The Road to Berlin (61 page)

Throughout the first half of August the Soviet attitude seemed to waver. After the middle of the month it congealed into irreducible opposition and intractability. From Italy Churchill sent Eden a dispatch on 14 August, pointing out that it was ‘very curious’ for the Russian offensive to have halted and even drawn back ‘at the moment when the Underground Army has revolted’. Russian aid to the insurgents would involve ‘only a flight of 100 miles’, whereas aircraft from the bases in Italy faced a flight of 700 miles and losses were mounting. Churchill therefore proposed bringing pressure to bear by ‘referring to the implications that are afoot in many quarters’ and requesting Russian help. Mikolajczyk had already sent his own message to Stalin on 13 August asking for Russian assistance, only to receive on that same day a chilling reply: orders to ‘drop arms intensively in the Warsaw area’ had gone out; a Soviet parachutist had been dropped (only to be killed by the Germans); but now,
‘after a closer study of the problem’
, Stalin was convinced that the rising was ‘a reckless adventure causing useless victims among the inhabitants. … In view of the foregoing the Soviet command decided openly to disclaim any responsibility for the Warsaw adventure.’ The same charge of reckless adventurism came from Vyshinskii on 15 August in an official Soviet response to the American request made at President Roosevelt’s prompting for landing facilities for American bombers flying from the west to Warsaw, there to drop supplies or bomb German airfields. Operating by day and at high altitude, with fighter escorts, the American aircraft would then overfly the Soviet battle-lines and land at the base already used for the return-trip ‘shuttle bombing’, Poltava (where on the night of 21-22 June German bombers, accompanied by planes of the Hungarian Air Force, carried out a devastating raid which burned
out fifty Flying Fortresses on the ground, a disaster which, in the words of General Deane, ‘sowed the seed of discontent’, leaving the Russians ‘smarting and sensitive’ and the Americans ‘forgiving but determined to send their own anti-aircraft defenses as protection for the future’).

The brusque Soviet reply forwarded by Vyshinskii impelled both the British and American Ambassadors to seek an interview with Molotov. Not surprisingly, he proved to be unavailable, and it was Vyshinskii who again handled the western
démarche
. He restated the Soviet position as dourly as ever and simply refused to explain why Stalin had initially offered Mikolajczyk help for Warsaw, returning once more an obdurate refusal for facilities, which prompted Ambassador Harriman to report on 15 August that ‘ruthless political considerations’ alone must account for the Soviet attitude. The next day Vyshinskii gave both ambassadors a written explanation which blandly passed over the British and American dropping of arms over Warsaw as ‘an American and British affair’ to which the Soviet government could not object, but it could and would object to any landing on Soviet territory by these aircraft once they had finished their mission over the Polish capital. Eventually the ambassadors met up with the elusive Molotov and on the night of 17 August conducted another equally unrewarding exchange over Warsaw. While freely admitting a change in Soviet policy, and attributing it to the discovery on the part of the Soviet government of ‘the real nature’ of the rising, blaming the London government for the events in Warsaw and attacking them for slandering the Soviet government, Molotov held out no hope at all of intervention to save the insurgents even a part of their agonies. In his own dispatch of 18 August to Stalin, Mikolajczyk pleaded once more for Soviet help. He admitted that the rising, ‘as it seems now, was premature’ and uncoordinated with the Soviet command, but ‘the timing could not have been agreed jointly’, though the Polish commander did issue orders ‘to start the fight in Warsaw when the Soviet armies were approaching the capital, and broadcast appeals from Moscow had expressly called the population to rise in arms’. Mikolajczyk was now ‘warmly appealing for the resumption of technical contacts between the Red Army and the fighting in Warsaw’, and again asking for help in ‘arms-dropping, strafing of German centres and retaliating to the raids of the German Air Force’—and permission for American aircraft to use Russian bases.

