The Road to Berlin (53 page)

On the first day of its renewed advance (27 July), 2nd Tank Army covered about thirty miles, driving between German units stretched from Garwolin to Stochek and pushing them back on Kolbel–Sennitsa–Kalyszyn, operations which 2nd Tank conducted under increasingly heavy air attack and with each corps running very low on fuel and ammunition. This compelled the army commander to slow his advance, move up the tankers and supply lorries, regroup and prepare to resume the attack on 29 July.

After a preliminary artillery bombardment and air attacks on the morning of 29 July, the tanks of 3rd Corps moved forward again, cutting clean through the German lines, capturing Stanislawow and drawing up to Radzymin. 8th
Corps outflanked Sennitsa from the east, took the town during the course of 29 July and by the evening was advancing on Okuniew. Dubovoi’s 16th Corps, checked before Kolbel, set off on an outflanking move to the west of the Warsaw highway and broke into the rear of the 73rd German Infantry Division defending the Kolbel area, where a section of Soviet tanks captured the commanding general of the 73rd, General Franckel. As 2nd Tank Army raced up to Praga, with its right-flank columns (3rd Corps) cutting the road and rail links connecting Warsaw with Bialystok, 47th Army drew up to the Kalyszyn–Tsegluv line and 8th Guards Army to Tsegluv–Garwolin, the area into which German troops from Brest-Litovsk were retiring—only to find Soviet units at their back.

On 31 July the lead tanks of the Soviet armoured columns, together with some motorized infantry, suddenly burst into Otwock and Radzymin, not more than a dozen miles from Warsaw. This put Soviet tanks north-east and east of Praga, the Warsaw suburb on the eastern bank of the Vistula, which fairly bristled with defences—pill-boxes and fixed firing positions, field fortifications, numerous minefields, anti-tank and anti-infantry obstacles in profusion. By the evening, 2nd Tank Army command knew that the Soviet tank units had stumbled into a heavy and formidable concentration of German armour with at least five divisions,
SS
formations
Wiking, Herman Goering
and
Totenkopf plus
two
Panzer
divisions, the 19th and the 4th. To the east, in the area of Siedlce, Soviet mobile forces were still engaging strong concentrations of German armour (including
SS
units), with Yushchuk’s 11th Tank Corps—also low on fuel and ammunition—along with cavalry units of the ‘cavalry-mechanized group’ trying to batter its way forward and clear the Germans out of Siedlce, all at a time when Rokossovskii’s right flank was finally breaking down German resistance at Brest-Litovsk and the 2nd Belorussian Front—on Rokossovskii’s right flank—fought for possession of Bialystok. One by one these German strong-points—Siedlce, Brest-Litovsk and Bialystok—fell to the advancing Soviet armies by the end of July, but the 1st Belorussian Front command showed a justifiable nervousness about the ‘Praga concentration’ of German forces. On 26 July Front
HQ
anticipated the weight of the German counter-attack falling in the Siedlce–Lukow area and urged Chuikov to hold his ‘main grouping’ on the right flank in order to counter the ‘activization’ of enemy operations. At that moment 2nd Tank army was advancing into the thick of a considerable concentration of German strength, into the midst of the
SS
divisions and the
Panzer
divisions deploying the latest heavy tanks, the ‘Royal Tigers’, when Soviet tank divisions were all feeling the hurt of their losses sustained in the drive from Lublin to the approaches to Warsaw—no less than 500 tanks and
SP
guns. During the night of 28 July the citizens of Warsaw could hear the sounds of the battle waged between German and Soviet tank forces at Wolomin, but once at Praga the commander of 2nd Tank issued orders that the suburb must not be assaulted by tank units; motorized infantry would first carry out a thorough reconnaissance and uncover the weak spots in the enemy defences, and only then could the armour be introduced.

Soviet tanks had definitely breached the southern perimeter of the German bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Vistula at the approaches to Warsaw, but—contrary to what the inhabitants of Warsaw imagined and the command of the ‘Home Army
(Armija Krajowa, AK)
believed—the German defence was by no means disorganized. The precipitate withdrawal of German rear units, civilian bodies and military commands, begun on 21 July, had already been halted on 26 July when fresh German military forces began to move up to Warsaw and be deployed south of the city istelf.
Luftwaffe
General Stahel took over military command of Warsaw on 27 July and the German authorities announced to the populace at large that the city would be defended, at the same time conscripting civilian labour to build fortifications. To the east, on the other side of the wide Vistula, Maj-Gen. Radzievskii, temporary commander of 2nd Tank Army, realized at the end of July that his formations were in contact with three, possibly four,
Panzer
divisions and with one infantry division; to meet the threat of a powerful counter-attack, 2nd Tank must concentrate and be gathered into a ‘fist’, with 3rd Tank Corps at Wolomin, 8th Guards Tank Corps at Okuniew, 16th Tank across a line running from Zbytki (near the Vistula) to Milosna Stara, some five miles north-west of Milosna Stara. All tank formations were to go over to the defensive as from midnight on 1 August.

