by George Bruce
Ignoring military etiquette, General von Vormann had impatiently been calling direct to Reinefarth instead of to General von dem Bach for a decisive attack on the Old Town.[243] But von dem Bach had insisted on the destruction first of the Home Army outposts there. Soon he would be ready for the final onslaught.
The 17th of August was a turning-point for everyone alive in smoke-blanketed Warsaw, then crumbling to rubble and cinders under the impact of bombardment and flame. For the first time the Germans shelled it with their heaviest rail guns throwing seven-feet-long missiles weighing one-and-a-half tons. These monsters roared over the city, smashing in one hit targets like Home Army district commands or their own captured supply depots. Happily they sometimes did not explode.
This bombardment continued for five hours, demonstrating that further resistance would be useless. Then new tactics were employed. German officers carrying a white flag marched towards the Home Army barricade near Saxon Gardens in the City Centre. To the Polish officer who met them they handed a letter from General von dem Bach to Colonel Chrusciel. It called for immediate surrender, with combatant rights for the Home Army, which involved their treatment as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention. If the terms were rejected, von dem Bach would order the annihilation of the city, and of everyone in it.
For Komorowski it could hardly be termed a dilemma. The gamble of starting the Uprising on 1 August just before the guns signalled the supposed entry of Soviet forces into the city had failed, bringing in its train a huge legacy of death, suffering and destruction. Moreover, the future of the Home Army, short of ammunition and split into separate groups without unified control, was hopeless. Destruction, postponed merely by desperate counter-attacks against the overwhelmingly stronger Germans, must be its fate.
Komorowski now had the chance of releasing both suffering civilians and heroic troops from this agony, even though their future lay in the grim conditions of German refugee and prisoner-of-war camps.
He knew well enough of course, that by all the rules of warfare ‘a military force in our position should surrender’.[244] But, as he put it, ‘all my hopes and expectations were still based on the certainty of an early renewal of the Russian offensive, which would result in the occupation of the capital. It was the only solution to our present difficulties that any of us could foresee.’[245]
The Soviets and the Germans were still engaged in hard fighting with armoured units over the approaches to Warsaw from the north and south. Cut off as he was, Komorowski had no way of knowing this; for even if the news reached London, which until the battle ended, was unlikely, Mikolajczyk would not necessarily tell him.
So after the failure of his first gamble, he now embarked upon another, in which he knew for certain how costly were the stakes in terms of human life. Perhaps his concussion had temporarily taken away his reason; for there is a kind of madness in Komorowski’s rigid determination to go on swimming in this niagara of blood until the flag of Old Poland was raised for the London Government amid the hell of a Russo-German battle in the ruined city.
He makes no mention of discussion with Jankowski, the Deputy Premier. The politicians had no voice in this decision, although it was rightly a political one. ‘I ordered Monter (Chrusciel) to leave General von dem Bach’s letter unanswered,’ he says bluntly.[246] The grounds were that the Germans could not be trusted and would kill the troops. But von dem Bach, as subsequent events made clear, was offering an agreement embodied in a document signed by both parties, similar to that which Komorowski was eventually to sign.
So the German proposal was ignored. And while the Old Town battle went on, to emphasize their disregard of the German offer Chrusciel launched a series of minor counter-attacks on isolated enemy points in the City Centre, starting with the telephone company’s building. A massive concrete block, one of the tallest in the sector, it was held by a German garrison which, with well-directed fire from high windows, had stopped nearly all movement in the surrounding roads and streets, making attacks almost impossible.
Behind the Polish attack on this fortress lay that blend of the improvised, the haphazard and the heroic that ran through the whole Uprising. A man aged sixty, working as a technician in the building for many years, was refused enlistment in the Home Army on the grounds of age. In his heart he refused to accept this refusal. When the enemy turned his workplace into a fortress he put his knowledge of it to good use by starting to dig a tunnel to the basement, alone at night, from the cellars of some ruined houses nearly fifty yards away. After two weeks of solitary, unremitting toil he reached the basement wall.
