Józef Unrug (; 7 October 1884 – 28 February 1973) was a German-born Polish admiral who served as a submarine commander in the Imperial German Navy in World War I and helped create Poland's navy after the independence of Poland. During the opening stages of World War II, he served as the Polish Navy's commander-in-chief. As a German POW, he refused all German offers to change sides and was incarcerated in several Oflags, including Colditz Castle. He stayed in exile after the war in the United Kingdom, Morocco and France where he died and was buried. In September 2018 he was posthumously promoted in the rank of vice admiral by the President of Poland. After 45 years his remains, along with those of his wife Zofia, were exhumed from Montrésor and taken in October 2018 to his final resting place in Gdynia, Poland.
Naval officer Józef Michał Hubert Unrug was born in Brandenburg an der Havel into a noble family of Prussian and Polish descent. He was the son of Thaddäus Gustav von Unruh, a Generalmajor in the Prussian Army. His aristocratic family was extremely wealthy and he grew up as very much a member of the elite.
After graduating from the gymnasium in Dresden, Unrug completed naval college in 1907 and began his service in the Imperial German Navy. The major intellectual influence on the Imperial German Navy from the 1890s onward was the 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power upon History by the American historian Alfred Thayer Mahan. German emperor Wilhelm II had read it and enthusiastically embraced the book's message that whichever nation had the most powerful "blue water navy" would dominate all of the world's oceans and would always be the world's greatest power. Starting in 1898, the German Navy was transformed from a "green water navy" meant to operate in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea into a "blue water navy" meant to dominate all of the world's seas. Mahan's theories about sea power and world power remained the dominant intellectual basis of all German naval thinking right up to 1945, and The Influence of Sea Power Upon History became the "Bible" of the German navy. In common with all other German naval officers, Unrug had to read Mahan's book as part of his officer's education.
Unrug was a romantic who was disenchanted with modern Germany and came to see in the Poles the sort of romanticism and passion that he found missing in Germany. Unrug grew up speaking German, but he was of partially Polish descent on his father's side.
During World War I, he commanded a U-boat, and was promoted to command the training-submarine half-flotilla. In 1914, he was a lieutenant commander in the Imperial German Navy in command of a submarine, but he was distrusted by the senior command and was assigned to training duties in the Baltic instead of a combat command. The Polish historian Władysław Szarski described Unrug as an aloof man who few knew well, but was very "serious" about his duties and was "extremely just and principled".
Career In 1919, after Poland regained independence, Unrug left Germany and volunteered for the Polish Armed Forces. Soon afterwards, he was transferred to the nascent Polish Navy, where he served as chief of the Hydrographic Division and then as commanding officer of a submarine flotilla. Out of his pocket, the wealthy Unrug purchased the hydrographic ship which became ORP Pomorzanin for the new navy. To establish the maritime frontiers of the newly reestablished Polish state required a ship to perform shipped surveys and to make maps. Unrug's purchase of the ship, which was needed urgently at the time, won him many allies in the Marynarka (Polish Navy).
One of the most skilled officers in the Polish Navy, Unrug was quickly promoted to Counter Admiral. In 1924, he came into conflict with Admiral Kazimierz Porębski and was put on a paid leave for a year. In 1925, Porębski had to resign in a scandal after he was discovered taking bribes. Overcoming his limitations in the Polish language, he became Commander of the Fleet of the Polish Navy in 1925. Unrug's task as commander of the Marynarka was largely to train officers for the nascent force. Unrug was respected, but not loved as he imposed a very strict discipline. The Marynarka in the interwar period tended to favor the Mahanian concept of a fleet strong enough to dominate the Baltic, which would allow ships from Poland's ally France to enter the Baltic and deliver supplies to Poland. However, the vast cost of buying warships caused successive governments in Warsaw to balk at the immense expenditure that this would entail and to reject the "green water navy" plans of the Marynarka. This was all the more so as the Franco-Polish alliance of 1921 committed France to automatically go to war if Poland were attacked. This would mean that Poland in a sense could "borrow" the services of the French Navy, which was expected to enter the Baltic to ensure that French supplies would reach Poland. In the late 1920s, the Sanation regime had decided to buy a force of 9 mine-laying submarines with the intention of protecting Poland's coastline. However, as Poland lacked sufficient funds to buy submarines, a loan from France was necessary, and the French made extending the loan conditional upon the Poles also buying two destroyers. In this way, the Marynarka acquired two destroyers despite the doubts of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, Poland's de facto leader, about the need for the two destroyers. The Marynarka ended up with the two French-built destroyers, ORP Wicher and the ORP Burza together with the French-built submarines Wilk, Żbik, and Ryś.
