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

by George Bruce

  The Germans, using fresh forces against the weary Polish troops, now began to make gains. After an hour’s battle they finally drove the insurgents out of the Jewish cemetery. Another German battalion supported by field-guns threw back the Polish forces holding the Catholic cemetery. Radosław himself, with a battalion of only two hundred and fifty men and the one remaining tank in service, then led a counter-attack which hit the German flank with great impetus and for the time being stopped their advance. But the action was costly indeed.

  Radosław was badly wounded, while sixty men, including five officers were killed and another sixty wounded. The remaining Polish tank was damaged and immobilized, but two anti-tank guns with ammunition were captured.[220]

  In the afternoon of 11 August the Germans again attacked Okopowa Street from the Catholic cemetery in the north and the Evangelist cemetery facing it further south. The Poles came under withering enemy fire. To prevent decimation of this valuable force Colonel Ziemski ordered it to retreat through the Ghetto ruins towards Stawki Street, and at 4 PM under cover of the gun of the immobilized tank the battalion retired through heavy enemy fire to the line of the former Parysowska and Lubecki Streets in the Ghetto ruins. Rearguard of the retreat, Second-Lieutenant Kuba’s platoon, including five girls, lost its officer and twenty men.

  The headquarters of Radosław’s group, now below half their strength, moved to Muranowska Street. The near-by Stawki Street sector now became the advance defence of the Old Town against German attacks from the hard-won Ghetto and cemetery areas westwards.

  The Germans had thus won at high cost two districts vital for the city’s defence by 11 August, while von dem Bach had already launched a preparatory attack on the Old Town. Large parts of Warsaw were already in ruins; tens of thousands of people were dead beneath them, or shot and then burnt by the Germans. The situation of the defenders became hourly more serious.

  From day to day Komorowski and his staff still hoped for a big Soviet thrust towards Warsaw. But reports that the Soviets had arrested all commanding officers of the Home Army who had reported to them after having led diversionary actions against the Germans east of the Vistula tended to dash these hopes. Indeed, they gave rise to the suspicion that the Soviets might leave the Home Army insurgents to fight it out alone with the massive concentrations of Germans in Warsaw. Komorowski and his staff therefore awaited with growing anxiety the arrival of the promised Soviet arms.

  The desperate Polish resistance, their apparent determination to fight to the bitter end, worried the German commanders exceedingly by mid-August. Well to the north and south of Warsaw the Soviets pressed them hard, while at the same time they needed more and more troops in the city to hold down the insurgents.

  The Germans ascribed this Polish resilience to well-thought-out tactics which permitted German assault troops, flame-throwers and even tanks to advance right up to the barricades and then broke up these attacks by Piat mortars, incendiary bottles, machine-gun fire and sniping at officers. Casualties were hit mainly in the head and it was almost impossible to find out where the shots came from. They believed that the snipers were mainly on rooftops or in the higher storeys of houses, only rarely on ground floors or in cellars. The fighting hardly seemed to confirm reports of a scarcity of arms and ammunition among the insurgents.[221]

  Lack of reliable information about the strength and location of the insurgent groups also confused the Germans. But it was an outcome of their own terror policy. The Poles believed they would either be tortured to obtain information, or shot out of hand, according to which unit captured them, so never surrendering, they fought to the end. The Germans were therefore attacking more or less in the dark. They knew that in Mokotow they faced a force of about four thousand fighting men, another group of unknown strength in the Old Town, a strong though much depleted force in the City Centre and other units of whose strength they were uncertain in the various suburbs, including Bielany, Zoliborz and Marymont. Partisan groups three or four thousand strong were also reported to be assembling in the forest areas around the city.

  Disagreements between General von Vormann and Himmler over the quality and the quantity of forces allocated to Warsaw also caused difficulties. How little von Vormann and the Middle Army Group had to say in this matter is shown by an earlier telephone conversation between von Vormann and General Krebs, Chief of Staff of Middle Army Group, at 11.30 AM on 9 August:[222]

  Von Vormann: I cannot manage Warsaw yet. I have not enough forces. There are one and a half million Poles. We are like a ship surrounded by water. Von dem Bach cannot do it. He reports that his task is impossible.

