artillery and few antitank guns.9
Battle: 2 and 3 October
On 2 October Polish units ran into the German 13th Motorized Infantry Division, part of General Gustav von Wietersheim's XIV Motorized Corps. The German attack on the first day was beaten off, and the Poles went over to the offensive. Fighting spread across a wide area, around Kock, Serokomla, Krzywda, Wojcieszków, Adamów, Helenów and Wola Gułowska.10
How hard the Poles pressed shows in a German report of the evening of 3 October, quoted by the historian Waldemar Kowalski. It admitted that the corps and its 13th Motorized Division were fighting off with their main forces a Polish attack by all arms at and northwest of Kock, and that the fighting was not over.11
Battle: 4 and 5 October
On 4 October the Germans counterattacked, and the 29th Motorized Infantry Division under General Joachim Lemelsen came in from the northwest. Kleeberg sent part of his force against it and turned most of his units on the 13th Division. The heaviest fighting raged around Adamów, Krzywda and Wola Gułowska, which changed hands several times.12
On 5 October soldiers of the 60th Infantry Division and the cavalry struck the left wing of the 13th Motorized Division. In a daring attack they took the strongly held church and Carmelite monastery at Wola Gułowska and drove the Germans from the cemetery beside it. The German division was forced to fall back. It was a tactical victory.13
Veterans' memories of these days survive in recordings made for Radio Free Europe in 1969. Major Jerzy Mielżyński, who led a squadron of uhlans, recalled the last fight on 5 October in the forest by Wola Gułowska, where his men beat off three German attacks. A sergeant-major of the 1st Krechowce Uhlans remembered four days of fighting without a break, horses and men worn out, and an antitank gunner weeping as he loaded his last round.14
Out of ammunition
On the afternoon of 5 October the group's quartermaster reported to Kleeberg that the ammunition was gone, for the antitank guns and the rifles alike. Food and medicine for the wounded were also exhausted, and the group was the last Polish formation still fighting. In the forester's lodge at Hordzieszka, Kleeberg decided on his own responsibility to surrender.15
That evening he wrote his farewell order. He reminded his soldiers that he had gathered them from distant Polesie to fight to the end, that they had meant to help Warsaw and that Warsaw had fallen before they arrived. Now they were surrounded and further fighting would only waste blood that might still be needed. It is the privilege of a commander, he wrote, to take responsibility on himself. He thanked them for their courage and ended with the opening words of the national anthem: Poland is not yet lost.16
At eight that evening he told his officers. General Podhorski, who wanted to break through and fight on, did not attend. In the night the soldiers were paid, and some units buried their weapons so the Germans would not get them.17
The surrender
At eleven in the morning on 6 October, on an overcast day, Kleeberg surrendered to General von Wietersheim before the Jabłonowski Palace in Kock. Military honors were observed and the officers were allowed to keep their pistols. The sergeant-major of the 1st Krechowce Uhlans quoted above later remembered that the Germans saluted them as they marched into captivity.18
Into German captivity went 16,860 soldiers of the group, among them 1,255 officers and four generals: Kleeberg, Podhorski, Ludwik Kmicic-Skrzyński and Czesław Młot-Fijałkowski. The Germans took 10,200 small arms, 205 heavy machine guns, 20 guns and 5,000 horses; the rest had been destroyed or hidden.19
Kleeberg and the memory of Kock
Kleeberg was held in the Oflag IV B prisoner camp in the fortress of Königstein in Saxony. Seriously ill with heart disease, he died in a military hospital at Weisser Hirsch near Dresden on 5 April 1941 and was buried in the Neustadt cemetery. In 1969, on the 30th anniversary of the battle, his remains were brought back to Poland and laid on 6 October in the war cemetery at Kock, among the soldiers who fell in the last battle of 1939. He was posthumously promoted to general of division.20
Kock closed five weeks of fighting in defense of Poland, which then lost its statehood for more than five years. It ended not in defeat in the field but with empty magazines, and it became a symbol of the soldiers of September who fought on after the campaign was lost. Many of them would fight again, in the underground and abroad.21
The campaign had opened at Westerplatte, and its largest battle was fought on the Bzura; see also the greatest battles in Polish history.
