Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (47 page)
These units were added to the existing German garrison, and formed into a dedicated Attack Group. They moved into position on the 4th, with a full-scale assault on the western suburbs starting at dawn on the 5th. They were taking Himmler’s orders literally. Their skirmishes with Home Army defenders were almost a sideline, since for two days they concentrated on massacring every man, woman, and child in sight. No one was spared – not even nuns, nurses, hospital patients, doctors, invalids, or babies. Estimates of their non-combatant victims in the suburbs of Ohota and Vola vary from 20,000 to 50,000.
On the 6th, von dem Bach instituted a new policy. Only men were to
be shot. Captured civilians were to be sent to a transit camp newly set up 16km (ten miles) outside the city. Executions were to be handled by specialized
Einsatzkommando
s (task forces). The Attack Group was to concentrate on attacking the rebels. The chaos was so immense that it obstructed the Germans’ own operations. The main strategic west–east thoroughfare was still blocked. On 4 August, the 19th Panzer Division, whilst redeploying from Praga towards the Soviets’ southern bridgehead, took numerous casualties as it passed through the besieged city. To cap it all, the Luftwaffe had started to bomb rebel-held districts. Relays of Junkers Ju87 and Messerschmitt Me-109 fighter-bombers were operating from the airport.
Facing this formidable war machine, the Home Army had no air force, no heavy artillery, and few fully armed units. But it immediately proved to be no mean adversary. Its command structure was divided into eight city districts, and each district into wards. Its military formations were based on large groupings, which in turn were composed of battalions, companies, and platoons. But in practice, given the demands of urban warfare, in which relatively small forces were often required to operate on a semi-autonomous basis, the company of 50–100 men, usually named after the pseudonym of its commanding officer, became the basic unit. Over 600 such companies had fanned out into the city on 1 August, each with a specific street or building to defend. Their geographical diffusion, together with their ability to merge or to separate at will, made them extremely difficult to pin down and winkle out. They quickly exposed the Germans’ failings.
Meanwhile, in Cracow, the authorities of the General Government reacted by ordering a pre-emptive roundup of young men, similar to the one that had misfired the previous week in Warsaw. On this occasion, the Gestapo took no chances. After sweeping the streets on the afternoon of Sunday 6 August, they then searched the houses of suspect youngsters. At 10 Tyniets Street, they broke in, but failed to find the twenty-four-year-old Underground actor and aspirant priest who was praying on his knees, ‘heart pounding’, in a hidden compartment in the cellar. His close colleague had been shot as a hostage only shortly before. When they left, a young woman guided the fugitive to the archbishop’s palace. He was taken in, given a cassock to wear, and was told to present himself as one of the archbishop’s ‘secretaries’.
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In this way, Karol Wojtyła took a major
step towards ordination, and in the long term, towards the Throne of St Peter.
In the considered opinion of professional soldiers, both German and Polish, an insurrection by ill-armed irregulars in a large urban area had no chance of long-term success. In military terms, it could only be considered a short-term, stop-gap measure. There were few places to hide, and no way to escape. In street fighting, as distinct from the guerrilla-friendly environment of forests and countryside, the superior discipline and firepower of regular units supported by armour and artillery was thought to be invincible. It was for these reasons that the Home Army had originally planned to stage a rising outside the towns, and that the SS in Warsaw anticipated a quick victory. [
TRAPPED
, p. 255]
Nonetheless, despite the deployment of some 50,000 troops, the German concentration of forces hardly reached the density required by an urban battlefield of some 250km
2
(100 square miles). The perimeter of the three main insurgent positions which had stabilized by the end of the first week, in the Old Town, the City Centre, and the Southern Suburbs, totalled over 80km (fifty miles), and it was too long to be attacked except in local segments at any one time. The insurgents proved capable of surviving the heaviest bombardments, and they were extremely adept at repeatedly reoccupying the strongpoints which they had lost. They also enjoyed interior lines of communication whereby they could reinforce sectors under assault. They showed themselves far superior in the arts of entrapment and surprise, frequently nullifying or reversing laborious German offensives that were highly predictable. Nor, amazingly, did they ever run out of arms and ammunition. They became past masters at seizing their requirements from a bewildered enemy who, like the large but clumsy opponent of an expert judo player, found great difficulty in bringing his weight and bulk to bear.
After the first week, therefore, when neither side had gained a decisive advantage, Warsaw became the scene of long, relentless battles of attrition. Every day, usually at dawn, the Germans would return to their chosen sectors like workmen returning to a building site. Unable to dislodge their adversary by standard infantry tactics, they would call up the bombers and the heavy guns, pound the insurgent positions into mounds of rubble, demolish a few barricades, and gain a few yards or a couple of streets. Next morning they would find that half the barricades had been rebuilt during the night and booby-trapped, and that the shattered buildings provided perfect cover for unseen snipers and grenade throwers. In this way, practically every building and cellar had to be fought over time and time again before the Germans could secure a disputed sector. Every delay played straight into the insurgents’ hands. The days became weeks; and, eventually, to the common dismay of all combatants, the weeks became months.
