by George Bruce
It met with a sharp rebuke. The Russian General Gruczko gruffly warned Filipowski: ‘Lwow is Soviet and Ukrainian for the time being… A Polish Government led by Morawski exists and the Polish Army, commanded by Zymierski, is fighting against the Germans. Home Army units fighting the Germans will be absorbed into the Polish Army. The Polish administration… will be subordinated to the Soviet organs.’[82]
Next day, 28 July, he was again summoned to the Soviet headquarters. General Gruszko ordered him to instruct his men to lay down their arms within two hours and disband. ‘Soviet authorities here will proclaim general mobilization,’ Gruczko declared. ‘The Poles will have the choice of joining either Berling’s army or the Red Army. Home Army officers who are exempted from the mobilization order may retain their arms and voluntarily join Berling’s army.’[83]
Filipowski returned to his headquarters, ordered his troops to disband at once and informed Komorowski by radio. The Home Army commander replied with an order to all troops east of the Curzon Line receiving Soviet mobilization orders to enlist instead in Berling’s forces.[84]
Komorowski’s quixotic policy of trying to seize large towns in the disputed areas east of the Curzon Line before the advent of the Red Army had failed. Warsaw had now become his only hope. The failure to raise the White Eagle of old Poland in Volhynia, Wilno and Lwow had convinced him and his senior commanders that ‘an effort was needed which would stir the conscience of the world’. Only a successful uprising in Warsaw could do this. Towards it Komorowski and his staff during the second half of July 1944 were moving.
Chapter Seven: The bells toll for Warsaw
During the Warsaw winter of 1943-4 Nazi ferocity raged without check. State Security Police Chief Dr Ludwig Hahn conscientiously carried out the Hitlerian terror policy. Mass executions to terrorize the people had taken place almost daily in the streets from 16 October 1943 onwards. The death toll averaged 280 a week, some of the victims being Secret Army men and women, usually tortured before execution.
Nevertheless, people tried to lead as normal an existence as possible, though they never knew whether they would ever come home again if they ventured on to the streets, or whether they would be seized in one of the massive house-to-house searches were they to stay at home.
But from 15 January 1944, not long after the Soviet forces had entered Poland in pursuit of the Germans, Hahn ended mass street executions. The last occurred when forty men were taken from the Pawiak prison and shot outside 6 Senatorska Street, making the total for that day, 15 February, no less than 250.[85] A possible reason for the change was the underground’s reprisal killing of the German SS and Police Leader Kutschera. Mass executions were still to take place, but secretly, in Palmyra Forest and amid the grim ruins of the Ghetto. Bursts of firing echoed nightly across the capital. Some eight thousand four hundred Polish men, women and children were killed in Warsaw from October 1943 to 31 July 1944. ‘People like me, ordinary people, picked up off the streets,’ wrote the Polish poet Zofia Nalkowska then, in her journal. ‘There is fear, there is shame, racking the heart, sucking at the entrails… They are just the same as I when I walk down the street… It is sheer chance that they are not me, that they are not any of the ones who have escaped… Take me tidying a desk drawer where the papers have been soaked by the drips from the skylight.’
A beautiful and attractive city had become a giant and terrifying death-trap.
It was against this background of continuing Nazi killings that Komorowski and the Secret Army staff planned their moves in July to restore the old Poland after the political failure of the Tempest actions.
They feared both a spontaneous uprising, which could easily happen in this city where hatred had reached an inflammable point; and an uprising launched by the Communist Polish Workers’ Party.
But events began to overtake and push them into precipitate action in mid-1944, when serious military and political blows weakened the Germans. First came the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June, the breakout from the bridgehead of St Lô on 26 July; second, the renewed Soviet offensive in Poland on 18 July by Marshals Koniev and Rokossovsky from the line of the Bug river, which drove the Germans back pell-mell; third, the attempt by Colonel von Stauffenberg to kill Hitler on 20 July, and its effects on the higher echelons of the Nazi Party.
