The Red Army and Berling on the Vistula

By the end of September 1944 the Red Army had been in Poland for two months. The Belorussian offensive and the Lwów–Sandomierz operation had carried it in the summer to the line of the Vistula and the Narew: Soviet forces held the whole of eastern Poland, with Lublin, Białystok, Lwów (Lviv) and Rzeszów, they had bridgeheads on the left bank of the Vistula at Magnuszew and Sandomierz, and since 14 September they had also held right-bank Warsaw. The statement that the Red Army was already “deep in Poland” needs qualifying, however: most of the Polish lands, including left-bank Warsaw, Kraków, Łódź, Poznań and Silesia, remained in German hands until the January offensive of 1945. 24 September came just after the failure of the only attempt to reach insurgent Warsaw across the Vistula – the landing by soldiers of the Polish 1st Army under General Zygmunt Berling, whose last groups were withdrawn from the left bank on the night of 22/23 September and on 23 September.

The front on the Vistula and the Narew

After the advance of several hundred kilometres in Bagration, the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky reached the approaches to Praga, Warsaw’s right-bank district, at the turn of July and August. A German counter-attack by panzer divisions at Radzymin and Wołomin smashed the Soviet 3rd Tank Corps at the beginning of August, and the front outside Warsaw came to a halt for six weeks. During this time, while the uprising was raging in the city, the Soviet armies were defending the Warka–Magnuszew bridgehead (PL), where the Polish 1st Armoured Brigade had also fought in August at Studzianki, while Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front held the Baranów–Sandomierz bridgehead.

At the beginning of September the right wing of Rokossovsky’s front moved forward again to the Narew. From 5 September soldiers of the 65th Army of General Pavel Batov were crossing the river between Pułtusk and Serock, while further north Soviet troops seized a bridgehead at Różan. On these bridgeheads, enlarged until the middle of September and then defended all autumn against German counter-attacks, the later offensive into East Prussia and Pomerania was prepared. At the same time the 1st Belorussian Front prepared a converging attack on the German bridgehead east of Warsaw.

The capture of Praga and the supply drops

On 10 September troops of the 1st Belorussian Front, including the Soviet 47th Army, attacked the German bridgehead at Praga. The same day Joseph Stalin, after weeks of refusals, agreed that Allied aircraft flying to Warsaw could land in territory held by the Red Army. The Home Army High Command, which after the fall of the Old Town and Powiśle had opened contact with the Germans about a surrender on 9 September, broke off the talks on 11 September. The Polish 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division took part in the fighting for Praga. On 13 September the Germans blew up the Warsaw bridges over the Vistula, and on 14 September right-bank Warsaw was in Soviet and Polish hands; the last pockets of resistance were eliminated on the morning of 15 September.

On the night of 13/14 September Soviet aircraft appeared over left-bank Warsaw and began dropping arms, ammunition, food and medicines to the insurgents. The flights, in which the Polish 2nd Kraków Night Bomber Regiment (PL) also took part from mid-September, continued until the end of the month. The light aircraft dropped containers from low altitude, at first without parachutes, so that many of them broke apart on impact. From 10 September the Soviet air force, which since August had been permitted to fly over the city only for reconnaissance, was again flying combat missions over it. On 18 September 107 American B-17 bombers flew over Warsaw; as part of Operation Frantic they had taken off from Britain and landed at Soviet airfields. They dropped 1,284 containers, of which, according to Polish calculations, roughly a quarter reached the insurgents. This was the only operation on such a scale; further planned flights did not take place, partly because the Soviet side withheld its consent. According to Jerzy Kirchmayer’s tally, the insurgents received a total of about 104 tonnes of supplies from all the Western and Soviet drops.

The landing across the Vistula

After the capture of Praga, the Polish 1st Army, formed in the USSR and subordinate to the communist Polish Committee of National Liberation, took up position opposite left-bank Warsaw. On 15–16 September its divisions relieved the Soviet units on the river: the 2nd Infantry Division faced Żoliborz, the 1st Cavalry Brigade faced Śródmieście (the city centre), and the 3rd Infantry Division (PL) faced Czerniaków. Berling received the order to prepare a crossing on 15 September from the chief of staff of the 1st Belorussian Front, General Mikhail Malinin. On the left bank the insurgents still held Żoliborz, Mokotów, Śródmieście and a narrow strip along the Vistula at Czerniaków, which since 11 September had been defended by, among others, the Radosław Group. On the morning of 15 September, as the first scouts from Praga made it across to the bank, Andrzej Romocki “Morro”, commander of the “Rudy” company of the “Zośka” battalion, was killed there.

On the night of 15/16 September a reconnaissance company and the 1st Battalion of the 9th Infantry Regiment – some 420 men – crossed from Saska Kępa to Czerniaków, followed the next night by the 3rd Battalion with a few guns. The crossings were organised in haste, after cursory reconnaissance, in boats and on pontoons under fire from German positions on the bank; there was a shortage of crossing equipment, communications and staff officers capable of commanding on the bridgehead. Berling’s men, fighting alongside the soldiers of “Radosław”, enlarged the bridgehead but were unable to link up with Śródmieście. According to tallies for the 3rd Division, 1,254 of its soldiers were ferried across to Czerniaków between 16 and 23 September, of whom 961 were killed, drowned or taken prisoner; 293 returned to the right bank, 52 of them wounded.

