The Road to Berlin (62 page)

During the night of 13 September low-flying Soviet aircraft dropped arms, medicines and food supplies for the insurgents in Warsaw, but the weapons and food, dropped in canisters without parachutes, were either spilled or fell into German hands. Soviet
AA
guns moved up to the eastern bank and fighters covered the supply-dropping flights that went on for the next two weeks involving over 2,000 sorties delivering 505 anti-tank rifles, almost 1,500 machine-pistols and 130 tons of food, medicine and explosives. Meanwhile Malinin (chief of staff, 1st Belorussian Front) ordered Chuikov to hand over 1st Polish Army for deployment in the Garwolin area, effective as from dawn on 12 September. General Zymierski that same day instructed 4th Infantry Division to move with all speed from Lublin into the Garwolin area, the Polish reinforcement being intended for the Praga battle. Berling, 1st Polish Army commander, decided to make a forced crossing of the Vistula straight off the march to bring Polish units on to the western bank in the Czerniakow area, an operation that meant improvization all the way since equipment for the crossing and artillery ammunition was in short supply—but so was time, for a freshly arrived German
Panzer
division (25th) had already begun to attack the insurgents in Zoliborz and more German attacks directed against Czerniakow began to clear the Vistula bank of Polish fighting men, leaving only a narrow strip of land, cut off from the City Centre, defended by 400 insurgents.

Under cover of darkness on the nights of 16 and 17 September two battalions of the 9th (Polish) Infantry Regiment commanded by Major Mierzwinski crossed the Vistula to Czerniakow, only to be pinned down by heavy German fire in support of tank and infantry attacks. Colonel Goranin’s 6th Infantry Regiment in an effort to reduce German pressure on Czerniakow sent over its 2nd Battalion in the direction of Zoliborz, where a small bridgehead was established on the western bank. Berling decided to try a third assault landing, this time just to the north of Czerniakow, putting down units of two regiments between the railway bridge and Poniatowski bridge with the object of bringing an attacking force into the rear of German troops assaulting Czerniakow. The first parties went over during the night of 19 September, covered by smoke-screens and artillery fire—two battalions (1st and 2nd from 8th Infantry Regiment) in all.

For all these fierce, fighting attempts to bring immediate aid to the insurgents, sorties which Berling launched on his own responsibility and for which he was
subsequently punished, the situation of the insurgents deteriorated disastrously. On 22 September Rokossovskii, who earlier in the month had advised Stalin that his Front forces were in no condition to liberate Warsaw, ordered 1st Polish Army over to the defensive and the evacuation of Polish troops from the western bank, the last survivors of the bridgeheads moving over the Vistula during the night of 24 September. On 18 September American bombers, flying at high altitude, dropped supplies over the city and then proceeded to Soviet airfields, but again this isolated action could not affect the outcome; the altitude of the drop and the prevailing high wind robbed the insurgents of seventy per cent of the supplies dropped that day.

By mid-September, with Soviet policy visibly modified, Stalin could avoid both supporting a rising that meant underwriting a
fait accompli
devised by the ‘London Poles’ (thus discrediting his own policy based on the ‘Lublin Poles’) and also escape a growing breach with his allies and the odium implicit in total abandonment of the insurgents. The Warsaw rising was with each day nearer the point of being throttled, and the
Armija Krajowa
—the core of the Polish underground—lay decimated. Soviet troops were once more on the move immediately in front of the city but Stalin knew that they could not take it by frontal assault. On 23 September he passed on his gloomy views to Ambassador Harriman (who gave him news of the Anglo-American decisions taken at Quebec), referring to the weight of German fire that swept the Vistula crossings and thus held back the tanks—and without tanks, no frontal attack could clear the Germans from the high ground.

