The Warsaw Uprising begins

At 5 p.m. on Tuesday 1 August 1944 – “W-hour” – units of the Home Army (AK) attacked German posts, barracks, offices and transport hubs in every district of Warsaw. The order had been issued the previous evening by the AK commander, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, who entrusted its execution to the commander of the AK’s Warsaw District, Colonel Antoni Chruściel (“Monter”). Beyond the Vistula, a dozen or so kilometres from Praga, the Red Army’s leading units were fighting German panzer divisions. The uprising, planned to last a few days, went on for 63 days and ended in capitulation on 2 October 1944.

The popular account of that day – that the Poles rose up expecting help from the approaching Soviet forces, help that never came – needs two qualifications. First, the aim of the uprising was not only to defeat the Germans but also political: to liberate the capital by Polish efforts before the Red Army took it, and to receive the Soviets in Warsaw as its hosts, on behalf of the lawful Polish government in London. Second, help was not entirely absent, but for several weeks the USSR refused or restricted it; Soviet supply drops began only on the night of 13–14 September, and attempts by soldiers of the Polish 1st Army to cross the Vistula to Czerniaków and Żoliborz were made on 16–23 September, when the uprising was already close to collapse. Drops by the Western Allies, mostly from Italy, could not change the city’s situation.

The political aim: hosts to the Red Army

From the autumn of 1939 the plans of the Polish underground had envisaged a general uprising at the moment of Germany’s collapse. When it became clear in 1943 that Poland would be liberated not by the West but by the Red Army, the plan was changed. Bór-Komorowski’s order of 20 November 1943 introduced Operation Tempest (Burza): AK units were to strike at the retreating Germans just before the front arrived and, together with representatives of the civil authorities of the Polish Underground State coming out into the open, to face the Soviet forces as the hosts of the territory.

The political background was growing steadily worse for the Poles. In April 1943, after the Germans revealed the Katyn massacre, Joseph Stalin broke off relations with the Polish government-in-exile; in July 1943 General Władysław Sikorski was killed. At the Tehran Conference the “Big Three” provisionally agreed to base Poland’s eastern border on the Curzon Line, something the Polish government was not told. On the night of 3–4 January 1944 the Red Army crossed Poland’s pre-war border.

The experience of Tempest in the summer of 1944 was painful. In Wilno (Vilnius), AK units fought side by side with Soviet troops in Operation Ostra Brama, and after the city was taken the NKVD arrested their commanders and disarmed the soldiers. The Lwów uprising ended in the same way. On 22 July the manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) was proclaimed – a body created in Moscow and subordinate to Stalin, which claimed the right to govern the lands occupied by the Red Army. Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk set out for Moscow on 26 July for talks with Stalin and arrived there on 30 July.

In this situation a group of officers at AK headquarters – above all General Leopold Okulicki (“Kobra”) and General Tadeusz Pełczyński (“Grzegorz”) – argued that the capital, which had been excluded from Tempest in the spring, could not be surrendered without a fight. In their view, the liberation of Warsaw by the AK would give the lie to Soviet propaganda about the AK “standing with its rifles at ease”, strengthen Mikołajczyk’s position in Moscow and confront Stalin with a choice: recognise the Polish authorities or crush them by force in full view of the world – this was how Bór-Komorowski himself explained the reasoning years later.

Not everyone shared this view. The Commander-in-Chief, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, warned that the AK could not hold a large city for long and that the attempt might end in a massacre of the civilian population, and he considered a general uprising without an agreement with the USSR a mistake. His instructions of July 1944 were, however, not unequivocal and allowed for a brief seizure of a “larger centre” before the Soviet forces arrived. In a telegram of 26 July the government in London authorised the Government Delegate for Poland to proclaim an uprising at a moment of his choosing.

The decision of 31 July

The last days of July brought signs of German collapse in Warsaw. On 23–27 July the remnants of units shattered in Belarus retreated westwards through the city, German civilians fled, offices were evacuated, and the district governor, Ludwig Fischer, left the capital for a few days. On 27 July Hitler declared Warsaw a fortress and gave command of the garrison to General Rainer Stahel; the same day Fischer called on 100,000 inhabitants to dig fortifications. The population boycotted the call.

