Operation Ostra Brama

Before dawn on 7 July 1944, on the south-eastern outskirts of Wilno (Vilnius) – between the Rossa cemetery and Belmont – several thousand partisans of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) moved to attack the German fortifications. This was Operation Ostra Brama (named after the Gate of Dawn): an attempt to capture the city with their own forces before the Red Army marched in, and to meet it there as the host. The same day the spearheads of the Soviet 3rd Belorussian Front reached Wilno, and in the afternoon regular Soviet units entered the battle. The fighting for the city lasted until 13 July.

The statement that on 7 July “Soviet troops entered Wilno” simplifies the day. The first Soviet tanks did indeed appear on the outskirts that day, but the German garrison held out in the city for another six days, and the first hours of fighting belonged to the units of the Polish underground. The very question of whom the city belonged to was also in dispute. For the Polish government in London and the Home Army, Wilno was a Polish provincial capital, part of the Polish Republic within its 1939 borders. For the Soviet Union it was the capital of the Lithuanian SSR, incorporated into the USSR in 1940, and Moscow regarded that position as settled.

Wilno under German occupation

The Wehrmacht took Wilno on 24 June 1941, and the city became part of the General Commissariat of Lithuania within the Reichskommissariat Ostland. For the Jews of Wilno the occupation meant annihilation: most of them were killed at Ponary as early as 1941, and the Germans liquidated the Wilno Ghetto in September 1943. The Poles, who made up the majority of the inhabitants of the city and the surrounding districts, lived under double pressure – from the German authorities and from the Lithuanian auxiliary administration and police, which the Germans had allowed to help run the country.

The Polish underground built one of the strongest Home Army districts in the Wilno region. From 1941 it was led by Lieutenant Colonel Aleksander Krzyżanowski (“Wilk”), an artillery officer who from 1943 led more than a dozen partisan brigades into the forests. They operated in a difficult position. They fought the Germans and the Lithuanian auxiliary formations: on the night of 13/14 May 1944 the AK defeated units of General Povilas Plechavičius’s Lithuanian Territorial Defence Force at Murowana Oszmianka. The Polish–Lithuanian conflict also struck civilians – on 20 June a Lithuanian auxiliary police unit shot 38 or 39 inhabitants of Glinciszki in reprisal, and on 23 June soldiers of the AK’s 5th Wilno Brigade killed between 21 and 27 Lithuanian settlers, including women and children, at Dubinki. Krzyżanowski’s talks with the Lithuanian pro-independence underground foundered on the question of who should own the Wilno region. At the same time relations with the Soviet partisans, who from the autumn of 1943, on orders from Moscow, had been trying to disarm Polish units, were tense, and in places turned into open fighting.

Over all this hung the dispute over the border. When in April 1943 the Germans publicised the discovery of the Katyn graves and the Polish government turned to the International Red Cross, Moscow broke off relations with it. At the Tehran Conference Churchill and Roosevelt agreed in principle that Poland’s eastern border should run roughly along the Curzon Line – which meant that Wilno and Lwów would remain in the USSR. When in January 1944 the Red Army crossed Poland’s pre-war border, it became clear that the question would be decided on the ground, as the front passed through. The government in London had no diplomatic relations with Moscow, and the hopes raised by the Sikorski–Stalin declaration of December 1941 had long since evaporated.

From Tempest to Ostra Brama

The Home Army’s answer to the approaching front was Operation Tempest (Burza), introduced by an order of the Commander of the Home Army, General Tadeusz Komorowski (“Bór”), in November 1943. AK units were to strike the rear of the retreating Germans, take control of territory before the Red Army arrived and meet it as hosts – soldiers of the Polish Republic, an ally of the coalition powers, with their commanders and the representatives of the Government Delegation for Poland coming into the open. The plan assumed that fighting would be possible only once the Germans were in full retreat. It was first applied in the winter and spring of 1944 in Volhynia, where the AK’s 27th Volhynian Infantry Division fought side by side with the Red Army.

