Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (33 page)

The immediate effects of the Soviet Army’s appearance on the Vistula were threefold. First, the German garrison in Warsaw, threatened both from the south and the east, prepared to withdraw and the civilian administration was ordered to evacuate. Second, as Rokossovsky had suspected, the German command decided to throw in its reserves and to strengthen the defence lines to the east of the city. Third, in expectation of the decisive assault on Warsaw, almost everyone anticipated some sort of action from the citizenry, who would fall on the German defenders from the rear and thereby assist the Soviet assault.

The timing was crucial. If the German garrison pulled out too hastily it would encourage the population to rise and would greatly reduce the chances of a successful defence. If the German reserves were thrown in too late, they would not be able to save the easternmost defence lines. If the Soviet assault were launched before sufficient heavy equipment had been assembled, it stood to be repulsed. If the population rose before the Germans and Soviets became fully engaged, they would be risking their lives in vain. Each of the decision-makers, therefore, was faced with a finely balanced throw.

For once, Rokossovsky decided to move with caution. His frontline troops were exhausted. His second-line positions needed consolidating. His infantry reserves and his heavy artillery were still moving up. In the long run, he would probably gain more by holding on to the bridgeheads than by chancing his arm on a premature assault on the city. Above all, as may be safely deduced, his forward intelligence was poor. He did not know for
certain what either the German command or his would-be Varsovian helpers were aiming to do. He held the overall advantage. He could afford to take a breather and regain his strength, to absorb a punch if it came, and then to launch a devastating counter-punch at his leisure. For which reason, his first priority had to be reconnaissance. So at the end of July, he ordered the tanks of his Second Army to probe the German defences. Their task was not an easy one. Driving forward into uncharted terrain, they were vulnerable to German fire. Scores of tanks and their crews were lost. But on 31 July, one daring company of T-34s found their way round or through the defence lines and entered the outskirts of Warsaw’s eastern suburb. They provided the sight for which the watchers had been waiting for weeks to see.

Meanwhile, the pressmen and the propagandists were straining at the leash. Governments were pressed to state their positions. War correspondents had a duty to report action. And Allied broadcasters had a duty to encourage optimistic news. Statements, reports, and appeals were descending thick and fast from all sides.

On 25 July, the Soviet Foreign Office had issued a statement. It announced that the liberation of Polish territory had been launched by Soviet and Polish troops. It said that their sole object was ‘to squash the enemy’ and ‘to help the Polish people to re-establish an independent, strong, and democratic state.’ It explained that the Soviet Government had decided not to establish any administration of its own on Polish soil, preferring instead to make an agreement with the Polish Committee of National Liberation. ‘The Soviet Government does not wish to acquire any part of Polish territory or to bring about any changes in the social order.’
⁴⁵

In those same days, both the KRN and the PKWN issued decrees, statements, and manifestos that were filtering through to the outside world. The PKWN Manifesto chose to call the exiled Government in London ‘a usurper’, and to denounce the 1935 Constitution as ‘fascist’.
⁴⁶
On 29 July, Radio Moscow broadcast an emotive appeal for the citizens of Warsaw to assist their impending liberation:

Warsaw already hears the guns of the battle which will soon bring her liberation. Those who have never bowed their heads to the Hitlerite power will again, as in 1939, join the struggle against the Germans, this time for a decisive action . . . For Warsaw which did not yield, but fought on, the hour of action has already arrived.
⁴⁷

Still more electrifying was the Polish-language broadcast of 30 July, which came from the Soviet-controlled station of the PKWN, and which was repeated four times:

On 1 August,
The Times
of London reported that the Battle for Warsaw had been joined. Since all such reports from the Eastern Front had to pass through the hands of Soviet censors, it was reporting material that had been prepared two or three days previously. The BBC made similar comments.

At that juncture, as he recalled in his memoirs, Rokossovsky had established his command post in a village within eyesight of eastern Warsaw. On the morning of 2 August, he was asked to look for himself:

P
OLAND HAD A TRADITION
of fighting for its freedom like no other country in Europe. Armed Polish risings against the partitioning powers were a regular and well-publicized fixture of the nineteenth-century scene. But even before the partitions, in the days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the nobles had steadfastly defended their right to form confederations or ‘armed leagues’ and to contest the policies of the kings, which they themselves had elected. The cult of the country’s ‘Golden Freedom’, therefore, had thrived for centuries, and had been celebrated by poets and balladeers for generations. It was still strong in the early twentieth century. In December 1918, for example, a popular rising in the province of Great Poland drove out the German army and secured the province for the Polish Republic. In 1919-21, three Risings contested the German hold in Silesia. Risings in Vilno and in Lvuv secured those two cities for Poland, while the Polish-Soviet War took on the appearance of the ancient
levée en masse
in defence of Poland against Soviet Russia. For the people who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, fighting for the country’s freedom could be seen not only as a patriotic duty but also as a tradition that had brought results.
¹

No less ingrained were the non-martial forms of resistance. Indeed, Polish public opinion had always been deeply divided between the ‘romantic’ advocates of armed combat and their ‘positivist’ opponents who felt that the human and material costs of insurrection were excessive. The latter tendency, which had gained the upper hand in the late nineteenth century, mocked the macho displays of the insurrectionaries, favouring instead what they called ‘Organic Work’. Their preference lay not with fighting but with a more patient strategy, which aimed to build up the oppressed nation’s economic and cultural resources and, in effect, to create an alternative social system that simply sidelined official state policies.

