First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  Suddenly, a heroic group of cavalrymen, about 500 horses, flew at full gallop out of the undergrowth. They advanced with an unfurled banner in their midst … All German machine guns fell silent, only the cannons continued to fire. Their barrage created a wall of fire about 300 metres in front of the German lines. The Polish cavalry advanced at full speed; a sight straight out of a medieval painting! They were led by their commander with a raised sabre. The distance between the Polish cavalry and the wall of German fire was quickly shrinking. To continue this charge into the arms of death was madness. And yet the Poles broke through.50

  In truth, after their initial success, the Poles had to endure an armoured counter-attack, before disengaging later in the afternoon. They had sustained heavy losses. That evening, all surviving cavalrymen were ordered to dismount and proceed on foot, under cover of darkness, into Warsaw. Their horses were let loose. ‘It was a dreadful order,’ Rudnicki wrote, ‘smelling of “sauve qui peut”.’51 The departing Uhlans left over 100 dead comrades behind, and a similar number of wounded. The remainder of the two cavalry regiments managed to break through to the capital.

  One of those who made it through during those last days before the ring closed was General Tadeusz Kutrzeba, the architect of the Polish counter-attack on the Bzura. Along with remnants of the Poznań and Pomeranian armies, he made his way into the capital on 20 September, and presented himself at the headquarters of General Juliusz Rómmel, the commander of Polish forces in Warsaw, with the words: ‘I have lost a battle.’ Though he had expected a dressing down or even a confrontation – after all, Rómmel had neglected to send assistance to his men on the Bzura – he was to be pleasantly surprised. ‘I was received with chivalry, honour and understanding,’ Kutrzeba recalled, ‘no trace of displeasure, no complacency.’52 In time, he would be appointed Rómmel’s deputy.

  On 22 September, with Hitler across the Vistula in Praga, Polish forces attempted to repeat the trick they had pulled off at Wólka Węglowa at nearby Łomianki. Early that morning, around 5,000 soldiers – the remnants of the Poznań Army – set off, under the command of General Mikołaj Bołtuć, in an attempt to pierce German lines and break through to Warsaw. After breaking the first line of defence, their advance was halted by intense artillery fire at the railway embankment that ran parallel to the river. According to one German account, the Poles ‘did not even have a bravery born of desperation, rather [they] were moved by a fatalistic sense of futility’.53 Others disagreed. A soldier of the German 30th Infantry Regiment described the Polish attack as being so intense that some German positions became untenable, and panic briefly reigned before ‘officers, NCOs and men fought back desperately with rifles and machine guns, finally pulling hand grenades and entrenching tools from their belts in the hand-to-hand fighting’.54 Dawn revealed a scene of bloody chaos, with the dead littering the roadside, and horses, wagons, artillery pieces, cars and trucks all thrown together in a ‘whirlwind of destruction’.55 By the afternoon, unable to break through and having lost their commander in the battle, the Poles called off the attack. Their losses were estimated at around 800 dead.

  One death that day would have special significance. Word reached Hitler on the afternoon of 22 September that Colonel-General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, the monocled former commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, had been killed at the front outside Warsaw. Having been forced into retirement the previous year, after being disgraced in a spurious homosexual scandal, Fritsch had returned to command his former regiment, the 12th Artillery, and in that capacity had been inspecting the front lines at Praga, when he was caught either by a ricochet or by a sniper’s bullet in the upper thigh, severing his femoral artery. As his adjutant recalled, the general collapsed immediately, waving away his efforts to loosen his belt with a weary ‘Just leave it’, and then lost consciousness. Before a tourniquet could be applied, Fritsch had bled to death.56

