Uprising Summary:
(German Brennkommando troops on Leszno Street in Warsaw, pictured in the act of burning the city, 1944)
The Warsaw Uprising (Polish:
Powstanie Warszawskie; German: Warschauer Aufstand) was a major World War II
operation, in the summer of 1944, by the Polish underground resistance, led by
the Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa), to liberate Warsaw from German Occupation.
The uprising was timed to coincide with the retreat of the German forces from
Poland ahead of the Soviet advance. While approaching the eastern suburbs of
the city, the Red Army temporarily halted combat operations, enabling the
Germans to regroup and defeat the Polish resistance and to raze the city in
reprisal. The Uprising was fought for 63 days with little outside support. It
was the single largest military effort taken by any European resistance
movement during World War II.
The Uprising began on August 1, 1944
as part of a nationwide Operation Tempest, launched at the time of the Soviet
Lublin–Brest Offensive. The main Polish objectives were to drive the Germans
out of Warsaw while helping the Allies defeat Germany. An additional, political
goal of the Polish Underground State was to liberate Poland's capital and
assert Polish sovereignty before the Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National
Liberation could assume control. Other immediate causes included a threat of
mass German round-ups of able-bodied Poles for "evacuation"; calls by
Radio Moscow's Polish Service for uprising; and an emotional Polish desire for
justice and revenge against the enemy after five years of German occupation.
Initially, the Poles established
control over most of central Warsaw, but the Soviets ignored Polish attempts to
make radio contact with them and did not advance beyond the city limits.
Intense street fighting between the Germans and Poles continued. By September
14th, the eastern bank of the
Vistula River opposite the Polish resistance positions was taken over by the
Polish troops fighting under the Soviet command; 1,200 men made it across the
river, but they were not reinforced by the Red Army. This, and the lack of air
support from the Soviet air base five-minutes flying time away, led to
allegations that Joseph Stalin tactically halted his forces to let the
operation fail and allow the Polish resistance to be crushed. Arthur Koestler
called the Soviet attitude "one of the major infamies of this war which will
rank for the future historian on the same ethical level with Lidice."
Winston Churchill pleaded with
Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt to help Britain's Polish allies, to no avail. Then,
without Soviet air clearance, Churchill sent over 200 low-level supply drops by
the Royal Air Force, the South African Air Force, and the Polish Air Force
under British High Command, in an operation known as the Warsaw Airlift. Later,
after gaining Soviet air clearance, the U.S. Army Air Force sent one high-level
mass airdrop as part of Operation Frantic.
Although the exact number of
casualties is unknown, it is estimated that about 16,000 members of the Polish
resistance were killed and about 6,000 badly wounded. In addition, between
150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly from mass executions. Jews
being harbored by Poles were exposed by German house-to-house clearances and
mass evictions of entire neighborhoods. German casualties totaled over 2,000
soldiers killed and missing. During the urban combat, approximately 25% of
Warsaw's buildings were destroyed. Following the surrender of Polish forces,
German troops systematically levelled another 35% of the city block by block.
Together with earlier damage suffered in the 1939 invasion of Poland and the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, over 85% of the city was destroyed by January
1945 when the course of the events in the Eastern Front forced the Germans to
abandon the city.
Wola Massacre:
The Uprising reached its apogee
on August 4th when the Home Army soldiers managed to establish front
lines in the westernmost boroughs of Wola and Ochota. However, it was also the
moment at which the German army stopped its retreat westwards and began
receiving reinforcements. On the same day SS General Erich von dem Bach was
appointed commander of all the forces employed against the Uprising. German
counter-attacks aimed to link up with the remaining German pockets and then cut
off the Uprising from the Vistula river. Among the reinforcing units were
forces under the command of Heinz Reinefarth.
On August 5th Reinefarth's
three attack groups started their advance westward along Wolska and Górczewska
streets toward the main East-West communication line of Jerusalem Avenue. Their
advance was halted, but the regiments began carrying out Heinrich Himmler's
orders: behind the lines, special SS, police and Wehrmacht groups went from
house to house, shooting the inhabitants regardless of age or gender and
burning their bodies. Estimates of civilians killed in Wola and Ochota range
from 20,000 to 50,000, 40,000 by August 8th in Wola alone, or as high as 100,000.The main
perpetrators were Oskar Dirlewanger and Bronislav Kaminski, whose forces
committed the cruelest atrocities.
The policy was designed to crush
the Poles' will to fight and put the uprising to an end without having to
commit to heavy city fighting. With
time, the Germans realized that atrocities only stiffened resistance and that
some political solution should be found, as the thousands of men at the
disposal of the German commander were unable to effectively counter the
resistance in an urban guerrilla setting. They aimed to gain a significant
victory to show the Home Army the futility of further fighting and induce them
to surrender. This did not succeed. Until mid-September, the Germans shot all
captured resistance fighters on the spot, but from the end of September, some
of the captured Polish soldiers were treated as POWs.
