by George Bruce
Komorowski added that the military situation strongly indicated a Soviet victory, though a slow one, and that the occupation of all Poland was likely. As a result, he said, ‘We must be prepared for an open collision between Poland and the Soviets, and on our part we should have to demonstrate to the full, in this collision, the independent position of Poland.’
Komorowski was reviving the plans outlined by General Rowecki in 1942-3 for resisting the Soviets should they enter Poland without consent, an attitude which General Sikorski had called ‘suicidal’.
On 10 April 1944 the Germans counter-attacked in the Kowel region and after hard fighting temporarily seized the military initiative and drove back the Soviet forces. The Polish 27th Division and the Soviet 56th Cavalry Division were encircled during fighting near the Turia river. Colonel ‘Oliwa’ was killed, Major Zegota, his second-in-command, withdrew to regroup and rest his troops in the forests west of Kowel. He clashed with the Germans once more then radioed Komorowski to ask whether he should try to break out west or east, and was ordered to come west. In the end one column broke out to the east, traversed the Russo-German front and was absorbed into General Berling’s People’s Army; the other went west and crossed the Bug river to link up with Home Army detachments.[70]
Komorowski meantime had not taken up the Soviet terms for military cooperation. For this, the Secret Army men, and in the end Warsaw too, paid dearly. Komorowski’s policy warned the Soviets of his plans, and their policy too hardened. It was another turning-point.
Henceforward, Soviet commanders agreed to Polish-Soviet military collaboration during the fighting, but afterwards demanded the Secret Army’s incorporation into General Berling’s Polish divisions under Red Army command. Officers who refused faced shooting; men, forcible enrolment in Berling’s army or detention in camps in Russia. No Home Army formations were tolerated behind the battle front.
Operation Tempest had thus failed in its brave and hopeful political aims of raising the Polish flag in Volhynia until the emergence of the underground civil authority, acting temporarily on behalf of the London Polish Government.
The failure pushed Komorowski and the Warsaw GHQ into a still more uncompromising stance towards the Soviets in eastern Poland. Hitherto towns had not been included in Tempest operations, on the not very convincing grounds that in this way Tempest would be distinguished from the ‘general and simultaneous uprising’; and to avoid civilian losses. But on 1 June Komorowski decided that if their political aims were to be achieved cities and towns must be captured before the Soviets’ arrival — except Warsaw, where there was to be no fighting. Indeed, the Government-in-exile and its delegate in the capital, Jan Jankowski, had already begun to discuss arranging through the Vatican for Warsaw to be declared an open city.[71]
The underground civil authority, meantime, was preparing for the task of government it hoped and expected to undertake while Poland was in the process of being liberated. By Presidential decree dated 26 April 1944 Jan Jankowski was appointed Deputy Prime Minister. In this capacity he nominated a Council of Ministers made up of himself and three men from each of the main political parties, the Peasant, Socialist and National parties. Their task was to direct the main fields of the country’s underground administration, apart from military affairs.
The Communist Polish Workers’ Party was not invited to take part. Was another chance missed of establishing some degree of eleventh-hour cooperation? Even though the Polish Communists were in concert with Stalin, had not Sikorski stressed that an understanding with Russia was essential, and would this not have been a step in that direction?
For the same reasons the Communists were not represented on the Council of National Unity, an advisory body set up in January 1944, composed of three men from each of the four main parties, one from smaller parties, as well as Church and Co-operative representatives. No political decisions were made without the agreement of this body. An executive committee of five members called the Praesidium deputized for the Council. Komorowski attended its sessions once a month to brief it on the military situation.
In the military field Komorowski and his staff in Warsaw called the tune, even though their actions directly affected the people’s lives. War, Clemenceau once remarked, is far too important a matter to be left to generals. Komorowski and his staff were in precisely that position of having a free hand in a potentially disastrous military situation.