  According to Hans Baur, Hitler was informed of the death as he waited to board his aircraft that afternoon to leave for Danzig. He ‘briefly expressed his regret’, Baur wrote, ‘then got back into the plane’.57 In the days that followed, Hitler would pen a short communiqué and order a state funeral, which he himself would not attend. Many of those that knew the general suspected that, depressed by his treatment the previous year, he had chosen to end his life by deliberately exposing himself to enemy fire.58 The diarist Victor Klemperer would have summed up the thoughts of many Germans when he recorded the event: ‘Colonel-General Fritsch, until a few months ago Commander-in-Chief of the army, fell outside Warsaw on 22 September. A few lines of obituary, tiny picture, details merely in passing and trivialised. Independently of one another Eva [Klemperer’s wife] and I placed the same question mark.’59

  Just as Polish units were trying to make it into Warsaw, so the city’s many remaining foreign nationals were trying to get out. On 21 September, they got their chance when it was announced that a temporary ceasefire would permit the evacuation of those foreigners holding passports from neutral countries. One of those leaving was the American photographer Julien Bryan, who had been chronicling the siege of the city and was now gathered with hundreds of others outside the Hotel Bristol, clutching only the one small piece of hand baggage that was permitted. In due course, a convoy of cars and army trucks arrived, and the evacuees were processed and loaded. Bryan’s thoughts were with those who could not escape the maelstrom. One of the saddest sights, he later wrote, were the Polish staff of the US Embassy, who ‘calmly rounded up the others to go to a place of safety, when they themselves must remain’. Another who stayed behind was the US vice-consul, Thaddeus Chyliński, who refused to leave his Polish wife, though he possessed an American passport.60

  Once the evacuees were all loaded into the trucks and cars, the convoy set off across the Vistula into Praga, and then travelled northward, past the ruined houses and bemused civilians, and towards the ‘no man’s land’ a few kilometres beyond. Crossing the Polish lines, Bryan recalled, ‘we could see shallow trenches and machine guns, crudely camouflaged with small branches, and infantry lying quietly with their rifles in shell holes and ditches. Barely five hundred yards [450 metres] behind them, in the workers’ district of Praga, children were playing.’ Soon after, the evacuees climbed down from the vehicles, said their goodbyes to their Polish drivers and continued their journey on foot. In due course, they were met by German soldiers, who helped them onto a fleet of spotless army trucks for their onward journey to Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and safety. ‘The Germans made quite a show,’ one eye-witness noted. ‘Handsome officers in bright new-looking uniforms hastened to pick up the hand baggage of women and to carry their small children for them, smiling all the while.’61 ‘It was all smiles and courtesy,’ Bryan remembered. ‘Having shelled and bombed us for weeks, now they carried our bags, patted babies.’ He couldn’t help but notice that a German propaganda film unit was on hand, to record the event for posterity. Bryan’s own efforts at counter-propaganda – the three small rolls of film containing his iconic images of the German siege – were smuggled out inside a souvenir gas mask.62

  The city that Bryan had left was in turmoil. German infantry assaults continued and were met with a sometimes desperate response. A nurse in a field hospital recalled a Polish soldier rushing into the building to announce that the Germans had broken through and that tanks were on their street. She watched as the building was fortified:

  I begin packing, they help barricade the windows. Hand grenades are being handed out, we get them too. The captain walks up to me: ‘Can you use a gun? This is for your personal use.’ A small ‘Belgian’ [pistol] falls in my pocket. Behind the barricades, soldiers with grenades, rifles, ammunition on hand. Machine guns upstairs. All eyes are focused. Without fear.63

  Where the German attacks were successful, they were often followed by a level of brutality that had become grimly customary. Michalina Mazińska experienced the new realities at first hand when her block, in Brzeziny on the east side of the Vistu
la, was taken by the enemy. ‘I was in my flat with my husband and child,’ she told a post-war commission, when the Germans arrived and took her husband outside into the courtyard.

  My child was crying desperately for its father, and I looked through the window. The Germans got three men, ordered them to put their hands up and shot all three of them. I couldn’t stay in the flat due to the overwhelming noise and shooting, so I went to the basement. As I was going downstairs, I heard the last words of my husband, who said, ‘Jesus, Mary, deliver my soul!’ Germans yelling, a crack and a blood-curdling groan.64

  Three days later, when she dared to retrieve her husband’s body, she found that he had taken six bullets and been stabbed in the side with a bayonet. His only fault was to have been unlucky.