That same day, 23 September, German troops took up positions along the length of the Vistula bank, leaving the Polish commander north of Czerniakow (Colonel Radoslaw) no choice but to drag those men still able to fight back through the sewers to Mokotow and to put the wounded over the Vistula in boats. The next day, 24 September, German units reinforced from 19th
Panzer
began to fight their way from the south and west into Mokotow, forcing the Polish defence units into ever narrower lines until withdrawal through the sewers to the city centre became imperative. But this time the Germans were ready and waiting, blocking off the sewers and pitching gas grenades into those sections where the Poles tried to make good their escape, killing hundreds in these miasmic, slimy tunnels. After reducing Mokotow, it was the turn of Zoliborz in the north, and finally the forest of Kampinos. General Bor-Komorowski had failed to establish any operational link with the Red Army, hope of a Soviet assault on Warsaw had gone, and British and American aircraft had disappeared from the skies. After two months of merciless fighting, sixty-two days of unending horror and atrocity, with 15,000 men of the 30,000–40,000 of the
Armija Krajowa
dead, the population forcibly evacuated or murdered on the spot, 150,000–200,000 civilians immolated out of one million, the dead entombed in the ruins and the wounded lying untended on the roads or suffering their last agonies in cellars, surrender could no longer be delayed. On October 2 the fighting ceased: the
Poles were collected for deportation or extinction in the gas chambers, after which the Germans bent to the maniacal labour of levelling Warsaw to the ground. The German command reckoned its 10,000 dead, 7,000 missing and another 9,000 wounded.

During the last frenzied spurt of fighting, with Berling’s men clinging to the embankment on the western edge of the Vistula inside Warsaw, Stalin sent Marshal Zhukov (latterly with the southern battle-fronts in Bulgaria) to investigate the situation of 1st and 2nd Belorussian Fronts. German pressure was forcing the Polish troops out of their precarious footholds: the two Soviet officers parachuted in to make contact with General Bor-Komorowski (who acknowledged their arrival in a signal to London on 21 September, announcing ‘liaison’ with the eastern bank) were, according to the Marshal, not received, ‘nor did we ever hear from them after that’. With the Front command convinced of the impossibility of capturing Warsaw, the units on the western bank were pulled back to their original positions. Marshal Zhukov’s impression of 47th Army, operating between Serock, Modlin and Praga, was not encouraging; advancing along flat terrain, the 47th was already worn down and suffering heavy casualties, and things looked no better with 70th Army at Pulutsk. For Zhukov, the ‘operational aim’ seemed far from clear, though Rokossovski referred to
Stavka
orders prescribing that 47th Army reach the Vistula between Modlin and Warsaw. Zhukov reported to Stalin and asked for permission to halt offensive operations in 1st Belorussian Front area ‘because it led us nowhere’, and for the right flank of 1st Belorussian and the left of 2nd Belorussian Front to go over to the defensive. Recalled to Moscow, both Zhukov and Rokossovskii faced a restless, discomfited Stalin, impatiently listening to an account of the German brake on Soviet movement which was presently incurring ‘unjustifiably heavy losses’. Stalin proposed strengthening 47th Army to force a breakthrough between Modlin and Warsaw. Zhukov scotched this idea, suggesting instead a turning movement south-west of the city and a ‘powerful splitting blow’ in the direction of Lodz–Poznan, all demanding major reinforcement. Stalin took twenty minutes to think it over; he did not commit himself over the new attack but agreed to Soviet troops going over to the defensive. Warsaw, a gaunt, fire-blackened tomb for all its dead, still lay ahead of the Soviet troops.

Three hundred miles to the south, and not much more than three weeks after the start of the general insurrection in Warsaw, the small but strategically placed republic of Slovakia also took up arms against the Germans. Both risings, Polish and Slovak, finally came to the same bloody end. Both were hamstrung by the same fatal divisions in their ranks, the conflict between the ‘bourgeois’ military forces and those communist-led or communist-raised, the problem of the exile government’s relations with Moscow and the crucial question of the Red Army’s role in support of the rising.

Already on 8 April 1944 units of 1st Ukrainian Front had reached the eastern boundaries of Czechoslovakia. In his May Day broadcast Stalin promised the liberation of Czechs and Slovaks from the Germans, and from Moscow broadcasts in Czech urged the populace to form ‘national committees’
(narodni vybory)
, a plan previously discussed in the talks between President Benes and the Czechoslovak Communists in December 1943, a measure designed to help in the fight against the Nazis and also to establish a means of participating in the administration of liberated territory. The planning of the Slovak rising also dated back to December 1943, when a secret meeting of all the Slovak underground organizations decided to form a ‘Slovak National Council’. This body included representatives of all political groups engaged in the struggle against the Germans and incorporated a demand for the restoration of Czechoslovakia within its pre–Munich frontiers as a major part of the Council’s political platform.