On the evening of 29 July Radio Moscow broadcast an appeal in Polish to the people of Warsaw declaring that “the hour of action has struck”, and on 30 July the communist Tadeusz Kościuszko Radio Station (PL) called out: “People of Warsaw! To arms!” The AK command feared that if it did not take up the fight itself, the communists and part of the population would do so, and the Polish underground authorities would lose their last trump card. On the same day, 29 July, the emissary Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, who had arrived from London, warned that an uprising could count neither on the Polish Parachute Brigade nor on large supply drops, and that in the West it would cause at most “a storm in a teacup”.

On the morning of 31 July a briefing at AK headquarters ended without a decision; Bór-Komorowski merely ordered that readiness be maintained. At about 5.30 p.m. Colonel Chruściel brought a report that the Red Army had taken Radość, Miłosna, Okuniew, Wołomin and Radzymin and that Soviet tanks had been seen in Praga. Bór-Komorowski summoned the Government Delegate for Poland and Deputy Prime Minister, Jan Stanisław Jankowski, who, having heard those present, gave his consent. At about 6 p.m. the commander ordered the fighting to begin at 5 p.m. the following day.

Soon after the participants had dispersed, the head of AK intelligence, Colonel Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki (“Heller”), arrived together with Colonel Józef Szostak (“Filip”) (PL) and Colonel Kazimierz Pluta-Czachowski. They reported that the news of tanks in Praga was exaggerated and that the Germans had launched a counter-attack in the Warsaw bridgehead. Bór-Komorowski nevertheless judged – as he later wrote – that cancelling the order would risk chaos and exposure. At 7 p.m. Chruściel issued the order to the district commanders: “I order ‘W’ on 1.08 at 17.00.” Because of the curfew, many recipients received the order only on the morning of 1 August.

Forces and weapons

According to General Jerzy Kirchmayer, there were about 50,000 sworn AK soldiers – men and women – in Warsaw, most of them in the seven districts and the separate Okęcie sector of the Warsaw District, plus the units held at the disposal of headquarters: Lieutenant Colonel Jan Mazurkiewicz’s (“Radosław”) Kedyw and the Baszta Regiment. Other estimates give figures of about 40,000 to 50,000. Smaller organisations also joined the fighting, among them the National Armed Forces (NSZ) and the communist People’s Army (AL).

Only some of them could be mobilised. According to the team of authors of Polskie Siły Zbrojne w drugiej wojnie światowej (The Polish Armed Forces in the Second World War), about 36,500 soldiers reported on 1 August (about 32,500 in the city and 4,000 in the suburbs); according to Kirchmayer, about 23,000 went into action. Weapons were the weakest point. The district’s stocks included some 3,800 pistols, 2,600 rifles, 657 submachine guns and fewer than 200 machine guns, with ammunition for two or three days of fighting; part of the stocks had been lost earlier through German raids on arms caches. Because of the hurried mobilisation, only about 40 per cent of the stored weapons reached the assembly points. According to estimates cited by Polish historians, between 1,500 and 3,500 soldiers were armed when the uprising broke out; the rest went into battle with blades or tools, or served as reserves.

On the German side, according to Tadeusz Sawicki, who drew on German documents, the Warsaw garrison numbered about 13,000 soldiers of the Wehrmacht, SS, police and airfield staff, and about 16,000 including the anti-aircraft units. The city also lay in the operational zone of General Nikolaus von Vormann’s German Ninth Army, whose front-line units – among them elements of the Hermann Göring Parachute Panzer Division in Wola and tanks of the SS Wiking Division in Mokotów – were passing through Warsaw or stationed near it.

W-hour

Last-minute changes – setting the start of the fighting for 5 p.m. in the afternoon and cutting the time for mobilisation from 48 to 24 hours, in practice to just a few because of the curfew – meant that the assembly was hurried and chaotic. In Śródmieście (the city centre) just over 60 per cent of the soldiers reached their units; in outlying districts such as Wola and Praga, about 40 per cent. In Żoliborz the first exchange of fire took place as early as about 2 p.m., and elsewhere clashes broke out before the appointed hour. The Germans, warned by informers, declared an alert for the garrison and all Germans in the city at 4.30 p.m. The element of surprise was largely lost.