TRAPPED
Thousands of civilians are trapped by the outbreak of the Rising
The time was drawing near for the destruction of Warsaw. The Uprising was a blameworthy, lightheaded enterprise; it completely confirmed ‘Tiger’’s diagnosis – although no one can tell what shapes the legend may take, or what influence it may exert during the decades and centuries to come. You could already hear Russian artillery fire. Rumours of an insurrection were greeted joyfully: a chance to throw oneself at one’s tormentors and take revenge . . . Soon, however, came news that there would be no Uprising. One of my socialist colleagues told me that to take action now, when the premier of the London government was flying to Moscow, would be nonsense. Stalin was too clever to negotiate with anyone using such a trump card . . .
That day, 1 August, [Yanka] and I were walking over to Tiger’s for an after-dinner chat and a cup of tea. I had something terribly important to discuss; namely, my new translation of an English poem. On leaving for a walk one should never be too sure of returning home, not only because something may happen to one personally, but also because the house may cease to exist. Our walk was to last a long time.
Ten carefree minutes under a cloudless sky. Then, unexpectedly, everything burst, and my angle of vision changed as I found myself advancing on all fours. This outer-city district, where vegetable gardens and sparsely scattered houses bordered the fields, was thickly planted with SS troops. Machine guns fired at anything that moved. Not far away some friends lived; but when neither running nor walking is possible, three hundred feet becomes a whole journey . . . In spite of this I never let go of my book – first of all out of respect for social ownership, since the book bore a call number of the University Library; secondly I needed it (although I could stop needing it). Its title:
The Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot
, in the Faber & Faber edition.
It was dawn of the next day by the time we crawled up to the island; that is, to a small modern flat with beautiful flowers in the courtyard; the open spaces around it made it seem completely cut off from the outside world.
Czesław Miłosz
1
When the Rising broke out I was in the flat with my mother and our maid. My father was somewhere in town, we wouldn’t see him for many months, but he is my strongest memory of the first days of the Rising. Telephones were still working, so my father called from nearby, saying he would climb to the top of the roof and if we
climbed our roof we would see him. I clearly remember climbing carefully, hiding among the chimneys to avoid being spotted and fired at. My memory is confused – was it that my mother told us to do this to make it stick in our minds, or did we assume little chance of seeing him again? In winter, when he was discovered in Cracow, it was like a miracle because we thought he was dead. I already thought of myself as a little boy without a father.
Krzysztof Zanussi
2
Christine and I were living in a room across the street from the Opera House. On 1 August we suddenly heard shooting throughout the city. We knew what it was: the Russians were already on the other side of the Vistula; we could see their tanks in Praga from the third floor of our building.
We attempted to make our way to the Old Town but were not allowed out in the street. We made our way from our basement through those of the next four houses. Then we needed to go above ground, to run across a street. I gave Christine instructions: ‘When I say “run”, then run! Then flat on your belly! Down here you’re going to die,’ I said. ‘The house will collapse and we’ll be buried. If we go up we still have a chance.’ Somehow I got her out of that basement, the moment before a bomb fell on the building.
The Germans started burning out the houses. Our building was already on fire. We were trying to extinguish the flames, but I couldn’t keep it up for long . . . We moved to the next building, then that house burned out. We saw what was the remains of a garden plot; somebody had dug a hole, just large enough for the two of us to slide into. Cinders were flying everywhere. You couldn’t see the sun for all the ashes; it was like a huge orange ball. All of Warsaw was burning. I had to urinate on my handkerchief and cover Christine’s head with it, to keep her hair from burning. We stayed in that hole for three days . . .
John Damski
3
Much was due to the resourcefulness of the insurgents, to brilliant improvisations, to their auxiliary services largely run by women, and,
above all, to their unbreakable spirit. Where AK platoons possessed only one gun for every two men, the night watch would take over the weapons of the day watch. So long as the guns of the dead and wounded could be recovered, the ratio of guns to men was actually increasing. Weapons and ammunition had often to be won from enemy stores. Communications were maintained through warrens of deep trenches and sewers. Underground kitchens, hospitals, workshops, and command posts continued to function in the deep, impenetrable levels of Warsaw’s multistoreyed cellars. The men and women of the AK fought like tigers at bay, undeterred by horrendous casualties and undiverted by hopes of survival after capture. It was a long time before the German command realized that instead of trying to kill them, there might be a better chance of persuading them to capitulate with honour.
