The Road to Berlin (59 page)

Model meanwhile was probing deeper into the weak spot in the Soviet line, the strip of land between Praga and Siedlce, an attack from which would hit the Soviet formations south of Warsaw in the flank and in the rear. The German
Panzer
divisions and one infantry division moved down from the north and north-west, only to crash into the 3rd Soviet Tank Corps (2nd Tank Army). Rokossovskii saw that one possible way to get the Red Army into Warsaw was to put the maximum insurgent effort into Praga, trying to take the bridges over the Vistula and hitting the German troops fighting off the Russians nearest to Warsaw in the rear. This, he felt, was the only way of helping Soviet troops to break into the city and to have any direct influence on events there. The Soviet command knew of no such plans, however, and under heavy German pressure they had already ordered 2nd Tank Army over to the defensive, with 47th Army following in its wake; Soviet tank units were taking up defensive positions along a line running from Kobylka through Ossuv, Milosna Stara and on to Zbytki (where 16th Tank Corps held flank positions close up to the Vistula). Both Soviet armoured and infantry units were committing their last reserves; 3rd Tank Corps had been pushed away from Wolomin and faced the danger of encirclement by
elements of three
Panzer
divisions. Soviet armoured spearheads had been repulsed; the situation between Praga and Siedlce was deteriorating very rapidly, and Rokossovskii saw no way out but to speed up the advance of Batov’s 65th and Romanenko’s 70th Army through the Bielowieza forest and so to spear the Germans in their flank. But a move of this order demanded time, and Soviet units were now falling back. Rokossovskii’s proposed counter-move demonstrated that it was not simply a matter of being checked before Praga, but of preparation for a bigger battle that barred the way to Warsaw. This confirmed the Polish estimate submitted to the British command in London, and it was the gloomy but all too real setting against which the Delegate’s and the Home Army commander’s signal of 1 August had to be read: ‘As the battle for the capture of Warsaw has begun we ask you to ensure Soviet assistance for us
by means of an immediate attack from outside.’
With every hour, ‘outside’ became more distant from Warsaw.

After four days of fighting inside Warsaw between the Polish insurgents and the German forces, the areas controlled by both sides became more definitely demarcated. Poles and Germans set about building barricades round their respective perimeters, and out of the German sectors deep ‘fingers’ poked into the city, splitting up those parts of the city in Polish hands into three distinct sectors—Mokotow and Czerniakow in the south; the city centre and Powisle facing on the river bank, with the Old Town to the north; and finally Zoliborz—a situation that ‘Monter’ recognized for what it was by setting up three detached commands. Though hemmed in at various points, the German command concentrated on clearing the main routes leading from the west into Praga. This had been half accomplished already, after heavy air bombardment and tank attacks had opened the direct westerly road from Wola to the Kierbiedza bridge over the Vistula, but it remained a hazardous thoroughfare swept by Polish gunfire.

With Poles and Germans engaged in savage battles on every street and at every junction, the fighting degenerated into barbaric displays on the part of the Germans, aimed at ripping out Polish resistance wherever they came across it. Once an area was cleared, all Polish men were taken out and shot, civilians were pressed ahead of tanks to form living screens for German attacks, prisoners were shot out of hand, and the wounded lying in the hospitals, together with the doctors and nurses, were also summarily shot. Incendiary bombs, artillery fire, tank guns and flame-throwers, supported by heavier guns, moved into bombardment positions, turning streets, houses and buildings into a morass of fire or gaping ruins. After little more than a week German tanks, assault guns and infantrymen, assisted by the fearful fighting squads of Bach-Zelewski’s licensed killers, smashed a great wedge through the Polish sectors and emerged on the Vistula, turning at once to capture and clear the Old Town by attacking it from three sides.
Reichsführer
Himmler, responsible for quelling the revolt in Warsaw,
had assembled a miniature but monstrous army for this purpose. Dirlewanger’s 4,000 convicts in his penal brigade were bad enough, but few could compare for ferocity with Kaminski’s
SS
brigade, over 6,000 strong, formed from Russian prisoners of war, expert in every kind of atrocity and urged to live by fearful excesses by Kaminski himself, excited by his pathological hatred of the Poles. Faced with men such as these the Poles could expect no mercy, and they got none.

