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On Sept. 6, Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, the supposed strongman who had insisted on Poland's forward strategy, evacuated his military headquarters from Warsaw and kept retreating until he crossed into Rumania. After Sept. 16, no further general orders went out from either the marshal or his headquarters. Local units maintaining pockets of resistance throughout Poland -- about 250,000 men in all -- were simply left on their own, to fight on as best they could.
On Sept. 17 came the final step in the disaster: the Soviet army invaded eastern Poland and proceeded to grab whatever had not yet been grabbed by the Germans. Actually, this had all been preordained in several secret protocols of the previous month's Nazi-Soviet treaty. Only the date of the Soviet invasion had been left uncertain. Stalin had a little difficulty in thinking up an excuse to attack, but he finally declared that he was acting "to restore peace and order in Poland, which has been destroyed by the disintegration of the Polish State."
So it was all over, except for the fact that besieged Warsaw still stood unconquered. German panzers and infantry had surrounded the capital since Sept. 14, but every time they tried to smash into it, they were blocked by overturned trolley cars, heaps of rubble, sniper fire, homemade gasoline bombs. Luftwaffe bombers swept over the city almost continually. Civilian casualties numbered in the thousands, many of them buried inside collapsed buildings. Food and medicine began to run out. "Everywhere corpses," one survivor later recalled, "wounded humans, killed horses." As soon as a horse fell, said another, "people cut off pieces of flesh, leaving only a skeleton." Throughout the battle, Warsaw Radio broadcast a Chopin polonaise over and over, showing that the surrounded city was still fighting.
A German officer entered Warsaw under a flag of truce on Sept. 16 and delivered an ultimatum: surrender in 24 hours or artillery would begin shelling the entire city. The Polish commandant refused to receive the message. German planes dropped leaflets with the same warning. Then the shelling came.
"One of the first great fires, which later raged throughout all Warsaw, was in the Jewish quarter," cabled photographer Julien Bryan, who worked for Time Inc. and the Chicago Daily News, the only American correspondent in the city. "I saw able-bodied men working in pitiful bucket brigades along with stooped, old, long-bearded men in long black coats and skullcaps. Apartment houses whose sides had been ripped out earlier in the day were now ravaged by flames. An old woman stood in front of the ruins of her home, a teakettle steaming on her stove but fire coming from the burning building. There was a skeleton on an iron bedstead nearby. She was dazed and poking in the hot ashes. Nearby a little boy was playing with a football -- all he had saved. The bodies of 14 horses were smoking and smelling in the street. Twenty feet from them were the bodies of ten people who had sought refuge in a dugout -- a direct hit."