The weapons used during the Rising were extraordinarily one-sided. The insurgents relied to a large extent on small arms, on old army rifles, and on hand grenades, especially the homemade
filipinki
. They quickly organized a network of underground factories and repair shops which kept up the flow of these basic armaments. They were desperately short of automatic weapons, although they collected a modest arsenal of machine-guns, Stens, rocket-launchers, and antitank guns from airdrops, from enemy stores, from their own production lines, and from the enemy. Their street barricades ranged from the frivolously flimsy to the supersolid, especially when constructed of heavy flagstones. They were numerous enough to prevent free access to any district; and even when approached by German armour, they could slow the tanks down sufficiently for the attackers to be attacked. (See Appendix 30.) The Germans, in contrast, possessed all manner of small, light, medium, heavy, and ultra-heavy weapons, and limitless supplies of ammunition. Their infantry carried modern Schmeisser sub-machine guns and rode in APCs. Their armoured formations used a variety of vehicles, from the massive sixty-eight-tonne Tiger II to the small Hetzer self-propelled antitank gun. Their artillery was supplied with a wide range of equipment including Rheinmetall Le-FH18 field-guns, 81mm mortars, and the famous 88mm AA gun. They also used grossly oversized anti-siege guns such as the 60cm ‘Karl’ howitzer or the long-range Bertha cannon firing 38cm shells. Their armoured trains rolled round suburban railway lines, seeking out the best locations for their salvoes of high explosive. [
MASSACRE
, p. 258]
Two items in the German armoury gained special notoriety. One, the Goliath, was an unmanned, remote-controlled miniature tank, which could serve as a platform for cameras and listening devices but was primarily employed as a transporter of explosives. Its only weakness was its long electric cable which was susceptible to the attention of daring soldiers and small boys who learned how to crawl out among the rubble with a pair of pincers and cut the Goliath dead with a single snip. The other, the
Nebelwerfer
, was a mobile, multiple rocket-launcher which fired a mixed salvo of incendiaries and explosives. Its nicknames, of ‘Cupboard’ and ‘Cow’, derived from the terrifying noises that accompanied each firing,
and that were variously described as the grating of heavy furniture on a stone floor or as the bellowing of a wounded cow.
MASSACRE
A religious order attracts the attention of the Nazis
From dawn on 2 August, the Jesuit fathers have been celebrating a perpetual Mass in their chapel . . . Explosions shake the walls. Plaster and rubble rain down. Violent gunfire continues until the
Agnus Dei
. Father Henryk Wi., oblivious, celebrates the Mass calmly to its conclusion.
Around ten o’clock, there is a violent knocking at the main entrance. A band of armed SS men burst in.
‘
Wer hat hier geschossen?
’ they ask . . .
The Porter, who is a friar, waves his arms . . .
‘
Ja verfluchten Polen! Wo sind Banditen?
’
The SS men carry out a search and return.
‘Everything in order,’ they say to the Father Superior. ‘But come with us.’ . . .
The clock strikes eleven o’clock. Again soldiers’ boots reverberate. The SS men return. Father S. asks, ‘Where is the Father Superior?’
‘Go downstairs.’
The German voices bring Father Ko. downstairs.
‘What is going on?’ he asks in excellent German.
‘Shots were fired from this house.’
‘That is impossible. No one has a weapon!’
‘But someone fired from this building!’ screams one of the SS men.
‘We have been in the basement the whole time. I would stake my life that no one fired. This is a closed house.’
‘Everyone to the boiler room!’ screams an SS man.
An SS man stands at the doors of the boiler room, with a sub-machine gun in his hand and grenades in his belt. Suddenly he points his finger at Father Wi., who is closest, and orders him into the corridor. He appears again . . . and signals to Father L., sitting in a chair. The old man gets up with difficulty. ‘I suffer from rheumatism,’ he says in German. The SS man nods. He stops the priest in the corridor and asks him the time. The priest takes off his watch, gives it to the thief, and carries on. Another SS man indicates a door to him. More and more priests and brothers flow into one small room.
Father W. says: ‘This is our last hour . . . Soon we will find ourselves before the Lord Jesus. We must be prepared . . . Everyone can make their confessions.’ Father M. reads from the breviary of apostolic blessings for the hour of death. The doors open and an SS officer appears, gathers everyone’s attention, and issues an order.
‘
Los.
’ The SS men pull out the pins of the grenades and throw them into the crowd. Awful explosions follow. Bricks, plaster, wood, and glass fly, and awful cries ring out. As if in reply, SS men stand in the doorway and spray bullets into the swirl of bodies, which slowly becomes silent.
Father K. lies face to the ground and tries to free himself from the weight of the dead. Father S. is also alive. Next to him, Father Wi. is moaning. Father Wr. is in the throes of death. Father L. raises a hand, as though administering the Last Rites. The voices and moans bring the SS men back. They shoot at those who are still moving.
A young boy from a German family darts in. He has attached himself to the SS men and never leaves their side. His childish voice rings out.
‘
Achtung! Der lebt noch! O hier, hier, er atmet noch!
’
The SS men return and more rounds ring out, accompanied by childish laughter and applause.
‘I hold my breath,’ remembers Father R. ‘My eyes are closed, I do not see his face but I wait for the shot and darkness, letting my head drop like a corpse’s.’ Father S. also feels the breath of an SS man. ‘How can I pretend to be dead when my heart is beating like a hammer?’
The retreating footsteps of the SS grow distant. The living extricate themselves from under the pile of bodies. ‘Father, please take care not to tread on my face.’ It is Father K. So he is alive! His face is streaming with blood.
Father K. sees two women, lighting their way along the corridor with a torch. ‘The torch, please.’
One of the women gives it to him silently.
‘And who are you?’
‘Nurses. From the state medical point of Professor L.’
‘Can we leave here?’
‘Yes, the boys are nearby. There are no Germans. We are caring for the wounded.’
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