Who won the Battle of Wizna?
Germany won the Battle of Wizna, fought from 7 to 10 September 1939, but only after a few hundred Polish soldiers under Captain Władysław Raginis, about 720 by the usual count and fewer than 650 by one recent estimate, held a 9-kilometer line of bunkers on the Narew river against General Heinz Guderian's panzer corps. Raginis killed himself rather than surrender when his last bunker fell. The stand is remembered as the Polish Thermopylae.1
In September 1939, a few hundred Polish soldiers held a line of bunkers near the village of Wizna against a German force many times their size, part of Guderian's advancing panzer corps. For three days the tiny garrison held the crossing of the Narew river before it was finally overwhelmed. The stand is remembered as the Polish Thermopylae, and its commander chose death over surrender.2
The bunkers on the Narew
Wizna guarded the crossing of the Narew where it meets the Biebrza, on the road to Białystok. The defense sector, part of the Independent Operational Group Narew under General Czesław Młot-Fijałkowski, ran for about 9 kilometers along the eastern bank of the two rivers, from Kołodzieje to Maliszewo, split into a northern subsector at Giełczyn and a southern one at Góra Strękowa by the causeway that carried the road.3
Work on the fortifications began only in the spring of 1939, and time and money ran out before it was done. The backbone was six heavy concrete bunkers with walls 1.2 meters thick and retractable armored cupolas, backed by smaller bunkers, with more still under construction when the war came. They had no ventilation and no radio links between them, and one of the heavy bunkers still lacked its cupola. A similar line of bunkers north of Mława had held off German attacks for the first three days of the invasion.4› Battle of Mława, 1939
Raginis and his garrison
The commander was Captain Władysław Raginis, born in Daugavpils (Dyneburg) in 1908 and raised in Vilnius, an infantry officer who in 1939 was serving with the Border Protection Corps (KOP) in its Sarny unit. His company reached Wizna from the Osowiec fortress. With his artillery commander, Lieutenant Stanisław Brykalski, he swore to hold the position to the end, an oath meant to steady the men.5
The garrison was a patchwork: the 8th rifle company and a mounted scout platoon of the 135th Infantry Regiment, an infantry gun platoon and pioneers of the 71st Regiment, a reserve sapper company, a fortress artillery battery and a machine-gun company of the Osowiec fortress battalion, about 720 men in all with no reserves behind them. They had six old 76 mm field guns, 24 heavy and 18 light machine guns, and just two anti-tank rifles. What they lacked above all was a real weapon against tanks.6
A corps against a garrison
In the second week of the invasion General Heinz Guderian persuaded Fedor von Bock to send his XIX Panzer Corps east from East Prussia through Wizna, to drive deep behind the Polish armies. The figure usually quoted for the German force is 32,000 to 42,000 men; the Border Guard museum gives about 42,000 men with 350 tanks, and the plaques at the battlefield list two panzer divisions, an infantry brigade and a motorized brigade.7
7 and 8 September
The first Germans to arrive came from Jedwabne on the afternoon of 7 September: a reconnaissance battalion of the 10th Panzer Division, which scattered the Polish mounted scouts and took the village of Wizna. The Poles had already blown up the bridge over the Narew. On 8 September the Germans reconnoitered the line and brought up their artillery. After dark, under shellfire, the crew of the westernmost light bunker abandoned it.8
9 September: the storm
From about ten in the morning on 9 September German artillery and aircraft pounded the bunkers. Brykalski was killed in the observation cupola of the command bunker, Raginis was wounded, and the bridge at Strękowa Góra was destroyed. By the afternoon the northern subsector at Giełczyn had been overrun. At about four o'clock Raginis reported that the German superiority was overwhelming; soon afterwards his only radio was knocked out. By evening, Guderian wrote, his attack had gathered proper momentum, the bunkers at Maliszewo fell, and German units pushed on toward Tykocin and Zambrów.9
10 September: death before surrender
By the morning of 10 September only Raginis's command bunker at Góra Strękowa was still fighting. When the ammunition ran out, the badly wounded captain ordered his men to leave the bunker, and then, true to his oath, blew himself up with a grenade. The Border Guard museum puts it in a single sentence: after the ammunition was gone he ordered the crew to abandon the position, “and he himself was torn apart by a grenade”. With the consent of the German commander, Raginis and Brykalski were buried beside the bunker.10
Most of the defenders died on the battlefield; about forty were taken prisoner and a few broke through to Polish units. Relief from the Narew group reached the area only on 11 September, too late. The stand delayed an armored corps but could not stop it.11
Legend and numbers
Wizna is often summed up as 720 Poles against 40,000 Germans, or “40 to 1”. Historians caution that the real figures were smaller on both sides. Dariusz Szymanowski, who has done most to commemorate the battle, estimates 400 to 500 Polish soldiers spread over about 100 square kilometers, and Tomasz Wesołowski of the University of Białystok, working from newly found German archives, puts the garrison at fewer than 650 and argues that the fighting was shorter and fewer German troops took part than usually claimed. Even so, his colleague Wojciech Śleszyński calls the German advantage crushing, and he notes that the “Polish Thermopylae” label is debatable but accepted, so there is no need to reject it.12› Battle of Thermopylae, 480 BC
Śleszyński also points out that Nowogród near Łomża, another strongpoint of the Narew group, held out longer, yet it was Wizna that became the symbol of the fighting in the region. The legend grew in the 1970s, when, he argues, the communist authorities wanted heroes from the middle ranks rather than senior commanders. It reached a worldwide audience in 2008, when the Swedish band Sabaton recorded the song “40:1” on its album The Art of War. In 2009 President Lech Kaczyński awarded Raginis the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, calling him one of the most moving symbols of the Polish soldier's heroism in 1939.13
Visiting Wizna today
In 2011 the Wizna 1939 Association exhumed the remains of Raginis and Brykalski, and DNA tests confirmed that the remains were those of Raginis. In September that year both were reburied with military honors in a war grave inside the ruins of the command bunker on Góra Strękowa, now the center of the memorial. In 2012 Raginis was posthumously promoted to major and Brykalski to captain, and in 2014 a mural of Raginis, based on a photograph from 1938, was painted in Wizna. Anniversary ceremonies are held at the bunker, as on the 75th anniversary in 2014.14› Battle of Westerplatte, 1939
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