Five hours after the Soviet tanks rolled into their defensive positions and Soviet infantry dug in, on that same day, 7 August, men of the
Armija Krajowa
launched their own offensive inside Warsaw, attacking German installations and strong points; the ‘Warsaw rising’ had begun, and the city was speedily plunged into a savage internal battle.

Throughout the late winter and early spring of 1944, as ‘the tide of Teheran’ fast spent itself, the Prime Minister and Marshal Stalin conducted their rasping correspondence over Poland. While the British government tried to steer the Polish government in London in the direction of a Russo-Polish ‘settlement’, Stalin took an unwavering stand on two issues—recognition of the Curzon line and the need to ‘reorganize’ the Polish government, ‘the London clique’ so bitterly assailed by Moscow. Towards the end of December 1943 members of the Polish government, while probing as deeply as they could into the nature of the Teheran ‘agreement’, pressed more evidence on the British government relating to ‘the most energetic agitation’ aimed at ‘the Polish government and its organs in the home country’ conducted by Communist agencies; the ‘infiltration of Eastern and Central Poland’ by Russian partisan detachments was proceeding apace, while ‘communist bands at large’ were provoking German reprisals against the civilian population and the same bands had even ‘murdered a number of soldiers and members of the Polish Underground Movement’.

In a conversation on 20 December, Prime Minister Mikolajczyk and Mr Eden explored the implications of a Soviet advance into Poland. Mikolajczyk pointed
to what lay behind the Soviet accusations laid at the door of the Polish government—‘the threat of ruthless extermination of the leadership of our underground movement’ in the wake of the Soviet advance—while Eden, having read a note on Stalin’s declaration at Teheran regarding Poland, urged the Polish government to ‘state its position in order to show Stalin that he laboured under a mistake’. On the question of frontiers, Eden told Mikolajczyk that his impression was ‘that the Soviets insist on the Curzon line, but I did not try to get to the core of the matter’. Two days later, at dinner on 22 December, Eden took up all these matters in greater detail with the Polish government. In an attempt to find a way to resume Soviet–Polish diplomatic relations, he proposed that the Poles should issue a statement ‘denying all charges levelled against them’ and proposing ‘the co-ordination of military operations on Polish territory’, whereupon Mikolajczyk pointed to the fate of the previous agreement made in 1941 on ‘co-ordination’ and demanded that British troops be sent to Poland once Red Army units crossed into Polish territory. Eden did not find this a very useful suggestion, but Mikolajczyk persisted with it; it was left to Sir Alexander Cadogan to propose separating requests for resumption of diplomatic relations from proposals dealing with co-operation. On the territorial settlement, the British members expounded the plan for shifting the Polish frontiers from east to west, outlining the Soviet claims which ‘embraced all the territories up to the Curzon line and the “Botha Line” in Galicia’.

At the end of December the Polish government issued its formal denial of Soviet charges, referring to its ‘instruction for the Home Country’ issued on 27 October 1943 and rejecting charges that ‘Communists in Poland were being murdered’ on the orders of the commander of the Secret Army; in spite of the failure of previous attempts at ‘co-ordination’, the Polish government declared its willingness for ‘Polish armed action’ to be included in ‘the general strategic plan of the Allies’. Within a week, the first Red Army units had crossed the former Polish frontier and on 5. January 1944 the Polish government issued its own statement, referring to itself as ‘the only and legal steward and spokesman of the Polish nation recognized by Poles at home and abroad’ and asking for ‘the earliest re-establishment of sovereign Polish administration in the liberated territories of the Republic of Poland’ not ‘in
all
the liberated territories’, a formulation that was deleted under pressure from the Foreign Office. This declaration, for all its pruning, produced a sour reaction in some quarters of the British press and a tart comment from Stalin in his letter of 7 January to the Prime Minister—‘the latest declaration of the Polish
émigré
government’ did not encourage him to think that ‘these circles can be made to see reason … They are incorrigible.’