Making and getting enough arms was one of the Secret Army’s major worries, apart from staying out of the Gestapo’s clutches. Normal infantry weapons were most needed — Sten and Bren guns, hand-grenades, revolvers, Piat anti-tank guns as well as plastic explosives, fuses and detonators. The RAF supplied a total of about forty-nine tons of weapons from August 1942 to 30 April 1943, relatively little, due to the flight problems involved. This supply increased during the period 1 August 1943 to 31 July 1944 to 263 tons,[72] including uniforms, medical equipment and blankets, still extraordinarily little, considering that only sixteen aircraft were lost during these operations.
But the Home Army’s Quartermaster Department had during the past three years organized its own secret arms production remarkably well. Groups of technicians throughout central Poland supplied blueprints for both standard weapons and new developments, including time and incendiary bombs, railway bombs and detonators.[73] Production of all arms needed was carried out in German-controlled and inspected workshops and secret Polish workshops. None of them knew which others were involved.
Ironically, the favourite workshops for the purpose were those controlled by the Germans, because the best Polish workmen and the most sophisticated machinery were available there. These workers made the parts — gun barrels, trigger mechanisms, magazines — either covertly during night-shifts, when German supervisors were not so much in evidence, or else by modifying official factory drawings and producing the parts openly.
When the Secret Army could not obtain specific parts or materials anywhere in Poland, it arranged for Poles employed in German-controlled factories to send orders for them to parent industrial establishments in the Reich. The consignments would then be intercepted on arrival at the Polish factory. German plants who unknowingly sent material to assist the Polish underground included Magdeburg Werke, Zeiss of Jena, Bruhn-Werke of Brunswick and Stock of Berlin.[74]
The Secret Army employed many small Polish workshops for the production of automatic rifles, light automatic weapons and flame-throwers, though it was complicated by the need to provide secretly the necessary metal, which had first to be stolen from German stocks. Having captured some of these weapons, the Germans decided that they could only have been produced in large, well-equipped plants by expert technicians. The Gestapo therefore searched these big plants, and fortunately ignored the small ones. Home Army technicians themselves assembled and tested the weapons in secret workshops, of which there were seventeen, including two completely proofed against the sound of firing.
Materials were bought on the open market, bought or stolen from German plants, seized in armed raids on warehouses or transports; by adaptation of less effective materials and fictitious orders to German plants.[75] For the production of the explosive cheddite the Secret Army needed 120,000 kg of potassium chlorate, a chemical which the Germans had placed under special guard. Polish directors of a matchworks factory therefore over-ordered substantially and in due course the Secret Army cleared the warehouse in a night raid. When more was needed, the staff of a German-controlled factory ordered several tons from the Reich. It was secretly intercepted under the noses of the German supervisors on arrival and transported to the Polish workshops. Other materials were similarly obtained. A large foundry in Germany unknowingly supplied sixteen tons of iron sheeting for making flame-throwers. The German firm of Bruhn-Werke in Warsaw imported a rush order of special steel wire by air from Sweden which the Secret Army needed urgently for Sten-gun springs.
Instead of storing these arms and ammunition in Warsaw where they might e
asily be discovered by the enemy, and in any case were considered unlikely to be used there for fighting, the Home Army secretly transported them to the eastern regions for use in the Tempest operations there.
On 22 June 1944 Stalin launched the Soviet summer offensive with 124 divisions and nine rifle brigades on four fronts, against the German Central Army Group commanded by Field-Marshal Ernest Busch. Within seven days the German defences had crumbled along a 350-mile front. The German 4th and 9th Armies centred around Minsk virtually ceased to exist, while the 3rd, further south, was routed. On the northern flank Soviet General Bagramian’s 1st Baltic Front and General Chernyakhovski’s Third Belorussian Front surged forward north and south of Vitebsk, taking the city on 27 June and destroying five German divisions. General Zakharov’s Second Belorussian Front overran Mogilev on 28 June and Rokossovsky’s First Belorussian Front destroyed a force of 33,000 Germans at Bobruisk the next day. The Moscow-Smolensk highway was cut in two places west of Minsk, which fell on 3 July with some 50,000 captured, and by 5 July Rokossovsky had taken Kowel. By 15 July the Soviet armies had knocked out twenty-five German divisions.
