Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Elsewhere, more circumspect tactics brought more effective results. Five companies of the elite Parasol Battalion, for instance, already hardened by action in the underground K-Div. organization, took up positions on 1 August on the western side of the adjoining Jewish, Lutheran, and Calvinist cemeteries. Their HQ and observation post was located in an old folks’ home. On the morning of the 2nd, they were unable to stop a column of Panthers, which drove past into the positions of their comrades of the Zoshka Battalion. That afternoon, however, they were confronted by a major German attack directed from the western suburbs. They faced a column of Tiger tanks of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, supported by elements of the 2nd Regiment of Grenadiers and an armoured artillery regiment. Whilst the tanks were smashing their way up front through a complex of barricades manned by the Communist AL, an assortment of Home Army units fell on the trailing German infantry. In this way, the attack was brought to a halt some 200 metres (650 feet) short of Parasol’s main defence line. Next day, the cemetery district was subjected to heavy bombardments from an armoured train. Parasol suffered its first serious casualties in the evening, when its HQ took a direct hit from bombs dropped by a score of Heinkel 111s. The command post was relocated a few streets away. On the 4th, Parasol captured three armoured cars, a large cache of guns and ammunition, and a band of prisoners. And, amidst considerable rejoicing, it received two PIAT antitank rockets and two machine guns as its share of the drop by the first RAF Liberator. The night was spent burying the dead, rebuilding barricades, and strengthening defences. After four days of hard fighting the battalion had lost only 8 per cent of its effectives in dead and wounded. At that rate, they would not be annihilated for some time. They had passed their baptism of fire.
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In one incident, when Parasol had begun to prepare a strongpoint
near the Hospital of St Stanislas Kostka, a white-coated doctor came out and asked them to move on, for fear of German reprisals. They obliged. Next day, the doctor and all his staff and patients were massacred.
The 5th and 6th of August saw two of the blackest days in Warsaw’s history. The principal reinforcements of the German garrison had arrived, and
SS-Gruf.
Reinefarth launched his grand assault on Vola. The insurgents were gradually forced back towards the City Centre. Hand-to-hand fighting persisted in the cemeteries, even when the main insurgent units had been ordered to retreat through the ruins of the Ghetto. Rheinefarth complained about a shortage of ammuition. ‘We just can’t kill them all,’ he grumbled.
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The price was paid by civilians. On 5 August alone, an estimated 35,000 men, women, and children were shot by the SS in cold blood.
The first week of the Rising brought little satisfaction to either side. The insurgents had not seized full control of the capital. The Germans had not crushed the insurgents. Both the opening assault by the Home Army and the subsequent German counterattack had fallen short of their goals. Far more civilians had been killed than combatants. Indeed, the obsession of the SS with slaughtering innocents was seriously hampering the German military effort. Neither side had been brought to its knees. So neither side was willing to call a halt.
Impasse
The fighting continued with unrelenting intensity. The Soviet Army was clinging on to its bridgeheads far to the south of the city, but it had been driven back in the central sector and had not achieved its original objective of establishing the front right along the line of the Vistula. The Wehrmacht had contained the Soviet pincers on either side of Warsaw, but the SS had not suppressed the Rising.
Given his overall supremacy in men and materiel, Rokossovsky must have been confident that his setback on the central sector would prove temporary. But he estimated the delay at two to three weeks, and it was not until 8 August that he drew up his plan for the next stage of the campaign. The plan, which was agreed with Zhukov and submitted for
Stavka
’s approval, assumed that the German salient east of Warsaw would be eliminated by the third week of August. After that would come a massive new offensive across the Vistula from the 25th, liberating Warsaw
in the opening stage and driving westwards towards the Oder, 450km (280 miles) distant.
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German strategy, whilst stubbornly blocking the Soviet advance, gave priority to separating the Rising from operations at the front. To this end, a cordon was thrown round Warsaw on all sides, and two reserve Hungarian divisions were brought in to strengthen it. Systematic measures were taken to open the west–east supply line through the city and keep it open; the guard on the Vistula bridges was strengthened; the eastern suburb of Praga, where the insurgents had already been defeated, was heavily garrisoned; and the southern Soviet bridgeheads were surrounded by rings of steel. Von dem Bach kept his forces in the city busy, pounding insurgent positions and chipping away at vulnerable sectors, especially in the western suburbs. But it was not until 19 August, towards the end of the third week, that
SS-Gruf.
