Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (67 page)
The one success in Anglo-American policy, which now occurred, concerned the long-postponed USAAF overflights to Warsaw. Yet the reaction of the US Administration, having scored this one success, was to drop all further initiatives. When the President’s economic adviser, Oscar Cox, suggested that Mayor LaGuardia of New York be asked to provide aid for rebuilding Warsaw, the State Department squashed the suggestion. ‘I wonder’, argued Charles Bohlen, ‘if it would be advisable to single out Warsaw for special treatment when other cities such as Rotterdam, Belgrade, Caen, Stalingrad etc have suffered as much if not more.’
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More tellingly, Roosevelt made all further aid to Warsaw dependent on Soviet cooperation. ‘Whether or not additional operations will be undertaken’, he told Harriman, ‘is dependent on the date of relief of Warsaw and [on] assistance given by the Soviets in the meantime.’
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In the meantime, the President was receiving negative views on the situation in Warsaw coming straight from the Kremlin. ‘The insurgents are still fighting, but were causing more trouble than support.’ ‘There are groups in four different isolated parts of the city, who are engaged in attempting to defend themselves without offensive ability.’ ‘The insurgents are intermingled with the Germans’, presumably hindering a Soviet assault. Harriman even told the President: ‘Stalin showed understanding and concern for the Poles
in Warsaw, and none of his previous vindictiveness.’ No less that ten days after the capture of Praga, he reported that it would be ‘possible to judge the situation more clearly after Praga had been taken.’
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The 1st (Polish) Independent Parachute Brigade was stationed at Stamford in Lincolnshire. Formed in 1943 from Polish servicemen already serving in Britain, it had received a standard dedicated to Warsaw, and its officers had assumed that the eventual liberation of Warsaw from the air was its principal raison d’être. In August 1944, the son of its commanding officer was fighting in the ranks of the Home Army in Warsaw. ‘Stan’ was the man who led the attack on the German storehouse which gave the AK its German helmets.
When training was completed in the spring of 1944, the brigade was put, by agreement, at the disposal of the British Chiefs of Staff. But it wasn’t sent to Normandy. And when the Warsaw Rising broke out, expectations arose, especially among the rank and file, that Warsaw would be its imminent destination. The British authorities explained both to Gen. Boor and the Poles in London that the facilities for transporting the brigade to Poland simply did not exist (which was true). So people in the know were resigned to an alternative assignment.
Even so, the lack of action was unbearable. And on 13 August many men from the brigade had refused to eat breakfast as a prelude to a hunger strike. Their OC wrote to the Commanderin-Chief.
I report the spontaneous reaction of [my] units to the lack of Allied assistance for Warsaw . . . The soldiers’ conduct is within the bounds of good conduct . . . I share their attitude . . . The whole brigade is touched most deeply by the fact that it is not being used for the one task for which it was formed. The fighting spirit of the men will necessarily be affected . . .
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In mid-September the 1st (Polish) Independent Parachute Brigade learned that it was going to be sent to participate in Operation Market Garden – Montgomery’s ill-conceived attempt to seize the Rhine crossing at Arnhem. It was a bitter blow, which might have caused a mutiny. But it didn’t. The Poles stayed loyal. They jumped at Arnhem in the second wave after the British 1st Airborne Division had found that the target area was surrounded by two SS Panzer divisions. Only 2,000 out of 10,000 parachutists escaped the disaster.