He then reported his achievement and Chrusciel planned to send troops along the tunnel and storm the building as a gesture of defiance in answer to von dem Bach’s letter. At 2 AM on 16 August the wall was blown and an assault company stormed upstairs. Surprise was complete. The attackers gained a foothold on the lower floors before the Germans knew what was happening. The enemy then barricaded every floor and corridor. A Polish women’s demolition squad blew holes through the walls and a fierce battle with hand-grenades was waged from room to room. Amid the acrid cordite smoke the Germans fought right up to the tenth floor. The exhausted Poles were then surprised to find the enemy had vanished. They had slid back down a steel tube to the basement.
The Home Army had gained possession of the building, but were now faced with its possible demolition by Germans in the basement. Eventually one hundred and sixteen of them surrendered, the rest were killed by flame-throwers. Having seen what the Germans had done to their women and children the Poles were little inclined to mercy. The battle for this strategically placed building had ended after ten hours. The so-called elderly man who had made it possible was rewarded by enlistment, a revolver and ammunition.
On one of the prisoners of this action a Polish soldier found a diary which reveals something of the feelings of the ordinary German soldier fighting in Warsaw. It began with an entry by the diarist, Kurt Heller, marking the start of the Uprising on 1 August. It went on:
2.8. We are still surrounded.
3.8. Ulrich killed. SS Sturmführer killed and many others.
4.8. Still cut off. No help from outside. We expect relief today or tomorrow. No food. Water very short.
5.8. Rudolf killed. Others killed with him. Can’t keep going much longer. Luttewitz killed. Hollweg badly wounded.
6.8. At noon shelled by own artillery. Attempt at sortie failed, one killed, four badly wounded, of which one died. Fourteen of us now killed. Buried at eight this morning in the courtyard. Bad air from the dead.
8.8. Our men 100 yards away, but opposition from bandits too strong.
9.8. Food very scarce.
12.8 Hunger acute. Every day only a drop of soup and six cigarettes… When will these sufferings stop?
16.8 Terrible hunger. At night we are terrified. When first stars appear, think of home, wife, and my boy, who is buried somewhere near Stettin.
17.8. Poles tried to smoke us out by fire and bottles of petrol. More men lost their nerve and committed suicide.
19.8. No hope of relief. Surrounded by Poles. Who will be the next for the mass grave down in the courtyard?[247]
The capture of this building gave impetus to further small attacks in the City Centre. A battle for the German police headquarters was fought with hand-grenades across the nave of the adjoining Church of the Holy Cross. In peacetime men raised their hats and women curtsied when passing it because in one of the pillars Frederick Chopin’s heart was immured. Expelled from the carnage within, the Germans set the church ablaze, but happily the fire which brought down the roof timbers left the relic untouched. The hated Police HQ fell shortly afterwards, giving the Home Army a big haul of ammunition and machine-guns. Other strongpoints fell in the City Centre too. But this was not enough to rescue the Home Army from the danger of piecemeal destruction it faced.
The belief in mid-August that von dem Bach’s big attack was due had caused a sense of desperation amo
ng Komorowski and his fellow staff officers in the Home Army GHQ in the Old Town. Shut up in their headquarters, with huge fires blazing in nearly every street, the aggressiveness of their troops limited by lack of ammunition, the Home Army Staff decided that a link with Zoliborz, as the channel for arms and men from the Forest of Kampinos, was their only possible salvation.
The first move, for which the order was sent to Captain Szymon, in charge of the fifteen hundred well-armed men in Kampinos, was to be an attack on the near-by airfield at Bielany, just north of Zoliborz. Across this ran the main road from Warsaw to Modlin, which the Uprising had forced the Germans to use as one of their two communications links with the Warsaw sector of the Eastern Front.
