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

by George Bruce

  Major Ludwik’s Praga detachments seized the railway control centre at the corner of Targowa Street and Wilenska Street, completely disorganizing the Wilno station. His units also destroyed two German tanks and occupied a telephone exchange. But a squadron of Tiger and Panther tanks opened fire on the railway building and other near-by objectives taken by the insurgents. Many were killed, the rest forced to retreat. By night time on 2 August the Praga detachments were defending themselves in isolated groups and the Uprising there was over as a serious threat to the Germans.

  Janusz Tomaszewski, aged 11, had graduated to the Baszta Regiment from the underground ‘Grey Column’ scouts. On 31 July he was ordered to join his platoon at a villa near to a German-occupied school at the corner of Narbuta and Kazimierzowska Streets in Mokotow, because fighting was expected to start; but it was a false alarm. Some of the men went home and others stayed in the villa awaiting the new zero hour, and among them was Tomaszewski — now a captain in Warsaw’s River Police. Mokotow, the Uprising’s southern bastion, barred the Germans’ southerly access to the City Centre and its bridges.

  At 3 PM on 1 August Tomaszewski was issued with a revolver and a few rounds of ammunition and told to be ready at 5 o’clock for an attack on the school, occupied by three hundred SS. Like all the initial attacks on the first day it had been planned as a surprise night attack, so that when zero hour was unfortunately changed from 3 AM to 5 PM it became doubly dangerous. The Poles could no longer count on the surprise factor and the inherent dangers of an attack on this well-fortified building were much greater in daylight.

  Already, before 5 o’clock, they could hear in the distance the sounds of firing and of heavy explosions. They still waited. Finally, the orders came and the attack on the school began with an advance across an open potato field. But the enemy were on the alert and this first attack was beaten back by machine-guns on the roof and in concrete bunkers at every corner of the building. The folly of mounting in daytime attacks originally planned for the night became tragically clear.

  Another attack was planned for 3 AM. Over the centre of the city they saw a red glow and clouds of dark billowing smoke, heard the distant crash of guns and the crackle of automatic fire warning them fighting had not ceased there.

  It began to rain. The SS in the school now and then fired their machine-guns or tossed grenades at random in the direction of the Polish lines, clearly with the object of showing they had no shortage of ammunition. The Home Army men on their part kept quiet and did not reply, in the knowledge that every single bullet or grenade must be used to good effect.

  The attack began at 4 AM with a rush in the rain on the German positions. Heavy explosions thudded in the darkness as demolition squads blew down gates and doors. Petrol bombs flared, grenades crashed and the sudden rattle of automatic fire signalled that the outer strongpoints were overcome and the attack had moved on to defenders on staircases and inner rooms.

  At one point Janusz found himself faced by Germans in a narrow passage. He fired his revolver while the enemy were attacked from the other direction and shot down. The impetus of the night attack began to pay off and soon those Germans still alive retreated, leaving the school in Polish hands. Losses had been heavy, but the attack was successful, the strongpoint had been taken and with it a large quantity of arms and ammunition.[178]

  Elsewhere in Mokotow during the night a number of other detachments which had failed to take their objectives had retired across country to the Kabacki Forest. Only small units were left in southern Mokotow. The Germans then moved in with strong forces of tanks along Sobieski Avenue, from Wilanow, and although the insurgents had built anti-tank barricades and other obstacles they were driven back by heavy gunfire. Many were killed and wounded and the rest of these forces fled to the Kabacki Forest.

  Only Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel’s group still hung on. In the early hours of 2 August he concentrated his remaining troops into a district of solid concrete apartment houses between Odynca and Pulawski Streets and Niepodleglosci Avenue and there held out.

  During the first night’s fighting, more than 2,000 Home Army troops were killed or wounded. About 5,000 left the city to hide in the surrounding woods after they had failed to take their objectives. A considerable amount of arms and ammunition had been captured, but much was lost, especially in the suburbs, where caches fell into German hands.

