What happened on 17 September 1939?
In the early hours of 17 September 1939, with the Polish army still fighting Germany, the Red Army crossed Poland's eastern border. Moscow claimed the Polish state had ceased to exist, but it was carrying out the secret protocol of the German-Soviet pact of 23 August, which divided Poland between the two powers. Some Polish units fought the invaders, and by the end of September Poland was partitioned along the Bug.1
On 23 August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. A secret protocol attached to it provided for Poland to be divided between them. Germany invaded on 1 September. By mid-September the main Polish armies were beaten or surrounded and Warsaw was under siege, and Stalin chose his moment.2
Choosing the moment
According to the historian Wiesław Jan Wysocki, Stalin probably made his final decision on 13 September, and the next day Voroshilov and his chief of staff Shaposhnikov ordered Soviet troops to their starting positions by the evening of 16 September. The IPN, Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, says the Red Army General Staff had begun preparing the invasion at the end of August. Wysocki argues that Stalin waited until the outcome of the Polish-German war was certain, so that Poland would not give in too soon.3
A note at 3 a.m.
At 3 a.m. Moscow time on 17 September the Polish ambassador, Wacław Grzybowski, was handed a note that justified the attack by concern for the national minorities of Poland and claimed that the Polish state and its government had in fact ceased to exist. He refused to accept it. Wysocki writes that he told Vladimir Potemkin, Molotov's deputy, that the Soviet move meant a fourth partition of Poland.4
The troops did not wait for the note. Wysocki has Soviet border guards and Red Army units crossing between 1 and 2 a.m.. The IPN dates the first attacks on Border Protection Corps watchtowers, at Czuryłowo, Szapowały and Polikszty, to about 4.40 a.m..5
How big was the invasion?
The sources count it differently. The IPN gives more than 600,000 soldiers with 4,700 tanks and 3,300 combat aircraft. Wysocki gives the two attacking fronts, the Belarusian under Mikhail Kovalyov and the Ukrainian under Semyon Timoshenko, over 460,000 men, about 5,500 armored vehicles and about 1,800 aircraft, and about a million men once the second line, border troops and the NKVD are counted.6
Against them, Wysocki puts about 300,000 Polish troops in the eastern provinces, of whom only some 100,000 could fight, and about 20 battalions of the Border Protection Corps (KOP) spread along a border some 1,400 kilometers long. Many of those troops were remnants of units retreating from the German front.7
Do not fight the Soviets
Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz, the Polish commander-in-chief, heard of the invasion at Kuty near the Romanian border at 6 a.m.. Wysocki writes that his first instinct was to fight, but that as reports came in he concluded resistance on that scale was hopeless. At about 10 p.m. he issued a directive: do not fight the Soviets unless they attack or try to disarm Polish units, and withdraw toward Romania and Hungary. The President and government crossed into Romania.8
Wysocki stresses that the order reached many units late or not at all, and that blaming it for the disarming of Polish troops in the east is unjustified. General Wacław Stachiewicz, the chief of staff, wrote that none of the officers at headquarters doubted that the Soviets had stabbed Poland in the back.9
The fighting in the east
Polish units did resist. The IPN lists skirmishes at Kowel, Sarny, Baranowicze and Tarnopol, the defense of Wilno on 18 and 19 September and of Grodno on 20 and 21 September, and a night fight at Kodziowce on 21 and 22 September, where a regiment of uhlans met a Soviet armored unit. Wysocki names KOP battalions, the Polesie brigade and the sailors of the Pinsk river flotilla among the units that fought.10
The best-known stand was made by the KOP under General Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann, who had taken command of the corps in August 1939. His troops fought the Red Army at Szack on 28 and 29 September and again at Wytyczno, near Włodawa, on 1 October, after which he broke up his force. He escaped through Lithuania and Sweden to the West. The last battle of the whole campaign, against the Germans at Kock in early October, has its own story.11
Prisoners and crimes
Wysocki counts 240,000 to 250,000 soldiers, border guards and policemen taken prisoner by the Soviets, and puts Polish dead in the fighting at 3,000 to 3,500 soldiers and civilians, or 6,000 to 7,000 by other data. He gives Soviet losses as 2,500 to 3,000 killed. Among the officers captured, twice wounded, near Sambor on 29 September, was General Władysław Anders.12
The IPN cites historians who estimate that in September 1939 alone Red Army soldiers and security men murdered about 2,500 prisoners and several hundred civilians. About 300 defenders of Grodno were shot, as were about 150 sailors of the Pinsk flotilla, and General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński was murdered with his adjutant.13
The partition
On 28 September Germany and the Soviet Union signed a treaty on borders and friendship in Moscow, and Poland was divided along the Bug River. On 10 October the Soviets handed Wilno to Lithuania, and on 1 and 2 November the rest of the occupied lands were formally annexed to the USSR. The IPN counts at least 800,000 Polish citizens taken deep into the Soviet Union over the next two years; arrests, deportations to the Gulag and the Katyn massacre followed. The day's other story is on 17 September in history.14
