Army "Poznan" ( Polish Armia Poznań ) - the army of the Polish Army , formed in the spring of 1939 and participated in the defense of Poland against the troops of the Third Reich in September 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II .
Content
Creation History
On March 15, 1939, units of the Wehrmacht entered Prague , completing the partition of Czechoslovakia, and on March 23 they occupied the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda . Two days earlier in Berlin, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop demanded that the Polish ambassador Josef Lipsky give a final answer to Germany’s demands for the accession of Danzig and the construction of an extraterritorial motorway through the Polish Corridor .
Under these conditions, on March 23, 1939, a hidden mobilization deployment of Polish troops began on the basis of the mobilization plan "W" from April 1938. One of the created associations was the army of Poznan, the commander of which was appointed division general Tadeusz Kutsheba .
The army was intended to fill the gap between the armies "Lodz" (in the south) and "Pomorie" (in the north) and the cover of Greater Poland .
Battle
The composition of the army "Poznan" included the following units and formations:
- 14th Infantry Division
- 17th Infantry Division
- 25th Infantry Division
- 26th Infantry Division
- Greater Poland Cavalry Brigade
- Podolsk cavalry brigade
Battle Path
In the early days of the war, the Germans did not take active military action against the Poznan army. They hoped to encircle Polish troops west of the Vistula , and the Poznan army found itself in the very future bag. In the meantime, the Pomog army , located north in the Danzig Corridor , was cut into two parts by a German strike. The troops of its northern group were surrounded, and the south - defended north of Bydgoszcz . The commander of the Pomozhn army, General Bortnovsky decided to take her remains to the south, and he went to Torun , where he met with the commander of the Poznan army, division general Tadeusz Kutzheba . After conferring, the generals decided that the surviving units of the Pomozha army would retreat beyond the Wisla to Torun .
On September 5, the High Command of the Polish Army decided on a general withdrawal for the Vistula. The armies Poznan and Pomozha were ordered to withdraw to Warsaw . Pursuing them, the 3rd Army Corps of the German 4th Army moved forward. The fact that his army did not enter the battle during the entire first week of the war put pressure on General Kutsheba, and he decided not only to withdraw his army’s formations to the capital, avoiding the enemy, but primarily to strike at the German 8th army , which through Lodz reached the Bzura River. Kutsheba partly decided to strike at Strykov from the Kutno region, break up the left-flank formations of the German 8th army and thereby ensure the further withdrawal of the Poznan and Pomozhn armies to Warsaw.
The battle of Bzur began on the night of September 9th . The flank strike of the Polish troops was an absolute surprise to the German command. Parts of the Wehrmacht were driven back several kilometers south of the Bzura River. In the next two days, Polish troops advanced 35 km south of Bzura, threatening the rear of German troops moving to Warsaw. Overestimating the successes of the Poznan army, the High Command of the Polish Army set a new task: instead of retreating to Warsaw, retreat to Radom and Krasnik . However, on September 11, it reversed this decision and again ordered the armies Poznan and Pomozhn to withdraw to Warsaw.
Although the battle on Bzur caused confusion in the German headquarters, these events also caused relief, since the Polish units connected by the fighting could not go east. On September 12, General Kutsheba , the commander of the Poznan army, found out that the Lodz army had already retreated to the northeast, and therefore ordered to stop the attacks and withdraw its troops for Bzura. On September 14, German units reached the lower course of Bzura. Not occupied by them was only a small area at the confluence of Bzura in the Vistula. Through it, separate groups of Polish troops succeeded in breaking into the east in the following days and joining the defenders of Warsaw. On September 17, the German 8th Army occupied Kutno . On September 19, the Germans broke through the Polish defense, dividing the encircled group into several parts. On September 19, the organized resistance of the Polish forces was broken, and on September 21 the last opposing groups capitulated.
Sources
- M.Meltiukhov “Soviet-Polish wars. Military-political confrontation. 1918-1939. ”- Moscow: Veche, 2001. ISBN 5-7838-0951-9