Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (64 page)
Capitulation talks were in progress throughout early September, and for two weeks the insurgents were under intense pressure to surrender. There was no prospect of relief. The suffering of the wounded and of civilians was indescribable. The Western airlift was faltering. Ammunition was running out. Soviet propaganda was relentlessly hostile. Rokossovsky’s long-awaited offensive was eternally at hand, but never quite realized.
By mid-September, the Home Army negotiators had obtained most of what they had hoped for. They had won combatant status, and a promise of no reprisals. Ignoring Gen. Rohr’s ultimatum, they sought instead to cement further guarantees and clarifications. They were on the very brink
of signing. But when the Soviet Army definitely appeared, and after it the Berling Army, the spirit of resistance revived. The capitulation talks collapsed.
Junction
Rokossovsky’s occupation of Praga in mid-September finally put an end to the long-drawn-out uncertainties on the central sector of the Vistula Front. All major German positions east of the Vistula had been overrun. The Soviet Army had taken control of a crucial springboard for further advances. At the strategic level, it now held all the ground which could serve as the base for pincer movements north and south of Warsaw and could open the way for a major breakthrough. At the local level, it appeared to hold the German garrison in Warsaw at its mercy.
The overall balance of forces in the sector undoubtedly stood in the Soviets’ favour. Rokossovky’s setback in the previous month had been fully overcome.
The German Ninth Army’s log of 16 September assessed the prospects very gloomily:
Today, a new phase of the Warsaw–Modlin sector is beginning. Reconnaissance indicates that the First Polish Army will exploit the [continued existence of] the Rising and will force the Vistula to establish a [new] bridgehead in northern Warsaw. Simultaneously, the 47th [Soviet] Army Group will try to break the southern wing of the IV SS Panzer Group, and, by a second crossing of the Vistula, will reach the Kampinos Forest, where close to 8,000 insurgents are still operating. This would threaten the rear of the Ninth Army, and penetrate our frontline in the Vistula–Narev triangle. It would also pose a grave danger for East Prussia, since a pathway towards Danzig would be opened . . .
111
With Marshal Rokossovsky’s assent, therefore, Gen. Berling issued an order on 16 September 1944. Units of the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment of the First Polish Army were to force the Vistula and to link up with the insurgents. Here was the order which Gen. Boor had expected six weeks earlier.
Crossing the Vistula under fire was no easy feat. Though some cover was provided by a belated artillery barrage, by Soviet aeroplanes, and by a smokescreen, the men had to crouch and crawl across wide, exposed
sandbanks, wade into a shoulder-high stream or lie on crude pontoons, slowly drifting into the line of enemy machine-guns. They were led by a Soviet officer, and they were met on the western bank in the district of Cherniakov by two Home Army officers, Maj. ‘Whip’ and Capt. ‘Butterfly’. The long-awaited junction had been made. 120 out of the 150 men in the leading company were lost. [
FRAGMENTS
, p. 360]
In theory, the link-up between the insurgents in west-bank Warsaw and the Soviet forces on the east bank should have been turned into a winning combination. The insurgents still controlled their three extensive enclaves, in the north, in the City Centre, and in the south; and Berling was expected to deliver the arms, ammunition, food, and manpower which had been so sadly lacking. The main Soviet force, which now lined the Vistula, threatened to encircle the German garrison on all sides, and hence to deter the commitment of further reserves. In practice, the task of resupplying the Rising proved almost unsurmountable. The same factors which had prevented the Germans from dislodging the insurgents now prevented the reinforced insurgents from dislodging the Germans. Nothing short of a full-scale Soviet offensive was going to produce a decisive result. From the insurgents’ viewpoint, of course, the hope was that the limited landing by Berling’s men would be the prelude to something much greater. Everyone in central Warsaw knew that the largest army in the world was now less than a quarter of a mile away. Everything was going to depend on the decisions of the next two weeks.
