The bombing of Warsaw

On Sunday 10 September 1939 German aircraft appeared over Warsaw at half past five in the morning and kept coming back all day. According to Polish sources, among them the chronicle of the siege compiled by Władysław Bartoszewski, the capital suffered seventeen raids that day, involving some 70 aircraft in all. The heaviest, in the afternoon, lasted two hours. Bombs fell on Krakowskie Przedmieście, around Królewska Street and Piłsudski Square, on Praga, Grochów, Targówek and Saska Kępa. Airmen machine-gunned refugees on the Grochów road and women digging potatoes in the fields on the edge of the city. At the same time German artillery was shelling the city, and its shells set fire to one of the towers of the Royal Castle. The people of Warsaw called the day “Bloody Sunday”, although in Polish history the name is now more often associated with the events in Bydgoszcz a week earlier.

English-language chronologies of the war sometimes give 10 September as the day on which Warsaw was bombed “for the first time”, in twelve raids. Both statements need correcting. The Luftwaffe had been attacking the capital since the first day of the war, and 10 September was one of the heaviest days of bombing, but not the first. Polish studies give seventeen raids for that Sunday, and also list 4, 8, 9, 13, 17, 20 and 24 September as days of particularly heavy attacks. The most terrible day of the siege was yet to come.

The first week: airfield, factories and stations

Warsaw was the only city in Poland that had been prepared before the war for air defence on any significant scale. The operational plan “West” assumed that the land fighting would take place far from the capital and that its main threat would come from the air. The city was therefore defended by about 19 per cent of Poland’s anti-aircraft artillery, more than 70 guns of 75-millimetre calibre and several dozen 40-millimetre guns, and in the air by Colonel Stefan Pawlikowski’s Pursuit Brigade: 53 PZL P.11 and P.7 fighters, a third of Poland’s fighter strength.

The Germans intended to strike Warsaw on 1 September with the entire bomber force of two air fleets. This raid, named Operation Wasserkante, did not take place because of bad weather. Smaller formations nevertheless appeared over the capital and bombed Okęcie airfield and the PZL aircraft works, and bombs also fell on the working-class estates of Koło and Rakowiec. The first civilians were killed. On the same day the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, called on the belligerents not to bomb civilian populations or undefended towns, and Hitler gave assurances that the Luftwaffe was attacking military targets only. At the same time Stukas reduced Wieluń to rubble.

In the first days the Polish defence held up reasonably well. According to the calculations of the aviation historian Jerzy Cynk, by 6 September the Pursuit Brigade had shot down some 30 aircraft, but had itself lost more than 30 fighters. On 4 September a German formation from East Prussia broke through over the city and carried out the heaviest raid so far: houses burned in Praga and Grochów, and some thirty people were killed under the rubble of two tenement buildings in Wronia Street. The next day bombs hit the East Station, crowded with refugees, killing among others about twenty Girl Guides who were helping the wounded.

After that the defence weakened sharply. Between 3 and 5 September, as the government and the supreme military authorities evacuated Warsaw, nearly half of the anti-aircraft guns were taken east, along with the barrage balloons and searchlights. On the evening of 6 September the Pursuit Brigade was ordered to move to airfields near Lublin. From then on the city was defended by only a few batteries; the historian Tadeusz Jurga estimated that the effectiveness of the anti-aircraft defence had fallen by at least three-quarters. From now on the Luftwaffe could bomb Warsaw almost with impunity.

The front at the city’s edge

On 8 September the 4th Panzer Division under General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, the most advanced formation of the 10th Army, reached the outskirts of Warsaw. That evening and the following morning it tried to take the city off the march, attacking Ochota and Wola, and was thrown back at the barricades with heavy losses in tanks. On the afternoon of 8 September the capital came under German field artillery fire for the first time, and on 9 September the Luftwaffe committed nearly 150 Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers of General Wolfram von Richthofen in support of the assault. The raids then came every two hours from dawn. The Polish capital had become a front-line city, and in practice the line between bombing military positions and bombing residential districts vanished altogether.

West of Warsaw the Battle of the Bzura was by now under way, in which the Polish Poznań and Pomorze Armies struck the flank of the German 8th Army. This forced the Germans to pull the 4th Panzer Division back from the capital and postpone the assault. Over the following weeks bombing from the air and artillery fire became the main means of putting pressure on the defending city.

Sunday 10 September

According to the German historian Jochen Böhler, the daily order of the Luftwaffe general staff of 10 September expressly called for “far-reaching destruction in the densely populated districts of the city”. This was justified by alleged Polish atrocities against German soldiers – the same propaganda narrative that Berlin had spread after the events in Bydgoszcz. It was a sign that the raids on Warsaw were ceasing to be merely support for the fighting on its approaches.