From Italy Churchill sent the President a message proposing a joint message to Stalin, giving ‘true counsels’ even if Stalin resented it (though ‘quite possibly he wouldn’t’). In Moscow Ambassador Harriman received instructions to inform either Stalin or Molotov that American military forces would help the Polish insurgents as best they could. But the thrust for this type of intervention was appreciably diminished by State Department advice to the Ambassador (sent on 19 August) not to press the Russians too peremptorily over the use of Soviet bases for operations involving Warsaw, because this might prejudice the ‘shuttle-bombing’ arrangements which remained a prime consideration for the American military. Since this weighed less with the British, they would be inclined to push
harder and certainly further than the President was prepared to go. Harriman nevertheless sent Molotov a letter setting out the American intention to help and this was followed within hours by the short but unequivocal appeal from Churchill and the President—‘We hope that you will drop immediate supplies and ammunition to the patriot Poles of Warsaw, or will you agree to help our planes in doing it very quickly?’ Eden discussed this ‘second direct intervention’ with the Polish ministers in London on 21 August, though the British minister took a pessimistic view of the possibilities of ‘Marshal Stalin changing his mind’.

Such wisps of hope as did remain were blasted to nothing by Stalin’s withering reply of 22 August, denouncing ‘the handful of power-seeking criminals who launched the Warsaw adventure’, throwing ‘practically unarmed civilians’ against German tanks and aircraft; since the military situation was bad for Poles and Russians alike, the only way to bring ‘the best, really effective help to the anti-Nazi Poles’ must be a new, large-scale Soviet offensive to crush the Germans and liberate the Poles. All reference to specific requests—Soviet air-drops or permission for Allied aircraft to land behind the Soviet lines—Stalin omitted from his curt, categorical message, a message suggesting either real conviction or a sense of immunity based possibly on knowledge that the Americans were not prepared to go to all lengths (demonstrated in the reluctance implicit in the signal of 19 August to Ambassador Harriman). Even if the latter was guesswork, Stalin’s instinct did not fail him. The President on 24 August intimated that without the use of Soviet airfields nothing much could be done, and though importuned by the Prime Minister to send yet another joint message to Stalin, he replied on 26 August that such a move would not be ‘advantageous to the long-range general war prospect’. If the Prime Minister wished to intervene, however, the President had no objections on that score.

In Warsaw itself the German ring round the Old Town tightened with each passing day, days filled with unending air and artillery bombardment. Polish attacks on 19 August, mounted from Zoliborz on Dworzec Gdanski and intended to pierce the German ring, brought little or no result, and more attacks from the direction of Zoliborz and the Old Town on the station at Dworzec Gdanski had no real effect. District by district the German troops set about clearing the insurgents, burning whole sections of the city to the ground and either killing or capturing the population. Reporting from the city late in August, General Bor-Komorowski admitted that the main German strongholds remained in German hands for all the Polish incursions, that Warsaw had become ‘a city of ruins’ where ‘the dead are buried inside the ruins or alongside them’, and where German aircraft rained down leaflets threatening the burning of the entire city—but that ‘there are only ruins left to be burnt’. The Polish command was making preparations to conduct a fighting withdrawal from the Old Town and move into the city centre, using the sewers to withdraw into the centre and on Zoliborz. More than
2,500 combatants disengaged from the maelstrom of the Old Town, leaving only the wounded who could not be dragged through the sewers. All that the Germans found when they smashed their way in at the end of the month were these immovable wounded, who were promptly doused with petrol and burned alive where they lay. With German troops commanding a wide swathe of the city from the centre to Zoliborz, the third and final stage of the rising was about to begin, the obliteration of Polish resistance in the City Centre and the clearing of the river bank between the Poniatowski and the Kierbedzia bridges over the Vistula.

On 1 September Churchill met the Polish premier in London and discussed bringing aid to Warsaw. To Stalin’s refusal of co-operation on 22 August Churchill confessed his own reaction—‘I could not believe it’—and there was cause for regret when the American President had not associated himself more forcefully with the plan to launch a mass daylight raid over Warsaw and land the bombers on Soviet airfields, thus facing the Russians with a
fait accompli
. Now they should look into the possibilities of a mass flight organized by the Royal Air Force. On the night of 4 September the War Cabinet met to consider the situation produced by what Churchill called the ‘extraordinary behaviour’ on the part of the Russians, and decided upon another appeal to the Soviet leadership, with a copy forwarded to the President and begging the use of American aircraft to fly to Warsaw, ‘landing, if necessary, on Russian airfields without their formal consent’. The note arrived amidst rumours that operations in Warsaw had actually ceased. President Roosevelt’s reply (5 September) referred to information from American intelligence that ‘the fighting Poles have departed from Warsaw’, so that the problem ‘has therefore been unfortunately solved by delay and by German action’. There was nothing more to be done. As for the Prime Minister’s plan for a mass flight and a mass landing on Soviet airfields, Ambassador Harriman in Moscow had been brusquely informed that, not only was Soviet permission not forthcoming, but that ‘even damaged aircraft’ would be refused permission to land.

