The encirclement of Warsaw

On 15 September 1939 troops of General Georg von Küchler’s German 3rd Army, having crossed the Narew and the Bug and come round behind the Polish capital from the east, appeared on the approaches to Praga, the part of Warsaw on the right bank of the Vistula. Around midday the Germans took Białołęka, and towards evening the first heavy fighting with the garrison of the Praga bridgehead broke out at Grochów. From that day Warsaw, which had been fending off attacks from the west and south for a week, was surrounded on three sides. The German command believed the city was trapped, and the very next day demanded its surrender. The defenders refused.

Popular chronologies of the war give 15 September as the day on which the Germans “completed the encirclement of Warsaw”. This is a simplification. The ring in the east had already closed on 13 September, when the leading units of the 3rd Army south of the city, between the Wilga and the mouth of the Okrzejka, made contact with units of the 10th Army. On 15 September the Germans came right up to the outskirts of Praga. West of the Vistula, however, a narrow corridor remained open through the Kampinos Forest to the Modlin Fortress, and for another week Polish units kept making their way into the city along it. Warsaw was cut off completely only on 22 September, when German infantry reached the Vistula at Młociny.

The northern pincer

Under Case White, Warsaw was to be taken by the pincers of two army groups. From the south-west came the 10th Army of Army Group South, whose spearhead, the 4th Panzer Division, had already stormed the districts of Ochota and Wola without success on 8 and 9 September. From East Prussia, as part of General Fedor von Bock’s Army Group North, the 3rd Army was advancing. Its task was to force the Narew and the Bug, outflank Warsaw from the east and link up with the 10th Army, so as to trap the main forces of the Polish Army in the bend of the Vistula.

Between 11 and 13 September the German II Army Corps forced the Bug–Narew line, while I Army Corps crossed the Bug and took Mińsk Mazowiecki. On 13 September Brigadier General Władysław Anders’s Cavalry Operational Group attacked Mińsk but failed to retake it, and over the next two days the Germans smashed the 1st Legions Infantry Division and the Mazowiecka Cavalry Brigade. The road to Praga lay open. On the night of 13–14 September the commander of the Warsaw Army, Major General Juliusz Rómmel, brought into right-bank Warsaw the Operational Group of Brigadier General Juliusz Zulauf, which had withdrawn from the Narew. Zulauf took command of the Warsaw–East sector, and in those days his garrison grew to about 40,000 men and 70 guns. Anders with his cavalry and the 10th Infantry Division moved off southwards, to place themselves at the disposal of the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, who was drawing the remnants of his forces towards the Romanian border.

The defence of the capital as a whole had been directed since 3 September by Brigadier General Walerian Czuma, commandant of the Border Guard, who had been entrusted with organising it almost from scratch. From 10 September the Warsaw Defence Command was subordinate to Rómmel’s Warsaw Army, while civilian affairs were handled by the city’s commissarial mayor, Stefan Starzyński. For two weeks the city had been bombed, and since 8 September it had been under artillery fire. On 12 September Starzyński called on men with military training to volunteer for the Warsaw defence battalions, and the authorities imposed a curfew from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m.

The fighting at Grochów

Küchler was convinced that the Poles had not yet had time to organise the defence of Praga and ordered it to be taken on the march. II Corps was to attack from the north-east, from Jabłonna, and I Corps, with the 11th Infantry Division, the 61st Infantry Division and the 1st Cavalry Brigade, from the east and south-east, through Wawer, Rembertów and Zielonka.

In the north, German attacks by small detachments achieved little. The situation was more dangerous at Grochów, whose defence was commanded by Colonel Stanisław Sosabowski, commander of the 21st “Children of Warsaw” Infantry Regiment (PL). On the morning of 15 September he received word that a strong German column was approaching from Mińsk Mazowiecki, and he sent a battalion forward to block the road junction. The order came too late: at about 5 p.m. a Polish company ran into superior enemy forces near the tram terminus at Gocławek. It set two tanks on fire but lost half its men. Following the retreating Poles, the German infantry took Szembek Square and reached Grochowska Street, where it was halted only in the evening. During the night the Germans also seized the Gocław Embankment (PL), from which their artillery observers could see into Saska Kępa.

The defenders replied with night sorties. A company of the 21st Regiment broke through to Wawer, where it set a dozen or so German vehicles alight and came back with prisoners, while two companies of the 78th Infantry Regiment attacked Annopol. An attempt to recapture the Gocław Embankment on 16 September, however, ended in failure and in the death of Major Andrzej Górnicki, who led the attack.

The demand for surrender

Encouraged by his progress, on 16 September Küchler sent an envoy under a flag of truce to Praga with a demand for unconditional surrender. Rómmel refused to receive the envoy or his letter. The same day German aircraft dropped leaflets over the city: Warsaw was to surrender within twelve hours, and if it did not, the civilian population was to leave the city within a further twelve hours by the roads to Siedlce and Garwolin. After that deadline, the leaflets declared, the whole of Warsaw would be treated as a combat zone. The Germans claimed, moreover, that the Polish government had “made the city a battleground and stripped it of its character as an open city”, and that the Luftwaffe had so far bombed only districts of military importance.

The call to leave was in practice a fiction. The city was surrounded, the exit roads to the east were within range of German fire, and from the first days of the war the Luftwaffe had been strafing columns of refugees. No one had prepared a corridor through which more than a million inhabitants and the crowds of refugees from western Poland could leave safely, and no one knew where they were supposed to go. Warsaw remained full of civilians. A few days later, on 21 September, during a brief ceasefire, only 178 members of the diplomatic corps and about 1,200 foreigners left the city. According to the American official study of the Polish campaign, Hitler, visiting the troops outside Warsaw on 22 September, instructed the commander of the 8th Army, General Johannes Blaskowitz, not to let the civilian population out of the city before the assault. Hunger, the lack of water and casualties among the inhabitants were to break the defence faster than the infantry could.

On the evening of 16 September the 11th Infantry Division attacked again along Grochowska Street. Major Wiesław Radziszewski’s II Battalion of the 21st Regiment held the strongpoint at the junction with Waszyngtona Avenue at the cost of about a hundred dead, and towards dawn it counter-attacked and took 123 prisoners, including eleven officers. Further German attacks on Saska Kępa and Bródno also broke down.

What came next

On 17 September Hitler ordered the attack on Praga to be halted: the priority was to destroy the Polish armies fighting on the Bzura, where most of the aircraft and heavy artillery had been sent. That same day the Red Army entered Poland from the east. For the Germans this meant that, under the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which drew the boundary between the spheres along the Vistula, Praga might in future fall to the Soviets. The Army High Command therefore decided to take only left-bank Warsaw by storm, and to pin down Praga and destroy it by fire. On 22 September the former Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Werner von Fritsch, was killed while visiting forward positions on the approaches to Praga.

Between 19 and 22 September the remnants of the Poznań and Pomorze Armies fought their way through the Kampinos Forest into Warsaw, and with them came Major General Tadeusz Kutrzeba, who became Rómmel’s deputy. The capital’s garrison grew to about 100,000 men, but it was beginning to run short of ammunition, and the city of food, water and medicines. Once the corridor to Modlin had been closed on 22 September, Warsaw was left entirely to its own resources. The encirclement of mid-September was thus the beginning of a siege that ended with the air raid of 25 September, the assault and the capitulation of 28 September. The defence of the city lasted longer than the German command had expected and became one of the symbols of the Polish September – the first great battle for a city in the Second World War.