Romanian Bridgehead

• 1. Introduction

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  The Romanian Bridgehead was a strip of southeastern Poland that Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly hoped might save his country in the autumn of 1939. On the 14th of September, with German forces pressing in from the west, Rydz-Smigly issued an order: the roughly twenty divisions still capable of coordinated action were to pull back toward Lwow and then deeper south, to the hills along the borders with Romania and the Soviet Union. The plan was not improvised in panic. It had been drawn up in advance as a fallback option for exactly this kind of extremity. What no one could fully plan for was the second invasion that would arrive three days later, from the east.

• 2. The Plan Itself

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  Rydz-Smigly's calculation rested on geography. The hills, valleys, swamps, and the rivers Stryj and Dniester formed what he judged to be natural defensive lines against the German advance. Equally important was logistics. The area contained ammunition dumps that had been prepared for a third wave of Polish troops, and it was connected by transport to the Romanian port of Constanta. Through Constanta, Allied merchant ships could theoretically resupply the Polish forces indefinitely. The plan assumed the French would open a meaningful offensive on the Western Front, giving the Poles time to dig in through winter. That assumption would prove fatal.

• 3. Poland and Romania

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  Poland and Romania had been formally allied since 1921, and the defensive pact between them was still in force in 1939. Yet Poland never invoked it. The reasoning was deliberate: Warsaw calculated that a neutral Romania, with its port at Constanta open to Allied shipping, was worth more than an activated ally dragged into war. Most of the Polish Navy and merchant marine had already been evacuated before the 1st of September under what was called the Peking Plan. Those vessels would operate from French and British ports and eventually route supplies back through Romania. Keeping Romania out of the fighting was the price of keeping that corridor open.

• 4. The Soviet Blow

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  In the early hours of the 17th of September, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, acting under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had divided Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The invasion violated a non-aggression pact the Soviets held with Poland. That same night, the Polish government and members of the military high command crossed the border into Romania, intending to reach France and reconstitute the Polish Armed Forces in the West. Rydz-Smigly issued a new order: all units were to withdraw to Romania and Hungary. But communications had already broken down, and only smaller units managed to cross outside the main engagements.

• 5. The Fight to Reach the Bridgehead

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  Units of the Krakow Army fought at the Battle of Tomaszow Lubelski in an attempt to punch a corridor southward toward the bridgehead. Some forces under Kazimierz Sosnkowski evaded German capture and kept fighting in Lwow; others were stopped and taken by Soviet armored units. It was this two-front pressure, German from the west and Soviet from the east, that finally closed off the escape route. The Polish defeat at the Battle of Lwow, brought about by the combined German and Soviet assault, broke the last coordinated effort to clear a path south. Scattered units continued to probe and harass, slowing the Germans with diversionary skirmishes, and many small groups of soldiers slipped across the border under cover of darkness.

• 6. What Crossed the Border

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  As many as 120,000 Polish troops made it through the Romanian Bridgehead area into neutral Romania and Hungary. During 1939 and 1940, most of those men joined the newly formed Polish Armed Forces in the West, fighting in France and the United Kingdom. Before Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union and before the United States entered the war, the Polish Army was one of the largest Allied forces then in the field. The Romanian government also received something else that September: the treasury of the National Bank of Poland. Part of it, 1,261 crates holding 82,403 kilograms of gold, was loaded onto a commercial ship at Constanta and escorted by Romanian Navy vessels through the Black Sea to Western Europe, specifically to prevent interception by Soviet submarines. The second portion of that treasury, deposited in the National Bank of Romania, was not returned to Poland until the 17th of September 1947.