Concerted, not to say fevered, attempts were made by the Home Army Command to establish reliable communications with Rokossovsky’s headquarters. Gen. Boor assumed, whatever Stalin’s ultimate intentions might be, that Rokossovsky would wish to work with him in the local operational theatre. After all, Soviet aircraft were now regularly dropping supplies – usually without parachutes – and the Soviet artillery had opened up over the river against German positions in the Citadel and the Danzig Station. To this end, therefore, Monter was ordered to organize a party of seven men, who were not only to visit Rokossovsky in person, but were to take radio equipment with them, to ensure a permanent link. The group was led by Lt. ‘Poppy’, a ‘dark and silent one’ who was Monter’s chief of radio communications, and included the Soviet officer Kalugin, a representative of the People’s Army, Lt. ‘King’, and four other AK officers. It took them three days to travel from the city centre to Praga, first moving through the sewers from the city to Mokotov and eventually crossing the Vistula under cover of darkness on the night of 18/19 September. On reaching Rokossovsky’s HQ, they ran straight into trouble. The NKVD had found a German propaganda leaflet, purporting to emanate from the Home Army and urging the Varsovians to fight against Bolshevism.
FRAGMENTS
The mind of a seven-year-old boy stores images that have lasted a lifetime
Our tenement house, [202] on Cherniakov Street, had been under constant fire, mainly from the grounds of the YMCA building, from the very start of the Rising. Sitting in the cellar and listening to the gunfire, we children were pleased ‘when it finished’ because we would find a mass of bullets and shells outside to play with.
The first insurgent unit had appeared in our courtyard early on. There were a dozen or so young men and a girl who acted as a sniper on the roof. Was there just one girl? I no longer remember, although I can still see them exactly standing in the middle of the courtyard . . .
The Rising created a collection of short images in my head, sometimes static pictures, sometimes frames that are partially obliterated, others distorted perhaps by the ‘memory screen’ of the brain. Some of the images are silent, others have sound. I remember the dramatic warning cry of ‘Ukrainians!’, for example, which signified a greater danger than that posed by the Germans. Just as in a thriller film, danger came up the stairs with an invisible face. Leaning against the banister on the stairway, I would then look at the arm of the retreating uniform. Fortunately it was always someone from the Home Army (AK) unit. (I only heard about the existence of a People’s Army (AL) after the end of the Rising.) The Germans fired from minethrowers we called ‘bellowing cows’. The name came from the six ‘bellows’ before every series of explosions, as six mines were cranked into position. The cranking was as loud as the explosions. I will never forget that sound until the end of my days. After the cranking there was nothing one could do. If one heard the explosion, it meant that one had not been killed.
A shell from the Big Bertha cannon destroyed the fourth-storey annexe of our house. I will never forget it, because it caused the first death that I had ever witnessed. My uncle sank right on top of me. ‘Uncle, what are you doing?’ I asked, thinking it was a joke. But he was no longer alive. Was it Big Bertha? Almost certainly. No planes could be heard at the time. And I had a good ear for differentiating the various death-dealing sounds.
When we fled the Riverside district for the City Centre on 10 September, the weather had been very good. But the one-kilometre trek from Riverside to Three Crosses Square took up a day, and halfway down Moon Street a couple of bullets whistled
past my ear. We resorted first to sheltering in courtyards, and then to following a trench all the way along Cherniakov Street [to Ludna]. We went underground under Hospital Street, entered a small building on Conflict Street, and worked our way through the ruins of some warehouses. After that, an extremely dangerous stretch of shrubbery that was under fire awaited us, before we reached safety in the grocery store on the far side on the path to Three Crosses Square and Crane Street. In the City Centre we moved mainly through cellars. I was accompanied by a strange fear of being buried alive for two whole months . . . The final destination was 39 Basket Street, near Constitution Square.