  Chrusciel’s objectives — the seizure of the city, the closure of the bridges across the Vistula and the capture of arms — had fallen far short of attainment, but the Old Town and Wola, the north-western bastion of the Uprising, were cleared of the enemy. In Praga, Okecie, Bielany, Ochota, and parts of Mokotow the Germans still held out. About two-thirds of the western river bank were in Home Army hands, including Powisle and Czerniakow, although the Germans held strongpoints in Polish areas and also dominated wedges of territory there, thus splitting them into isolated sectors.

  Huge fires raged throughout the city. Petrol storage tanks were ablaze, as well as thousands of houses, the railway centre in Praga and numerous big buildings. ‘The struggle is in the nature of a general action all over the city,’ Komorowski reported in a radio message to London on 3 August.[179]

  Focus points of the struggle are scattered over the whole area with the exception of Zoliborz. Our own forces in Zoliborz were dispersed by enemy armour and withdrew in a westerly direction.

  The beginning of the struggle was quite critical, as we were fighting to retain the initiative. At present the initiative is in our hands, as the continual extension of the areas we hold shows. The spirit and morale of the commanders and soldiers is magnificent. The people are enthusiastically cooperating in the struggle. The streets of the city are intersected by numerous barricades, the national flag is flying over captured objectives.

  We are fighting effectively against heavy tanks, of which we have already destroyed or damaged over a dozen. Those damaged we are already putting to good use in the advancement of our own operations.

  So far the situation is not difficult for us, though the German attack is supported by armour and antiaircraft guns…

  In the centre and western part of the city the struggle is very intense. During 2 August enemy attempts to recapture conquered positions and streets were repulsed. The enemy is attaching special importance to recovering and clearing the main thoroughfares of the city. Heavy struggles are being waged for the General Post Office, which we captured yesterday at 16.35 hours…

  Attacks four times repeated on the Telephone Exchange yielded no results. The enemy is blowing up certain bunkers, which he cannot hold, and is burning buildings, especially in the suburbs.

  We have inflicted very heavy losses in men and motorized equipment on the enemy; we have taken prisoners. We are afraid of nothing except a shortage of ammunition. We have not sufficient arms for the volunteers, in sporadic cases members of the Polish Workers’ Party, who are reporting to us for cooperation with the Polish Home Army. No organized detachments except those of the Home Army have yet been reported.

  In another message on the same day Komorowski[180] nervously complained about lack of support. ‘We are waiting for supplies to be dropped. The Soviet artillery can be heard. We do not notice any Soviet attack on the city…’

  German fighting tactics also drew a strong protest from him in a third message on 3 August. He requested that the accusation should be passed on through neutral channels to the German command in Warsaw that the Germans were using civilians as human shields, binding men and women to tanks and dragging them along the streets, and similar atrocities. He advised the German Command in Warsaw that he had ordered ‘ruthless repressive measures to be applied to Germans in the hands of the Home Army’; but nevertheless reprisals were at no time officially carried out.

  Meantime, despite the dangers and discomforts which they had to face, the people of the capital made common cause with the troops. Boys, girls and women joined in the task of building barricades with anything from furniture t
o motor cars, while along the streets of battle national flags fluttered, a symbol of defiance and a gesture of support for the Republic. ‘The whole capital, possessed with the fervour of struggle, is fighting the Germans and obliterating the traces of bondage. Not a single political organization is fighting independently, everything is united round the country’s armed forces,’ noted Mr Jan Jankowski, the Deputy Premier.[181]

  But already the shortage of ammunition which had dissuaded Komorowski from starting the Uprising during the last days of July had become a tormenting anxiety after little more than three days and nights of fighting. Reserves were falling quickly from hour to hour; lack of weapons prevented the great numbers of volunteers from going into action.