It was an operation far beyond the strength of Szymon’s forces. Seven hundred men with field artillery and armoured cars held the airport, while at near-by Boernerowo was a formation of forty tanks. Szymon attacked with three columns while the remainder of his troops went to cut the main road to Modlin. In the early morning mist it was hard to see the perimeter defences and some of his troops were pinned down by machine-gun fire. But he at first succeeded for a short time in taking the airfield and cutting the road.
Panzer reinforcements arrived from the direction of Modlin. Several tanks were knocked out by the troops holding the road, but eventually the enemy drove off the Poles and recaptured the airfield. Szymon was wounded and more than a hundred men also killed or wounded. The rest dispersed as they could, some back to Kampinos, others to Zoliborz. The assault on Bielany airfield came to an end, a total failure. A less ambitious plan of marching the remaining Kampinos forces to Zoliborz as a first step in the relief of the Old Town was then ordered.
Under Major Okon the troops began a night march. Half-way there they ran into a battalion of the 9th Army’s Hungarian Division, who let them through to Zoliborz. The Polish sympathies of the Hungarians had already made the Germans suspicious. (Later it was discovered that they were negotiating to sell their artillery to the Poles for dollars and they were withdrawn from this sector.)
A flat area of allotments about half a mile long, where among the neat rows of onions, carrots and lettuce the Germans had established machine-gun nests, barbed wire and trenches, separated Zoliborz from the Old Town. The Citadel loomed on the horizon to the east. Anti-tank and anti-aircraft batteries on a neighbouring sports ground fired with monotonous regularity at chosen Old Town targets.
Lack of spare parts for the Zoliborz transmitters prevented radio contact with the Old Town at this time, and communication by land had not been attempted, yet links were essential if an attack was to be launched. A ten-year-old Polish goatherd now explained how the Germans let him pasture his goat in no-man’s-land. He agreed to take a message, trotted off past the enemy weapon pits with one hidden in the goat’s halter and came back safely in the evening with a reply, but not, unfortunately, from his journey next day. The boy was never seen again, nor was the goat.
Colonel Ziemski called for volunteers to reach Zoliborz. Three patrols who were chosen and briefed on the positions of enemy weapon sites along the route set out after midnight on 15 August. For about twenty minutes all was quiet, then suddenly machine-gun fire broke out and tracer bullets streamed through the night towards a spot about halfway over the allotments. Soon after, one patrol of three men returned carrying their wounded leader. There was no news of the other two. It seemed as though the attempt had failed.
The next evening, 16 August, two officers in stinking, filthy uniforms arrived at the GHQ. They were the two patrol leaders. Having safely reached Zoliborz the night before and delivered orders for the preparation of an attack, as well as for radio spares, they had returned through the main sewer linking the two districts. A radio link and a way through the sewers were now established. Their journey back was the first successful attempt at communication through this sewer.
In view of the Old Town’s desperate situation, ringed by troops ready for a major offensive, its buildings in flames and ruins and its streets now so blocked with fallen masonry that movement was hard and dangerous, General Pelczynski proposed that he should go to Zoliborz this way and personally take charge of an attack to try to expel the German forces and link up with Zoliborz.
It was a forlorn hope. A mere few hundred infantry could do little against four or five thousand enemy troops backed by tanks, artillery and aircraft. The other members of Komorowski’s staff actually opposed it, but Pelczynski evidently believed it better to die on a forlorn attack than be killed passively defending the Old Town against hopeless odds.
Just after midnight on 17 August he descended the narrow steel ladder and took his place in the pitch-black tunnel with the guide and the rest of his party to stumble through the foetid, airless atmosphere to Zoliborz. He arrived there nearly exhausted early next morning and soon after requested by radio that in view of the weakness of Major Okon’s force another four companies of one hundred each should be sent through the sewer forthwith to reinforce them. Some of the Staff at GHQ opposed this but the men were sent.
Main objective of the attack, which was to take place at 1 AM on 19 August, was in Gdansk railway station. Colonel Ziemski was to support it by an attack on German positions in this area from the Old Town.
