The Battle of Westerplatte, 1939: seven days that opened the Second World War

Before dawn on 1 September 1939 the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, moored in Danzig harbor since 25 August on what was billed as a courtesy visit, opened fire on the Polish depot at Westerplatte from a few hundred meters away. Its defenders had been told to hold for twelve hours, until help could come. No help came. They held for seven days.²

A Polish outpost in Danzig

The Treaty of Versailles made Danzig a Free City under the League of Nations and gave Poland the use of its port, but not control of it. In 1920, during the war with Soviet Russia, German dockers in Danzig refused to unload munitions bound for the Polish army, and Warsaw concluded that it needed a guarded depot of its own in the harbor. On 14 March 1924 the League's Council assigned Poland the Westerplatte peninsula, a sandy tongue of land at the harbor entrance, as a place to store and transship military supplies.³

The depot opened in 1926. A League decision of December 1925 capped its guard at 88 men: two officers, twenty NCOs and sixty-six privates. Detachments rotated every six months, a brick wall ran along two thirds of the peninsula, and from 1933 the Poles began to build reinforced concrete guardhouses, followed in 1936 by a modern barracks. On paper Westerplatte was a warehouse with sentries. As relations with Nazi Germany soured after 1933, it became Poland's most exposed military post.⁴

The garrison and its secret

In March and April 1939 a fresh guard platoon arrived, picked from the 2nd Legions Infantry Division in Kielce; sixty-nine of its eighty men came from the 4th Legions Infantry Regiment. Over the summer the depot was quietly strengthened beyond the League's limit. According to the IPN historian Jakub Mularczyk, civilian employees boarded the navy tug for Gdynia dressed in uniform, and the next day real soldiers came back in their place. By 1 September the garrison numbered just over 200 men; estimates range from 182 to about 210, and the Museum of Gdańsk counts about 217 soldiers and mobilized reservists.⁵

Their weapons were modest: about 160 rifles, roughly 40 heavy and light machine guns, four 81 mm mortars, two 37 mm anti-tank guns and a single old 75 mm field gun. They had no anti-aircraft guns at all. The plan relied on five guardhouses with machine-gun nests in concrete shelters beneath them, linked by fire and by telephone to the barracks, with field outposts such as Prom and Przystań pushed out in front to keep the enemy away from the main line. The task was to hold for six hours. On 31 August Lieutenant Colonel Wincenty Sobociński told Major Sucharski that no relief would come and stretched the requirement to twelve.⁶

Facing them were, by Polish estimates, some 3,000 to 4,000 Germans. Nearly half were sailors, from the battleship and several auxiliary vessels, including a naval assault company, supported by pioneers, about 65 guns and nearly 50 aircraft. General Friedrich Eberhardt commanded the land attack.⁷

1 September: the first shots

Shortly after four in the morning a single rifle shot alerted the sentries. At 4:45, the time used in Polish commemorations (the ship's log records 4:48), the battleship's guns opened up, and the German assault company went in. Westerplatte is usually called the first battle of World War II, although the bombing of the town of Wieluń is traditionally dated to 4:40; an IPN historian, Grzegorz Bębnik, has argued that the raid on Wieluń in fact began an hour later, at 5:40.⁸

The attackers expected a short fight. Instead they ran into crossfire from positions they had not spotted, took heavy losses and fell back. Lieutenant Leon Pająk's men at the Prom outpost held for about four hours before withdrawing to Guardhouse No. 1; Pająk himself was badly wounded and survived only thanks to the garrison's doctor, Captain Mieczysław Słaby. Pająk later judged that those four hours set the tone for the whole defense. By evening the twelve hours had passed and the depot was still Polish.⁹

2 September: the Stukas

The second day was the worst. Dozens of Ju 87 dive bombers, between 40 and 60 by one estimate, struck the peninsula. The upper floors of the barracks were wrecked, the radio station and the water supply were destroyed, and from then on the only water came from an artesian well in the cellar. A bomb destroyed Guardhouse No. 5, killing most of its crew, among them Corporal Jan Gębura, Józef Kita, Antoni Piróg and Ignacy Zatorski. The Germans also tried to burn the woods that hid the Polish positions.¹⁰

That day Major Sucharski, exhausted and convinced the position was hopeless, suffered a nervous breakdown and ordered a white flag raised. His deputy, Captain Franciszek Dąbrowski, had it taken down, and with the other officers insisted on fighting on. From then on Dąbrowski exercised direct command, while the order to surrender was kept from the men to protect their morale.¹¹

