Russia at war
Page 98
The Churchill-Stalin correspondence during the period of the Warsaw rising is marked by a tone of increasing exasperation on the part of Churchill about the Russians' unco-operative attitude, and by growing anger on the part of Stalin against the Warsaw
"adventurers" who had dragged the people of Warsaw into a senseless rebellion without co-ordinating their actions with the Red Army Command.
On August 4 (i.e. three days after the beginning of the rebellion) Churchill wired to Stalin:
At the urgent request of the Polish underground we are dropping, subject to the
weather, about sixty tons (on Warsaw)... They also say they appeal for Russian aid which seems very near. They are being attacked by one and a half German
divisions.
On August 5 Stalin replied:
I think the information given you by the Poles is greatly exaggerated and
unreliable... The Polish émigrés claim that they have all but captured Vilno with Home Army units... This has nothing to do with the facts. The Home Army consists
of a few detachments misnamed divisions. They have neither guns, aircraft nor
tanks. I cannot imagine detachments like these taking Warsaw, which the Germans
are defending with four armoured divisions, including the Hermann Goering
Division.
On August 8 Stalin reported to Churchill on the meetings that had taken place in Moscow between Mikolajczyk and the "Lublin Poles", but suggested that the meeting had, so far, been fruitless. Nevertheless, on August 10, Churchill thanked Stalin for bringing the two sides together, and also said that Polish airmen from the west had dropped more supplies on Warsaw. "I am so glad to learn you are sending supplies yourself. Anything you feel able to do will be warmly appreciated by your British friends and allies."
But it was not long before Churchill began to suspect foul play on the part of the
Russians. He telegraphed to Eden (then in Italy) on the 14th:
"It certainly is very curious that at the moment the Underground Army has
revolted the Russian Armies should have halted their offensive against Warsaw and withdrawn some distance. For them to send machine-guns and ammunition [to
Warsaw] would involve only a flight of 100 miles."
[Churchill, op. cit., vol. VI, p. 117.]
Two days later, according to Churchill, Vyshinsky informed the American Ambassador
that the Soviet Government could not object to English and American aircraft dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, but they did object to their landing on Soviet territory,
"since the Soviet Government do not wish to associate themselves either directly or indirectly with the adventure of Warsaw."
On August 16, Stalin sent—though in a milder form—a message to the same effect to
Churchill.
There was great agitation in London and Washington, and on August 20 Churchill and
Roosevelt sent a joint message to Stalin beginning: "We are thinking of world opinion if anti-Nazis in Warsaw are in effect abandoned", and pleading for Big-Three co-operation in the matter. Stalin replied on August 22:
Sooner or later the truth about the handful of power-seeking criminals who
launched the Warsaw adventure will be out. They... have exposed practically
unarmed people to German guns, armour and aircraft... Every day is used, not by
the Poles for freeing Warsaw, but by the Hitlerites who are cruelly exterminating the civil population.
From the military point of view the situation which keeps German attention riveted to Warsaw, is highly unfavourable both to the Red Army and to the Poles.
Nevertheless, the Soviet troops, who of late have had to face renewed German
counter-attacks, are doing all they can to repulse the Hitlerite sallies and to go over to a new large-scale offensive near Warsaw. I can assure you that the Red Army will spare no effort to crush the Germans at Warsaw and liberate it for the Poles. This will be the best, really effective, help to the anti-Nazi Poles."
Churchill went on speaking in terms of the Russians' "strange and sinister behaviour". He attributed the Russians' unwillingness to let Western planes land behind the Russian lines to the blackest villainy. "They did not mean to let the spirit of Poland arise again in Warsaw. Their plans were based on the Lublin Committee."
[ Ibid., p. 24.]
But then, he says, "On September 10, after six weeks of Polish torment, the Kremlin appeared to change their tactics."
That afternoon shells from the Soviet artillery began to fall upon the eastern
suburbs of Warsaw, and Soviet planes appeared again over the city. Polish
communist forces, under Soviet orders, fought their way into the fringe of the
capital. From September 14 onward the Soviet air force dropped supplies, but few
of the parachutes opened and many of the containers were smashed and useless.
And then:
The following day the Russians occupied the Praga suburb, but went no further.
They wished to have the non-Communist Poles destroyed to the full, but also to keep alive the idea that they were going to their rescue.
[ Ibid., p. 127 (emphasis added).]
On October 2, a little over a fortnight later, Bör-Komarowski capitulated to the Germans.
According to the Russian official History, in order to understand the situation one has to go back to the directives given by the Soviet Supreme Command to the various fronts on July 28. These directives included the following:
The 3rd Belorussian Front was ordered to capture Kaunas by August 1 or 2, and
then push on to the East Prussian border;
The 2nd Belorussian Front was also ordered to advance, farther south, via Lomza,
towards the East Prussian border;
The 1st Belorussian Front was ordered, after capturing Brest and Siedlce, to occupy Praga (opposite Warsaw) between August 5 and 8, and to establish a number of
bridgeheads south of Warsaw on the western bank of the Vistula.
