The Warsaw Uprising: 1 August - 2 October 1944 (Major Battles of World War Two) by George Bruce

Author:George Bruce [Bruce, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2021-02-13T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten: First Days

From the outset the Polish Home Army was faced with the problem of street fighting between units without radio links cut off from each other by intervening buildings. Each battalion, company or platoon fought independently, Polish and German positions formed a chessboard of hundreds of separate battle actions. These actions the Home Army launched with all the fervour of a revolutionary uprising in the fifteen kilometres of the city and its suburbs stretching from Bielany in the north to Mokotow in the south, and the ten kilometres from Praga in the east to Wola in the west.

Never before in history had insurgents tried to take over so big a town or city; nor had the difference in military power between the two sides ever been so marked.

Weapons apart, success in these conditions depended greatly on the capabilities, courage and leadership of junior commanders. On these levels the Poles proved themselves superior. In the first days of the Uprising, before the arrival of German reinforcements, their aggression, resilience and speedy action enabled them to outweigh the heavy armament as well as the rigidity of the German military hierarchy. Unfortunately, Polish junior commanders too often lost their lives owing to courage or impetuosity amounting to foolhardiness; but when one fell another spontaneously replaced him.

The Germans managed to maintain constant radio links between their commanders and units out in the city, whereas at some time or other during their assignments the Polish messenger women — the sole means of communication — were pinned down by heavy fire from enemy tanks or machine-gun posts, or killed.

But a way was at once improvised to allow freedom of movement from one district to another. Aided by the citizens, Home Army sappers blasted entrances in the cellar walls from house to house and created sign-posted subterranean routes. Through them voluntary traffic wardens directed the flow of wounded, arms, ammunition and messenger women. This underground system lasted until heavy bombing blasted the houses into rubble down to the very cellars.

Late in the afternoon of 2 August reports of the ebb and flow of the fighting began to reach Komorowski in his GHQ in Wola, the north-western bastion of the insurrection, where he was to spend the first six days. Wola, a working-class district, was captured early on 2 August, thus closing one of the east-west routes to the Germans for the time being. The important main Post Office building had been captured and later the water filter station and the gas works.

The fight for the vital electric power station, facing Good Street on the Vistula embankment, which guaranteed the electric power needed among other things for manufacturing weapons in the underground workshops went on for nineteen hours. Some weeks before the Uprising the Germans had strengthened the defences of this extensive plant along the river with barbed-wire, trenches and pillboxes and brought up to 150 the strength of the troops holding it inside and outside.

Just before 5 o’clock its telephone links with Stahel’s and Geibel’s

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