• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1080 0

They employed flamethrowers, siege mortars, gas, explosive-carrying robots and systematic flooding of the Poles’ underground refuges. Much of Warsaw was reduced to rubble by bombardment. The surviving inhabitants were driven out into the countryside or shipped to concentration camps. The men of the SS, and especially the Dirlewanger Brigade, surpassed even their record in Russia of pillage, rape and mass murder, overlaid with sadism. The wounded were machine-gunned. Prisoners were hurled from the windows of apartment buildings. Polish women and children were used as human shields for the advance of German troops. On 5 August Hans Frank, the Nazi governor, reported to Berlin: “For the most part, Warsaw is in flames. Burning down the houses is the most reliable means of liquidating the insurgents’ hide-outs.” Hitler awarded Knight’s Crosses to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and Oskar Dirlewanger for their roles in recapturing the Polish capital. It is a measure of the savagery of the forces suppressing the Rising that the Nazis themselves shot the commander of the RONA Brigade, a unit of Russians serving in German uniform. Its anarchic brutalities became an embarrassment even to Himmler. The Germans lost 9,000 dead in Warsaw in the first three weeks of the Rising, amid merciless street fighting. “Kamil” Baczynski, one of many Polish poets who flourished in those days, wrote before he was killed on 4 August:

O Lord of the apocalypse! Lord of the World’s End!

Put a voice in our mouths, and punishment in our hand.

The horrors of Warsaw highlighted the futility of any attempt by guerrillas to engage regular troops equipped with heavy weapons, artillery and armour. Though the Polish resisters were plentifully supplied with courage, most lacked essential military training. They were armed only with weapons parachuted from Britain, for many of which they possessed only a few magazines of ammunition apiece, together with such small arms and armoured vehicles as they could capture from the Wehrmacht. Lieutenant-General Wladyslaw Anders, commanding the Polish II Corps in Italy, was among those bitterly critical of the Rising. He was privately convinced that it must end in tragedy. He recognized, as others should have done at the outset, that irregular forces could neither defeat the armies of Hitler nor expect aid to do so from the Russians.

The Germans shrewdly grasped these realities. Ninth Army observed that “Army Krajowa considers ourselves and the Russians equally its enemies.” As early as 5 August, Ninth Army’s intelligence department suggested that “many civilians who were enthusiastic about the uprising are now having second thoughts . . . They fear that the city of Warsaw will suffer the same fate as the former Warsaw ghetto . . . They fear German revenge.” The insurgents’ leaders sought to inspire their own people and dispirit the enemy by feeding them upon fantasies: that 300 Soviet tanks were already advancing on Warsaw from the south-east; that Russian aircraft were only awaiting better weather to launch attacks in support of the uprising. Sceptical civilians remarked that the weather was not preventing the Germans from flying.

It has often been suggested that Stalin incited the Rising in order to induce the bitterly anti-communist Army Krajowa to immolate itself. This seems mistaken. The Lublin Poles’ appeals to their countrymen to revolt were of a piece with many other flights of radio propaganda rhetoric. The Soviet high command took them much less seriously than Bor Komorowski. A Western correspondent quizzed the Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, commanding 1st Belorussian Front opposite Warsaw, about the broadcast. Rokossovsky shrugged: “That was routine stuff.” The Red Army’s logistics were drastically stretched after its summer leap westwards. For the first ten days of August, Rokossovsky’s armies were committed to stemming an energetic German counter-attack east of the Vistula. In the beginning, therefore, Moscow had good military reasons for refusing to make a dash upon the Polish capital. The Russians