  While the Wehrmacht kept up the pressure on the ground, most of the danger for Warsaw came from the air. The bombing of the city had already been ramped up after 17 September, in an effort to force a surrender and make good on Hitler’s claim that the war was over. As one observer noted perceptively: ‘The Germans evidently realised our Allies would not create a second front, and that they could employ all their strength to crush our resistance. The advance of the Soviet Army seemingly had intensified the frenzy of their attack.’65 The Luftwaffe’s targets included the Royal Castle, the Sejm (parliament building), the Cathedral of St John and the city’s concert hall. ‘Nothing is sacred to the enemy,’ one diarist complained.66 As one gleeful German account put it, Warsaw was the target of a number of successful aerial attacks, hitting the power plants, water works and gas works, as well as attacking road and rail junctions in the suburbs. The Stukas ‘fall like meteors, heavy and blindingly fast … flames erupt with wonderful precision, accurate hits on appointed targets throw up pillars of smoke … A boiling red glow of fires glimmers over the city.’67

  In addition to the Luftwaffe raids, the Germans sent countless artillery shells – some estimated 25,000 in one day68 – to wreak chaos on the city’s streets and suburbs. Władysław Szpilman recalled that ‘the street, red with the glow of fires, was empty, and there was no sound but the echo of bursting shells … Heavy blood-red masses of smoke loomed over the buildings.’69 In the southern suburb of Mokotów, the bombs hit the house next door to Maria Komornicka, shattering all the windows. ‘As soon as I walked away from the window it hit,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘the ceiling over Mum’s bed caved in. Good thing she was not in it. She was sitting on the toilet.’70

  For those beneath the hail of bombs, it could be a real test of their nerves. One diarist testified to the emotional strain of an air raid:

  Crowded together … everyone stands and listens. Hearts beat loudly. You can hear a continuous whine – that’s an exploding bomb cutting through the air. Before you hear it actually explode, there is a terrible second of anticipation. During a fraction of a second, thousands of thoughts run through your mind and your heart misses a beat … People curl up to make themselves smaller, as small as possible, anything to avoid the bomb.71

  Some found it difficult to cope. In one instance, a fireman raged in despair at the destruction on a Warsaw street. ‘The town hall is burning,’ he yelled at no one in particular, ‘the castle is burning! Do you understand what it means to see all these beloved buildings burning and not be able to help? Warsaw is burning. The Germans are smashing everything we have!’72 Having devoted his life to saving Warsaw’s citizens and property, his impotence in the face of so much destruction was too much for him to take. Lack of rest exacerbated the nervous tension. An officer in an anti-aircraft unit complained that it was hard to sleep when ‘every few minutes you heard the whizz of an artillery shell, followed by a flash like lightning, which illuminated the room’. Just as frustrating for him was his anxious young deputy, who constantly shone a torch at his fiancée’s photograph, saying over and over ‘Jeszcze żyję, jeszcze żyję’ (‘I am still alive, I am still alive’).73

  Others were not so fortunate. One Warsaw resident recalled being caught in a raid in the Targówek district of Praga. After taking cover, she emerged to see ten corpses on the street: ‘We collected the blood-stained bodies with spades. The remains were so mangled, it was impossible to tell them apart.’74 A report from 19 September noted that, on that day alone, some 166 unclaimed corpses were retrieved from the city’s streets by the municipal authorities. They were buried in parkland and open ground, such as Krasiński Square or the Zoological Garden.75 Alexander Polonius joined a burial party at the Frascati Gardens in central Warsaw, where some seventy corpses were taken the following day. ‘They were brought in wheelbarrows and carts, loaded one on top of the other like so many lumps of meat, their heads and limbs dangling and shaking as the carts jolted over the uneven ground.’ The most difficult part of the task, he recalled, was to search the bodies for identification, rifling through blood-soaked coats and handbags. Most were impossible to identify: ‘Many of the bodies were those of women who had obviously been shopping and shot while they stood in the queue. They still clasped their handbags with their money, but had no identification on them whatsoever.’76

