Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (70 page)
Readers of the
Information Bulletin
of 18 September would have looked for this article in vain, since in reality, the quotation came from another newspaper, the
Information Communiqué
nr. 43, which was printed by the BIP of the Home Army’s Mokotov District. Still more to the point, only the first two sentences of the quotation bore any resemblance to the original. The parts of the article which Telegin omitted expressed views which he presumably did not wish to pass on:
. . . there is no difference between Polish soldiers . . . Whatever reservations we may have about the politics of the Polish forces in Russia, we see in each soldier of Berling’s Army above all a comrade-in-arms, a colleague and a brother . . . [Even if one wanted] one could not organize two separate armies of the Republic where each fighting man feels himself to be the brother of all the others . . . The Vistula will never be the frontier between two Polands.
156
In short, Telegin’s quote was a worthless collage of fact and fiction. What exactly he was doing is hard to fathom. But he was not collecting hard or objective intelligence. [
FOREST
, p. 394]
Of course, one has to wonder whether Stalin ever saw one hundredth part of the mountains of paper that were addressed to him. But even if he did see these reports, it is difficult to imagine what possible use he could have made of them. For he had created a vast informational machine, which produced such an indigestible
macédoine
of fantasies, falsehood, and occasional facts that it was quite incapable of rendering a recognizable picture of outside reality. No one who read Telegin-style summaries could conceivably have been moved to recommend active support for ‘the Londoners’. For which reason, the last paragraph of the last page of Telegin’s report of 25 September was underlined by someone in Moscow in thick pencil:
FOREST
A boy refugee from the East follows events from the shelter of the forest
We had left our small town – Pinsk – and had gone to the countryside near Warsaw, because Mother said that my father would be there. Father had escaped from imprisonment in 1939 and was teaching in a village school . . . We set off after Mother, who was still a young woman, sold the entire contents of our house and hired a cart. We found him quite by accident, driving through a village [called Sherakov], where my mother called to a man walking along the road. It was Father.
From then on we lived together in a poky little hut without lighting or water. We went to sleep at nightfall, because we had no candles. I was constantly searching for food – a crust, a carrot, anything. Father once announced in class, ‘Every child who comes to school tomorrow must bring a potato.’ . . . The next day half the class was missing . . .
Nearby, close to a settlement called Palmiry, there was a clearing in the forest where the SS carried out executions. The salvoes deafened us day and night. They transported the condemned in closed, dark green vehicles, behind which the execution squad rode in a lorry. It was part of the ritual that the soldiers in the squad always wore long coats belted at the waist. The village children would follow in the roadside bushes . . . I felt as if frozen ants were crawling all over me . . . After the shooting, the column would return to Warsaw, the SS men smoking and chatting.
The partisans would come at night. Their faces appeared from nowhere, pressed against the glass of the window. Sitting at the table, I observed that they were always preoccupied with the same thought; that they could be killed at any moment . . .
One autumn night, when they came, it was raining. My father had gone into hiding. They spoke to Mother in whispers. We had to dress quickly and leave. A roundup was taking place. Whole villages were being taken to concentration camps.
We escaped to a prearranged hiding place in Warsaw. It was the first time I had seen a tram, multistoreyed houses, or rows of shops. Why we returned to the countryside, I don’t know. We went to a different village across the Vistula. All I remember is sitting at the side of a wooden cart and listening to the warm sand of the bridleway spilling through the spokes of the wheels.
1
Throughout the war, my dream was for a pair of shoes. In the forest I went barefoot, and the skin on my feet was as hard as leather. I dreamt of solid, hobnailed shoes
that would make a ringing sound on the pavement. The fashion, though, was for high knee-boots, a symbol of masculinity . . .
In 1944, I became an altar boy. My parish priest became a chaplain at a field hospital. Rows of camouflaged tents stood hidden in the pine forest. During the Warsaw Rising . . . there was feverish hustle and bustle. The guns of the front thundered nearby and we saw the smoke. Ambulances arrived at great speed. They carried the wounded, often unconscious, and unloaded them chaotically, often on top of each other. The exhausted stretcher-bearers would lay them out on the grass like so many sacks of grain (except that the sacks were leaking blood). Then they took a plastic hose and showered them with a strong jet of cold water. Any who showed signs of life were taken to the tent which contained the operating theatre. Every day, on the ground outside that tent, lay a heap of freshly amputated arms and legs.
The casualties who showed no signs of movement were taken to a huge grave at the back of the hospital. That’s where I stood for hours, beside the priest, who held a breviary and an aspergillum. Together, we recited the prayers for the dead and the dying. We pronounced ‘Amen’ dozens of times a day . . .
At some point, all fell quiet. The nurses and the tents disappeared. The front and the hospital had moved on. Nothing remained except the crosses in the forest.
Ryszard Kapu
ci
ski
Please give instructions on the following question. To what extent, in the coming days, is it a necessity to render assistance to the insurgents with arms, ammunition, and foodstuffs. The position of the insurgents is really acute, and they cannot reckon on any aid from anyone other than the Red Army. In order to supply the aid within maximum limits, it is necessary for the Front to release 500 tons of B-70 aviation fuel and 2,000 freight parachutes and to transport ex-enemy weapons from our central stores including rifles, machine-guns, and rocket-launchers . . .