Holding on

On 3 September the defenders learned that Britain and France had declared war on Germany, and for a while they hoped help might come after all. Across Poland, radio bulletins carried a phrase that became famous: Westerplatte broni się nadal, "Westerplatte is still defending itself", with greetings from the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, to its heroic crew. The defense was held up as an example to soldiers fighting elsewhere.¹²

Inside the perimeter the days blurred into one. The men stayed at their posts without relief, slept little, ate dry rations and carried water from the barracks under shellfire. Corporal Edward Łuczyński later summed it up as seven days without relief at the posts, "without light, without water and without sleep". The number of wounded kept growing, and Słaby had almost no medicines or instruments to treat them.¹³

7 September: surrender

On the morning of 7 September the Germans opened about an hour of massed artillery fire, then pioneers with flamethrowers set the woods ablaze before an infantry assault. The attack was beaten off, but Guardhouse No. 2 collapsed and Guardhouses No. 1 and No. 4 were badly damaged. With wounded men at risk of gangrene and no hope of relief, Sucharski decided to stop. Słaby's wish to save the wounded weighed heavily, and the other officers did not clearly oppose the decision.¹⁴

In a report written in 1946, which the IPN has published, Sucharski described the moment: W tych warunkach i wobec znanego mi częściowo położenia w kraju, zdecydowałem się na kapitulację ("In these conditions, and given what I partly knew of the situation in the country, I decided to capitulate"). A white flag went up on the barracks, and at first the Germans did not even notice it. General Eberhardt allowed Sucharski to keep his officer's saber in captivity, a gesture of respect for the defense.¹⁵

Losses and captivity

Fifteen defenders were killed, the figure given by the Museum of Gdańsk and the IPN; some accounts count 16, others about 20 with those who died later. Estimates of the wounded run from about 30 to about 50. German losses are not known exactly: the Museum of Gdańsk says they remain unknown, while recent Polish research estimates about 50 killed and some 150 wounded, far below the 300 dead once claimed in Polish accounts.¹⁶

The prisoners were gathered on a clearing by the Mewi Szaniec fort, where officers were separated from the men, and then taken by bus into Danzig while a hostile crowd jeered and threw stones. In Warsaw, the Kurjer Warszawski printed an obituary for the whole garrison on 10 September, and the poet Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, believing them all dead, wrote his "Song of the Soldiers of Westerplatte". In fact most survived: the officers went to German officer camps, and nearly all the rank and file to Stalag I A at Stablack in East Prussia, where many stayed until 1945.¹⁷› Defense of Hel, 1939

Memory and the command dispute

Westerplatte had little effect on the course of the German invasion of Poland, but it became one of the most powerful symbols in Polish memory: a tiny garrison standing firm against overwhelming force at the very start of the war. Gałczyński's poem, Melchior Wańkowicz's book and Stanisław Różewicz's film shaped the legend, and in 1966 the 25-meter Monument to the Defenders of the Coast was unveiled on the site.¹⁸

Since the early 1990s some authors have argued that the real leader of the defense was Dąbrowski, not Sucharski. Historians such as Marek Deszczyński of the University of Warsaw take a middle view: the defense was a well-run fight for a small fortress, Dąbrowski took over when Sucharski could not command, and Sucharski's surrender came when further resistance would only have cost lives. Sucharski did not live to see the debate. His ashes were brought from Italy and buried at Westerplatte on 1 September 1971.¹⁹

The battle for the graves lasted longer. A cross and a plaque with the names of the fallen were set up by the site of Guardhouse No. 5 in July 1946; in 1962 the communist authorities removed the cross and put a Soviet T-34 tank in its place, and the tank was taken away only in 1989. Excavations by the Museum of the Second World War in 2019 found the remains of fallen defenders, including Ignacy Zatorski, and on 4 November 2022 they were buried with military honors in a new cemetery of fifteen steles, one for each of the dead.²⁰› Warsaw Uprising, 1944

Visiting Westerplatte today

The peninsula lies at the harbor mouth in Gdańsk, and the Museum of the Second World War now cares for the battlefield. Visitors can walk past the ruins of the New Barracks, the soldiers' cemetery and the monument. Guardhouse No. 1, moved in 1967 to save it from demolition, is the only surviving guardhouse open to the public: since 1974 it has housed a memorial room with relics of the depot and its defenders, run as a branch of the Museum of Gdańsk since 1980. Each 1 September a ceremony begins there at 4:45, to the sound of sirens.²¹› Battle of Mokra, 1939