  Food was already an urgent priority for all Varsovians. Given that the city had been cut off by the Germans for around a week, and the population was swollen with refugees from the suburbs and soldiers from Kampinos Forest, the food situation was critical. Scavenging, even pilfering, were commonplace. Marta Korwin remembered agonising over the moral implications of stealing from a nearby field of cabbages in order to feed the patients in her hospital. ‘It had not taken long – less than three weeks – to change our ethical values,’ she wrote.77 Desperation bred ingenuity. Horsemeat soon found its way onto the kitchen table, and was even praised by the authorities for its flavour. It did at least have the advantage of relative abundance: equine corpses had become common on Warsaw’s streets, and many of them would scarcely be cold before they were butchered by hungry civilians. One eye-witness recalled visiting a restaurant on Nowy Świat, where he was treated to a soup made from red cabbage and horsemeat: ‘A horse’s jawbone and a cannon bone protruded from the soup tureen.’78

  In such trying circumstances, a little humour was invariably required, and some found it in the German leaflets that were dropped on the city on the morning of 21 September. The leaflets were intended to intimidate: to demand the city’s surrender, to reiterate Poland’s predicament and the failings of her military and leadership, and to threaten further bombing if the city’s defenders did not comply. But, both the mangled Polish grammar and the empty promises of fair treatment for prisoners aroused little except a cynical smile. ‘We received leaflets like those, in broken Polish, every day, and we laughed at the spelling mistakes,’ one observer wrote. ‘We did not believe in German “chivalry”, as our experience provided evidence to the contrary.’ Another diarist added that ‘no one paid any attention to the German threats and promises. The leaflets were torn up or burned. Some people thought they were poisoned. One fell in our garden … Father stuck his walking stick through it and brought it unostentatiously into the kitchen and burned it in the cooker.’79

  Such petty acts of defiance demonstrate that, for some at least, morale was solid and the will to resist unimpaired, despite the suffering. In fact, the secret situational reports of Warsaw’s Defence Command would seem to confirm that assumption. A ‘positive atmosphere’ among the residents continued, it was reported on 21 September, and though the news of the Soviet invasion had caused concern, the ‘will to fight and the faith in ultimate victory’ were unaffected.80 The anecdotal evidence from Warsaw’s diarists lends further corroboration. One recalled a sergeant calmly addressing injured soldiers in a cellar during an air raid. ‘It is nothing, boys,’ he said, ‘if they destroy us, burn us, kill us. Death comes only once. And to lose a fortune, a hand, a leg, or life itself for what one believes, for a holy cause – one has to do it. If the whole of Poland is occupied – if it be completely destroyed – we shall rise again, so don’t worry, boys.’81

  The ma
instay of Warsaw’s morale during the siege were the radio broadcasts of Stefan Starzyński, whose defiant addresses lent a purpose to the suffering and gave a vision for the future. ‘No news carried with it more authority’, one Varsovian recalled, ‘than that broadcast every day by Mayor Starzyński, whose daily talks to the populace were listened to with religious attention. In them, he spoke about current events, he educated the people, he heartened them to resist, he interpreted and explained the situation and exposed the lies spread by the German wireless service.’82

  The address given by Starzyński on the afternoon of 23 September was a prime example. Looking back over his time as mayor, he told his listeners:

  I wanted Warsaw to be great. I believed that it would be great. I and my colleagues drew up plans, sketched the great Warsaw of the future. And Warsaw is great. It happened sooner than we expected. Not in fifty years, not in a hundred, but today I see a great Warsaw. As I speak these words to you, I see her through the windows in all her glory and grandeur, surrounded by billows of smoke, reddened with flames of fire, magnificent, indestructible, grand, fighting Warsaw. And though the places where magnificent orphanages were to stand are filled with rubble, though barricades thickly covered with the bodies of the dead stand where parks used to be, though hospitals are in flames – not in fifty years, not in a hundred, but today Warsaw is at the height of her grandeur and glory, as she fights for the honour of Poland.83