The Warsaw Uprising: 1 August - 2 October 1944 (Major Battles of World War Two) Read online

  THE WARSAW UPRISING

  1 August — 2 October 1944

  GEORGE BRUCE

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter One: September disaster, 1939

  Chapter Two: Birth of the Secret Army

  Chapter Three: Plans for an Armed Rising

  Chapter Four: Two tragedies — the Ghetto and Katyn

  Chapter Five: Stalin shows his hand

  Chapter Six: Tempest fails

  Chapter Seven: The bells toll for Warsaw

  Chapter Eight: Soviet defeat in the suburbs

  Chapter Nine: The Uprising flares

  Chapter Ten: First Days

  Chapter Eleven: The Germans counter-attack

  Chapter Twelve: The battle in the cemeteries

  Chapter Thirteen: Stalin changes his mind

  Chapter Fourteen: Battle in the Old Town

  Chapter Fifteen: Retreat through the sewers

  Chapter Sixteen: Defeat, surrender and destruction

  Bibliography

  A Note to the Reader

  Foreword

  The purpose of this book is to present the story of the Warsaw Uprising of 1 August 1944, and also to give some idea of the policies and of the people responsible for the events which made a heap of rubble out of one of Europe’s finest cities, and killed some 250,000 people.

  In Britain, the Uprising has become little more than a memory. This is to be regretted. The Warsaw Uprising not only presents a drama of unexampled heroism, ending in appalling tragedy, but also provides us with the first example of full-scale urban guerrilla warfare.

  I have tried to be impartial, yet I have to admit that this is a book of some bias. Deeds of savage cruelty culminating in a massacre of some 40,000 civilians were committed by the Nazis. It is impossible to be impartial about such things, though one can be objective.

  In order to reveal how the Uprising was launched it has been necessary to cover in some detail the growth, training and development of the Secret Army as well as the motives which inspired it. And for this I have turned to the official documents of the war-time Polish Government-in-exile.

  I acknowledge that chapters 2-8 of my book are based in part on Dr Jan Ciechanowski’s University of London doctoral thesis The Political and Ideological Background of the Warsaw Uprising 1944, since published by the Cambridge University Press under the title The Warsaw Rising of 1944. Apart from the documents which had already been published in Documents of Polish-Soviet Relations, most of the Polish documents quoted in my chapters 2-8 were originally selected and translated by Dr Ciechanowski. I also acknowledge the help of Polish books about the Uprising by Colonel Adam Borkiewicz, Mr Jerzy Kirchmayer, Mr Zenon Kliszko and Mr Alexander Skarzincki.

  I am indebted to a number of people who have helped me in various ways; more especially to Mr Adam Zamoyski for translations; to Mrs Czamocka, archivist of the Polish Underground Study Trust, and to Mrs Oppmann, archivist of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, for help and guidance; to Colonel Iranek-Osmecki in London, Colonel Stanislaw Komomicki, Captain Tomaszewski, Mr Alexander Skarzinski and Mr Wladislaw Bartelski in Warsaw for interviews and personal statements; to Mr Andrzej Broniarek and Mrs Anna Broniarek of the Polish Interpress Agency, for facilitating my researches in Warsaw; and to Mr Pawel Cieslar, Mr Josef Garlinski and Mr Jerzy Kedzierski.

  I and my publishers also wish to thank the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum for permission to use extracts from History of the Polish Armed Forces and Documents on Polish Soviet Relations, Vols I and II. Finally, I wish to thank the staff of the Polish Library for kindness and help, as well as the staffs of the London Library and the Ministry of Defence (Central and Army) Library.

  Chapter One: September disaster, 1939

  Thursday, 31 August 1939, was still another day of brilliant sunshine and blue cloudless skies in Warsaw’s hot dry summer. The Vistula river, winding like a ribbon of bronze round the eastern suburbs, had fallen to barely five hundred instead of the normal six hundred yards wide. A pattern of white sails tacked back and forth in the fitful breeze over the rippling surface. The Poniatowski Bridge and its neighbour to the left, the Kierbedz Bridge, were clogged with traffic. The harvest was in, and horses and carts from the country jostled for place with heavy army lorries from which the red faces of young peasant troops peered wistfully.

