The Lwów uprising

On 23 July 1944 the heaviest street fighting for Lwów (Lviv) was under way. Units of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) – as part of Operation Tempest – were fighting the retreating Germans side by side with the tanks of the Soviet 4th Tank Army (PL), which broke into the city centre that day. These events went down in history as the Lwów uprising, although the term “uprising” needs a caveat: this was not an independent rising against the occupier but the Polish underground’s part in the battle for a city that was at the same time being taken by Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front. The first clashes between the Home Army and the Germans took place on 22 July, and the city was finally cleared on 27 July. For Poles, Lwów was a Polish city, the capital of the Lwów Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic; for the Soviet authorities it was part of the Ukrainian SSR, into which it had been incorporated in the autumn of 1939.

Lwów before the front arrived

By 1944 Lwów had five years of double occupation behind it. In September 1939 the city was taken by the Red Army, and in June 1941 by the Wehrmacht. The German occupation brought the annihilation of Lwów’s Jews, who before the war had made up almost a third of the population: the Lwów Ghetto was liquidated in June 1943, and the Janowska camp was a site of mass executions. The city’s Polish elite suffered heavy losses, symbolised by the murder of the Lwów professors in July 1941.

The city had a strong underground. Lwów was the seat of the command of the Home Army’s Lwów Area (also known as the South-Eastern Area), headed from August 1943 by Colonel Władysław Filipkowski (codename “Janka”), an artilleryman and veteran of the Polish Legions. In dealings with the Soviet command he appeared, with the consent of the Home Army High Command, as a general. The commander of the Home Army’s Lwów District (PL) was Lieutenant Colonel Stefan Czerwiński (PL) (“Stefan”), designated commander of the re-formed Home Army 5th Infantry Division, “Children of Lwów”.

The front had been approaching since the beginning of the year. In January 1944 the Red Army crossed Poland’s pre-war border in Volhynia, and in the spring it occupied much of the Tarnopol Voivodeship. On 13 July 1944 the Lwów–Sandomierz offensive began: Konev’s troops broke through the defences of Army Group North Ukraine and near Brody encircled the German XIII Army Corps together with the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, made up of Ukrainian volunteers from Galicia. The Brody pocket had been destroyed by 22 July.

On 18 July the German administration and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police evacuated the city, and the next day some Wehrmacht units left. Retreating German divisions were still streaming into the area around Lwów, however, so the Polish command held back from starting the fight. On the evening of 21 July the first Soviet scouts appeared outside the city.

The Tempest plan in Lwów

Operation Tempest assumed that Home Army units would attack the retreating Germans and present themselves to the incoming Red Army as the masters of the ground – representatives of the Polish Republic and its government in London. In Lwów this had special significance: Moscow regarded the city as part of the USSR, while the Polish government and the Home Army High Command of General Tadeusz Komorowski (“Bór”) wanted to show that it was Polish and that the Poles had themselves contributed to its liberation.

An order of 5 July 1944 divided the city into five districts – the City Centre, East, West, South and North – and assigned each one assembly points and objectives to be seized. The underground units came into the open under the names of pre-war units: the 19th and 40th Infantry Regiments, the 26th Infantry Regiment and the 14th Jazłowiec Uhlan Regiment, re-created in the underground as a Home Army regiment. According to estimates cited in Polish literature, some 3,000 Home Army soldiers took up arms in the city itself and several thousand more across the district; the figures differ from author to author and depending on whether units held in reserve are included. Weapons were modest: small arms, sub-machine guns and grenades, supplemented with captured stocks during the fighting.

The plan also had a dimension that weighed on everything done in this multi-ethnic city. The orders provided for protecting the Polish districts against attacks by Ukrainian nationalist formations and against reprisals by the retreating Germans, and some units kept watch on districts inhabited by Ukrainians and on the residence of the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky by St George’s Cathedral.

The fighting of 22–27 July

On the morning of 22 July the Soviet 29th Motorised Brigade of the 10th Guards Tank Corps, part of General Dmitry Lelyushenko’s 4th Tank Army, attacked Lwów from the south-east along Zielona Street. The tank crews lacked the infantry for fighting in built-up areas, and so – as Polish accounts stress – they readily accepted help from the Home Army units. The same day the Polish underground went into action: the first to fight were squadrons of the 14th Uhlans, clearing the Łyczaków district and firing on Germans retreating along Zielona and Łyczakowska Streets. In the western district Home Army soldiers took the main railway station and wide areas along Gródecka and Króla Leszczyńskiego Streets, and in the southern district, abandoned by the Germans, they occupied the Citadel, where a depot they found allowed some units to rearm.