  Krebs: Report again in writing.

  Von Vormann: I have three to four thousand men against one and a half million.

  Krebs: The Reichsführer SS (Himmler) has looked into that and will give Obergruppenführer von dem Bach the means.

  Generals von Vormann and von dem Bach were convinced that upon the success or failure of Warsaw depended the spread of the Uprising throughout Poland. They also believed, incorrectly in fact, that the leaflets telling of the more brutal methods of crushing the Uprising had stayed the hands of the partisans in the forests, and that so soon as the city fell all activity in the countryside would stop. Having captured Wola and the Powazki cemetery area, they also believed at first that they had won access to the focus of the Uprising in the City Centre.

  Their main task, apart from crushing the insurgents, they saw as linking up with the 9th Army by means of routes across the city; and this necessity guided their actions. They ordered that the east-west link through the Kierbedz Bridge must be fully opened by Reinefarth’s force; and that Kaminski’s force would advance towards the main railway station, in order to overcome the insurgents fighting between there and Ochota suburb.

  ‘After the achievement of these aims,’ they stated, ‘further action will be based on the attitude of the insurgents… who must be called on to capitulate. If they refuse they must be annihilated by encirclement and their base in the Mokotow suburb be destroyed.’[223]

  After nearly two weeks’ fighting, a bizarre way of life had developed around the pattern of Polish barricades and strongpoints along the German wedges through the city. Amid the crash of hand-grenades and the rattle of machine-guns attacks were repulsed and counter-attacks launched in swift succession. Air-raids followed one another so quickly that in the ceaseless alert everyone’s nerves were stretched taut from dawn until the summer night brought three or four hours of quiet. Destruction by shells and bombs in daytime was the norm; the intermittent silences seemed strangely unfamiliar.

  Almost every house had become a bulwark against German infantry attack. Inside, Home Army men and civilian tenants shared both their meagre rations in communal kitchens, and the ever-present danger of bombs and shells. Often they shared death. In the courtyards around which many Polish houses and apartment blocks were centred, home-built altars made from old bricks became the rule, with a cloth, garlands of leaves and flowers and a cross. Among an already religious people danger intensified the need for spiritual outlets. Priests faced death going from courtyard to courtyard to say Mass at these Christian altars.

  The front line zigzagged through courtyards and up and down the floors of buildings, the Germans holding the ground floor and basement, the Poles the upper area, or the other way about. Civil authorities, hospitals, first-aid points and social welfare centres functioned night and day as little as sixty or seventy feet away from the ding-dong of battle.[224] Every area of the city and the suburbs could be hit by a variety of destructive weapons in addition to aerial bombardment.

  They were assisted by patrols of Polish police named the State Security Corps, who also opposed German fifth-columnists and snipers. The Poles called these patriots ‘pigeons’, from their habit of perching among rooftop ruins with water and rations for several days, rifles with telescopic sights firing through small holes in gables from the rear to kill men at the barricades. The Home Army organized buil
ding workers acquainted with the pattern of Warsaw’s ancient rooftops to uncover their vantage-points. A Polish sniper saw a ‘pigeon’ aiming at a soldier in the street below, took a quick bead on him and had the satisfaction of seeing him topple earthwards before he could fire. Passwords, identity cards and check-points changed daily helped to stop the infiltration of German snipers.

  Such were the conditions in which the Home Army and the civilian authorities tried to prevent disorder.

  Komorowski and his Staff now felt that they had no other course but to hold on until Soviet aid did come and meantime to fight back as hard as possible. Orders were given to speed up the output of grenades and other weapons in the secret workshops. Fortunately an unexpected source of explosive came to hand. The Germans were hitting the city with shells of the biggest calibre. Sometimes the old houses collapsed into heaps of rubble in the blast of these missiles. Often, however, they failed to explode. Polish sappers removed the fuses and from the biggest of these monsters took out about six hundred pounds of explosive, which was then used to fill empty food cans or biscuit tins to make hand-grenades or mines. Captured Goliath tanks also provided a useful source of explosive.