The Secret Army command still intended at this time that Warsaw should take as little part as possible in the fighting during the general uprising elsewhere in the country. The plan[86] was for a small but adequate number of troops, like a Home Guard, to protect the city’s population from last-moment Nazi atrocities. Main traffic arteries from east to west were to be left clear of obstacles, so that the retreating enemy forces would have uninterrupted movement westwards. But to satisfy the Polish wish for revenge and to do as much damage to the Germans as possible, a well-armed Secret Army force, about four thousand-strong, was secretly to leave the city when the front neared Warsaw, assemble some miles to the west and there launch a strong attack on the retreating and presumably demoralized Germans.
In the event, the consequences of this plan were serious for Warsaw. Throughout July, weapons made in the capital or dropped nearby by the RAF were transported at great risk by Secret Army helpers to the areas of eastern Poland where Tempest was under way. On 7 July Komorowski ordered 900 sub-machine-guns and ammunition, and during the last fourteen days of the month another sixty such weapons with 4,400 rounds were sent to the east.[87] It brought the weapon strength in the capital dangerously low in the event of any sudden outbreak of fighting.
Thus he had clearly no intention of ordering an uprising in the capital at least up to 21 July. But unknown to him the most influential members of his staff, General Pelczynski, Chief of Staff, General Okulicki, Chief of Operations and Colonel Szostak, Chief of the Bureau of Operations, during their daily meetings in the second half of July had privately debated the problem of whether or not an uprising should be launched there.[88] They agreed together that this had become necessary and that General Komorowski and Mr Jan Jankowski, Government Delegate and Deputy Premier, should be persuaded of the need for it.
On 21 July Generals Komorowski, Pelczynski and Okulicki, entering separately by password, as always, the home of a sympathizer where they had not met for several weeks, assessed the swiftly-changing military situation. Of the three only Leopold Okulicki had attended the Polish Military Staff College, and Pelczynski reputedly deferred to his opinion. Then aged forty-six, Okulicki was a somewhat impetuous, action-loving, hard professional soldier who had parachuted into Poland some months earlier from Britain as General Sosnkowski’s special representative on the Secret Army Staff. Unlike Komorowski, he was born of peasant stock, joined Marshal Pilsudski’s Legions at the age of sixteen, fought with distinction in the Polish-Russian War of 1920, became a regular soldier, and was soon commissioned. Okulicki, who had played a notable part in the defence of Warsaw in 1939, was one of the small original group of organizers of the Secret Army. He was arrested by the Russians in Lwow in 1941, spent eight months in a Soviet prison and was then released to help General Anders organize Polish forces there. He left Russia together with Anders and the Polish Army, with whom he fought in the Middle East.
Okulicki now submitted a proposal to his two fellow-generals at the 21 July meeting[89] that at the crucial moment of the expected German collapse they should launch the Secret Army in an uprising to take Warsaw and establish the independence of the Republic in its capital before the entry of the Soviets. Despite the shortage of arms there this did not seem to them too hazardous, if the right moment was chosen. Pelczynski was already won over. Komorowski, too, let himself he convinced by the ebullient, aggressive Okulicki.
For after the meeting on 21 July Komorowski sent to London a new optimistic appraisal of the up-to-date military situation in direct contrast to his sober report of 14 July. He forecast that the Soviet advance south of the Pripet Marshes would be rapid, would quickly arrive at the Vistula — which flowed t
hrough Warsaw — would cross it without effective German counter-actions and continue its westward drive.[90]
‘Generally, it seems certain that on the Eastern Front the Germans are in no position to regain the initiative from the Soviet army, or even to offer any effective resistance,’ he wrote. ‘In the last few weeks we have seen the growing disintegration within the German army, which is tired, and has no will to fight. This last attack on Hitler, together with the German military situation, could lead to their collapse at any moment. This imposes on us a constant readiness to rise.’
Already, on 19 July, Komorowski had ordered a twenty-four-hour stand-by for Secret Army forces throughout Poland. Now, he told London in this July message: ‘I have given the order for a state of readiness for rising on July 25 at 01.00 hours, but I have so far not stopped the current (Tempest) tactics.’