157
According to Communist sources, the Soviet capture of Praga was an isolated exception to the general order which had put the First Byelorussian Front into a defensive stance; and the first crossing of the Vistula by
elements of Gen. Berling’s First Army on the night of 15/16 September was undertaken ‘on the march’, that is, by sheer momentum and without pausing to make preparations.
158
Without doubt, conditions in the resultant bridgehead were insupportable. Schmidt’s force was bearing down on the attackers from the north, Dirlewanger’s from the west, and Rohr’s from the south. The insurgents’ southernmost stronghold shrank alarmingly. On the 16th it had measured several square kilometres. By the 20th, it measured barely one-tenth of the size. In due course, the Home Army soldiers of the Radoslav Group decided to escape westwards to their comrades, whilst Berling ordered his surviving soldiers to pull back across the Vistula. The junction of insurgent forces with professional troops under Soviet command, which had raised such high hopes in mid-September, turned into one of the most crushing defeats of the whole Rising.
The official tally of the dead in the eight-day battle for the Cherniakov Bridgehead was 4,938. This means that Berling must have injected a force of almost divisional strength; and one might have expected him to obtain a more favourable result. After all, in the seventh week of the Rising, this was the very first occasion that the insurgents were joined by professionals enjoying both artillery and aerial support.
What went wrong? Three factors appear to be responsible. Firstly, there was no element of surprise. The Germans had been waiting for weeks for Rokossovsky to send a force into Warsaw; and, having cleared the greater part of the Riverside district in the previous fortnight, they knew exactly where the landings would take place. They had prepared an extensive complex of bunkers and machine-gun nests, which ensured that the attackers would run straight into a gauntlet of heavy fire. Secondly, Berling’s troops had no experience of urban warfare. Unlike the Home Army men, who had learned to use every inch of cover, they were completely unfamiliar with the art of street fighting. Trained in the standard Soviet infantry tactics, which called for wave after wave of frontal attacks irrespective of cost, they threw themselves at the fixed German positions, and were mown down like the British infantry at the Somme. Their officers, who were watched over by Soviet-style politicos, would have been unable or unwilling to accept the advice of their Home Army colleagues. So they paid the price. And thirdly, the logistical support provided by the Soviets was manifestly inadequate.
In this last regard, one is faced with an insoluble puzzle. Rokossovsky’s staff must necessarily have given clearance for Berling’s operation;
they did provide a certain amount of artillery cover, and, by their own account, they were sending up thousands of aerial sorties. So why, at a time when no other major fighting was in progress, did Rokossovsky not put a greater share of his massive resources at Berling’s disposal? One simply cannot know. But certainly much more could have been done.
The desperate scenes on the Vistula beaches on 23 September may be likened to the death-laden chaos which would have occurred in Normandy if the German defenders had stood their ground. The panic was appalling. When the very last pontoon was trying to leave the shore under fire, an accompanying nurse expressed her fury at a perfectly healthy soldier, who took a running dive and landed heavily on the pile of groaning wounded. She was told: ‘Don’t worry, that’s our political officer.’ The Germans did not take ‘commissars’ prisoner.
159
The smaller bridgehead at Marymont had already collapsed, partly because Berling’s men had not managed to join up with the Home Army group in neighbouring Jolibord. Only 13 out of 536 were not counted as casualties. In retrospect, the most interesting detail can be found in the account of ‘Louis’, a political director of the Communist People’s Army (AL), who had established radio contact with the right bank and who was fully convinced of the Soviet Army’s impending arrival. At the time, he had attributed the Soviets’ failure to share details of their plans to ‘war secrecy’.
160
The collapse at Marymont coincided with the surrender of two more important districts in Jolibord and Mokotov. The City Centre alone was left under increasingly close siege.
With the beaches cleared, and the junction foiled, the German Command could finally turn its full attention to the large group of insurgents in the Kampinos Forest. A huge sweep through the forest was launched on 27 September by three battalions from the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the SS Panzer Divisions
Totenkopf
and
Wiking
, who acted like beaters in a grouse shoot. All the villages which had given the insurgents shelter were burned, all the male villagers shot. It was typical Nazi antipartisan warfare. A large column of retreating insurgents was caught in a carefully laid triangular trap in the diminishing space between a road and a railway line. Here were the hunters’ hides. By dusk on 30 September, the Kampinos Group had ceased to exist.
Once both the Vistula beaches and the Kampinos Forest were lost, the long-standing hopes for the Rising to be joined by the Soviet Army were lost with them. Marshal Rokossovsky had still given no sign of his readiness to move. Hence Gen. Boor was obliged to return to the policy which he had been pursuing before the Bridgehead was established. Whilst continuing to defend his rapidly shrinking positions, he would restart negotiations with the Germans about the terms of surrender. He would leave the door ajar for a last-minute change of mind if, by some miracle, the Soviets sprang into last-minute action. [
SEWER II
, p. 399]