The net result of the two strategies was a social consensus which may have disagreed on the methods but which was firmly united about the ultimate goal. Armed resistance was for the few, mainly for fit young males of a combative disposition. But it could be prepared in a supportive
context where a mass of other people were engaged. The role of women was crucial. It was Polish wives, mothers, and grandmothers who guarded the traditions, provided the social infrastructure, comforted the activists, and told their menfolk where their duty lay. They could even take up arms themselves. Their attitude was immortalized in the short life of Emilia P. (1806–31), the ‘Virgin-Hero’ of the November Rising, who had fought against the Russian army disguised in a man’s uniform and whose feats were celebrated in a poem by Adam M., ‘The Death of the Colonel’. Scores of Polish insurrections had accumulated a treasure house of romantic poetry, stirring anthems and magnificent music. The best known item in this repertoire is the famous
mazurek
of Joseph W., ‘Poland has not perished yet’, which was composed in 1797 and which became the national anthem in 1926. But no less stirring is
La Varsovienne
, ‘The Song of Warsaw’, which dates from the November Rising of 1830 and which was originally set to the words of a French poem by Casimir Delavigne:

At last the day of blood has dawned.
May it be the day of our deliverance!
See the white eagle in all its splendour
Whose eyes were fixed on the rainbow of France
When it took to the wing in the sun of July.
Now, as it soars aloft, hear its cry:
‘My noble country! For thee we pledge our doom:
Either the Sun of Freedom, or the night of the Tomb!

Poles, to the bayonet!!
That is our chosen cry
Relayed to the roll of the drum.
To arms! To die!
Long live Freedom!’
²

Given such a background, it was entirely natural that preparations for organizing Underground Resistance were laid even before the formal military campaign in September 1939 had been lost. The clandestine ‘Victory Service’ (SZP) was formed on the orders of the General Staff one day prior to Warsaw’s capitulation. Its commander, publicly known only as ‘the Doctor’, was himself a staff officer. It was designed to complement the other part of the plan, which was to send the maximum number of surviving Polish soldiers abroad. It was to remain subordinate to, and in
close touch with, the regular Polish authorities even when the Government and army staff took residence in Paris, and from July 1940 in London. Its regular
Information Bulletin
, which was printed secretly in Warsaw, was published in a magnificent unbroken run throughout the war.

From the very beginning, therefore, the Polish Underground possessed an established hierarchy and an unquestioned legal framework. Its first tasks were to set up communications, to secure the secret arms dumps that military units had been ordered to conceal before surrendering, and to organize a network of cells that could later be expanded into a countrywide force.

Such were the origins of Europe’s largest Resistance movement, which in January 1940 adopted the name of the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ) and in February 1942 the Home Army (AK). It was a branch of the regular Polish armed forces, whose special task was to fight the enemy at home through clandestine methods appropriate to an occupied country. It owed undivided allegiance to the Polish Government abroad, and took its orders from the Commanderin-Chief. In this regard, it enjoyed a much stronger political and legal framework than those within which the Resistance movements in France, Italy, or Yugoslavia operated.

Everyone assumed from the start that a national rising against the occupying powers was the ultimate goal. Paragraph 4 of the ZWZ’s Instruction No. 2 of 16 January 1940 went straight to the point:

For obvious reasons, the friends and families of serving officers formed the natural social constituency of the Resistance in its initial phase. The younger brothers and sisters of men who had fought in the September Campaign and who, if they hadn’t been killed or incarcerated in German or Soviet prison camps, flocked to the colours in their thousands. The thrill of secret activities was enormous. The practical possibilities, for the time being, were slim. The numbers, especially in towns or suburbs that had housed pre-war military garrisons, were very impressive.

The Staff Battalion of the movement’s High Command – universally known by its acronym, Bashta – was one of the very first units to take shape. Its origins went back to November 1939, when the leaders of the
military resistance began to recruit young volunteers to be trained as core commanders for the expanding cadres. Its initial duties were to staff the communications network – hence the high proportion of female recruits – and to guard the General Staff. By mid-1942, however, when it was joined by its future long-term CO, Lt.Col. ‘Daniel’, it possessed three battalions, B(altic), K(arpaty), and O(lza), and a complement of 2,000 soldiers. Each battalion was made up of numbered companies – B1, K2, O3
etc.
– which were generally identified by their commander’s pseudonym. It also ran several auxiliary services of great importance. Among these was the General Staff’s Bureau of Information and Propaganda (BIP), headed by two distinguished historians who published an official journal and maintained a clandestine radio broadcasting station. Yet its greatest contribution probably came from military training. In the two years prior to the summer of 1944, Bashta trained over 600 Underground officers. This figure was similar to the total number of companies that were to be put at the Home Army’s disposal in Warsaw.