Stalemate:
Despite the loss of Wola, the
Polish resistance strengthened. Zośka and Wacek battalions managed to capture
the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and liberate the Gęsiówka concentration camp,
freeing about 350 Jews. The area became one of the main communication links
between the resistance fighting in Wola and those defending the Old Town. On
August 7th German forces were
strengthened by the arrival of tanks using civilians as human shields. After
two days of heavy fighting they managed to bisect Wola and reach Bankowy
Square. However, by then the net of barricades, street fortifications, and tank
obstacles were already well-prepared; both sides reached a stalemate, with
heavy house-to-house fighting. Between August
9-18th pitched battles raged
around the Old Town and nearby Bankowy Square, with successful attacks by the
Germans and counter-attacks from the Poles. German tactics hinged on
bombardment through the use of heavy artillery and tactical bombers, against
which the Poles were unable to effectively defend, as they lacked anti-aircraft
artillery weapons. Even clearly marked hospitals were dive-bombed by Stukas. Although the Battle of Stalingrad
had already shown the danger a city can pose to armies which fight within it
and the importance of local support, the Warsaw Uprising was probably the first
demonstration that in an urban terrain, a vastly under-equipped force supported
by the civilian population can hold its own against better-equipped professional
soldiers—though at the cost of considerable sacrifice on the part of the city's
residents. The Poles held the Old Town until
a decision to withdraw was made at the end of August. On successive nights
until September 2nd , the defenders of the Old Town withdrew through
the sewers, which were a major means of communication between different parts
of the Uprising. Thousands of people were evacuated in this way. Those that
remained were either shot or transported to Concentration Camps like Mauthausen
and Sachsenhausen once the Germans regained control.
Life Behind The Lines:
In 1939 Warsaw had roughly
1,350,000 inhabitants. Over a million were still living in the city at the
start of the Uprising. In Polish-controlled territory, during the first weeks
of the Uprising, people tried to recreate the normal day-to-day life of their
free country. Cultural life was vibrant, both among the soldiers and civilian
population, with theatres, post offices, newspapers and similar activities. Boys and girls of the Polish Scouts acted as
couriers for an underground postal service, risking their lives daily to
transmit any information that might help their people. Near the end of the Uprising, lack of food,
medicine, overcrowding and indiscriminate German air and artillery assault on
the city made the civilian situation more and more desperate.
Food Shortages:
As the Uprising was supposed to
be relieved by the Soviets in a matter of days, the Polish underground did not
predict food shortages would be a problem. However, as the fighting dragged on,
the inhabitants of the city faced hunger and starvation. A major break-through
took place on August 6th, when Polish units recaptured the
Haberbusch i Schiele brewery complex at Ceglana Street. From that time on the
citizens of Warsaw lived mostly on barley from the brewery's warehouses. Every
day up to several thousand people organized into cargo teams reported to the
brewery for bags of barley and then distributed them in the city centre. The
barley was then ground in coffee grinders and boiled with water to form a
so-called spit-soup (Polish: pluj-zupa). The "Sowiński" Battalion
managed to hold the brewery until the end of the fighting. Another serious problem for
civilians and soldiers alike was a shortage of water. By mid-August most of the
water conduits were either out of order or filled with corpses. In addition,
the main water pumping station remained in German hands. To prevent the spread
of epidemics and provide the people with water, the authorities ordered all
janitors to supervise the construction of water wells in the backyards of every
house. On 21 September the Germans blew up the remaining pumping stations at
Koszykowa Street and after that the public wells were the only source of
potable water in the besieged city. By
the end of September, the city centre had more than 90 functioning wells.
Polish Media:
Before the Uprising the Bureau of
Information and Propaganda of the Home Army had set up a group of war
correspondents. Headed by Antoni Bohdziewicz, the group made three newsreels
and over 30,000 meters of film tape documenting the struggles. The first
newsreel was shown to the public on August 13th in the Palladium cinema at Złota Street. In addition to films, dozens of newspapers
appeared from the very first days of the Uprising. Several previously
underground newspapers started to be distributed openly. The two main daily
newspapers were the government-run Rzeczpospolita Polska and military Biuletyn
Informacyjny. There were also several dozen newspapers, magazines, bulletins
and weeklies published routinely by various organizations and military units.The Błyskawica long-range radio
transmitter, assembled on August 7th in the city centre, was run by
the military, but was also used by the recreated Polish Radio from August 9th. It was on the air three or four times a day,
broadcasting news programmes and appeals for help in Polish, English, German
and French, as well as reports from the government, patriotic poems and music.
It was the only such radio station in German-held Europe Among the speakers
appearing on the resistance radio were Jan Nowak-Jeziorański,[98] Zbigniew
Świętochowski, Stefan Sojecki, Jeremi Przybora,[99] and John Ward, a war
correspondent for The Times of London.
Limited Outside Support:
According to many historians, a
major cause of the eventual failure of the uprising was the almost complete
lack of outside support and the late arrival of that which did arrive. The
Polish Government-in-Exile carried out frantic diplomatic efforts to gain support
from the Western Allies prior to the start of battle but the allies would not
act without Soviet approval. The Polish Government in London asked the British
several times to send an allied mission to Poland. However, the British mission did not arrive
until December 1944. Shortly after their arrival, they met up with Soviet
authorities, who arrested and imprisoned them. In the words of the mission's
deputy commander, it was "a complete failure". Nevertheless, from
August 1943 to July 1944, over 200 British Royal Air Force (RAF) flights
dropped an estimated 146 Polish personnel trained in Great Britain, over 4000
containers of supplies, and $16 million in banknotes and gold to the Home Army. The only support operation which
ran continuously for the duration of the Uprising were night supply drops by
long-range planes of the RAF, other British Commonwealth Air Forces, and units
of the Polish Air Force, which had to use distant airfields in Italy, reducing
the amount of supplies they could carry. The RAF made 223 sorties and lost 34
aircraft. The effect of these airdrops was mostly psychological—they delivered
too few supplies for the needs of the resistance, and many airdrops landed
outside Polish-controlled territory.
http://www.worldwar2facts.org/warsaw-uprising.html
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