A momentous change of policy was concealed in this message. It meant that Warsaw, in which hitherto there was to be no fighting if it could be avoided, might now become a battleground within the framework of either the general uprising or Tempest. Commanders and their troops would now, from 25 July, be covertly standing by in readiness for the general uprising, avoiding German observation as best they could. But Komorowski had yet to convince Jan Jankowski and the leaders of the four political parties of the need for this plan.
The arguments for it, upon which the senior commanders of the Home Army agreed, were threefold, according to the History of the Polish Armed Forces,[91] semi-official post-war publication of the former London Polish Government: Militarily there seemed little doubt that unless the Germans brought in enormous reinforcements, which they did not possess, they could not hope to prevent the Soviet armies from crossing the Vistula in the very near future. Home Army Intelligence studies showed that Red Army offensives on the Eastern Front advanced by hundreds of kilometres at a time. The Soviet summer offensive from the Bug had a mere 500 kilometres to reach the Vistula and Warsaw, which suggested that it would cross the river and leave the capital far behind, securing an extensive slice of territory all along the western bank as a final launching pad for a decisive attack on Silesia, Pomerania and Berlin. A decision had therefore to be made about Warsaw.
The three generals believed that one of two situations would develop. Either the Germans would fail to organize an effective defence of Warsaw, abandoning it after the first Soviet attack. Or, in accord with their known policy of defending communications centres, especially those situated on rivers, they would try to hold it as an aid to holding east Prussia and southern Poland. To Okulicki especially, both of these alternatives indicated the need for an uprising. The first involved no problems, for the Home Army command believed it would be easy enough to seize the city before the advent of the Soviets. The second meant that a Nazi-Soviet battle would very likely take place, with ruinous effects upon the city; and the sole way, it was argued, of shortening this was by an uprising which would seize it and thus push the front out of the city. ‘The Home Army Command,’ says the History, ‘was well aware of the fact that the C-in-C in London and the western Allies were at this moment unable to help them substantially, but this did not have a direct bearing on the decision, for if all went well there should be no great immediate need for airborne help.’[92]
Their main motives for staging an uprising in the capital were political. They, and the London Polish Government, were determined to restore the old Poland, though some of them conceded that social and economic reform was desirable. Soviet Russia, on the other hand, was marching into Poland, they believed, ready to impose a social system that contravened the Republic’s independence and sovereignty. A battle for Warsaw by the Home Army to capture the capital would therefore echo throughout the world and expose Stalin’s policy of sovietizing Poland. This was additionally important because Soviet Russia was trying to foist on the world a picture of a nation plunged in apathy and resignation, liberated entirely by the Red Army and the Communist People’s Army. Finally, it was held that only by taking part decisively in the fight against the Germans would Poland be morally entitled to share the fruits of victory and a place among the victorious powers.
Apart from political and military reasons there were pressing psychological factors to be taken into account by the Home Army chiefs. Not only the Home Army men, but probably the whole nation in July, felt, together with an obvious desire to take revenge on the Germans, the need to achieve some victory in the Allied cause. The population of Warsaw, keenly aware of the city’s glowing tradition of independence struggle and its role as centre of underground Poland, felt this more keenly than anyone.
Komorowski, Pelczynski, Okulicki and other senior staff officers of the Secret Army ended on 22 July their talks on the need to launch an uprising in Warsaw. Komorowski at once told Jan Jankowski and asked for his support. Jankowski, who already believed that possession of Warsaw was vital for the Government, agreed that they must try to capture it before the entry of the Soviets.[93] He arranged a meeting with the delegates of the four main political parties forming the kernel of the underground state, so that Komorowski could find out their opinions of the plan.