  Komorowski knew of the technical problems which a flight with a heavy load of ammunition from England to Warsaw and then back involved, and that little support could be expected. But now that he found himself in a bloody battle against the savage German cohorts he could do no other than plead for bullets and guns. For the intensity of the fighting never flagged. Many of the Home Army’s key positions in areas they had seized had been consolidated by the eager troops, while the Germans had been partially expelled from the northern suburb of Zoliborz which had at first been lost.

  Everyone during these first four days was asking the same puzzling question: ‘When are the Russians coming in? When will the Red Army help us?’ After all, the word had gone round in the beginning that advance Soviet units were entering Praga and would soon be crossing the Vistula. And now, despite the red glow in the sky above Warsaw, the Soviet radio was silent both of appeals to fight and reports that Warsaw was fighting. Many people, listening anxiously to Moscow Radio for its response to the Uprising it had so fervently called for, were bewildered. Something seemed out of joint. They noticed that the Red Air Force had ceased operations over the city, but consoled themselves with the fact that the Luftwaffe too had for the time being vanished from the skies.

  They may have surmised that both air forces were engaged in the battle east of Praga in the Wolomin-Radzymin area during the first four days of August, for the sound of artillery rumbled on and on there, a distant accompaniment to the crash and rattle of the fighting in the near-by streets and squares.

  Mikolajczyk’s meeting with Stalin took place as arranged at 9.30 in the evening on 3 August in the conference room in the Kremlin, the Soviet dictator juxtaposed beneath vivid oil paintings of the two great Tsarist generals Suvorov and Kutozov. Mikolajczyk tried ineffectually to impress Stalin by introducing himself as a peasant who had risen through his own exertions. Almost at once the talks began to founder over the issue of the Polish Committee of National Liberation which Stalin had sponsored in Moscow and which he recognized as the Polish administration in liberated areas; and over Poland’s future frontiers.

  Stalin brought the Home Army into the argument. ‘What is an army without artillery, tanks and an air force?’ he demanded. ‘They are even short of rifles. In modern warfare such an army is of little use. They are small partisan units, not a regular army. I was told that the Polish Government has ordered these units to drive the Germans out of Warsaw. I wonder how they could possibly do this, their forces are not up to that task…’[182]

  ‘I agree that they are short of arms,’ Mikolajczyk answered. ‘I have a telegram from the Lublin area, where there are three divisions of the Home Army. If they were supplied with arms, they would be able to render significant service in further battles. I have the highest admiration for these men who in such circumstances have continued to fight and have even manufactured machine-guns in caves… I hope, Marshal, that you share my opinion that our men of the Home Army are admirable, for, in spite of the shortages of arms, they have been carrying out the orders of their Government and have continued to fight.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Stalin said, ‘they wish to fight, but as a matter of fact they are unable to do so. What a pity. They are good soldiers, but they need arms to fight and they have none.’[183]

  The meeting ended at midnight, after Stalin had insisted that Mikolajczyk should meet members of the Committee of National Liberation on 5 August to discuss the formation of a new united Polish Government, including members of the Committee. But the talks then inevitably foundered over the Committee’s wish to allocate only four cabinet seats to the London Government and keep the remaining fourteen for themselves.

  General Michal Zymierski, commander of the communist People’s Army, told Mikolajczyk that he had requested Stalin to supply arms for the insurgents and to issue orders to the Red Army to treat the city of Warsaw with consideration. He said that in his presence Stalin had dictated appropriate orders to Marshal Rokossovsky. Ten divisions of Rokossovsky’s army were said to be between Warsaw and Deblin, sixty miles south-east, ready to turn the flanks of the Germans from south and west. Zymierski then spoke of the problem of dropping arms from the air to an embattled city. ‘This could only be done in the neighbourhood of Warsaw and also in the Praga area, from whence the arms must be transported to the city. Arms must be provided, but how? The difficulty is increased by the lack of any liaison.’[184] The meeting ended without any real results.

  Mikolajczyk had so far made little progress. At the same time reports of the savage fighting in Warsaw continued to reach him. His suspicions, later to grow into accusations, that the Russians were deliberately withholding aid were born in Moscow at this time. He awaited with anxiety his final meeting with Stalin.