The tenants of our new lodging said that the pile of rubble in the courtyard concealed the remains of an anti-aircraft post knocked out in 1939 . . . The same pile of rubble served as a hunting-ground for my grandfather who, with help of a homemade catapult, repeatedly tried to bag a pigeon for me. The food situation was very bad. There was only barley, and in ever-dwindling quantities. My grandfather would walk to Lvuv Street with two water buckets fitted with cross-shaped covers to stop the water swilling out. My teddy bear was another important item because the remnants of my family’s fortune was sewn inside him in the form of ‘piglets’, or gold five-rouble coins. Apart from him, the only things which I managed to salvage after the Rising were a drinking glass and a half-burned copy of
Dr Dolittle
.
Throughout my life I have avoided the subject of the Rising. I avoided reminiscences, I did not even go to see André W.’s film
Kanal
(‘Sewer’).
1
Jacek Fedorowicz
On 17 September, Boor tried another tack. He sent a telegram to Rokossovsky via London and Moscow, giving precise instructions on how to reactivate the municipal telephone cable under the Vistula:
The cable runs from French Street to Paderewski Park. The junction box is situated 2 metres from the corner of Washington Avenue on the park side. Other boxes can be found 49, 68, and 69 metres from the first one. Three cables are bonded together in a triangular formation. We use the thick, upper cable. To operate a field
telephone, you have to link up all 24 strands of the cable and connect both earth wires. Once contact is made transfer to a double line, because of phone-tapping. Your station is [‘Lomzha’]; ours is [Rashin]. We are listening for your call-up sign from 18/9, 20.00 hours.
112
Apart from passing on this correspondence, Barnes Lodge was involved in the delicate task of listening in to Soviet radio traffic from Praga and of breaking Soviet military ciphers. They appear to have succeeded. According to a former operator, this was the probable source of the news that the Soviets intended to establish a second bridgehead in the northern suburb of Marymont.
113
The Marymont bridgehead, like its counterpart 8km (five miles) to the south at Cherniakov, turned out to have been organized by the Berling Army. It was greatly facilitated by the successful exchange of two liaison missions – one, a joint AK and AL venture, which crossed the river at the second attempt, and another in the opposite direction undertaken by a Soviet telegrapher called Vurdel, who parachuted into the Home Army Command centre in Jolibord. This toehold on the western bank, first established on the night of the 17/18th, received an advance party of seventy-eight men from an artillery observation group. It was expanded on the two following nights by 506 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment. Their misfortune was to have landed in a spot that was surrounded by German strongpoints and which was some small distance away from the insurgent positions. But their expectations were high. In the eyes of everyone involved, they were to be the forerunners of much stronger forces to follow.
114
Like all armies, the Home Army had its political warfare department forming part of the Bureau of Information and Propaganda (BIP). It was subject to the Supreme Commander AK. One may express surprise that such an outfit could function at all in the conditions of the Warsaw Rising. One is compelled to express admiration and amazement not only that it functioned with particular brilliance, but also that it kept going without interruption from beginning to end. The phenomenon can only be explained by the fact that insurrectionary Warsaw formed a close-knit, dynamic community driven no less by cultural than by military energies. The insurgents were fighting to save their way of life.
The press of insurrectionary Warsaw can be studied in great depth on
the basis of an unusual five-volume collection,
A Survey of the Home Press in the Period of the Warsaw Rising
, which was assembled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the exiled Government in London and which was published for internal circulation only in April 1945. One can only wonder how such an enormous pile of material was smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Europe in the middle of the war. Apart from a full run of the official Home Army
Information Bulletin
, it contains extracts from the socialist
Worker
,
Warsaw Fights
,
Insurgent News
, and
Polish Commonwealth
.
Everyday news was dominated by detailed accounts of the fighting, but it contained innumerable curiosities. At one point, for instance, the
Bulletin
announced that the insurgents had been joined by five deserters of Polish descent from the Wehrmacht and by two ex-Soviet soldiers. The latter were wearing a red star alongside the white eagle on their caps. There was also a platoon of deaf-and-dumb soldiers; twenty-one boys and two girls, under their officer ‘Yo-Yo’.
115
Two other features, however, stand out. One was a remarkable awareness of events in the outside world. The other was a passion for culture, and particularly for poetry. [
FELDWEBEL
, p. 364]