The Warsaw Uprising

“The city [Warsaw] must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation”

Heinrich Himmler, October 17, 1944

Warsaw, Poland. October 2. On September 17 1944, Stanley Nosecki, of the Polish Independent Parachute Brigade, was preparing to jump into the Netherlands under the command of the redoubtable Major-General Stanislaw Sosabowski. He was to take part in the disastrous Operation Market Garden and Field Marshal Montgomery’s attempt to seize the bridge over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem. However, Nosecki’s mind was elsewhere, in Warsaw. Before Nosecki jumped he closed his eyes and dreamt of the Poniatowski Bridge, the King’s Castle, the Zygmunt Column and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier”. “Are they still fighting on those famous streets of Nowy Swiat and Tamka? Is the Holy Cross Church still there, where I used to serve as an altar boy every other Sunday?” ‘They’ were his fellow patriots in the Polish Resistance, led by the Polish Home Army and the Polish First Army, who were fighting a desperate battle against battle-hardened Nazi troops. On October 2, 1944, seventy-five years ago today, these brave men and women were finally forced to lay down their arms.

Being here today at the excellent Warsaw Security Forum is an act of pilgrimage to those Warsaw fighters who stood up for Poland. It was not just the Nazis they had to face, but also the brute cynicism of Stalin. The aim of the uprising was to install a free Polish government that would affirm Polish sovereignty before the Red Army, which had pushed the retreating Nazis back to the shores of the River Vistula, installed a puppet regime loyal to Moscow. The Home Army had hoped for support from the Americans and British, but as so often their hopes were all but dashed.

Operation Tempest had begun on August 1 and was planned as a nationwide campaign. For sixty-three days the Poles fought in what was the largest resistance operation of World War Two.  There were possibly up to 49,000 Polish combatants, but only some 5000 at most had any guns. They faced up to 50,000 well-trained and well-armed German troops. By the end of the struggle over 15,000 Poles were either dead or missing.     

In the initial phase of the Uprising, the Poles seized much of central Warsaw and the surrounding forest. They tried to make contact by radio with Soviet forces, but the Red Army did not respond. Worse, they just waited on the edge of the city for the Germans to exact their bloody revenge. Over time, the Nazis divided Polish forces into six pockets, which they then systematically destroyed. Neither the Red Army, nor the Soviet Air Force, made any meaningful attempt to support the Poles.

Churchill argued at length with both President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin, but to no avail. Frustrated, Churchill ordered the Royal Air Force, with Bomber Command’s Polish squadrons to the fore, to support the Uprising. Between August 4 and September 28 the RAF dropped some 300 tons of supplies at low level, albeit some 50% fell into Nazi hands. Roosevelt eventually relented and permitted the US Army Air Force to conduct one high-level mission, which missed the target. The Soviets? They refused the RAF use of their airfields, forcing the RAF to fly long missions, and even fired on RAF aircraft. Forty-one aircraft were lost and three hundred and sixty RAF aircrew died. The Soviets did, in the end, drop some 13 tons of supplies, but much of it was dropped from high altitude with no parachutes and destroyed. In any case, it was all too little too late. On this fateful day, seventy-five years ago, some 15,000 Polish fighters were taken prisoner, and faced a grisly fate. By then, between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish citizens had been killed, with a further 700,000 expelled from the city. Himmler kept his criminal word, and razed Warsaw to the ground.       

Fifty metres from my house there is a cemetery. Within its gates some twenty young Poles lay interred in Dutch clay. They had died, like so many Poles before and since, fighting for the liberty of others so they too might one day be free. They had died free men. The men and women of the Warsaw Uprising who laid down their arms that dark October day all those years ago were not defeated. No force, however haughty in its hubris can ever defeat the Poles, for the flame of freedom burns too brightly in them.

This blog is in honour of the brave Polish fighters who died defying two tyrants, and who laid the foundation for the free Poland of today. Poland, like Warsaw, emerged from the ashes, and should remind all Europeans that to defend freedom one must be vigilant...and strong.  

Julian Lindley-French