The right flank of the 1st Belorussian Front indeed clashed with the Germans on July 31
"on the close approaches to Praga, the suburb of Warsaw on the right bank of the Vistula". Meantime, the left flank of the 1st Belorussian Front forced the Vistula south of Warsaw and captured the small bridgeheads of Magnuszew and Pulawa. The capture of
these bridgeheads was followed by frantic German attacks on them; though the Russians were not to be dislodged, they were not strong enough to enlarge them.
Something obviously went seriously wrong with the Russian military plans at the end of July and beginning of August. Under the dateline "Outside Warsaw, August 1" (the day the Warsaw Rising began), Makarenko wrote in Pravda of August 2:
On to Warsaw! In an offensive there is a moment when the military operation
reaches its culminating point and, having acquired its necessary pressure and
impetus, goes ahead without any doubt as to what will happen next. At such a time when the full strength of the offensive comes into motion, it starts advancing in great strides, and then no power can stop its victorious forward march.
Whatever exactly this verbiage was supposed to mean, every reader must have
interpreted it as signifying that the Red Army would be inside Warsaw within a. few
days. On August 3, the Soviet papers published a map showing the front running a few miles from the Vistula, just east of Praga, though on a very narrow salient. The talk in Moscow was that Rokossovsky was going to capture Warsaw on August 9 or 10. And
then something went wrong: apparently that coup de main, of which Guderian was to speak, had not come off.
The news from Warsaw grew more tragic every day. Then, for nearly a fortnight there
was a news blackout in Russia as far as the Warsaw sector was concerned, and it was not till August 16 that an ominous communiqué was published saying that "east of Praga our troops have been repelling
the enemy's large-scale attacks, and have abandoned Ossow."
Ossow was only a short distance from Praga, and there was no real indication how far the Russians had been pushed back.
After denouncing the decision taken by the AK command, with the blessing of the Polish Government in London, to start the Warsaw uprising on August 1 as an anti-Soviet
"political operation", and after describing the wholly inadequate quantities of arms available inside Warsaw, the Soviet History goes on to say:
The very first day proved highly unfavourable to the insurgents... They failed to capture the strategic points in the city, the railway stations or the Vistula bridges...
As a result, the Germans were able to bring up heavy reinforcements. The
commanders of some of the AK detachments, discouraged by all this, dissolved them or took them out of Warsaw. Yet, despite these unfavourable conditions, the
struggle continued, and greatly grew in vigour when the population of Warsaw
joined in... Rank and file members of the AK, unaware of the political schemes of their leaders, fought bravely against the Nazis... However, the forces were too
unequal... In the second half of August the situation became truly tragic, with the Germans carrying out Hitler's orders to wipe Warsaw off the face of the earth.
[ IVOVSS, vol. IV, p. 243.]
The explanation now given is that although "in principle" (as could be seen from Stalin's letter to Churchill of August 16), the Soviet Government did not wish to be associated with the Warsaw Rising (on which it had not even been consulted), it nevertheless "did all it could" because many thousands of Warsaw patriots had joined in the struggle.
In reply to the Western charge that the "Soviet Command had deliberately stopped its troops at the gates of Warsaw and so condemned the insurgents to death", the History says:
[IVOVSS, vol. IV, pp. 244 ff (emphasis added).]
People who say this have never taken the trouble to study the possibilities of the Red Army at the time of the Warsaw Rising. Here are the real facts:
In the second half of July the troops of the 1st Belorussian [Rokos-sovsky] and of the 2nd Ukrainian [Konev] Front entered Polish territory and began to advance
towards the Vistula... At the end of July, even before the beginning of the Warsaw Rising, the tempo of the offensive had greatly slowed down. The German High
Command had by this time thrown very strong reserves against the main sectors of
our advance. German resistance was strong and stubborn. It should also be
considered that our rifle divisions and tank corps had suffered heavy losses in
previous battles; that the artillery and the supply bases were lagging behind, and that the troops were short of both petrol and munitions.
Infantry and tanks were not receiving nearly enough artillery support. During the delays in re-basing our air force on new airfields, this was much less active than before. At the beginning of the Belorussian Campaign, we had complete control of
the air. At the beginning of August our superiority was temporarily lost. In the 1st Belorussian sector between August 1 and 13 our planes carried out 3,170 sorties and the enemy planes 3,316.
Consequently, after a long forty-day offensive, with enemy resistance much stronger than it was, our troops could not maintain the high tempo of our advance, and give immediate help to the Warsaw rising. This was quite obvious to the German
command. Thus General Tippelskirch writes: "The Warsaw Rising started on
August 1, at a time when the strength of the Russian blow had exhausted itself." The task was rendered all the more difficult as we were faced with the problem of
forcing the Vistula.
And then:
On August 1, troops of the left flank of the 1st Belorussian Front approached
Warsaw from the south-east. In approaching Praga, the 2nd Tank Army met with
fierce enemy resistance; the approaches to Praga had been heavily fortified... It was also here that the Germans concentrated a heavy striking force of one infantry and
four Panzer divisions, which struck out at the beginning of August and drove the 2nd
Tank Army away from Praga, before the bulk of our troops had had time to approach
this Warsaw suburb.
