The 1944 Warsaw Uprising
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| Polish cross for Warsaw insurgents (obverse) |
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| Polish cross for Warsaw insurgents (reverse) |
On 22nd June 1944, two weeks after the D-Day landings, the Red Army launched Operation 'Bagration' (named after a Tsarist general who fought Napoleon), the offensive which destroyed the German Army Group Centre. This was arguably Hitler's greatest defeat of the war. As 'Bagration' encircled and destroyed the German forces in its path, Soviet radio began calling on the people of Warsaw to rise up against the Nazis, although Warsaw was not one of 'Bagration's' strategic objectives. Some see this as part of an organised plan to destroy the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa or AK, loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in London), but it was probably the result of thoughtless overconfidence, similar to the US's calling on Iraqi minorities to rebel after the 1991 Gulf War.
The AK planned a rising against the Germans, so that Warsaw could be seen to have been liberated in the name of the London Polish government, rather than the new Soviet puppet government proclaimed at Lublin. This was essentially a continuation of an operation in eastern Poland called Burza (Tempest), where AK formations had risen up against the Germans as the Red Army entered their sectors. Burza had been a failure, however, because the Soviets simply arrested (or murdered) the higher-ranking AK officers and then absorbed the troops into Zygmunt Berling's Polish forces, fighting alongside the Red Army.
The AK rose on 1st August 1944, basing themselves on intelligence that the Red Army was nearly on the River Vistula. Soviet motives during the Uprising are still a matter of debate, but it seems likely that the AK's intelligence was wrong. The Red Army was still some distance away, and temporarily recoiling before a counterattack.
The failure of the Poles to capture any of the Vistula bridges, or the airport, meant that the Uprising was probably doomed to failure from the start. The Soviets, whose armies were by then in need of a rest and resupply, did not reach the Vistula until September, and even then Marshal Zhukov concluded that the river could not be crossed in force.
Stalin described the AK's leaders as "war criminals" and refused to allow western Allied aircraft to land in Soviet-held territory after supply drops over Warsaw, arguing, with some justification, that the supplies would be inadequate and were as likely to fall in German-held areas as in AK-held ones. This decision cost a number of Allied aircrew their lives. Red Air Force aircraft, involved in large-scale air battles over bridgeheads to the south, were utterly absent from the skies over Warsaw. Even when the Red Army had reached the east bank of the Vistula in September Soviet efforts to help the Uprising were limited to artillery support, a doomed crossing by Berling's Polish forces (Berling's army, incidentally, included a number of Jewish soldiers) and eventually (Stalin having relented) some air drops of arms and ammunition, most of which fell on German positions.
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Scouts Polish Boy Scouts played a distinct part in the Uprising, with young boys often acting as couriers between units. A captured German Panzer Mk. V tank bore Boy Scout insignia on its turret. A plaque commemorating the rôle of Boy Scouts can be seen on the Old Town wall, near the Statue of the Little Insurgent, which has quickly become one of the symbols of Warsaw. Interestingly, there were considerable links between the largely conservative and religious Catholic scouts and the largely Zionist, left-leaning and secular Jewish scouts of Hashomer Hatzaír. A number of Catholic scouts remained loyal to their Jewish colleagues, including Alexander Kaminski, editor of the AK's main publication. |
The Poles (some 20,000 AK soldiers, as well as small numbers of Communist fighters who rose up alongside the AK) fought bravely for two months. The German troops (some of them freed criminals and turncoat Soviet POWs, under the overall command of a former commander of Einsatzgruppen murder squads) committed barbaric crimes, especially in the first weeks of the Uprising. 225,000 civilians died, and after the failure of the Uprising the Germans blew up large portions of the city, though they were eventually forced to treat surviving Polish troops as combatant POWs. The Poles were (and remain) convinced that the Soviets had cynically left them to their fate, and in some ways the split between the major powers over the Uprising marks the start of the Cold War.
Some 500 Jews died fighting in the Uprising, including veterans of the Ghetto Uprising. Few fought in the AK. Some found elements of it anti-Semitic, but the main reason was that groups in the ghetto had had more contact with the Leftist formations because the AK, saving its strength for the liberation of Poland and well aware that it would have to pre-empt the Soviets, had no intention of fighting in 1942 or 1943, while the Communists, modelling themselves on partisans further east, were in favour of fighting as soon as they had the strength to do so.