On the evening of 3 August, with the Warsaw rising in its first furious phase, Stalin and Mikolajczyk finally met in Moscow in an encounter that seemed far from unfriendly. Almost at once, in his exposition of his ‘programme’, Mikolajczyk asked Stalin ‘to order help to be given to our units fighting in Warsaw’, to which Stalin replied: ‘I shall give the necessary orders.’ Then Stalin pointed out Mikolajczyk’s omission—‘was this a deliberate omission?’, he asked—of the Polish Committee for National Liberation, the body with which the Soviet government had already concluded an agreement ‘on the provisional administration of the liberated Polish territories’. Stalin went on to explain his point of view; before any Soviet–Polish agreement, there must be an end to ‘the present dualism of power, the Government in London on the one hand, and the Committee in Chelm on the other. I agree with Churchill that it would be proper to unite all the Poles in order to create a provisional government.’ Nor could Stalin accept the argument that the men of the Polish Committee were nonentities, representing ‘but a very small section of Polish public opinion,’ as Mikolajczyk phrased it; there must be, Stalin continued ‘very big and quite unforeseeable changes’. As for the
Armija Krajowa
, the Home Army, Stalin expressed the greatest scepticism of its fighting abilities: ‘I was told that the Polish government has ordered these units to drive the Germans out of Warsaw. I wonder how they could possibly do this; their forces are not up to that task. As a matter of fact, these people do not fight against the Germans, but only hide in the woods, unable to do anything else.’ Against Stalin’s barrage of facts about the Home Army’s incompetence and stupidity, Mikolajczyk put up a defence based on their record, though he admitted that he had not thought the subject would come up for discussion and had no specific reports to hand. But if the Home Army lacked arms, as Stalin insisted even as he admired it as human material, would not it be possible to contribute ‘on your [Stalin’s] part to the rearmament of the Home Army?’ Stalin returned no direct answer but urged Mikolajczyk ‘to take into consideration’ that the Soviet Union did not want ‘two authorities fighting each other’ in Poland; that ‘we shall never allow’ the Poles to fight amongst themselves and that if the Polish government should ‘prefer the existence in Poland of two different forces … in that event we shall be forced to continue to assist the Committee of National Liberation. Such is our position.’

With this exchange the conversation seemed to reach an impasse, broken by Mikolajczyk referring Stalin to the question of frontiers; this again triggered off differences over the Curzon line, with Mikolajczyk pleading for Lvov and Vilno
but Stalin foreclosing arguments about the actual implications of the ‘line’ with the remark that ‘it is a historical document, well known to everybody; there is no point in arguing about it; it was not we who invented it, at the time nobody asked us for our opinion.’ Stalin refused to budge on either principle or on details; ‘it is not a question of magnanimity or friendship and feeling. It is in the interest of the Russian state that Poland should be independent and strong.’ It would be possible, Stalin intimated in his final statement, to come to a definitive agreement on frontiers ‘with a new, united Polish government’. It was up to Mikolajczyk to bring about that unity and it was urgent that this be done. At the Polish Prime minister’s prompting on how to proceed, Stalin suggested a meeting between ‘both Polish groups’, falling in with Mikolajczyk’s suggestion that such a meeting be held in Moscow. On taking his leave Mikolajczyk asked Stalin ‘privately to take a personal interest’ in those men of the Home Army who revealed themselves to the Red Army and offered to co-operate in fighting the Germans, whereupon Stalin promised that they would not be harmed ‘provided they did not play the fool’.

Not many hours later the British Prime Minister on 4 August sent Stalin his first signal dealing with the Warsaw rising: the British, in response to urgent Polish requests but subject to weather conditions, proposed to drop sixty tons of arms and ammunition over the south-western sector of the city ‘where it is said that a Polish revolt against the Germans is in fierce struggle’, and where ‘they appeal for Russian aid which seems very near’. Stalin’s reply made the next day was chilling and began ominously, after perfunctory thanks for the message about Warsaw: ‘I think the information given to you by the Poles is greatly exaggerated and misleading,’ at which he went on to chide the Poles for their claims in connection with the capture of Vilno and referred to ‘the facts’—‘the Home Army consists of a few detachments, misnamed divisions. … I cannot imagine detachments like these taking Warsaw, which the Germans are defending with four armoured divisions.…’ As Stalin’s reply went out to London, the Delegate of the Government in Warsaw sent his own signal to Mikolajczyk, stressing that ‘a complete cessation [of Soviet operations] continues even now while for the second day the Germans heavily bombard the town from the air. … In other words there is no Soviet intervention.’ The signal continued: the behaviour of the Soviet troops was ‘incomprehensible, passive and ostentatious’, all at ‘a distance of a dozen kilometres from Warsaw’, behaviour to which must attach a ‘political significance’ and as such be raised ‘with the Allied quarters’.