Unrug and Admiral Jerzy Świrski were often at odds with Marshal Piłsudski, who was opposed to what he called their "grandiose" plans for a vast Polish fleet. Unrug and Świrski wanted Poland to have at least a "green-water navy" that would dominate the Baltic and ultimately aimed for a "blue-water navy" capable of reaching out into the North Sea and the Atlantic. Despite Piłsudski's opposition to greater naval expenditure, after much lobbying by Unrug, the Marynarka acquired two French-built destroyers and three submarines between 1930 and 1932. Piłsudski himself favored a "brown-water navy" for Poland as he wanted the Marynarka to be equipped only with riverine gunboats and coastal patrol boats. A turn to navalism in Poland started in August 1930, when the German cabinet minister Gottfried Treviranus delivered a belligerent speech in Berlin advocating that Germany take all back all of the lands lost to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles by any means necessary, including war. In response, various civic groups in Poland started a public subscription campaign to raise enough money to buy a submarine to be named The Answer to Treviranus. By 1935, enough money had been raised to buy a submarine from a Dutch shipyard, which entered the Marynarka under the name Orzeł. The fund-raising effort to buy the submarine put navalism into the mainstream of Polish politics in the 1930s.
The Polish historian Jacek Lubecki noted that the "prodigious" increase in naval spending took place despite Piłsudski's doubts, which he attributed to the decay of the Sanation regime as Piłsudski's mental facilities declined. Piłsudski had created a very "personalistic" dictatorship with power concentrated into his hands, and with his mental decline the regime was plunged into "chaos", leading to a very haphazard and confusing decision-making process. This allowed Admiral Unrug to press successfully for greater naval spending over Piłsudski's doubts. Lubecki argued the money spent on the Marynarka was "squandered", as he contended that money spent on buying expensive destroyers and submarines would have been better spent on building up a motorized tank and anti-tank forces for the Army instead. A force of considerable assistance to the Marynarka was the Maritime and Colonial League, a society made up of people influenced by Mahan, who believed that building a "blue-water navy" would make Poland into a world power and allow it to acquire a colonial empire in Asia and Africa. Apart from advocating navalism, the Maritime and Colonial League was also supportive of the Sanation regime at a time when the Great Depression had damaged its popularity.
In 1932, Unrug and Commander Tadeusz Morgenstern-Podjazd were summoned to a meeting with Piłsudski and were ordered to send the destroyer ORP Wicher under command of Morgenstern-Podjazd into the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland). The cruise of the Wicher resulted in the Danzig crisis of 1932, the successful resolution of did much to raise the prestige of the Marynarka in Poland. In the aftermath of the Danzig crisis with the successful use of gunboat diplomacy, Piłsudski approved a six-year expansion plan for the navy, ordering two Grom-class destroyers and two Orzeł-class submarines. The principal problem with Polish defense spending was the far greater size of the German economy—for example, the total Polish defense spending in the five years 1934-1939 for the Army, Navy and Air Force combined amounted to just one-tenth of the Luftwaffe's budget for the year 1939. As such, no matter how much money was devoted to the Marynarka, the Kriegsmarine would always be the greater force, making the plans for a "green-water navy" capable of dominating the Baltic impractical. Despite the economical problems, in 1936 it was announced in Polish newspapers that the Marynarka was committed to a "maximum plan" of buying two battleships that would cost 70,000,000 zlotys each, plus two heavy cruisers. By 1938, Polish newspapers were reporting that the "maximum plan" now envisioned a fleet of 3 battleships, 1 aircraft carrier, 2 heavy cruisers, 12 destroyers, 24 torpedo boats, 24 submarines, 16 minesweepers and 1 mine-layer. The "maximum plan", which went well beyond Poland's economic capacity at the time, was a "fantasy", and in practice the Marynarka had to settle in 1938 for a construction plan of two destroyers, two submarines, four minesweepers and seven motor torpedo boats. Reflecting the economic problems caused by the Great Depression, the Sanation regime planned to raise part of the necessary funds to pay for the scaled down "maximum plan" via public subscription.
At the beginning of the Danzig crisis in May 1939, Unrug shifted the two naval rifle battalions assigned to defend Gdynia to building field works in the Polish Corridor. In the summer of 1939, Unrug was appointed commander of the Coastal Region Defense and relocated from Gdynia to the strategic Hel Peninsula. General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, the chief of the British military mission to Poland, believed that the disparity in size between the Kriegsmarine and the Marynarka made it advisable for the latter to have as much of its fleet out of the Baltic before a possible war started and to be based in British ports. This was the origin of "Operation Peking". Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły was initially opposed to Carton de Wiart's suggestion but ultimately decided to accept it. Rydz-Śmigły believed if the Danzig crisis led to a war, it would be possible for France and Britain to supply arms to Poland via Romania and as such control of the Baltic was not necessary. Rydz-Śmigły ordered Unrug to make the necessary preparations to move the Polish fleet out of the Baltic. On 26 August 1939, the day after the signing of the Anglo-Polish alliance, Unrug issued the captains of all of the Polish destroyers, except the Wicher which had engine problems, with sealed envelopes with orders not to open them until the message "Execute Peking" was received. On 29 August 1939, Unrug issued the order "execute Peking", which led the captains to open the envelopes containing the message to sail for Britain within three hours of opening the envelopes.
World War II