Apocalypse On The Vistula

August 1944, 81 years ago, saw a terrible tragedy played out on the banks of the Vistula during what we know today as the Warsaw Uprising. In all, the attempt by some 40,000 underground resistance fighters - members of the Polish Home Army or AK - to seize the city from the occupying Germans lasted 63 days, ending in a bitter and brutal failure that led to death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Upwards of 200,000 civilians were killed or injured (many of them mutilated in systematic German atrocities), while another 700,000 or so became slave labour, ended up in concentration camps, or were left to fend for themselves as refugees: on Hitler's orders, the city was literally razed to the ground, street by street, building by building. At the time, and for many years afterwards (indeed, it still pops up today), the story was that the Soviets could have saved the uprising but Stalin chose not to, halting his divisions on the Vistula to allow time for the AK to be destroyed before the Red Army moved in to take the Polish capital for itself. The story is a plausible one on several levels. Firstly, Stalin had no wish to see the insurgents triumph. Soviet plans for post-war Poland, already well-advanced, envisaged a puppet government subservient to Moscow at the expense of the Polish government-in-exile in London, which commanded the loyalty of the AK. The Soviet leader even refused to help with an Allied airlift of food and weapons to AK-held areas of Warsaw, much to Churchill's disgust - only doing so belatedly when all was lost. It's also clear that the AK fighters themselves expected the Red Army to help them, timing the insurrection to coincide with the arrival at the Vistula of Marshal Rokossovsky's 1st Belorussian Front (the Marshall was himself a Pole whose sister was then still living in Warsaw). When no Soviet support came, the sense of betrayal among the Poles was understandably acute. But this is where the received narrative starts to unravel. For the AK had not told the Soviets when the uprising would start (Rokossovsky only learned about it the day after it began - and was horrified) and there were no plans to co-ordinate with the Red Army, no doubt because the Poles wanted an exclusively Polish takeover of their capital before the Soviet communists arrived (Poles had already experienced Stalinist repression, after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939). Angry at this independent action by the Poles, Stalin condemned the uprising as 'adventurism' and would have nothing to do with it. But there were overriding military reasons why the Red Army halted at the Vistula. The fact was that, by August 1944, Rokossovsky's armies had been on the move without a pause for at least six weeks: his men were exhausted and their supply lines now lagged hundreds of kilometres behind them. The mighty Vistula in itself posed a huge logistical challenge, with the Germans in well-prepared defensive positions on the opposite bank. Indeed, strong panzer counter-attacks had soon inflicted severe damage on two major Soviet tank corps. Under these circumstances, and facing other pressures elsewhere along a very extended front, Rokossovsky had little option but to pause his advance so as not to jeopardise the greater goal of pushing Hitler's forces back into the Reich itself. The Polish uprising presented an added challenge in this already difficult situation, but it played no part in Rokossovky's decision-making. In the event, soon after the AK's surrender on 2 October, German defensive fire was still so fierce that the Soviet commander cancelled the offensive on Warsaw altogether and pulled back his armies. It wasn't until well into January 1945 that Red Army troops finally captured the Polish capital. By then a pre-war city population of 1.3 million had fallen to a mere 153,000. And in a grotesque twist worthy of Kafka (but quite logical in Stalin's mind), in the aftermath many surviving AK fighters, heroes of the anti-Nazi struggle, found themselves arrested by the NKVD as 'enemies of the people' and imprisoned (some were even executed) alongside their former German occupiers.

AK fighters man a barricade during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (rarehistoricalphotos.com)

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk

An Understandimg History Podcast