  Over the parched grass of the Royal Park a few soldiers still on leave walked arm-in-arm with girls, or watched the fat carp in the fish-ponds stir sluggishly beneath white and rose-coloured drifts of fallen petals. To the south of the city, in the Lazienki Park, mothers and children promenaded sedately around the lake and through the woodland to the Botanical Gardens.

  At a first glance everything seemed normal, a typical, lazy day in a season rich with summer’s pleasure, except for the absence of Warsaw’s usual gaiety, the lack of young men among the holiday strollers, so that it looked for the moment a city of middle-aged and old men and women. And the bells, deep and low, or thin and high, of Warsaw’s innumerable churches pealed a little urgently, a chorus of anxiety or warning.

  Poland was near the abyss. Radios in the crowded cafés blared out the news that the Polish delegation had arrived in Berlin for final talks with Hitler, but only the simplest people believed that he intended to negotiate. From the officers of the General Staff in the austere and historic War Ministry building in Saxon Square to the correspondents of the international press in the Hotel Bristol bar, all knew by now that Hitler had massed his new tank armies along Poland’s borders. The really well-informed hoped that Britain and France would honour quickly their pledges to aid Poland if Germany attacked.

  A smoky red sunset ended the last day of the old era in Polish history.

  Hitler invaded at dawn on 1 September 1939 with fifty-eight divisions, fourteen of them armoured or motorized, supported by 1,400 fighters, dive-bombers and bombers. Poland, in contrast, put into the field barely thirty divisions, mostly cavalry and infantry, with just one motorized brigade. The Government had delayed full mobilization at the request of Neville Chamberlain’s Government in London, which up to the last moment had tried to appease Hitler.

  Poland now became the first nation to experience the new type of swift mechanized attack called blitzkrieg, or lightning war, in which an entire country could become a battlefield. All the tactics which Germany would use in 1940 to break through in the west she now rehearsed. Nazi parachutists in Polish uniform blew up bridges, railways and telegraph lines to prevent unified command from the outset. Fifth-columnists, the so-called Volkdeutsche, or Germans with Polish nationality, spread panic among civilians so as to choke the roads with refugees. Low-flying aircraft strafed them there and in the villages. Hitler waged war against the entire Polish people.

  During the first two days the Luftwaffe destroyed almost the whole Polish air force of nine hundred aircraft, large numbers of them on the tarmac, where they were grounded for lack of petrol. Against great numerical and mechanized superiority many of the Polish divisions, everywhere fighting with great courage and determination, retreated eastwards to a line formed by the rivers Vistula and Narew. The country to the west was quickly overrun, with large masses of troops encircled and destroyed.

  German mechanized strength was certainly decisive. But still another factor in defeat were the unrealistic strategic ideas of Poland’s General Staff, stemming from a foreign policy which had seen Soviet Russia as the real enemy and Germany as a possible ally. Clearly, the Polish General Staff had not, until it was to
o late, planned for a war in which the country fought alone against an enemy three or four times stronger. And this unrealistic thinking led straight to catastrophe. Polish strategy stemmed from the belief that she would be fighting alongside an ally powerful enough to give her decisive superiority over the enemy. And the anti-Sovietism of her pre-war military dictatorship showed that the ally was certainly not Russia. General Romer, the Polish Chief of Staff, summarized his views of Poland’s strategy thus:

  Our general strategic situation at the beginning of the war will be favourable, and therefore from the very beginning of hostilities we must prosecute the war as actively and rapidly as possible in order to bring it to a victorious conclusion as quickly as possible. At the beginning of the war we and our enemies will be operating in enormous areas with poor transport facilities (i.e. in the USSR). Our principles must be taken from the lessons of the Napoleonic Wars, from the first battles of the World War (particularly on the Eastern Front), and from the last Russo-Polish War. Our salvation lies in a war of movement.

  And upon these impracticable ideas Poland’s military strategy, tactics and training were founded. These were for an offensive based on manoeuvre by infantry and cavalry but without modern weapons and weak in fire power. When the enemy proved to be Nazi Germany, this unrealistic strategy was hurriedly replaced by defensive tactics, with almost no defences prepared, aimed at holding back the Nazis until Britain and France could mount an effective attack in the west.