From 6 AM on 18 August until late evening the Germans rained bombs and shells on the already blasted Old Town. Under cover of this, Reinefarth was moving his assault groups as near as possible to the Home Army barricades and strongpoints. Later, that ominous quiet which precedes a battle reigned in the half-mile space leading to the Zoliborz sector, lit intermittently by brilliant white flares in which the Germans could easily see anything that moved.
Church clocks still working in the Old Town chimed 1 o’clock in notes thin and high or low and sonorous; machine-guns rattled suddenly, grenades banged from the direction of Gdansk railway station. The attack had begun. German flares lit the sky, not only white but red now for artillery support. Within seconds the quick-firing guns on the enemy armoured train began their rhythmical chorus. Flames arose from warehouses near the station which the assault force under Major Okon had set ablaze.
The Polish attack had actually reached the open allotment sector, but the enemy shells from the Citadel guns began bursting among them. The leaders of the attack were falling, the rest wavered. Soon the survivors were retreating and making for cover. The guns thumped away for two or three more minutes, then died down and though the night was still white with flares only the occasional fusillade broke the silence.
Beside the barbed-wire and in the carefully tended allotments lay the dead and wounded. The breakthrough had failed again. Reinefarth’s troops tightly ringed the Old Town and from 8 AM next day, 19 August, the Polish troops there began their battle for survival.
Chapter Fourteen: Battle in the Old Town
General von dem Bach, loud of speech, close-cropped, tall, heavily built, methodical and severe in the Prussian manner, was desperately anxious to be able to report quickly to the Führer that he had put down the Uprising.
He personally inspected at the time of the attempted Home Army breakthrough all his troops except those few surrounded by the enemy. He observed that the northern wing of General Rohr’s group, attacking the City Centre, was protected from Polish forces in Zoliborz by 9th Army Cossacks. Its southern wing was in liaison with, but did not quite join an outpost of the SS Kaminski Brigade. ‘I had the distinct impression that their occupation of a vodka factory was the cause,’ von dem Bach said later.[248]
He evaluated the entire situation in the city in relation to his up-to-date information in mid-August about the Russo-German battle front and then evolved a new plan. This laid down that the various districts of Warsaw were to be captured in succession by concentrating on each all the available force. He planned to make the Old Town, which was the northern part of Warsaw, the target of his heaviest attacks. ‘An important factor in this decision was the ever-present threat of a Soviet attack on Praga,’ he wrote:[249]
I was counting on the likelihood of the eastern bank of the Vistula falling into Soviet hands even before the end of the Uprising. Necessarily therefore the most important aim of my attack was to seize the entire western bank of the Vistula. My plan of action foresaw a pincer movement from the south along the Vistula so as to be able to create a front against the Russians at any moment.
The City Centre I had from the start seen as the last objective of my plan. The attack on the Old Town was to open the way to the Vistula for my northern group. The attacks on Mokotow and Czerniakow were to reach the same aim from the south. These forces were to join up on the river bank. I decided that Zoliborz would be the last to be attacked before the final storming of the City Centre since its commander was not in a position to attack my north wing.
Aerial photographs had shown von dem Bach that the City Centre was the most strongly fortified by barricades, and less liable to surprise attack. He was taking into account the possibility of influencing the outcome by means of negotiations, and leaflets persuading the Poles that further fighting was hopeless, and believed that a direct attack on the City Centre would only increase the will to resist.
He flooded the city with leaflets promising good treatment to those who left it, and offering to negotiate a capitulation. Simultaneously, he increased military pressure by stepping up terror-bombing on residential districts and hospitals, while heavy guns shelled the whole area; street after street was on fire.
On 19 August, there was not a cloud in the sky. The sun blazed on the walls and buildings and on burned-out heaps of ruins. The soldiers’ heavy boots left heel-prints in the melting asphalt on the pavements. Everywhere there were swarms of flies. The unburied dead and those in shallow graves in the streets were decomposing and in places the air was heavy with the odour of corpses.[250]