Oddly enough, in the same week that the brigade entered the fray at Arnhem, Warsaw’s besieged population saw a vast Allied air fleet passing overhead. Tens of thousands of desperate people thought that ‘their paras’ had finally arrived. [
AIRDROP
, p. 378]
On 18 September 1944, a huge fleet of Flying Fortresses of the US 8th Army Air Force flew from Britain to supply Warsaw, and continued on to the Soviet base at Poltava. It was the first and last time that Western supplies reached Warsaw on this route. A later TASS report described the shuttle flight as ‘one of the largest ever to land in Russia.’ When the Flying Fortresses passed over Warsaw around 2 p.m., they certainly created a grand spectacle. They were accompanied by sixty fighter escorts. The sky was a perfect blue. The planes were in wide-spaced formation, flying at a great height ‘as if on parade’. The silver fuselages glinted in the sun. The engines left multistranded spirals of white vapour trails. A rhythmic roar shook the buildings far below, punctuated by the popping of AA guns. Suddenly, the sky was filled with a mass of multicoloured parachutes, slowly descending, swaying in the breeze. On either side of the barricades, German troops and insurgents watched in amazement. The American report was optimistic:
Three combat wings (110 B-17s) dispatched to drop supplies at Warsaw. Three a/c returned early. All formations dropped on Primary [target] visually. Approximately 1284 containers dropped with fair to excellent results. 105 a/c landed at Russian bases. Flak: moderate. E/A Opposition: nil. Claims: nil. Losses: 2 B-17s, cause unknown.
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In reality, over 80 per cent of the 1,284 containers fell into German-controlled districts. There were no parachutists. And there were no more Frantic missions to Warsaw.
Meanwhile, the RAF flights from Italy continued. They had been grounded in early September by bad weather and by tests on a new bombsight that would be effective from a much higher altitude. Twenty aircraft were ready to take off from Amendola and Brindisi on 10 September:
A sense of duty kept the Polish crews going. They were an extraordinary collection of men of all types and ages . . . One flyer who came
from Balkan Airforce HQ was RAF Air Commodore [Raiski]. . . . [He] had fought against the Bolsheviks as a young pilot in 1919[–20]. Now he was on the same flight as a Group, who had been deputy commander of the Polish Bomber Brigade in September 1939. They all shared the hazards of the Warsaw flights with a former airline pilot, an assistant professor of psychology from Warsaw University, a high school teacher, an Argentinian and a Canadian of Polish origin. One inexperienced navigator . . . was briefed for his first trip to Warsaw, neatly packed his few belongings, wrote a letter to his parents in Poland, drafted a will, took off, and never returned. One gunner on a Polish Liberator had been released from a maximum security prison at the outbreak of the war. On a homeward flight over the Balkans, he leaned out of a gun turret entrance, joking with the rest of the crew, and inadvertently touched the traversing switch. The turret swung round and broke his neck.
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AIRDROP
The USAAF provide a grand spectacle
On 18 September something extraordinary happened; a large American air flotilla, the first we had seen since the fighting started, appeared overhead. The Flying Fortresses, over 100 planes, were flying at a very high altitude and were thus out of reach of the intense anti-aircraft fire. The countless specks which appeared behind them turned out to be parachutes. Ignoring the danger, people were coming out of the cellars and climbing the heaps of rubble to get a better view of the spectacle in the sky. Their faces beaming with hope and joy, they were embracing one another and crying with relief. As the multicoloured parachutes came closer, somebody shouted, ‘Our commandoes are landing!’ – but unfortunately he was wrong, they were supplies. Having dropped their cargo, the planes landed on the other side of the River Vistula, on Soviet-controlled territory. Since by now only a small part of the city remained under our control, three-quarters of the eighty tons of supplies dropped from such a great height fell into German hands. Had the help come a few weeks earlier, the outcome of the Rising might have been very different. Now it was too late.
Our daily paper, the
Warsaw Courier
, wrote: ‘Stalin had planned the total destruction of Warsaw a long time ago. A vibrant city with a long democratic tradition would have been a source of constant irritation in his vast totalitarian empire. Only when he saw Warsaw almost razed to the ground did Stalin decide to throw a few sackfuls of food to the dying few, an empty gesture designed to deceive world opinion.’
In his memoirs, General Boor colourfully presents the progress of this drop:
We had awaited the American air expedition with growing impatience. It had been announced and then retracted so many times because of unfavourable atmospheric conditions. At last during the night of 17th and 18th September the BBC announced that the expedition was imminent. We waited tensely for the morning broadcast. If it ended with the song ‘Just Another Mazurka’, the expedition was going to take off. If ‘The March of the Infantrymen’ was played out, we would meet with delay yet again.
This time, however, ‘Just Another Mazurka’ ended the broadcast and a radio message arrived immediately afterwards, informing us that we should expect the expedition between 11 and midday.