  But the Nazi tactics of blitzkrieg and total war quickly overwhelmed Poland. The President of the Polish Republic, Ignace Moscicki, the members of the Government and the Commander-in-Chief fled the capital on 5 September for a small town in the south-east near the Rumanian frontier. Warsaw, the departing Government proclaimed, should be declared an open city and be surrendered without a shot.

  Thousands of lives and irreplaceable works of art might well have been saved had this policy been followed. It was perhaps the prudent and sensible decision, but such an ignoble acceptance of alien domination was foreign to the Polish character, hardened as it had been by 150 years’ struggle for national survival against predatory neighbours. Besides, British and French armies, people still hoped, would soon launch a decisive attack in the west, overrun Germany and save Poland at the eleventh hour. So the citizens of Warsaw, led by the para-military organization of the Polish Socialist Party, decided to resist.

  Two days later, on 7 September, armoured spearheads of General von Reichenau’s German 10th Army, having advanced 140 miles in a week, crashed into Warsaw’s southern suburbs. While they pounded the city with heavy artillery and while the Luftwaffe smashed it from the air, leading politicians of the three main prewar Opposition parties[1] banded together with civic leaders to set up a Defence of Warsaw Committee. In the absence of the Government it was headed by the Lord Mayor, Stefan Starzynski. It included Mathew Rataj, of the Peasant Party, M. Niedzialkowski, of the Socialist Party and General Michal Tokarzewski, military representative.

  The Socialist Party, and the Jewish socialist organization, the Bund, then issued manifestoes calling on their members who belonged to the military reserve to rally in defence of the city. The Socialists took the lead, mainly because they were strong in the capital. For four days, while the Nazis hammered it with bombs and shells, recruiting went on. Thousands volunteered but the military commission accepted only trained men, either from the reserve, or from their own para-military organizations. The rest, whose lives they had no wish to throw away, were put to work digging trenches, tank traps, erecting barricades, laying anti-tank mines.

  The citizen soldiers were mostly factory and transport workers, students, shop assistants, reinforced by a few hundred regular soldiers who had escaped to the city after the dispersal or surrender of their units. By 11 September the Germans had surrounded the city and were attacking with tanks and infantry as well as artillery. They penetrated the western suburbs, but the volunteer battalions repulsed them, mainly by the deft use of petrol bombs. ‘I was one of 460 men, fully equipped,’ recalled a member of one of these battalions.

  Half an hour after the heaviest raid on Warsaw, in which Smocza, Elektoralna and other neighbouring streets were completely destroyed, I took the oath of allegiance — an oath of loyalty and fidelity to Poland, but with no mention of the President or the Government. After the ceremony the battalion set out for Praga and took over the defence of the sector Zacisze-Elsnerowo. We remained in this sector until the capitulation. The battalion fought well, and even occupied the enemy’s positions for a brief while. Fighting started every evening about 6 PM with our attack, and lasted till dawn. During daylight German planes bombed our positions three or four times a day and destroyed trenches and munitions stores. Many of our number fell, many more were wounded. Those who were only slightly injured returned to their posts as soon as they had received first aid.[2]

  But the defence was foredoomed, for courage and devotion could not outweigh the lack of aircraft, anti-tank guns, water, food and medical supplies. Day and night the city was swept by artillery fire and smashed by bombs from aircraft which dived to a mere two or three hundred feet above the roofs. Warsaw finally surrendered on 1 October, when it was almost without food or water and thousands lay dead or dying. Volunteers’ legion documents were burnt to keep them out of Nazi hands.

  Meantime, three historic events had sealed the country’s fate. The remnants of the Polish army, encircled by the Germans, surrendered by the end of September. Thousands were taken prisoner, but thousands more escaped to France. Secondly, on 17 September, Soviet Russia, with troops and political commissars, had invaded the large areas of undefended eastern Poland assigned to it under the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Thirdly, believing there was no hope now that these two military giants had between them torn the country apart, President Moscicki, the Government and the Commander-in-Chief crossed the frontier into Rumania, Poland’s ally, at the end of September. There, further disaster awaited them. Contrary to the treaty between the two countries they were interned, because of Rumania’s fear of Nazi or Soviet intervention.