On the following day, 6 August, another round was danced in this elaborate but grisly minuet: from London the Polish President Raczkiewicz instructed Ambassador Ciechanowski in the United States to press for ‘authority for Eisenhower [to] render aid via air drop [of] ammunition [to] Warsaw combatants’—the British air drop had not yet gone in, ‘due to so-called technical reasons’, but ‘everything is now a matter of hours’. Not a few of these valuable hours Mikolajczyk expended in Moscow, talking this time to the representatives of the
‘Lublin Committee’, the step Stalin had suggested on 3 August, a meeting that developed into a barely concealed political wrangle with Mikolajczyk intervening twice to ask for help in the Warsaw rising, only to be told—at his second attempt—that the Chairman of the National Committee arrived from Warsaw on 4 August. ‘It was quite quiet there until the 4th of August. They mislead you in London … the Germans launched four armoured divisions against the Red Army in the Praga suburb,’ and the attack on the Home Army was joined by General Rola-Zymierski, the new C-in-C of the Soviet-raised Polish armed forces, as well as Wanda Wassilewska, who insisted that ‘the Home Army must be disbanded’. What the Committee was demanding amounted to the dissolution not only of the Home Army but also the London government. It was not, therefore, surprising that the meeting adjourned in the evening having reached no conclusion, only to reassemble the next day (7 August) at 11 o’clock in the morning.

This time Boleslaw Bierut, the chairman of the National Committee, the individual who had reportedly left Warsaw on 4 August and had seen no sign of a rising, attended the conference and called on General Zymierski to give ‘some information about Warsaw’. The general began by denouncing how, ‘lightheartedly, and without any understanding with the Red Army’, the Home Army command had precipitated the rising: on 5 August General Zymierski approached Stalin, seeking arms supplies for the Polish insurgents and an assurance that the Red Army would treat Warsaw ‘with consideration’. With General Zymierski standing by, Stalin issued orders to Marshal Rokossovskii to plan an outflanking attack from north and south, the position being presently that Rokossovskii had ten divisions between Deblin and Warsaw ‘ready to turn the flanks of the Germans from the south and west’. Over supplies of arms, the general had ‘intervened three days ago [4 August] at Soviet
HQ
s’, though he was bound to point out the difficulties of delivering arms ‘to a city in the midst of battle’—dropping them by air could be done only in the neighbourhood of Warsaw (Skierniewice, Tomaszow and Lowicz) and in Praga, from where the arms must be transported into the city. ‘Arms must be provided, but how?’ Mikolajczyk pointed out that there had been ‘several proposals relating to airlifts’, but Mr Bierut cut him short brutally: ‘An agreement with the Western Allies does not suffice. It is an agreement with the Soviet Front Command that matters’ and, ‘as far as we know’, there had been no attempt ‘to come to an understanding with the Soviet commander in charge of the operations round Warsaw’. At this, the subject reverted to the possible composition of a ‘government’, so composed on the basis of present discussions that ‘out of a total of eighteen posts you [the Committee] would assign only four to the representatives of the Government’. That was Mikolajczyk’s quick calculation. ‘Bierut nodded.’ The plan, Mikolajczyk continued, meant having him represent the Polish Peasant Party, along with Professor Grabski as a member without specific political allegiance,
and two more members to represent the Labour Party and the Polish Socialist Party. ‘Bierut nodded.’

General Zymierski broke the silence by returning to the rising in Warsaw, saying that ‘Stalin had issued orders to Rokossovskii that the Polish units should participate in the assault on Warsaw’: General Berling’s Polish Army was presently deployed between Deblin and Pulawy, but on the evening of 6 August General Zymierski had again called on Stalin, asking him to speed up operations against Warsaw. Stalin explained his own position in the light of what was happening not far from Warsaw itself: ‘I shall do everything possible but this cannot be done within 2–3 days because the Germans have thrown into action four armoured
SS
divisions and because of this I shall have to make a deep outflanking manoeuvre.’ At this disclosure, General Zymierski turned back to the question of ‘the constitution of the government’, one more inconclusive discussion which brought about an adjournment until the evening. Chairman Bierut was again brutally abrupt: ‘A prompt decision is necessary.… If we do not come to an understanding, we shall form a government ourselves.’