At 5 p.m. the insurgents struck almost simultaneously at several hundred targets. The dispersal of forces over too many objectives, the decision to move AK headquarters to Wola (the Kedyw went with it, while the Baszta Regiment remained in Mokotów) and the shortage of weapons meant that many attacks broke down within the first few hours.

The balance of the first day

According to Polish historiography, the attack of 1 August ended in clear failure. The insurgents did take, among other places, the Prudential building on Napoleon Square – the tallest building in Warsaw, on which the white-and-red flag was raised – the power station in Powiśle (PL), the food and uniform depots at Stawki, the law courts in Leszno, the town hall on Theatre Square, the Military Geographical Institute in Aleje Jerozolimskie and the Railway Directorate building in Praga. The list of failures was much longer. They did not capture Okęcie airfield, where the attackers, including sub-units of the separate Okęcie sector, suffered heavy losses in open ground, nor the airfield at Bielany. None of the bridges was taken – neither the Kierbedź Bridge nor the Poniatowski Bridge nor the railway bridges – and not a single railway station. Attacks were repulsed on the Gestapo headquarters in Aleja Szucha (PL), the Brühl Palace housing the governor’s office, the Saxon Palace with Stahel’s headquarters, the Citadel, the University and the SS barracks on Rakowiecka Street.

This meant that the insurgents had not gained access to the line of the Vistula, while the German units retained the crossings linking Praga with the left bank and the main thoroughfares cutting across the areas held by the Poles. The largest territorial gains came from the fighting in Śródmieście, the Old Town and the eastern part of Wola, but these were islands separated from one another by German strongpoints.

Polish historians estimate the losses of the first day at nearly 2,000 AK soldiers killed and wounded, and German losses at about 500 killed, wounded and captured. Some units were shattered, among them those in the separate Okęcie sector and in the Wola and Praga districts. After the attack collapsed, the main forces of the Żoliborz district withdrew to the Kampinos Forest, those of the Ochota district to the Chojnów Forests, and some of the units from Mokotów to the Kabaty Forest; in all, nearly 5,000 soldiers left the city during the night. In Praga, where the Germans had superiority as well as front-line units passing through, the uprising had virtually died out by 3 August.

Even so, on the night of 1–2 August barricades sprang up in the districts held by the insurgents, and the population greeted the outbreak of fighting with an enthusiasm which, historians stress, helped overcome the crisis of the first hours. On 2–4 August the insurgents captured, among other places, the Main Post Office and the Polytechnic, and on 4 August, faced with a shortage of ammunition, Chruściel ordered offensive operations to be scaled back.

The front beyond the Vistula

When the uprising broke out, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 1st Belorussian Front had behind it an advance of several hundred kilometres from Belarus and Volhynia. Its 2nd Tank Army (PL) reached the approaches to Praga at the end of July, but from 30 July it ran into a German counter-attack by XXXIX Panzer Corps – the Hermann Göring Division, the 19th and 4th Panzer Divisions and the SS Wiking and Totenkopf Divisions – directed by Field Marshal Walter Model. In the battle of Wołomin and Radzymin the 3rd Tank Corps was encircled and destroyed; on 1 August the commander of the 2nd Tank Army ordered a switch to the defensive. That same day, south of Warsaw, the 8th Guards Army crossed the Vistula at Magnuszew.

The assessment of this halt is the subject of one of the main controversies. Soviet and communist Polish historiography, as well as some Western historians, among them David Glantz, stress that the Soviet forces, exhausted by a long offensive, really were stopped by the German counter-attack in the first days of August. Many Polish historians, among them Mikołaj Iwanow and Piotr C. Śliwowski, point to Soviet documents showing that the pause was meant to be short, and that the prolonged suspension of the advance on Warsaw over the following weeks was decided by political considerations – the withdrawal of the 2nd Tank Army from the city (from 6–8 August), the ban on flights over Warsaw and the refusal to allow Allied aircraft to land at Soviet airfields. The dispute therefore concerns not so much 1 August as what Stalin decided in the weeks that followed.