  The Polish people had fought for the cause of freedom and had resisted tyranny. They were now prostrate.

  The Nazi terror regime began. Through the battle-scarred city German soldiers in fine uniforms goose-stepped in long grey columns. Cobbled streets trembled beneath the steel tracks of hundreds of tanks, Luftwaffe squadrons roared overhead. The hereditary enemies of the Germans, the Poles, were utterly defenceless, watching fearfully, or praying in those of their churches that had not been blown to pieces.

  They soon learned the fate of their country. It was to be erased from the map of Europe, just as completely as it had been in the third and last partition by Russia, Austria and Prussia in 1795. Having occupied western and central Poland up to the line of the Bug river, Hitler incorporated the northern industrial province of Silesia and the north-western half of Poland into the German Reich. And of the remainder he created a German colony, called the General-Government, its capital being Cracow, although it included Warsaw. Nazi Germany then had a total of 21,200,000 Polish citizens in its iron grip.

  The nation which gave birth to Copernicus and to Chopin was now to become a community of slave-labourers for Adolf Hitler. The regions incorporated into the Reich were to be totally Germanized by wholesale seizure of farms, houses, factories and the mass deportation of residents. Hundreds of thousands of peasant families were uprooted from their homes, their work, their land and bundled off to unknown places miles away in the General-Government.

  Soon after dawn, convoys of lorries and armed SS men drove into the villages. All the exits and entrances, including the smallest field paths were guarded, with machine-guns trained on the village. SS detachments ran from homestead to homestead, shouting ‘Heraus!’, beating on doors with rifle-butts, driving the inhabitants into the roads while their houses were looted down to the smallest trinket.

  The SS men then drove the peasants — men, women and childre
n — with kicks, fists and rifle-butts into lorries. Those who resisted were shot dead. In the villages of Sola and Jelesnia a number of women were shot when they tried to run away among farm buildings. Eventually the lorries carried their human cargo off to assembly points where, usually in the open fields, in rain, frost or snow, they were kept for as long as three or four days until a train load was ready. The journey, in unheated cattle trucks, lasted from three to fourteen days in the bitter cold of the Polish winter.

  The survivors, once thriving peasant farmers, arrived at their unknown destination with nothing more than a small bundle. German farm workers were moved into their homes without delay. Mass expulsion emptied the cities of western Poland also. Poznan, the capital, with 270,000 inhabitants and a history of flourishing cultural, commercial and political life, was stripped of its inhabitants street by street. The citizens were first ordered to clean their homes from top to bottom and leave a supply of necessities, together with all kitchen utensils, bed linen and furniture for the incoming Germans. Marched or driven off to rendezvous points, they were kept there until they could be removed either to labour camps or somewhere in the central General-Government.

  For this region, Hitler had decreed, was to become a reservoir of cheap labour and of Nazi military requirements. Its parliamentary institutions were suppressed, its political parties dissolved. Its universities were closed and their contents looted or destroyed. Museums, libraries and art collections were removed to Germany. All schools except a small number of elementary ones were shut down. A Nazi administration was clamped on the people and the Polish legal system gave way to the German Criminal Code, with death penalties for trivial offences against Nazidom. A starvation diet and a policy of genocide was to be the fate of Poland’s citizens.

  Warsaw especially was to suffer Nazi savagery. The first great European city to make a determined stand against Hitler’s armies, it had paid heavily for this in terms of loss of life and destruction of beautiful paintings, sculptures and buildings. The Nazis saw Warsaw as a focus of resistance. ‘We have in this country one point from which all evil derives: namely Warsaw,’ exclaimed the Governor-General of Poland, Hans Frank[3] in a speech to Luftwaffe officers on 14 December 1943. ‘Were there no Warsaw in the General-Government, we would be spared four-fifths of all the trouble we have to contend with. Warsaw is and will remain the focal point of disturbance from which restlessness is being spread all over the country.’