While the insurgents fought it out in Warsaw the Polish government in London slowly worked round to a compromise solution which would facilitate a political settlement with Moscow, offering the ‘Lublin Commitee’ fourteen seats in a combined coalition government, proposals submitted to and debated by the Polish underground even in the vortex of the battle. But for many Poles the Warsaw rising lay blanketed in a conspiracy of silence. The Prime Minister late in August queried what looked like a ‘stop in the publicity of the facts about the agony of Warsaw’, and urged that, while there need be no mention of the ‘strange and sinister behaviour’ of the Russians, there was no case for being coy about the consequences. Anglo–Polish relations, already very tense, slumped sharply with General Sosnkowski’s Order of the Day for 1 September, which castigated Great Britain for abandoning her Polish ally, thus prompting a British demand for his immediate resignation. Churchill advised Mikolajczyk not to submit his own resignation out of despair over Warsaw. Should this happen, the British ‘will not
support any other head of the Polish government’, and in any event such a step would simply leave the field wide open for Moscow to work its will unopposed. Mikolajczyk seemed nevertheless bent on resignation and declared his inability to ‘take appropriate measures with regard to General Sosnkowski’ because he could not prove that ‘the line of policy pursued by the Polish government was right and appropriate’.

The day after this conversation, on 6 September, the insurgent command in Warsaw telegraphed that ‘Warsaw has lost all hope of help from Allied air deliveries or from a Soviet advance which would liberate the city’. The German troops in the city set about clearing the Vistula bank, pushing Polish fighting units back into the City Centre and severing any contact the Poles might have with Soviet troops fighting their way into the eastern-bank suburb of Praga, a precaution that speedily afforded the Germans several advantages. Already the glacial indifference and the unbending hostility of the Soviet leadership was melting. On 9 September the British Ambassador in Moscow received the Soviet reply to the War Cabinet’s representations, a note that once more disassociated the Soviet government from any responsibility for what was happening in Warsaw and rounded on the British government for not warning the Soviet Union in advance about the rising (and referred to similarities with the ‘Katyn massacre’ denunciations of April 1943), but then went on to announce Soviet air-drops over Warsaw and Soviet agreement ‘in principle’ to the use of its airfields by Allied aircraft, provided the operational plans were agreed in advance by the Soviet authorities. This sign of co-operation prompted Mikolajczyk to send an immediate telegram to President Roosevelt asking him ‘to give orders to General Eisenhower to carry out the operation of American air-squadrons in order to help Warsaw’.

Early in September Soviet troops, regrouped and reinforced, were on the move again. Rokossovskii ordered three Soviet armies, 48th, 65th and 70th, to make all possible speed towards the river Narew (Batov received ‘categorical orders’ from the
Stavka
to be on the Narew early in September). On 5 September Panov’s Don Tank Corps’ forced the Narew at Pulutsk and to the south of it, which eased the passage of 70th Army pushing on in the direction of Sokoluv, Radzymin and Modlin (north of Warsaw). To break into Praga Rokossovskii proposed to use divisions from both 70th and 47th Armies, with the latter attacking the south-eastern sector of the Praga perimeter; Gusev (commanding 47th Army) would acquire 8th Guards Tank Corps and Colonel Bewziuk 1st Polish Infantry Division as reinforcement. The aim of this Soviet operation was to clear German forces out of the reach of land stretching between the Vistula and the western Bug. If Soviet troops did take Praga, they would be fully drawn up on the Vistula facing Warsaw. Bewziuk’s Polish riflemen changed positions with Soviet units at the beginning of September, coming under Gusev’s operational command on the fifth; at this time the insurgents still held three main sectors, Zoliborz, the City Centre and Czerniakow (together with Mokotow), although
only the battle groups in Czerniakow had direct access to the Vistula bank. During the night of 9 September units of 1st Polish Division concentrated in the Miedzylese area, the artillery already in position. The next night Soviet bombers, supported by Polish units of the
Krakow
squadron, bombed the German defences on the southern edge of Praga and at 0920 hours on the morning of 10 September Bewziuk sent in the assault battalion from 1st Regiment. After four days of heavy fighting Polish and Soviet troops cleared Praga, bringing them out on the Vistula bank opposite the Polish positions at Zoliborz, Solec and Czerniakow.