On the night of 17/18 September sub-units of the 6th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Division crossed to Żoliborz in the Potok area. Despite several attempts they failed to link up with the insurgents of Lieutenant Colonel Mieczysław Niedzielski (PL) “Żywiciel” and suffered heavy losses from German tanks. On 19 September two battalions of the 8th Infantry Regiment, under a smokescreen and with artillery support, seized a bridgehead between the Poniatowski and Kierbedź bridges in Powiśle. They could not hold it: of more than 800 soldiers who had crossed, only 164 were evacuated the following night. By 20 September the Germans had wiped out the bridgeheads in Żoliborz and Powiśle.

The fall of Czerniaków and the withdrawal

From 21 September the Germans – the Reinefarth and Rohr battle groups of von dem Bach’s corps, reinforced by units of the Hermann Göring Parachute Panzer Division – attacked the Czerniaków bridgehead from several directions. As early as the evening of 19 September some 260 soldiers of “Radosław” had gone through the sewers to Mokotów. The rest – the remnants of the “Zośka” battalion, the “Kryska” group and some 200 of Major Stanisław Łatyszonek’s men from Berling’s army – were pushed back into a few houses on the Vistula, and by 22 September they were defending only the buildings at 1 Wilanowska Street and 53 Solec Street. On the orders of the commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, Berling began evacuating his soldiers from the left bank; only a small proportion of the defenders made it across the river under fire, and a few broke through to Śródmieście. On the morning of 23 September the Germans took the last positions in Czerniaków and murdered most of the Home Army soldiers they captured.

Losses were heavy. According to Polish figures, the Polish 1st Army lost 2,297 killed and 1,467 wounded in the fighting for the Warsaw bridgeheads; other tallies give slightly different numbers. Several hundred insurgents died alongside Berling’s soldiers. Assessments of the landing still divide historians. Some, among them Alexandra Richie and Mikołaj Iwanow, consider it to have been mainly a propaganda exercise, carried out with forces too modest to change the uprising’s situation. Others stress the limited capabilities of a poorly trained, newly formed army that fought without adequate support from Soviet artillery, engineers and crossing equipment, as well as Berling’s own mistakes in allocating his forces. After the war Berling presented the landing as his own decision, for which he paid with his post; Marshal Rokossovsky, by contrast, wrote in his memoirs that he had personally approved the plan for the crossing to Czerniaków.

The Soviet position

The assessment of the Soviet Union’s attitude to the uprising is one of the main controversies in the historiography. Soviet historiography and some Western historians, among them David Glantz, point to the exhaustion of the troops after Bagration, overstretched supply lines and the strength of the German defence outside Warsaw. Others, including Mikołaj Iwanow, draw attention to political decisions: the withdrawal of part of the forces from the city in August, the ban on combat flights over Warsaw until 10 September, the long refusal to let Allied aircraft land, and Stalin’s hostile statements about the leaders of the uprising, whose defeat eliminated forces loyal to the government in London. The September attack on Praga, the supply drops and the landing came in the final phase of the fighting, when the insurgents had already lost most of the districts along the Vistula. After the soldiers had been withdrawn from the left bank, the 1st Belorussian Front made no further attempt at a crossing, and the front outside Warsaw froze.

Place in the war

September 1944 fixed the front line in Poland for the months to come. Soviet troops remained on the Vistula and the Narew, with bridgeheads at Magnuszew, Sandomierz, Serock and Różan, until January 1945, while the Red Army shifted its main autumn effort to the Baltic states, Hungary and the Balkans. The uprising, with no hope left of linking up with the troops beyond the Vistula, lasted another week: Mokotów fell on 27 September and Żoliborz on 30 September, and on 2 October at Ożarów the envoys of General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski signed the agreement on the cessation of hostilities in Warsaw. On 30 September Stalin removed Berling from command of the Polish 1st Army and sent him to study in Moscow; the reasons for this decision have never been fully explained.

Left-bank Warsaw, emptied of its inhabitants and demolished by the Germans, was taken by soldiers of the Polish 1st Army and the Red Army only on 17 January 1945, during the January offensive, which within a few weeks moved the front from the Vistula to the Oder. For years the memory of the landing divided Poles just as the memory of the uprising itself did: in the Polish People’s Republic the sacrifice of Berling’s soldiers was emphasised while Stalin’s conduct was passed over or played down; in the emigration, the passivity of the Red Army was stressed. Today the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw bears a plaque inscribed “Czerniaków – Żoliborz – Jabłonna 23 IX 1944”, and on the bank of the Vistula stands the Monument to the Insurgents of Czerniaków and the Soldiers of the Polish 1st Army.