Thus the moment approached for the final stages of Tempest in eastern Poland. On 12 June General Komorowski and his staff had decided independently of London to concentrate Secret Army partisan groups about 10,000 strong, though still under-armed, in the Rudnicka Forest and elsewhere near the city of Lwow, in the Ukraine. Colonel ‘Wilk’, who was in command, received orders from Komorowski at the end of June to launch Tempest and capture the city at the approach of the Red Army by means of a full-scale attack by two brigades, supported inside the city by additional Secret Army units. He gave this order independently of London.
But on 7 July 1944 General Sosnkowski, in a message to Komorowski, warned that Stalin had decided to proceed with regard to Poland by the method of ‘accomplished facts’.[76] Pointing out that in these circumstances a general armed rising would have too slender a chance of success, he ordered Komorowski to go ahead with Tempest, which he was of course already doing. But he prudently recommended: ‘If, owing to a happy conjunction of circumstances, in the last days of the German retreat and before the entry of Soviet troops, a chance should arise for us to occupy, even temporarily, Wilno, Lwow, or any other important centre or a circumscribed small part of land, we should do so, in order to appear as the rightful masters.’
Sosnkowski was no doubt thinking of the casualties the Secret Army might face without the heavy weapons needed for a full-scale attack. But it was too late. Two brigades of the Home Army, about 5,500 men, attacked Wilno from the south on 6 July. Despite their fierce courage the Germans, with heavy mortars and machine-gun nests in defended strongpoints, flung them back. Colonel ‘Wilk’ reported to Warsaw in the early hours of 7 July: ‘… Home Army forces attacked Wilno. Fighting went on for twelve hours. City not taken. Heavy losses…’ [77]
On 7 July Red Army units attacked the town and military liaison was established, but even so not until 13 July were the last German strongpoints overcome. The Commanding Officer of the Nowogrodek Area reported Wilno’s capture to Komorowski — ‘with the considerable participation of the Home Army, which entered the city. Relations with the Soviets temporarily correct. Wilno experienced a brief, but joyful moment of freedom.’[78]
But relations with the Soviets worsened almost at once. Red Army men next day turned back Home Army units trying to enter the city to stress its Polish character and support a Polish administration. The NKVD arrested Colonel ‘Wilk’ and his staff of thirty officers when they attended a conference with the Soviet General Chernyakhovski. Polish units 6,000 strong retired towards the Rudnicka Forest, pursued by Soviet units. Some obeyed Soviet orders to lay down their arms, other resisted and were shot or disarmed and transported to Russia; still others accepted conscription into General Berling’s army as the lesser of two evils. A few escaped to the West. And so Tempest in Wilno also failed.
So far Komorowski had harvested only bitter fruit from the seeds of the policy of ‘no compromise with the Soviets’ which he and Sosnkowski had consistently sown. The Soviets were determined to annex all the territory up to the Curzon Line, and by vainly trying to set up a Polish administration Komorowski was courting failure and tragedy. Komorowski and his staff seem to have been either unable or unwilling to understand this. Ignoring the dead Sikorski’s earlier instructions that in face of such a situation in the east they should withdraw from this region across the Bug river, they now prepared for a third attempt.
Perhaps at Lwow the dice would fall in their favour and they would be lucky.
But meantime Komorowski wished to steel his troops against the Soviet armies, prepare them morally for the clash he had envisaged in his sombre message of 19 April to Sosnkowski. Accordingly, on 12 July 1944 he issued a special order[79] to all Secret Army province and district commanders on relations with the Soviets. Reminding them that the Soviets did not recognize the Polish Government and tried in all possible ways to undermine it, he declared that this was the policy of an enemy of the Polish Republic, whose independence they were trying to defend. ‘Thus, on the one hand the Soviets are a powerful ally in our fight with the Germans, and on the other, a dangerous usurper, striking at the very roots of our independence.’