  Food for the troops was just adequate around mid-August, but monotonous. All three meals consisted of captured tinned tongue and wine from the vast cellars of a famous Polish vintner. Under fire on the barricades soldiers ate slices of ox tongue with château-bottled Bordeaux or Hungarian Tokay.

  For civilians, food scarcity was becoming a food shortage. There was no meat, but plenty of sugar; in the suburbs plenty of green vegetables, in the central sectors flour, barley, dried peas and beans, just enough to maintain subsistence level, provided that these foodstuffs were exchanged between the districts.

  Volunteers were called for to carry sacks of food from place to place. Soon men and women bowed under the weight of these sacks filed through streets often under enemy fire, across courtyards, along the house-to-house subterranean passages and cellars to distribution points where the food was most needed. Human pack-animals, toiling underground in every direction they became a vital part of daily life. Every day some were killed or wounded, but there was never a shortage of volunteers.[225]

  The civil authorities arranged with the Peasant Party for all peasants living near Warsaw to make their first task the supply of the city with food of any and every kind. Some provisions were then taken to Home Army troops in Kampinos Forest for overnight smuggling into Warsaw and in this way a little more food arrived.

  Even before the end of the fighting in the cemetery sector, units of Dirlewanger’s and of another group about two thousand strong commanded by Major Reck, had begun the first preparatory attacks on the key district of the Old Town, supported by tanks and field-guns. A force of 1,357 Polish troops faced them. They were equipped with four heavy machine-guns; fifty-two light machine-guns; two hundred and forty-nine submachine-guns; forty-five flame-throwers; six Piat anti-tank mortars; one mortar, one field-gun, a fair number of rifles and revolvers and a substantial number of incendiary bottles and hand-grenades.[226] Another 4,953 unarmed troops and about one hundred and seventy thousand civilians were packed into these tall ancient houses leading down to the river, an area barely half the size of Chelsea south of the King’s Road, or about one half a square mile.

  German attacks from the west along Leszno Street towards the Town Hall, in the southern part of the Old Town, were thrown back with heavy losses. The next day, 9 August, Colonel Ziemski sent in an attack on the Gdansk station and the armoured train standing there, which had begun to bombard his positions with heavy-calibre shells. Polish troops reached the station and set it ablaze, but the Germans drove them back with many wounded before they could reach the train; there were, in fact, two armoured trains. However, with their quick eye for German weapons, the Poles captured some heavy machine-guns.[227]

  On 11 August the Germans launched heavy attacks against the Old Town barricades in their first effort to try to penetrate the district. Bombers, guns across the river in Praga, mortars and tanks pounded the defences or bombed the tightly-packed houses. Then, through the ruins of the castle on Swietojanska and Kanonia Streets, masses of enemy infantry with two tanks attacked from Marienstat. A determined Polish counter-attack supported by heavy machine-gun fire threw them back. Two more tanks then clattered up to the barricades defending the Bank of Poland building. One of them was destroyed with incendiary bottles and the other withdrew. Despite heavy losses the barricade, which also defended an entrance into the Old Town, was held that day.

  The Home Army’s aggressiveness survived even exhaustion and hunger. Lieutenant Domanski and a small detachment made a sortie that day from a barricade on the verge of the Old Town several hundred yards to Theatre Square. Here they attacked a German unit, forced it to retreat, then withdrew with rifles, ammunition and an anti-tank gun.

  ‘From 3.30 AM to 1400 hours today, after yesterday’s harassing enemy fire, concentric attacks were directed against the Old Town and Stawki,’ Komorowski reported to London.