Jankowski asked Komorowski to let him have a draft of questions first, adding that he should ‘formulate the questions very concisely and say very little’. Jankowski was the Deputy Premier of a substantially right-wing Government, even though the Prime Minister, Mikolajczyk, was himself a moderate Peasant Party leader. In Warsaw, many members of the Polish Socialist Party had moved during the occupation far to the left, and though anti-Soviet were at the same time suspicious of both the London Government and the Home Army leadership. Hence these two leaders knew they had to take care if they were to carry the politicians with them.
Komorowski and Jankowski therefore drafted two simple questions and personally submitted them to the politicians.[94] The first was: whether the representatives of the Committee of National Unity believe that the entry of Soviet troops into Warsaw should be forestalled by the seizure of the capital by the Home Army? The second: what minimal period should, in their opinion, elapse between the seizure of the capital by the Home Army for the civil authority, and the entry of the Red Army?
The politicians unanimously said yes to the first question; and to the second agreed that at least twelve hours would be needed to allow the civil authority to start functioning.[95]
Komorowski had thus secured full agreement on the need to launch the uprising in Warsaw, but only by disallowing free discussion and imposing two rigidly formulated questions which over-simplified the grim realities underlying the problem. None of the vital military issues were raised in these questions, such as the fact that the Western Allies could not bomb German-held airfields or drop parachutists; that there was to be no operational liaison with the Red Army; that both food and ammunition stocks were enough for five days’ fighting only, or at what moment in the presumed German retreat the uprising would be launched. Komorowski merely gave the politicians an analysis of the current military situation on the Russo-German front, so far as it was known to him.
At this time Home Army units under the command of Colonel Tumidajski were cooperating closely with the Red Army in the fighting in the Lublin district about 140 miles south-east of Warsaw, where they had captured several small towns and destroyed a number of heavy enemy tanks and self-propelled guns. Chelm was taken by combined Home Army and Soviet forces on 21 July; Lublin the next day.
On the evening of 22 July an event of great significance for the London Government and the Home Army became known in Warsaw. At 8.15 PM Moscow Radio announced in Polish[96] that a Polish Committee of National Liberation had been set up in Chelm, the first large town freed from German occupation in Polish territory not claimed by the Soviets. It declared that the London Government and the civil authority in Poland were illegal and that the Communist National Council of the Homeland in Moscow was ‘the sole legal source of authority in Poland’ as the ‘provisional Parliament of the Polish Nation’. The Committee of
National Liberation was described as the de facto though provisional Polish Government. At the same time it was announced that the National Council of the Homeland (KRN) had assumed authority over the Communist People’s Army and appointed General Rola-Zymierski as its Commander-in-Chief.
This open challenge of their authority at once strengthened the resolve of Komorowski and the Home Army staff to launch the uprising. They and Jan Jankowski in a reply published in the official Home Army paper[97] dubbed the Committee of National Liberation a Soviet puppet, renewed their insistence on complete obedience to the legal independent Polish Government in London, forbade any negotiations with the Committee or its agents, and warned against the Communist People’s Army for its sworn allegiance to a foreign power.
Meanwhile, the Russo-German battle to the east, north-east and south-east of Warsaw grew almost hourly more of a factor in the decision of when to begin fighting in Warsaw, and from 22 July onwards the impact of the German reversal in Normandy, the attempt on Hitler’s life, and the rout of their armies in Poland hit Warsaw with dramatic effect. German civilians, of whom there were thousands there, besieged the railway stations for tickets to Germany, and when unable to get them offered the Poles small fortunes for horses and carts. From the Gestapo offices in the former Polish Ministry of Education and Religious Instruction in Szuch Avenue clouds of smoke arose as frightened officials hurriedly burnt incriminating documents and prepared to leave. The Nazi Governor of Warsaw, Dr Fischer, and the Mayor, Herr Leist, unceremoniously fled.
Komorowski, now under strong pressure from the fire-eating General Okulicki to launch the uprising at once, walked through the hot and dusty city to check for himself the reports he had received about the German rout. Wearing glasses, his military moustache shaved off, and purposely stooping slightly, he looked in his threadbare suit more like an ageing professor than a general with all the Home Army’s secrets in his head.