Reinefarth received orders to mount a concerted attack on one of the smallest sectors in the insurgent enclaves, in the Old Town. The Ninth Army log book repeatedly reported that the resistance was ‘ferocious’, ‘fanatical’, ‘extremely determined’, and that prospects for a rapid result were not good.
Home Army strategy turned almost exclusively to active defence. Lacking heavy weapons and having spent the element of surprise, the insurgents could only mount limited local counterattacks and were constantly forced to make tactical withdrawals. On the other hand, they daily witnessed their enemy’s inability to strike a knock-out blow. Allied airdrops were frustratingly scarce; but they raised hopes of more to come. Soviet intentions were sinisterly opaque; but as Rokossovsky steadily reasserted his supremacy his arrival on the far side of the river grew tantalizingly imminent. Death from surrender was seen as more likely than death in combat. So combat continued. [
PANTHER
, p. 281]
Once the initial fighting stabilized, the insurgents found themselves in control of three main areas – in the north, in the Centre, and the south – and in full command of two dense forests beyond the German cordon, one at Kampinos to the north and another in the Kabaty Woods to the south. Surface communication between these five areas was virtually impossible during daylight, but movement was feasible at night, and sewers and irrigation channels provided a ready-made network for the unsqueamish. German armoured columns were eventually able to roll along the main east–west boulevard between dawn and dusk, but they spent over two weeks securing this vital thoroughfare, and even then they did not usually venture out after nightfall. In the City Centre, the
insurgents were under pressure from the west, losing the cemeteries and most of the Ghetto by 12 August. But they fell back in orderly fashion; and in the middle of the month they were still holding the Old Town and the Riverside District in strength. In the northern suburbs, they re-entered districts that had been evacuated during the first week, and they were not seriously troubled there for the rest of the month.
PANTHER
A soldier from ‘Dyon 1806’, with three colleagues, achieves the impossible
The German Panther tanks were extremely heavily armoured, and I know from later experience that neither the American Shermans nor the British Cromwells with their 75mm cannon were strong enough to pierce the Panther’s armour. For our part, we had nothing more than small-calibre weapons; and our bullets bounced off the Panthers like peas off a wall. Hence we only captured a second Panther by a sort of freak chance. There were three of us from our unit, together with ‘Power’, a man of unheard-of valour, about whom much has been written.
In the instant when the tank was driving through the barricade, Power leaped out of a gateway, ran up to the tank and pushed an enormous petrol bomb through the driver’s visor. The bomb was too weak to damage the armour-plating. But by exploding right in front of the driver’s face, it blinded him and caused him to lose control. He must have pulled the right-hand guidance lever, because the tank lurched suddenly to the right, ran off the roadway, and drove down into a garden ditch that was five or six feet lower. The driver tried to reverse; but the tank only dug itself in even deeper. After gathering our senses for a couple of seconds, either Mark or I, since both of us speak German well, shouted,
‘Alle aussteigen!
, i.e., ‘Everyone out’; and sure enough, after a short delay, the tank’s upper cover opened, and the Germans began to climb out. Shouting,
‘Hände hoch!’
, we then jumped on top of the tank to disarm the Germans. Since it was damaged, the second tank had to be towed away by the first one.
At which point, a man in civilian clothes wearing a hat and coat (probably Radoslav in person) appeared from nowhere, introduced himself as a colonel, and demanded that we hand everything over. An argument ensued, and nearly led to shots being fired. But Power, as a pre-war officer, eventually gave in, and we had to surrender our captured weapons. All we kept was one brand-new carbine and its ammunition, which I hung on to, and a crate of antitank mines. There’s no doubt that the petrol bomb inserted by Power provided the decisive element. And that’s how we captured a tank!