As the battlefronts drew closer to Slovakia itself, the National Council began shaping its own plans in the light of two obvious contingencies, that either the Red Army would come bursting through the Carpathian passes into Slovakia and the whole Danube basin, or the German Army would simply occupy this vital rear area and defend the Carpathian line. In either event the Slovak armed forces and the populace at large must take up arms and drive the Germans out of Slovakia, a struggle in which the Slovak field army (particularly the 22,000 men of the ‘East Slovak Corps’ with its two infantry divisions) would play a decisive part, aided by the ‘Rear Army’ with its garrison troops some 10,000 strong; the Rear Army must speed the full mobilization of the Slovaks and help set up partisan detachments. The ‘independent state’ of Slovakia was for the moment ruled by Mgr Tiso, a Nazi puppet manipulated as Hitler’s whim and desire demanded, though latterly even the Slovak fascist leadership was growing discontented with the demands heaped upon them by the Germans. The activities of the underground Communists and pro-Czech middle-class politicians, if not entirely undetected, went increasingly undisturbed, leaving the army command to hatch its own schemes in the heart of the Slovak Ministry of National Defence. Preparations for revolt were both efficient and rapid. Officers known to be sympathetic to the Nazis were posted out of harm’s way, stocks of fuel, weapons, ammunition and even aircraft were laid by. The command of the military
gendarmerie
was carefully posted to select strategic spots and the
gendarme
detachments given orders to join partisan units in the event of German occupation or else to assist Slovak army forces.

The motives behind the development of a Slovak resistance movement were mixed. The Czechoslovak government in London kept a close watch on the situation in Slovakia, hoping to add much-needed lustre to the Czechoslovak cause by an act of overt and successful rebellion. The plans of the London-based government hinged, therefore, on establishing a Czechoslovak fighting force, an insurgent army, within the confines of the country, to be supported if possible by military units raised abroad. In April 1944 talks began in London with the
object of setting up Czechoslovak air transport squadrons which would give the government in exile means of direct communication with the ‘liberated areas’, including Slovakia. Early in May the London government also signed an agreement with the Soviet Union dealing with the problems of administrative authority in liberated Czechoslovak territory: in the area of military operations authority devolved directly upon the Soviet command, but the Czechoslovak government would then assume administrative responsibilities as rapidly as possible, affording the Soviet command all necessary assistance through its military and civil agencies.

Once Soviet troops appeared on the borders of Czechoslovakia, however, the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party took a hand, ‘appealing’ to the Soviet Party for assistance in waging partisan warfare. The Soviet response was understandably rapid. In the middle of April 1944 the
Orgburo
of the Ukrainian Communist Party formally approved a decision to ‘assist the Czechoslovak cause’ by setting up special training courses for partisans and organizing partisan cadres for service in Slovakia. Operational responsibility was invested in the Ukrainian Partisan Staff, to which body Rudolf Slansky was seconded as a special plenipotentiary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. About a hundred Czechs, most of them party members, joined the first partisan training course run by the Ukrainian Staff in a school also attended by Polish partisans under training; the initial plan called for the dispatch of some ten partisan groups (with fifteen to twenty men to a group) into eastern Slovakia. The Soviet command simultaneously hurried on with the organization of an expanded Czechoslovak regular military force raised and trained in the Soviet Union. Czechoslovak units had already played a distinguished part in the fighting for Kiev in 1943, and now the liberation of the western Ukraine placed many more potential recruits at the disposal of the Soviet authorities, who could also count on men who had deserted to the Red Army (including 4,000 Slovaks).

The 2nd Czechoslovak Parachute Brigade began to form up under Soviet supervision in January 1944; Slovaks made up the core of this formation. By mid-April the Czechoslovak paratroopers were sent off for special training. Under an agreement with the Soviet General Staff, the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps was being raised at its depot in Yefremov (in the Tula
oblast)
. This wholly new corps had an establishment of 16,000 men (plus 350 attached Soviet personnel and 800 women) organized as a motorized formation with four brigades and supporting arms, a regular force intended to serve as the basis of a ‘new’ Czechoslovak army.