Capturing Wilno went beyond these assumptions. The idea came in the spring of 1944 from Major Maciej Kalenkiewicz (“Kotwicz”), a Cichociemny – one of the special operations paratroopers trained in Britain – and a partisan commander in the Nowogródek District: the combined forces of two districts, Wilno and Nowogródek, were to take the city themselves before the Russians did, and thereby demonstrate to the Allies that Wilno was Polish. “Wilk” adopted the concept, and General Komorowski approved it at a briefing in Warsaw on 12 June 1944, giving it the code name Ostra Brama – after the Wilno city gate with its chapel and venerated image of the Mother of God. As Polish historians stress, the authors of the plan themselves understood that an assault on a fortified city was something different from Tempest in its original form.

For Wilno was not a city the Germans intended to abandon. Hitler declared it a “fortress” (fester Platz) to be defended to the end, and appointed as its commandant the Luftwaffe general Rainer Stahel, an air defence specialist who had earlier commanded the garrison of Rome. The Polish plan, drawn up at the end of June by the district chief of staff, Major Teodor Cetys (“Sław”), and Lieutenant Colonel Zygmunt Blumski (“Strychański”), provided for an attack by five partisan groupings from outside and a rising by the underground garrison inside the city itself. The main blow was to fall from the east and south-east. The whole operation was to be commanded by Lieutenant Colonel “Poleszczuk”. According to Polish studies, the partisan units of the two districts numbered some 15,000 soldiers, and up to 18,000 with the underground garrisons; according to the same estimates, some 9,000 soldiers from the Wilno District and some 6,000 from the Nowogródek District took part in the Wilno operation as a whole. They were, however, lightly armed partisans without artillery, unprepared to storm positions defended by regular troops.

A race with the front

The pace of events, however, was dictated by the Soviet offensive. Operation Bagration, launched on 22–23 June, shattered the German Army Group Centre within two weeks. On 3 July the Red Army entered Minsk, and on 4 July the Stavka ordered the 3rd Belorussian Front under General of the Army Ivan Chernyakhovsky to take Wilno by 10 July at the latest. The Soviet spearheads – the 5th Guards Tank Army of Marshal of Armoured Troops Pavel Rotmistrov and the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps – were advancing westwards at a pace of up to several dozen kilometres a day. Panic broke out in the city; so many people fled Wilno that, according to Polish estimates, only 70,000–80,000 inhabitants remained, which also broke up part of the underground network.

The date of the attack therefore began to slip forward. Tempest in the Wilno and Nowogródek regions began on 2 July. On the night of 4/5 July “Wilk” brought the attack on Wilno forward by a day, to 11 p.m. on 6 July, and when the Soviet troops came closer still, he decided on the morning of 7 July to strike at once, in daylight. The orders did not reach all units, some brigades were still on the march from as far as 150 kilometres or more away, and communications between the groupings barely functioned; the Nowogródek units advanced without guides who knew the terrain. According to the studies on which the Polish literature relies, some 4,500 AK soldiers from around Wilno took no part in the attack at all. Lieutenant Colonel “Poleszczuk” did not reach the city in time, and “Wilk” himself was just behind the line of one of the attacking battalions, so that in practice nobody was directing the operation as a whole. The German security services knew about the preparations, and the garrison had been put on alert.

7 July

Only two groupings reached their start lines: “East” under Major Antoni Olechnowicz (“Pohorecki”) and “South-East” under Major Czesław Dębicki (“Jarema”), some 4,000 men in all. They had two anti-tank guns, a few mortars and grenade launchers. They attacked from the most strongly defended side, on a front from the Rossa cemetery to Belmont, heading for Lipówka, Hrybiszki, Góry and Kolonia Wileńska. Once the defences were broken they were to meet in Cathedral Square.

