Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (15 page)

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2nd Stuka Training Wing.

Source: Speidel MS.

Poland did have a modern medium bomber, the P.37 “Elk.” Unfortunately, the Polish bomber arm had just begun to modernize, and only thirty-six Elks had reached the groups.

In addition to its obsolete aircraft and lack of centralized command, the Polish air forces were handicapped by poor dispositions. Each of the six Polish armies was given one fighter group, one reconnaissance group, and one balloon company, under an air unit commander. In all, the army and naval air forces had 165 of the available fighters, 265 recon aircraft, 100 liaison airplanes, 30 naval reconnaissance planes, and 10 naval defense aircraft. This left only 150 fighters for the defense of the Polish cities, industrial regions, and rear areas. Of these, sixty were located in the general vicinity of Warsaw, twenty in the Deblin area, thirty around Gdynia (the Polish Baltic Sea port), and forty in the various industrial regions. These fighter units were under the control of the chief of air forces at Polish GHQ in Warsaw.

World War II began at 4:40
A
.
M
. on September 1, 1939. There have been a great many misconceptions about the Luftwaffe’s success on that day. Many people believe that the Polish air forces were destroyed on the ground in the first few hours of the campaign. This simply is not true. The Polish leadership recognized that war was a distinct possibility, if not actually imminent. They did not keep their air units concentrated in their large peacetime bases; rather, with the international situation at the boiling point, they took the elementary precaution of dispersing their air units to ninety tactical airfields throughout the country. They thus saved most of their airplanes from the initial German onslaught.

The Poles lost control of the air battle before it began, because the Polish ground services were extremely primitive. No Polish air signal corps existed. This fact was of critical importance, for Polish air units had to depend on army signal units, which had no specialized training in aerial communications. The Polish tactical airfields were not even served by telephones. The Polish air command simply did not have the communications to contact—much less control—their small units, which were now scattered all over the country. Much like the Polish army, the Polish air units operated in “penny packets,” which were swamped one by one by the Wehrmacht. Except in the vicinity of Warsaw, where Polish communications were at their best, Polish aviators never achieved a single important concentration against the Luftwaffe.

The weather was poor throughout Poland on the morning of September 1, but it was especially bad in the zone of the lst Air Fleet, where most of the Luftwaffe’s striking power was concentrated. At Warsaw, for example, the cloud ceiling was 600 feet and visibility was less than three-quarters of a mile. Lacking proper instrument training, the Luftwaffe’s plans for a synchronized takeoff of all operational air forces were upset. Only a few units actually took off on schedule and the planned large-scale attack deteriorated into a series of actions by individual units. Only four groups of the Lehrdivision (the best-trained unit in the Luftwaffe) took off on schedule. The bulk of the 1st Air Division was simply grounded in eastern Pomerania. Only I Gruppe, 1st Bomber Wing, took off on schedule. In all, only five of Kesselring’s fourteen and one-third initial attack groups took off on time: hardly the overwhelming attack the German propaganda machine pretended it was. Yet it was successful, because the Polish Air Command was simply not able to exercise more than the slightest control over its own units.
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In the south the weather was somewhat better. Operating out of bases in Silesia and Bohemia, Loehr’s air fleet attacked Polish airfields and ground installations in the vicinity of Lvov, Krosno, Krakow, Chenstochau, Kattowitz, Moderovka, Kielce, and Radom. Other units attacked the Polish railroad system and successfully disrupted the mobilization of the Polish army.

The most successful attack took place at Krakow, where the main base of the Polish 2nd Air Regiment was located. Here 60 He-111 bombers from the 4th Bomber Wing dropped forty-eight tons of bombs on the airfield, which was then attacked by 30 Stukas, followed by 100 Do-17s, which came in at treetop level. The air base was completely smashed. However, only a few Polish airplanes were destroyed, and most of these were second-line trainers or inoperable aircraft that had been unable to move into the interior.

While 2nd Air Division flew these missions, Baron von Richthofen’s Special Purposes Air Command was providing close air support for the Tenth Army. Due to the closeness of their tactical airfields to the front lines, Richt -hofen’s three dive-bomber groups and one ground attack group (352 aircraft) were able to fly multiple missions in direct support of the ground units. In all, the Fliegerfuehrer z.b.V. flew thirteen group-sized missions and delivered 139 tons of bombs on targets assigned by Luftwaffe liaison officers attached to the army. Polish troop concentrations and marching columns were attacked repeatedly. Near Wielun, thirty Stukas caught a Polish cavalry brigade in the open. At Udet’s suggestion, sirens had been attached to the fixed landing gear of the Stukas. When they dived, these sirens (dubbed “the trumpets of Jericho”) emitted a high-pitched scream. Coming in at an angle of 80 degrees, they released 550-pound bombs and fired their two 7.92mm Rheinmetall machine guns into the helpless cavalry formations. The results, General Speidel wrote later,

were highly satisfactory and led to the complete disorganization of the Polish ground forces thus attacked. Entire Polish units disinte-grated, the troops fleeing in wild disorder from the burning settlements, only to come under repeated air attack in their wild eastward flight. The impressions of the first day of combat thus revealed clearly that the new close support air arm had supported the army’s advance decisively and in numerous cases had made the advance possible at all.
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Richthofen’s division only lost one aircraft that whole day. Sixteen others were damaged by Polish defensive fire. Fourteen undamaged Me-110s had to make forced landings because of faulty navigation—they simply got lost on their first combat missions and could not find their way back to base.