It was a sunny day with good weather. A clear sky.
Of course, the inhabitants of Warsaw knew nothing of the imminent help, so the sight of American aircraft flying overhead, appearing unexpectedly over the city, provoked indescribable joy. The bombers flew extremely high, leaving behind them a trail of white specks. They were parachutes.
The Germans opened a barrage of anti-aircraft fire, which, however, did not reach the machines.
Warsaw lived through moments of indescribable enthusiasm. Everyone except the ill and the injured poured out of the cellars. They deserted their basements, and teemed into streets and courtyards. They assumed from the start that this was the arrival of the Parachute Brigade. A soldier standing not far from me observed the sky through binoculars. Suddenly he shouted loudly: ‘Oh my God, the Germans are shooting them all!’
One of the officers tried to calm him down, explaining that they were not parachutists, but only containers with arms and supplies.
‘But I can see their legs waving in the air clearly through the binoculars,’ the soldier insisted.
No doubt, the Germans were under the same erroneous impression, because they alerted their units.
1
A German sentry watches the same event
Today, in our command post, we were treated to a scene that most of us have only witnessed in the newsreels. Around 13.55 a fleet of American and British planes appear, at a height of around 1,000 metres, parading at first in twos and threes. There must be about fifty to sixty of them (I get to forty-four and then lose count). There is a mass of them up there, as when a huge flock of birds takes to the wing. Then we realize that something is falling from the planes, it seems directly above us. Parachutes are opening! The alarm is raised and a clatter of gunfire begins. Some claim to have seen men, limbs and hands. So, it’s a paratrooper landing at last, like the one in the west? Most unlikely here. The ’chutes descend, and I see black ones, green, yellow, and white . . . Oh, they are supply pods!
. . . Inside the others is German ammunition. Oh, how decent they are. The Americans are bringing the supplies that we left in our haste in the west, and they are delivering it to us in Warsaw, by plane!
2
H. Stechbarth
Air Marshal Slessor received orders that flights to Warsaw must not stop. So on 21/22 September, a mixed group of RAF and SAAF tried once more. This time, exceptionally, they all returned safely to base. But the cloud cover over Warsaw was so thick that the pilots could not find their targets. No confirmation of success was received. Then the dead-moon period set in. Flying was off. Slessor did not receive replacement aircraft.
The loss of an aircraft was always a dramatic event. In the last couple of months, the Varsovians had seen several crashes. One Liberator came down in the City Centre, killing the Canadian crew. Another came down in the lake in the Paderewski Park in Praga. The sole survivor was taken prisoner by the Soviets.
Yet the aircrews’ lonely ordeals were something which only they themselves could witness:
Capt. Erich Endler [SAAF] had used more fuel than his inexperienced crew had allowed for. He had made his drop, and was already over the northern border of Yugoslavia before he was aware of his dangerously low fuel level . . . There was no hope of putting a big aircraft down in the dark safely. There was nothing to do but to bail out, and the pilot gave the order. The co-pilot, Lt. Chapman and RAF Pilot Officer Crook jumped, landed safely, and fell into enemy hands. From the ground, they saw their aircraft, its engine dying, rapidly lose height and crash into the towering crags of the Alps.
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Air force losses are calculated in various ways. But one calculation reckoned that 306 planes departed from Britain or Italy for Warsaw, and that forty-one were lost: two US, seventeen Polish, and twenty-two RAF and SAAF. Losses totalled 13.3 per cent. Losses on the run from Italy to Warsaw reached 31 out of 186 aircraft, or 16.7 per cent. This compares with the raid on Nuremberg on 30/31 March 1944, which is sometimes claimed to have been the RAF’s ‘darkest hour’, where losses totalled 11.8 per cent.
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For well over a month, Soviet intentions with regard to the Rising had been widely interpreted unfavourably. Churchill himself had called them ‘strange and sinister’. Even the Americans had noticed. Pro-Soviet observers would certainly have said that the earlier confusion had been overcome, that serious measures were now in progress, and that the Soviet Union would have much to gain if the Germans were driven from Warsaw and a major foothold established.