First to Fight - The Polish War 1939 by Moorhouse Roger

Author:Moorhouse, Roger [Moorhouse, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473548220
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-09-04T22:00:00+00:00

For some, it was immediately clear what was afoot. At Niżniów (Nyzhniv), east of Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk), retreating Polish troops urged the civilian population to flee with them. ‘Run! Run for your lives, good people!’ they shouted. ‘Hide anywhere you can for they are showing no mercy. Hurry! The Russians are coming!’72 As one eye-witness recalled, the result was panic. ‘People ran in all directions, unable to find time or places in which to hide. I stood aghast as one small boy, frightened and confused, stopped to stare at an approaching tank. They simply machine-gunned him down.’73

Elsewhere, local populations believed that the Soviets were coming in peace; that they were ‘fellow Slavs’ who would do them no harm.74 One Pole remembered the Soviet soldiers as being ‘very friendly, very peaceful … they had such an excellent attitude. They came as friends, they embraced us, they kept saying that they had come to liberate us, liberate us from capitalism, from the bourgeoisie.’75 In Tarnopol (Ternopil), the city authorities urged the population to welcome the invaders, and in Równe local officials rode to meet the Red Army, thanking Soviet officers for bringing help in the fight against the Germans. Even where they were welcomed, however, Red Army units sometimes could not conceal their belligerent intentions. At Złoczów (Zolochiv), east of Lwów, the mayor greeted a Soviet cavalry unit with bread and salt, only to be kicked to the ground by the Red Army commander. Not long after, he was executed.76

The resulting confusion was not aided by the contradictory messages emanating from Soviet forces themselves. It may have been Polish wishful thinking to imagine that the Red Army was coming to help them fight the Germans, but it was also quite evident that some Soviet soldiers themselves were confused as to the purpose of their marching into Poland. As the Red Army’s own records show, despite the propaganda offensive, some ‘incorrect opinions’ were still very much in evidence. ‘We haven’t been attacked. We don’t want an inch of someone else’s land, so why are we on the march?’ asked a soldier from the 13th Rifle Corps. Another wondered: ‘Don’t we pursue a policy of peace? So why have we crossed the Polish border?’ A soldier of the 4th Tank Brigade went further, complaining that they had not been informed who they were going to fight against. He added disapprovingly that ‘this is against the teachings of Lenin and Stalin’. Another aired the heretical idea that the USSR was little better than Hitler’s Third Reich: ‘Germany is seizing Poland’s land’, he said, ‘and we are doing the same.’77 In such circumstances, it was perhaps not surprising that the Polish experience of encountering the Red Army in 1939 varied so widely, from amicable to murderous.

Moreover, it is clear that there was a policy of deliberate disinformation on the part of the invading army, which was masking its real intentions by proclaiming that it was indeed riding to Poland’s aid. Jan Karski, who was retreating eastward towards

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