On 23 July – the date from which some studies, especially in English, count the outbreak of the uprising – all the brigades of the Soviet tank corps went into the attack. The tanks entered the city in three wedges: one took the undefended southern part of the city, while the other two headed for the centre – from Łyczaków along Pijarów and Piekarska Streets, and along Zielona Street via Halicki Square. In the afternoon Soviet tanks reached the Market Square. Home Army platoons in the city centre worked with Soviet units to eliminate German pockets of resistance, and Polish guides led tank crews and artillery observers through the city, including through the sewers. In the eastern district one platoon took the municipal gasworks, captured its German crew and beat off attempts to blow it up. A Kedyw (sabotage and diversion) unit took the Polytechnic building, where a Home Army hospital was set up.

That day also saw an episode that the two sides remembered differently. Home Army soldiers from Officer Cadet Stanisław Ropuszyński’s platoon of the 19th Infantry Regiment made their way under fire to the Town Hall and hung Polish, British, American and Soviet flags from its tower; similar flags were hung on the Polytechnic and on the city-centre command building in Akademicka Street. According to Polish accounts the Soviet command soon ordered them taken down, explaining that they helped the Germans find their way around the city. Soviet tradition, for its part, credited the raising of the red banner over the Town Hall to the crew of the T-34 tank Guards of the 63rd Guards Tank Brigade (commanded by Lieutenant Aleksandr Dodonov) and to radio operator Aleksandr Marchenko, who was said to have been mortally wounded in the process. Russian archival researchers have questioned this version, while the tank itself became a Soviet symbol of the “liberation of Lviv”.

In the following days the fighting moved to the outskirts. On 24 July Home Army units from the western district attacked Kortumowa Góra (PL), a hill where the Germans had artillery, without success, and on 25 July retreating German columns drove Polish platoons out of Sygniówka and Lewandówka, causing momentary panic. For four days squadrons of the 14th Uhlans covered the right flank of the Soviet forces on the Pasieki line, beating off German attempts to break through from Winniki; on 26 July one squadron was bombed in error by Soviet aircraft, for which the Soviet command apologised. After the failure to take the city off the march with tanks alone, the front command sent the infantry of the 60th and 38th Armies against it from the east, while the tank armies bypassed Lwów – in the north General Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army. The last German units left Lwów on 27 July; Kortumowa Góra was taken on the night of 27–28 July, without the Home Army’s involvement. On 27 July Moscow marked the capture of the city with an artillery salute – by order of the day of Joseph Stalin, as for every major victory.

Polish losses were relatively light: according to studies based on Home Army documents, some 30 soldiers were killed and about 160 wounded. Soviet and German losses in the city itself cannot be separated from the figures for the operation as a whole.

Cooperation and mistrust

While the fighting lasted, cooperation between the soldiers of the two armies went – by consistent Polish accounts – surprisingly well. At a joint briefing at the Home Army headquarters in Kochanowskiego Street the commander of the Soviet group thanked Colonel Filipkowski for his help, and liaison officers were exchanged. On 26 July Filipkowski met a representative of Marshal Konev, a general who went by the name of Ivanov. It was then agreed – or so the Poles believed – that the Home Army 5th Infantry Division would be formed to continue the fight against the Germans.

The situation changed when NKVD units and the apparatus of Soviet power entered the city behind the front-line troops. At the next briefing “General Ivanov” proposed that the Home Army units hand over their assorted, often obsolete weapons, giving his word of honour that they would receive modern arms in exchange. At the one after that he categorically demanded that they lay down their arms. The Polish command issued the order accordingly, and on 28 July the units laid down their weapons in their quarters and the soldiers went home, keeping in underground contact; some weapons – often with the tacit consent of their commanders – were hidden. According to Polish accounts the soldiers were left to choose between joining General Zygmunt Berling’s Polish First Army and being conscripted into the Red Army. The white-and-red flags disappeared from the buildings. On 30 July Nikita Khrushchev, head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and Marshal Konev addressed a rally in Lwów.