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Andrzej Nowakowski
On 15 August, Gen. Boor ordered all Home Army units in the vicinity of Warsaw to come to the capital’s rescue. Fierce but abortive attempts were made to break through the German cordon from the Kampinos Forest. Similarly fierce and unsuccessful attempts were launched against German positions at the Danzig Station, to cut the main east–west railway line and relink the City Centre with the northern suburbs. No major ground was won or lost, but both sides exhausted themselves. In the southern suburbs the Home Army enjoyed greater success, holding on strongly to Mokotov opening up a pathway to the Kabaty Woods, and occupying a stretch of the Vistula foreshore facing Praga. This last conquest, which brought the insurgent strongholds to their maximum extent, was particularly valuable since it provided a prospective landingstage for Soviet forces approaching from the east.
Reinefarth’s assault on the Old Town relied increasingly on mass bombardments than to waves of infantry. It gradually reduced the insurgents’ redoubt to an oblong of streets roughly 1200m by 600m (1,300 yards by 650), where life of any sort among the mountainous ruins became increasingly perilous. By the fourth week of August, Gen. Boor was forced to prepare a military withdrawal through the sewers.
Yet the SS looked incapable of inducing the total collapse which they so earnestly sought. The anger of the Ninth Army Command was mounting. On 29 August, von dem Bach admitted to them that the Rising was unlikely to be terminated by existing methods. He requested the transfer of an extra division possessing fully trained and battle-hardened infantrymen, not ‘the rag-bag of assorted units’ which he had at his disposal at present. On 30 August, the Ninth’s log showed how difficult it was to fight both the Soviets and the insurgents simultaneously. The Soviets had just taken the town of Radzymin, 20km (twelve miles) to the east of Warsaw, so German reinforcements had to be brought in, and a battalion of sappers, which was vital to the final attack on the Old Town, was pulled out during the night in order to guard the Vistula bridges.
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As August wore on, German reactions to the Rising were conditioned by setbacks on other fronts. The Allies held Rome. The Americans were driving across France. The Soviets, though slowed before Warsaw, were gearing up for renewed offensives in East Prussia and the Balkans. Warsaw was annoying, even humiliating, but it was not Berlin’s most pressing problem. Indeed, the impasse on the Vistula rather suited the Wehrmacht’s purposes.
The German counterattack east of the Vistula by four
panzer
divisions had proved surprisingly effective. When launched on 2 August, it was conceived as a last-minute move to staunch the gaping wound caused by Operation Bagration and the collapse of Army Group Centre. But instead it made headway, and Rokossovsky, who had literally been within sight of Warsaw, was pushed back halfway to the Bug. With the Wehrmacht in full retreat in most other places, this must be reckoned an exceptional German achievement.
All German sources of the time took it for granted that the Soviet Army was seeking to link up with the insurgents. In its log of 8 August, the Ninth Army took satisfaction from the fact that ‘the Russian attempt to seize Warsaw by a coup de main had been defeated by our defence’ and that ‘from the enemy’s point of view, [the Rising] had started too soon’. Guderian later commented: ‘We Germans had the impression that it was our defence which halted the enemy rather than a Russian desire to sabotage the Warsaw Rising.’
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In the meantime, the most imminent threat, from the German point of view, lay to the north. Whilst Rokossovsky had been advancing towards the Vistula, the First and Second Baltic Fronts and the Third Byelorussian Front had invaded the Baltic states. One mighty thrust was aimed at the Gulf of Riga and the other at Lithuania and the Baltic coast round Memel. The latter operation, which made great progress in August but was not completed until October, was particularly dangerous since it gradually cut off a whole German army group in Courland. It also promised to lead the Soviet Army for the first time onto the territory of the Reich, in East Prussia. One effect of these developments was the decision by the Government of Finland on 25 August to sue for an armistice. A second was to sow the seeds of panic among the population of East Prussia. For the time being, however, they were relieved to learn that the latest Soviet offensive had been directed into the Balkans.
German propaganda inevitably tried to exploit developments to their own advantage. On 19 August the
Völkische Beobachter
, the principal
organ of the NSDAP, published a major article on the Rising. Entitled ‘The Satanic Game with Warsaw’, it concluded that ‘London and Moscow have rushed the Poles into a Rising and have left them in the lurch.’ The clear implication was that Churchill and Stalin were working in cahoots.
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