  Komorowski awoke in the early hours of 4 August with an uneasy feeling associated with the sound of battle that he could not at first understand.[185] Not far away a tank fired its heavy gun from time to time and the windows rattled. Suddenly he knew what had disturbed him. The artillery that had rumbled on and on for days across the Vistula in the east was silent. The distant noise of battle had ended. So struck was he with this fact that he awoke Pelczynski, his Chief of Staff, and Jankowski, the Deputy Premier. The strange silence across the Vistula surprised them also. Together, trying to find a reason for it, they ascribed it to a temporary lull in the fighting, but none of them guessed that it would be five weeks before they would hear that artillery again.

  It was an event that for the first time cast real uncertainty over the question of how long the fighting in the city would last. For if the end of the sound of battle meant, incredibly, that the Germans had stopped the Soviets, temporarily of course, their hope that the Uprising would end in four, or at the most eight days, had all at once become a cruel joke, with a background of the starkest tragedy.

  That afternoon, in the first German air raid since the Uprising began, yellow-nosed Messerschmitt fighters swooped low over Warsaw’s broad avenues and huge squares to strafe troops and civilians; shortly after, twenty-four bombers launched incendiaries and high-explosive bombs on Wola.

  These two developments — the lull in the Soviet offensive and a German air raid that presaged many more — brought into sharp and painful focus the urgent question of Home Army ammunition.

  Troops were still seizing ammunition and weapons in this battle for equipment, but not nearly enough, and even with their own arsenals working round the clock reports from district commanders stressed that four days were the most they could carry on fighting at the present intensity.

  Komorowski knew that, miracles apart, an end to the fighting in four days was impossible. They would not surrender; the Germans would go on attacking. And he now had to rethink his belief in Chrusciel’s report of 31 July that the Red Army would soon enter Warsaw. ‘I was fully aware that the army under my command was a revolutionary one,' he wrote later. ‘Its successes were due to the drive which enabled its soldiers to charge and take a strongly fortified enemy position, often without the help of even a heavy machine-gun.’[186]

  To rein them in and check their drive by controlling the use of ammunition would be like taking their best weapon away from them. The consequent risk of weakening their morale would be great. Komorowski had to weigh this against the
even greater danger of allowing the fighting to peter out owing to lack of ammunition and thus exposing everyone to Nazi barbarism. The answer was clear. Trigger-happy shooting and uncontrolled bursts from automatic weapons must stop. Henceforward, bullets must be fired as carefully as if they were torpedoes and operations should be launched for sound tactical reasons only.

  Nevertheless, Komorowski put his pen to this order regretfully. And on the same day he sent another top priority message to London: ‘I categorically demand help in ammunition and anti-tank weapons forthwith and on the days ensuing. A struggle lasting several days at least awaits us and we must be supplied throughout that time. We have staked everything on holding the capital. Muster strength for the effort.’[187] In a succeeding message he named the Jewish Cemetery, Napoleon Square and the Little Ghetto as dropping-points. ‘Our ability to hold out in the struggle depends on receiving ammunition from you,’ he stressed.[188]

  For three years Royal Air Force Halifax and Liberator aircraft had intermittently dropped arms and ammunition into Poland at isolated places prearranged and carefully guarded. These operations were geared to a system perfected over the years of German occupation. The BBC Polish programme signalled an intended drop on any given night by playing an agreed melody and its cancellation by another one. Still another indicated the dropping-place, for each of these known places was identified by its own melody. Signal lights pointed the precise dropping zones; and now this system had been extended to Warsaw. From the night of 1 August observers were ready in captured squares and parks on the secret list.

  Since the news of the fighting was received in London on 2 August Churchill had been trying to help Warsaw. Like King George VI and President Roosevelt he had received an urgent plea for help from Poland’s President Raczkiewicz. It had been supported by letters from General Sosnkowski to Field-Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air and to General Wilson, Allied Commander in the Mediterranean Area.