The very difficult position in which the 2nd Tank Army found itself at Praga may be measured by its losses.
In its battles fought on Polish territory—at Lublin, Deblin, Pulawa and the
approaches of Warsaw—it had lost about 500 tanks and mobile guns. Under the
weight of the German offensive it had to retreat from Praga, take up the defensive and repel the German attacks...
There followed weeks of confused fighting both north and south of Warsaw on the
eastern bank of the Vistula and also on the three bridgeheads the Russians had captured on the western bank—at Magnuszew, Pulawa and Sandomierz—all a considerable
distance from Warsaw. Everywhere the Germans were now throwing in heavy forces.
It is not clear from this how far away from Praga the Russians were thrown back, but they were certainly a considerable distance to the east of Praga by the middle of August, when Churchill was desperate to get Western planes to land behind the Russian lines.
Here I can supplement the History with what General Rokos-sovsky, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, told me at Lublin on August 26, 1944.
My informal and off-the-record conversation with Rokossovsky (after a great ceremony in the main square for the unveiling of a cenotaph to those who had fallen in the Battle of Lublin) was a brief but significant one. Here is what he said:
"I can't go into any details. But I'll tell you just this. After several weeks' heavy fighting in Belorussia and eastern Poland we finally reached the outskirts of Praga about the 1st of August. The Germans, at this point, threw in four armoured divisions, and we were
driven back."
"How far back?"
"I can't tell you exactly, but let's say nearly 100 kilometres (sixty-five miles)."
"Are you still retreating? "
"No—we are now advancing—but slowly."
"Did you think on August 1 (as was suggested by the Pravda correspondent that day) that you could take Warsaw within a very few days? "
"If the Germans had not thrown in all that armour, we could have taken Warsaw, though not in a frontal attack; but it was never more than a 50-50 chance. A German counterattack at Praga was not to be excluded, though we now know that before these armoured divisions arrived, the Germans inside Warsaw were in a panic, and were packing up in a great hurry."
"Wasn't the Warsaw Rising justified in the circumstances?"
"No, it was a bad mistake. The insurgents started it off their own bat, without consulting us."
"There was that broadcast from Moscow calling on them to rise."
"That was routine stuff, [sic] There were similar calls to rise from Swit radio [the AK
radio], and also from the Polish service of the BBC—so I'm told, though I didn't hear it myself. Let's be serious. An armed insurrection in a place like Warsaw could only have succeeded if it had been carefully co-ordinated with the Red Army. The question of
timing was of the utmost importance. The Warsaw insurgents are badly armed, and the
rising would have made sense only if we were already on the point of entering Warsaw.
That point had not been reached at any stage, and I'll admit that some Soviet correspondents were much too optimistic on the 1st of August. We were pushed back.
We couldn't have got Warsaw before the middle of August, even in the best of
circumstances. But circumstances were not good, but bad. Such things do happen in war.
It happened at Kharkov in March 1943 and at Zhitomir last winter."
"What prospect is there of your getting back to Praga within the next few weeks?"
"I can't go into that. All I can say is that we shall try to capture both
Praga and Warsaw, but it won't be easy."
"But you have bridgeheads south of Warsaw."
"Yes, but the Germans are doing their damnedest to reduce them. We're having much difficulty in holding them, and we are losing a lot of men. Mind you, we have fought non-stop for over two months now. We've liberated the whole of Belorussia and nearly one fourth of Poland; but, even the Red Army gets tired after a while. Our casualties have been very heavy."
"Can't you help the Warsaw insurgents from the air?"
"We are trying; though, to tell you the truth, it isn't much good. They are holding only isolated spots in Warsaw, and most of the stuff will fall into German hands."
"Why can't you let British and American planes land behind the Russian lines, after dropping their supplies on Warsaw? There's been an awful stink in England and America about your refusal... "
"The military situation east of the Vistula is much more complicated than you realise.
And we just don't want any British and American planes mucking around here just at the moment.
[This may or may not be the true explanation, but it tallies with the usual Russian
cageyness at times of reverses.]
I think in a couple of weeks, we'll be able to supply Warsaw ourselves from low-flying planes if the insurgents hold any recognisable area in the city. But this high altitude dropping of supplies on Warsaw by Western planes serves practically no purpose at all."
"Isn't all this massacre and destruction in Warsaw having a terribly depressing effect on the Polish people here? "
"Of course, it has. But a fearful mistake was made by the AK leadership. We (the Red Army) are responsible for the conduct of the war in Poland, we are the force that will liberate the whole of Poland within the next few months, and Bor-Komarowski and the
people around him have butted in kak ryzhy v tsirke—like the clown in the circus who pops up at the wrong moment and only gets rolled up in the carpet... If it were only a piece of clowning it wouldn't matter, but the political stunt is going to cost Poland hundreds of thousands of lives. It is an appalling tragedy, and they are now trying to put the blame on us. It makes me pretty sick when I think of the many thousands of men we have already lost in our fight for the liberation of Poland. And do you think," he concluded, "that we would not have taken Warsaw if we had been able to do it? The whole idea that we are in any sense afraid of the AK is too idiotically absurd."