The arrests

On the morning of 31 July Colonel Filipkowski, with the agreement of the District Council of National Unity and the Government Delegate for the district, Adam Ostrowski, flew with a group of officers in a Soviet aircraft to Zhytomyr for talks with General Michał Rola-Żymierski, commander-in-chief of the Polish Army subordinate to the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN). He was accompanied by, among others, Lieutenant Colonel Czerwiński, Lieutenant Colonel Henryk Pohoski and Colonel Franciszek Studziński (“Rawicz”), commander of the Home Army’s Tarnopol District. The talks were to concern the fate of the Lwów Home Army units and their possible incorporation into the army subordinate to the PKWN – whereas Filipkowski answered to the government in London, which did not recognise the committee.

On the evening of the same day, 31 July, the officers of the Lwów District staff and the district commanders were summoned – supposedly to a briefing on the formation of the division – to the former Biesiadecki Palace in Batorego Street. Soviet officers were waiting for them in the hall; after a brief report by the Polish chief of staff, Major Kornel Stasiewicz (“Prosper”), the colonel in charge drew his pistols, and soldiers rushed in, disarmed those present and detained them. Some 30 Home Army officers were taken to the prison in Łąckiego Street, which had earlier housed a Gestapo prison. In the following days the NKVD set a trap in the headquarters building in Kochanowskiego Street and arrested everyone who came. Filipkowski and his companions were arrested in Zhytomyr on the night of 2–3 August; some publications simplify this, saying they were detained as early as 31 July. The Polish underground learned of the arrests from a report that reached the High Command in Warsaw on 2 August – by which time the capital was already in the grip of the uprising.

Filipkowski passed through the NKVD prison in Kiev, the cells of the SMERSH counter-intelligence of the 1st Ukrainian Front, and camps at Kharkiv, Dyagilevo and Gryazovets; released in November 1947, he returned to Poland and died in 1950 in Pieńsk. According to Polish studies more than 2,000 soldiers of the Lwów Home Army ended up in prisons and labour camps; some of the rank and file were drafted into Berling’s army or the Red Army, and some went underground again. A similar fate befell units that, after Tempest ended, set out from the Lwów area to help insurgent Warsaw and were disarmed on the way.

This scenario repeated what had happened in the Wilno region a dozen or so days earlier: after Operation Ostra Brama and the capture of Wilno the NKVD had likewise first worked with the Home Army and then arrested its commanders and disarmed its units.

The Ukrainian dimension

The battle for Lwów was fought in the shadow of the Polish–Ukrainian conflict. Before the war Ukrainians were a minority of the city’s inhabitants but the majority of the rural population of Eastern Galicia, and Lwów was the main centre of their political and cultural life. In 1943–1944 the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the armed wing of the Bandera faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, carried out mass murders of the Polish population in Volhynia – culminating in the “Bloody Sunday” of 11 July 1943 – and from the beginning of 1944 the attacks spread to Eastern Galicia too. The Polish underground responded with self-defence and retaliatory actions in which civilians were also killed. This is why the Lwów Tempest orders provided for protecting the Polish districts, and why the city’s Polish inhabitants feared not only the Germans but also the Ukrainian formations around the city.

Ukrainian nationalists also regarded Lwów as their city and had no intention of recognising either Polish or Soviet authority; the UPA was preparing to fight the USSR behind the front. The Soviet authorities exploited the conflict politically: they stressed the “Ukrainian” character of the city while at the same time launching a campaign against the Ukrainian underground that would last for years.

Place in the war

Lwów was one of the most important cities taken in the summer of 1944 in the offensive of the 1st Ukrainian Front, whose troops reached the San and the Vistula in the last days of July. For Poland the capture of the city meant above all that its fate was sealed. On 27 July 1944 the PKWN concluded a secret agreement with the USSR on a border based roughly on the Curzon Line, leaving Lwów on the Soviet side (Poland and the USSR signed the border treaty on 16 August 1945), and in February 1945 the leaders of the Big Three accepted this border at Yalta. In 1944–1946 most of the city’s Polish inhabitants left for the west under the so-called repatriation, and Lwów became a Ukrainian city.

The Lwów Tempest also showed the limits of the whole concept of the operation: Home Army soldiers managed to fight the Germans and cooperate with the Red Army on the battlefield, but coming into the open ended in disarmament and arrests. The experiences of Wilno and Lwów influenced the decisions of the Home Army command in the last days of July 1944, when it was considering taking up the fight for Warsaw – a city that, unlike Lwów, was not the subject of a territorial dispute and which the Poles wanted to liberate themselves before Soviet troops entered it.