The German response

For the first few days the Germans confined themselves to defending their strongpoints. News of the uprising, however, quickly reached Hitler’s headquarters. According to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was appointed to crush the uprising, Adolf Hitler gave Heinrich Himmler a verbal order to raze Warsaw to the ground and kill its inhabitants, taking no prisoners. The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Heinz Guderian, according to his own memoirs, demanded that the city be included in the Wehrmacht’s zone of operations, but the fight against the uprising was handed to the SS and the police.

Sent to Warsaw were SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth’s composite police group from the Warthegau, Oskar Dirlewanger’s SS special regiment, made up largely of criminals, the assault regiment of Bronislav Kaminski’s collaborationist RONA brigade, and Azerbaijani battalions. From 5 August these units carried out mass murders of the population of Wola and Ochota; their scale has led historians to speak of a massacre. In all, according to the most commonly accepted estimates, between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians died during the uprising.

The help they waited for

As early as 2 August Bór-Komorowski demanded supply drops from London over Napoleon Square and the Jewish cemetery in Wola, and on 3 August President Władysław Raczkiewicz appealed to Winston Churchill for help. The British air command in the Mediterranean, with bases around Brindisi, regarded flights to Warsaw – some 1,500 kilometres each way – as extremely risky. Nevertheless the first aircraft, including crews of the Polish No. 1586 Special Duties Flight, reached the city in the first days of August, and the flights from Italy – at a high cost in losses – continued intermittently until the end of September. The only large operation from Britain, by more than a hundred American B-17 bombers, was flown on 18 September, when Stalin at last agreed to let Allied aircraft land behind Soviet lines, as they had earlier done under Operation Frantic.

Mikołajczyk spoke with Stalin in Moscow in the first days of August. Stalin doubted whether the AK could liberate the capital and accused it of not fighting the Germans but “hiding in the woods”, yet he promised help. In the following weeks Moscow’s stance became openly hostile: in mid-August Stalin replied to Mikołajczyk with a refusal, the Soviet authorities called the uprising a “reckless adventure” for which they did not wish to bear responsibility, and they refused to allow Allied aircraft to land. Stalin softened his position only in September, when Soviet and Polish troops took Praga (10–14 September). From the night of 13–14 September Soviet and Polish aircraft began to drop supplies, often without parachutes, and on 16–23 September units of General Zygmunt Berling’s Polish 1st Army crossed the Vistula to Czerniaków and Żoliborz, suffering heavy losses and failing to hold the bridgeheads. Historians differ on whether this was a genuine attempt to help or a gesture with no chance of success.

Place in the war

The outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising was the largest armed action by a resistance movement in occupied Europe, and the only one in which an underground army fought regular battles for two months for a capital that then had nearly a million inhabitants. In April 1943, in the same city, the insurgents of the Warsaw Ghetto had fought without hope of outside help. Now Warsaw, which in September 1939 had endured German bombing and capitulation, once again became a battlefield, this time at the meeting point of two great fronts and two visions of post-war Poland.

After 63 days of fighting the uprising collapsed. On 2 October 1944 at Ożarów General Bór-Komorowski signed an agreement on the cessation of hostilities which granted the insurgents combatant rights. According to Polish estimates, about 16,000 insurgents were killed (including the missing) and about 15,000 were taken prisoner, among them the AK commander himself. The civilian population was driven out of the city through the transit camp at Pruszków, from where many were sent to concentration camps and forced labour. The Germans systematically burned and blew up the deserted left-bank Warsaw until January 1945.

Politically, the uprising failed to achieve its aim. The Home Army emerged from it bled white, and its command was in captivity. When the Red Army occupied the ruins of the city in January 1945, power was taken over by the people of the PKWN, which had turned itself into the Provisional Government. The disputes over help for Warsaw caused the first serious crisis in relations between Moscow on the one hand and London and Washington on the other; some historians regard them as one of the first harbingers of the Cold War.

The assessment of the decision of 31 July itself remains a matter of debate. Its defenders stress that the AK command had no good choice and that the uprising became proof of the will to be independent; its critics – from Sosnkowski to many post-war historians – point to the gap between aims and resources and to the enormous losses among the population. In communist Poland the memory of the uprising was long subject to censorship; after 1989 it became one of the central places in Polish memory of the Second World War.