The attack had no reconnaissance of the German defensive system. Battalions of the AK’s 77th Infantry Regiment took the first line of fortifications on the edge of Lipówka and crossed the railway line to Podbrodzie, but a German counter-attack threw them back to their starting positions. The 9th Brigade was pinned down in front of concrete bunkers near Hrybiszki, and the 8th Brigade was stopped by the fire of an armoured train near Kolonia Wileńska station. The furthest advance was made by the 3rd Brigade of Lieutenant Gracjan Fróg (“Szczerbiec”): it crossed the Wilejka (Vilnia), reached Belmont and the edge of Zarzecze, and one of its platoons fought in Antokol. The defenders had artillery, tanks, self-propelled guns and air support from Porubanek airfield; in daylight the partisans had nothing to counter them with. After a few hours the attack collapsed, and the units, having suffered heavy losses, withdrew to the area of Szwajcary. In the city itself only a few hundred members of the underground rose in arms, mainly in the Kalwaryjska district. In the other districts mobilisation failed.

Around noon on 7 July regular Soviet units reached the approaches to Wilno – the 3rd Guards Mechanised Corps, whose tanks took Porubanek airfield in the first days of the fighting. At 8 p.m. the Russians launched their first assault, which brought them only local success; in the evening General Nikolai Krylov’s 5th Army arrived and took over the main burden of the fighting. The partisans’ first contact with the Red Army foreshadowed what was to come: the commander of a Soviet tank brigade demanded that “Pohorecki’s” grouping lay down its arms. The major, on his own responsibility, disbanded his units and ordered them to go back underground; “Wilk” removed him and handed the grouping over to Major Antoni Wasilewski (“Olesiński”).

Six days of fighting and their outcome

The failed assault of 7 July did not end the AK’s part in the battle. Over the following days, as the Soviet ring tightened around Wilno and the 5th Guards Tank Army bypassed the city from the south, Polish units fought in the city alongside the Red Army. Captain Bolesław Zagórny’s (“Jan”) battalion took the Kalwaryjska district and from 8 July cooperated with the Soviet 97th Rifle Division, later fighting in the city centre. AK soldiers captured one block of streets after another, buildings, and the Łukiszki prison, from which they freed the prisoners. Stahel’s garrison, reinforced on 10 July by a drop of paratroopers, defended itself fiercely. The fighting ended on 13 July, and its final act – the disarming and arrest of AK soldiers – played out over the following days. Polish studies estimate the AK’s losses in the whole operation in the Wilno region at several hundred killed, wounded and missing.

Assessments of the operation divided its participants. After the war General Komorowski presented it as a success in which Polish units had taken a considerable part of the city and helped the Russians break German resistance. Its originator, Major Kalenkiewicz, wrote bitterly as early as the summer of 1944 that 12,000 men could have joined the attack but only 2,000 did, and that they had fought by day instead of by night, “defenceless, under the fire of enemy artillery and aircraft”. The discrepancy in the figures – from 2,000 to more than 4,000 soldiers in the first attack – stems from different ways of counting, but everyone agreed that the plan had already failed at the stage of concentration.

Place in the war

Ostra Brama is regarded as the largest armed action of the AK within Operation Tempest before the Warsaw Uprising. It was also the first attempt to take a large city before the Red Army marched in. The Polish command wanted in this way to show the world that Wilno was Polish and that the Polish Republic had its own army on this soil. Militarily the aim proved unattainable – the city was taken by the Soviet army, and the Polish partisans fought as its auxiliaries. Politically the outcome depended on the decision of Joseph Stalin, who had no intention of recognising either Polish claims to Wilno or units subordinate to the government in London. In the West the operation passed almost unnoticed: according to Polish studies, the British Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, blocked press reports about it so as not to irritate the Soviet ally.

The experience of Wilno was repeated in the following weeks in Lwów, where the AK rose on 23 July, and – on a different scale – in Warsaw, where on 1 August the Home Army High Command launched the uprising. For the soldiers of the Wilno AK, fighting alongside the Red Army ended within days in arrests, internment and deportation deep into the USSR; for Wilno itself it ended in incorporation into the Lithuanian SSR and the departure of most of its Polish inhabitants in 1944–1947. After 1990 the inscription “WILNO 7 – 13 VII 1944” was placed on one of the tablets of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.