  The attacks were supported by artillery fire, armoured trains, mortars, grenade-throwers and anti-tank guns. An enormous and crushing enemy superiority. Our counter-attacks threw the enemy back and recovered Stawki. Losses in killed and wounded. Further advances in Zoliborz. The enemy air-force is strafing the city with machine-guns and guns.[228]

  The defeat of Colonel Radosław’s group that morning in the Powazki cemetery area, culminating in the fall of Okopowa Street and of the Ghetto ruins, now began to tell upon the defence of the Old Town. Reinefarth’s infantry made contact with the German police troop detachments hitherto besieged in Pawiak prison, linked up first with General Stahel’s units in the Saxon Gardens and then with the troops holding the Gdansk station to the north of the Ghetto. Having cut the city into three, the Germans now tried to link up their wedges to encircle the defenders.

  Polish outposts in the western part of Leszno Street and the Stawki area held them up, though Radosław’s group, which had held on to its positions in the cemeteries with such tenacity, was now tired and in need of reforming. After his severe wound, Radosław had been replaced by Major Bolek.

  At dawn on 12 August Lieutenant Nalecz launched a spirited attack through Dluga Street and the cellars of the houses on Przejazd Street towards enemy positions on Leszno. Completely surprised, the Germans fled down Leszno to Orla Street. It was a triumph. The barricades on Leszno Street were reoccupied and a new strongpoint established in the concrete telephone building at the junction of Tlomackie Street and Przejazd Street.

  The Germans responded with heavy shelling and mortaring in the area of the Stawki warehouses, smashing some and setting others ablaze. At 10 o’clock Colonel Schmidt’s infantry, supported by a heavy tank, several field-guns and two armoured cars, attacked this region from the west with mortars and flame-throwers. The barricades were shattered and the Poles fell back towards the northern boundaries of the Old Town.

  ‘We hold Zoliborz, the Old Town and the City Centre with the exception of the east-west traffic arteries,’ Komorowski signalled to London during the morning of 15 August.

  Enemy attacks are made after artillery preparation from armoured trains with the support of mortars and grenade-throwers, anti-tank guns and armour, all the strength of infantry being then thrown in. We allow the enemy to come within very close distance of the barricades, and then open fire. Liaison is made difficult owing to the cutting up of the city into sections. Morale is very high, and there is a stubborn will to struggle. Silence on the Soviet side.[229]

  Meantime, tanks supporting Dirlewanger’s brigade had blown the barricade on Swietojanska Street to pieces soon after first light, decimating the defenders. Major Rog sent in a company to reinforce the remaining barricades there and in Kanonia Street. German infantry supported by a tank at that moment thrust into the castle ruins. A Polish lieutenant and four men surprised them with automatic fire and hand-grenades, killed several and the rest withdrew
under cover of the tank.

  In the afternoon the remnants of the indefatigable Radosław group counter-attacked Stawki Street, one of the Old Town’s northern defences. They drove the Germans out of the warehouses, captured quantities of ammunition and weapons, then occupied the school and the undemolished warehouses, where for most of the night they suffered withering mortar fire. ‘Today the enemy again tried to destroy our forces in the area of the Old Town,’ Komorowski reported during the night of 12 August.

  The situation was critical and objectives changed hands many times. There was a hail of fire. Towards the evening the situation was mastered by a series of counter-blows. If we do not get supplies dropped on Krasinski Square tonight the situation in this area may well be hopeless tomorrow. On other sectors there are no essential changes. Silence from the Soviets… Heavy losses in life and great destruction of buildings.[230]

  The appeal was successful. Two RAF aircraft with Polish aircrews successfully dropped containers into the Old Town, one of them flying low over Krasinski Square, only to be shot down by anti-aircraft fire and crashing near Praga.

  Komorowski and the Home Army Staff began to experience a feeling of helplessness. Having been cut off from Chrusciel’s HQ by the wedge the Germans had driven through the city on 7 August, they were unable to organize linked defensive operations between the Old Town’s northern group and the City Centre forces. Attempts to communicate through the sewers had so far not been successful. To make matters worse the building in Barakowa Street where the GHQ was situated came under heavy fire. To ease the situation GHQ was therefore moved to the near-by Krasinski Palace on Dluga Street.