Three days later, on 10 January, Mikolajczyk learned at first hand from President Benes (who had recently journeyed to Moscow) something of Stalin’s views. Stalin did not ‘exclude Soviet–Polish agreement’ if their present government was changed (Stalin’s ire being directed principally at Sosnkowski, the Polish C-in-C); any agreement concerning eastern Poland was to be based on the Curzon
line; the western frontiers of Poland—which ‘did not preclude the Oder line’—could involve a Russo–Polish–Czecho–Slovak–Anglo–American agreement; there would be no pressure and no ‘proposal of adhesion’ for Poland to join a Polish–Czech–Russian pact; Stalin’s ‘positive attitude’ towards Poland resulted from his view that, though Germany was to be destroyed, there was no such thing as ‘a communist Germany’; and finally, on fears about the ‘Sovietization’ of Poland and Europe, Stalin dismissed this by saying that ‘we are not such fools as to undertake things we cannot achieve’. Peace would depend on co-operation with England and America; Germany ‘must be disrupted’; Italy and France could be counted out, so that ‘guarantees’ for Poland must engage Poland itself, Czechoslovakia, England and America. None of this gave the Polish Prime Minister much comfort; in territorial terms Poland ‘was to be deprived of half of her territory, including those two frontier-pillars, Lvov and Vilno’. President Benes seemed merely to be ‘repeating Soviet arguments’ and appeared ‘mesmerized by Soviet strength’.

The very next day a
TASS
announcement, authorized by ‘the Soviet government’, threw up fresh alarms within the Polish government. It was a reply to the Polish statement of 5 January and aimed to counter ‘a number of incorrect assertions … among them the incorrect assertion concerning the Soviet–Polish frontiers’, all in a document which, while not totally hostile or wholly negative, introduced new and significant shifts in the Soviet position. The Soviet government no longer considered ‘the frontiers of 1939 to be unchangeable’, thus marking a change in the prevailing Soviet stance on the ‘Ribbentrop–Molotov’ line of 1939; the Soviet–Polish border could run approximately along the so-called ‘Curzon line’ with some corrections ‘in favour of Poland’, so that ‘the eastern borders of Poland can be fixed by agreement with the Soviet Union’. The Soviet claim to the western Ukraine and western Belorussian districts was based on the plebiscite carried out ‘according to broad democratic principles in 1941’: if this was not enough, the Soviet statement referred to the ‘injustice’ worked by the treaty of Riga in 1921 which had been ‘forced on the Soviet Union’—real revision of diplomatic history. The Polish government, which ‘frequently plays into the hands of the German invaders’ through ‘its wrong policy’, came in for abuse—‘cut off from its people … incapable of establishing friendly relations with the Soviet Union … equally incapable of organizing an active struggle against the German invaders in Poland itself’—but the statement ended with a saving clause:
‘at the same time
, the interests of Poland and the Soviet Union lie in the establishment of firm friendly relations between our two countries’.

The effect of this Soviet statement was to bring the British and Polish governments into immediate collision; the former found ‘the Soviet proposals as a fair basis for negotiation’, even ‘a great step forward from the Teheran negotiations’, while the latter insisted that there was ‘no reason to believe in the sincerity of Soviet intentions’—indeed, ‘all signs are to the contrary’. The exchanges between Eden and Mikolajczyk of 11 January were tense and not a little painful. At the
close Mr Eden stipulated that the Polish reply to the Soviet statement must be agreed with him, and he painted a gloomy picture of the consequences of a Polish failure to respond to this Soviet initiative. Two days later Mikolajczyk read to Eden the draft of a reply to the Soviet statement of 11 January; the phrasing of the third point, protesting against ‘unilateral decisions or
faits accomplis’
and arguments ‘designed to justify the loss by Poland of about half of her territory’, caused Eden to suggest a rephrasing, but this was not welcome to the Polish cabinet, which insisted on the retention of the original form of words. Only after lengthy discussion and Eden’s assurance that the British press ‘would be asked to produce as its own the arguments which have been removed from the Polish declaration’, was the section amended and the text presented by Eden to the Soviet Ambassador on 14 January, with the injunction that the British government ‘gave its support’ to the document as a means to ‘paving the way to an understanding’. That an ‘understanding’ was feasible at this juncture—a seeming break in the clouds of Soviet obduracy—appeared to be the overriding impression in London, nurtured by the reports from Moscow. Mr. Balfour (in charge of the British Embassy in Moscow in the absence of Sir Archibald Clark Kerr) reported that Molotov seemed to think the 11 January Soviet statement an ‘initiative’ likely to win British and American support, while Ambassador Harriman thought an agreement on the lines of the Soviet compact with President Benes was part of the Soviet plan, provided the Polish government was ‘reorganized’ and the Soviet position on boundaries given a form of recognition. Otherwise, in the opinion of Ambassador Averell Harriman, the deeper the Soviet advance into Poland, the less the likelihood of agreement acceptable to the Poles.