The first alarm was sounded at 5.30 a.m. Throughout the day smaller groups of aircraft circled over the city, dropping high-explosive and incendiary bombs. On the right bank of the Vistula bombs fell on Skaryszewski Park, the zoo and the East Station, where the Germans expected Polish batteries, and on Grochowska Street and Waszyngtona Avenue. At the State Tele- and Radio-Technical Works a store holding over ten thousand tonnes of coal caught fire. In the centre, tenement houses around Krakowskie Przedmieście were burning. According to Polish reports, Polish anti-aircraft artillery shot down five aircraft. Thousands of leaflets calling for surrender also fell on the city.

No one managed to establish the number of dead for that single day. The chronicles speak of many killed and wounded, and the hospitals, into which thousands of wounded soldiers from the front had been pouring for days, were already overcrowded. On the same day the Warsaw Fire Brigade was placed under the military commanders, since the fires had ceased to be a matter for a municipal service and had become part of the defence.

The mayor’s voice

For the inhabitants the chief source of support in these days was the city’s acting mayor, Stefan Starzyński. When on 5–7 September the government, the Commander-in-Chief Edward Rydz-Śmigły, the government commissioner for the capital and a large part of the police hurriedly left Warsaw, and a radio appeal by the head of military propaganda, Lieutenant Colonel Roman Umiastowski, set off a mass flight of men to the east, Starzyński stayed in the city. On 8 September the commander of the defence of Warsaw, Brigadier General Walerian Czuma, appointed him Civil Commissioner to the Warsaw Defence Command. The mayor spoke every day, sometimes several times a day, over the Warszawa II radio station. He talked about the situation in the city, thanked the people putting out fires and digging trenches, and appealed for calm and work.

He spoke of the air raids without diplomatic euphemism. After the bombing of 9 September he declared that “by barbaric methods the Germans are trying to destroy and burn the capital and to annihilate the civilian population”. In the days that followed he more and more often named the hospitals and churches that had been hit, and appealed to the International Red Cross and to the Western Allies to respond. His voice, which was heard abroad as well, made besieged Warsaw a symbol of Polish resistance for the world.

Was Warsaw a military target?

The question of the legality of the bombing of Warsaw differs from that of Wieluń. Warsaw was defended: it had a garrison and anti-aircraft batteries, and from 8 September it was a fortress in the military sense, around which fighting was going on. Some German and Western authors, among them the aviation writer Cajus Bekker, therefore held that the raids up to 25 September fell within the laws of war of the day, and that only the heaviest raid, that of 25 September, amounted to terror. German propaganda claimed that the Luftwaffe attacked only military targets and that the blame for the victims lay with the Polish command, which had “senselessly sacrificed the city”.

Polish historians, among them Tomasz Szarota, regard these claims as lies. They point out that greater destruction was recorded in the city centre than in the districts closer to the front line, that hospitals marked with the Red Cross were hit repeatedly, and that airmen machine-gunned civilians on roads and in fields. The northern district, inhabited mainly by Jews, was bombed especially heavily on the holy days of Rosh Hashanah (13 September) and Yom Kippur (23 September). Böhler, while distinguishing defended Warsaw from undefended Wieluń, concludes that here too the Luftwaffe’s main aim was to terrorise the population and to test in practice the capabilities of modern air power. The surviving order of 10 September is one of the stronger arguments for this side of the debate.

Place in the war

Sunday 10 September was a beginning, not a climax. On 13 September Hermann Göring ordered the first concentric raid on the city; some 150 fires broke out. On 17 September the Royal Castle burned. On 25 September, a day the people of Warsaw called “Black Monday” or “Wet Monday” (after the drenching of Easter Monday), several hundred German aircraft flew more than a thousand sorties over Warsaw, dropping, according to various sources, 486 or 560 tonnes of high-explosive bombs and some 72 tonnes of incendiaries. It was the heaviest air raid in the history of warfare up to that time. Estimates of civilian deaths for the whole siege range from about 10,000 to about 25,000, of whom, according to Szarota, between ten and twenty thousand were killed by aerial bombs; artillery caused the rest. At least 10–12 per cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed.

Warsaw was the first great capital to be devastated from the air in this war. Footage of its ruins was used in the German propaganda film Feuertaufe (“Baptism of Fire”, 1940), which was meant to show the world the might of the Luftwaffe, and in May 1940 Rotterdam met a similar fate. The experience of September 1939 was also a test for the Luftwaffe, after which it came to believe that air power could break a city’s will to resist. The following years showed how far this logic would lead: from London and Coventry to Hamburg and Dresden, and, for Warsaw itself, to the destruction of the city during the Uprising of 1944.