Only in the battle against the Germans were they to cooperate with the Soviets; politically they must resist them, and to counter the Soviet argument that the Polish people supported them, they must stress the entire obedience and loyalty of the people and the Home Army to the Government and the Commander-in-Chief. Commanders must fight the Germans independently for as long as possible without contact with the Soviets, entering into cooperation with the Soviets only if tactical factors made it imperative.
They should give them information about the Germans on request, but not tell them about the wider deployment of Polish units, not cooperate outside the military field and refuse to undertake any operation for the Soviets or to fight in any other place without authority from General Komorowski. Home Army soldiers must show a dignified attitude towards the Soviets, avoiding superiority or servility, and due to the wide gulf between the two sides should avoid political discussions with Red Army soldiers. They should simply declare that they fight for Polish independence and for freedom to decide themselves the social system they want after the war. They must avoid incorporation into the Berling army or the Red Army, defend themselves if Soviet forces attack them and if necessary temporarily disband.
Komorowski’s main fear, the above order makes clear, was destruction of the Secret Army through coming to blows with the Soviets or by being forced piecemeal to join Berling’s communist army. For even at this eleventh hour he believed that German military disintegration would offer the chance of a successful uprising, and with it the seizure of power in Poland by the London Government. But yet he warned against it in a realistic military analysis two weeks before the uprising. ‘The Soviet summer offensive, directed mainly at the centre of the German front, has achieved unexpectedly rapid and effective results,’ he reported to Sosnkowski, the Commander-in-Chief, on 14 July 1944.[80]
The defence of the German centre front has been broken, and the retreat has all the look of a defeated army. German losses must be enormous, if only judging by the numbers of generals killed or captured. The westward advance of the Soviet army threatens the entire German northern front with being cut off from their retreat into East Prussia and being pinned down against the sea. The road to Warsaw lies open. As long as the Soviet army’s advantages are not ruined by lack of supplies there is no way in which it can be stopped without a major offensive by German units in reserve… According to our information, the Germans have suffered a defeat on their central front which it will be impossible to repair without bringing in more important reserves. It looks as if the Germans will have to take a long step backwards to regain control of the situation.
Komorowski then forecast that the Soviets intended to launch an uprising throughout Poland
with the People’s Army, the military wing of the Polish Workers’ Party. ‘They believe that the Polish community, tired of war and thirsting for vengeance, will be ready for battle. The Soviets intend to call out the uprising at the moment they cross the Bug river. They are planning to drop paratroop units and arms for the people. For some weeks they have been dropping leaders and instructors.’
Prudently, he then contended that ‘with the present numbers of German troops in Poland, and their anti-insurrectionary preparations, consisting of turning every building held by them, and even offices into fortresses with bunkers and barbed wire, the universal rising would have no hope of success. It may only be successful in the event of the collapse and disintegration of the Germans… In the present conditions the carrying out of the rising, even with excellent supplies of arms and the cooperation of allied air forces and paratroops, would involve very high losses.’
It was a sound assessment. But Komorowski then concluded that nevertheless the Secret Army must testify before the entire world Poland’s will to fight the Germans, so as to destroy the Soviet propaganda charge that they were silent allies of the Nazis, or neutral towards them. No mention of an uprising in Warsaw occurs in this sober appraisal.
A four-day battle for Lwow began on 23 July. When Red Army artillery began thundering in the distance, Colonel Filipowski led 3,000 Secret Army troops in an attack on the city. He declared himself to the Soviet commander next day and offered liaison. But the Soviets turned down the offer on the grounds that the Polish units were ‘untrained and badly armed, which combined with great zeal had been causing them heavy losses’.[81] Filipowski and his troops nevertheless fought on, entered the town when it fell on 27 July and staged a patriotic demonstration to support an emergent Polish administration.