About noon the weather broke over northern Poland and the 1st Air Fleet got into the battle in strength during the afternoon. Kesselring committed seven groups from Luftwaffe Command East Prussia and thirteen from 1st Air Division—twenty groups in all. They attacked Polish ground service installations, ammunition depots, railroad facilities, trains, and troop concentrations. Five Stuka groups dive-bombed Polish shipping and attacked the Polish Baltic Sea ports and naval bases on Cape Hela, in support of the German Navy. Polish airfields at Graudenz, Thorn, Bromberg, Gnesen, Posen, Putzig, Lida, Warsaw-Okecie, Warsaw-Molotov, Goclav, Polck, Biala, and Brest were attacked, some of them twice. Several presumed Polish headquarters were bombed and strafed. The major ammunition depot at Rembertov was blown up, and Polish radio stations at Babice and Lacy were destroyed at the request of Army Group North, which intercepted coded messages from them. After these stations were neutralized, there was a noticeable interruption in transmissions from the Polish High Command.
¹⁴

The only serious resistance offered by the Polish air force came when ninety He-111s from 1st Air Fleet attacked the Okecie airfield near Warsaw and the nearby PZL airframe works. They were met by about thirty P.11 fighters at point-blank range. Some of the German bomber pilots were so unnerved that they broke formation and jettisoned their bombs over the countryside. Fortunately for the Heinkels, the escorting Me-110s promptly joined the battle. Firing their two 20mm cannon and four machine guns, they shot down five of the Polish fighters in a matter of minutes. It was the first air-to-air combat of the war.
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Kesselring later estimated that only thirty Polish airplanes were destroyed on the ground in the first day of the campaign. Because of the failure of the Polish air forces to form a coherent defense, only 44 percent of the air fleet’s combat missions were flown against it, while 56 percent of the missions were flown in support of the German Army and Navy.
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With their decentralized organizational policy and their failure to appreciate the need for effective air signal communications, the Polish air units had virtually taken themselves out of the battle before it even began. Elements of the Polish air forces continued to offer sporadic resistance until September 14–17, when they crossed the frontiers into Lithuania, Russia, and Rumania. They never played a significant role in the campaign.

By the afternoon of September 2, the General Staffs of the 1st and 4th Air Fleets had concluded that the Polish air forces had been only partially neutralized but were nevertheless thoroughly paralyzed. In fact, Kesselring’s chief of staff noted, they were not even able to
find
the Polish air force. From that point on, operational sorties in direct and indirect support of ground forces were given the highest priority. Indirect support missions involved disrupting Polish mobilization by attacking the Polish railroad system. This interdiction was soon applied to the highway system as well. Several Polish units found themselves unable to reach the front; others were unable to advance or retreat. The Polish armies lost much of their already limited mobility. At the front, Polish troop concentrations and defensive positions were subjected to repeated aerial bombardment before they were attacked by the army. Supply lines were also pulverized. Resupply could only take place at night, when it was possible at all.

Meanwhile, aided by its air umbrella, the German Army surged forward. On September 3 the third and fourth armies linked up, cutting off much of the Polish Pomorze army in the Polish Corridor, which had until then separated East Prussia from Pomerania and the rest of the Reich. To the south, Reichenau’s Tenth Army crossed the Warta and advanced on Warsaw, while List’s Fourteenth Army fought its way through the Polish Carpathians and advanced to the Vistula. The Luftwaffe assigned their dive-bomber and bomb -er missions to smaller and smaller units, down to flight level, to give better support to the army. Fighter and twin-engine fighter units, no longer needed as bomber escorts, were also assigned low-level ground support missions.

After the cutting of the corridor, air combat units were gradually transferred from the 1st Air Fleet to the 4th Air Fleet, which was supporting the main drive on Warsaw. The first transfer took place on September 6, when the 26th Stuka Wing was assigned to Loehr and another Stuka group was sent to Richthofen. The next day, Headquarters, 1st Air Division, was assigned to 4th Air Fleet, and 1st Air Fleet was gradually phased out of the battle. After Britain and France declared war on September 3, Goering became increasingly anxious about the safety of western Germany, where the Ruhr industrial region lay vulnerable to enemy air attack. We know now that he need not have worried, but, given the information available to him at the time, his concerns were certainly justifiable. As a result, combat aviation units were transferred to the zone of the interior as early as September 12, much to the disgust of General von Richthofen. Meanwhile, the land battle reached its climax. Kuechler’s Third Army pushed southward from East Prussia to invest Warsaw from the north, while Reichenau encircled and destroyed five Polish infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade (the bulk of the Krakow army) at Radom. Polish Galicia was quickly overrun and Gen. Heinz Guderian’s XIX Motorized Corps of Army Group North poured into northeastern Poland and into the Polish rear. The Polish government fled to Lvov, while Polish resistance everywhere began to deteriorate. On September 10 the Poznan army, heroically led by Gen. Tadeusz Kutrzeba, launched a surprise attack against the weak German eighth Army, which was covering the left flank of the main drive. This attack caused the German High Command some bad moments and the 30th Infantry Division was almost overrun. The German ground commanders reacted quickly, however, and reinforced General Blaskowitz to a strength of six corps. With these new units he was able to quickly encircle Kutrzeba, trapping elements of twelve Polish infantry divisions and three cavalry brigades in the Kutno Pocket—a full one-third of the entire Polish land force.
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About 150,000 Polish soldiers surrendered. General Kutrzeba later remarked that “every movement, every troop concentration, every line of advance came under pulverizing bombardment from the air. It was just hell on earth.
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Meanwhile, Richthofen pushed his Special Purposes Air Command to the limit of its ability and succeeded brilliantly. He was assigned the mission of supporting the Eighth Army at Kutno and played a major role in breaking the back of the Polish attack. Gradually reinforced (see Table
6
), he was in charge of the bulk of the Luftwaffe’s forces still in combat in Poland after the Kutno Pocket collapsed on September 17. Then he was given the mission of subduing the most important remaining center of Polish resistance: the city of Warsaw.