First to Fight

by Roger Moorhouse

  Many Varsovians were acutely aware that they were fighting for a higher cause. For the new civilian commissar of Warsaw, Stefan Starzyński, it was a fight for an eternal Poland; a nation that once again stood as a bulwark of humanity and culture. ‘The people of Warsaw will endure all tempests, all storms, all raids, all bombs,’ he announced in one of his radio addresses.

  They will not flinch, for they know that the Hitlerite plague shall be destroyed, that Germany’s disgrace will forever bury that nation and that nothing will ever wipe away this shame, and Poland will emerge from this war victorious, strong and powerful … to the glory of the country and to the glory of the whole world, whose culture and civilisation she has protected many times from barbaric hordes.16

  For others, their resistance was also aiding Poland’s British and French allies, whom they imagined were fighting the Germans on the Western Front. ‘The radio announced that the German attack on Warsaw has been stopped,’ one housewife noted. ‘Of course, they are not far away, but thank you God even for this, because every day’s delay is crucial for the Allied advance from the west.’17

  But, for all the defiance of its inhabitants, Warsaw was in dire peril. One diarist noted how the German aerial attack over the city was stepped up, often defeating the city’s efforts to defend itself. ‘No air-raid warnings were given now,’ he wrote, ‘they had crippled the city and its defence preparations.’ The bombers loomed high above the capital, silhouetted against the blue September sky. ‘We had to hurry down into the cellars,’ he recalled. ‘If a bomb fell on the building beneath which you were hiding, it meant certain death; it was the bullet in this deadly game of Russian roulette.’18 Marta Korwin witnessed a German air raid as she passed a market square:

  I stopped … to let [the crowd] pass. At that moment a bomb dropped on the pavement; it stood upright and then exploded. I had not heard the plane. I had seen bombs dropping from a plane’s belly before, but only this time did I see a bomb touch the ground and then explode. A number of people fell down like bags of sand; the rest vanished. My driver and I jumped out of the truck to see if we could help, but they had all been killed outright.19

  By now, heavy artillery shells were also landing on the city at a rate of forty every hour – one every 90 seconds. ‘One never knew’, one diarist wrote, ‘from which direction a shell would come; it would come without warning, and seemingly without purpose.’20 Władysław Szpilman recalled how the roads were quickly choked with rubble, as well as with the corpses of horses and civilians, making it difficult for him to reach the radio station, where his piano recitals were intended to raise the city’s mood. ‘More and more buildings lost their window panes,’ he wrote. ‘There were round holes in the walls where they suffered a hit, and corners of masonry were knocked off. By night the sky was red with the glow of firelight and the air full of the smell of burning.’21

  In addition, the lack of food in the city began to make itself felt. Bread queues became commonplace, and people were scavenging for whatever food was available. ‘If a horse was killed in the street, people queued to go at it with kitchen knives,’ one memoirist wrote. But it seemed there was at least one positive effect from the bombing: ‘after each raid, thousands of stunned fish floated to the surface of the Vistula, some of them enormous. The men collected the fish into buckets and we had excellent feasts.’22

  One of the most clear-eyed observers of Warsaw’s suffering during the German siege was the American photographer Julien Bryan, who arrived in the city on 7 September, just after most foreigners and government officials had left. Though he momentarily questioned his own sanity, he swiftly recognised the opportunity that had landed in his lap; this was, he said, ‘the kind of scoop that every photographer and newspaperman dreams about’. Meeting with Stefan Starzyński, he was left in no doubt about the significance of his presence. ‘Your pictures may prove to be of real importance,’ Warsaw’s former mayor told him, ‘so that the world may know what has happened here.’ Bryan was duly provided with a guide, an interpreter, a car – a battered 1936 Adler Trumpf – and a permit to photograph whatever he liked.23 He would become the primary visual chronicler of the siege of Warsaw.

  Bryan criss-crossed the city that September, photographing the bread lines, the barricades, the aftermath of the bombing, and – most memorably – the human cost of war. He visited recently bombed hospitals, full of hysterical patients and stoic staff; and saw the effects of a direct hit on a residential block on a street named Na Skarpie, which ‘looked as if a giant with an ice-cream scoop had taken out the entire central section’. Inside, the bodies of fourteen women and children would be recovered. But it is Bryan’s photographic portraits of ordinary Varsovians that are most arresting: the young boy sitting, his chin in his hand, amid the rubble of his former home; or the pained, pinched faces of the housewives in the bread line, who knew that a similar queue had been attacked by German aircraft the day before but were loath to give up their place; or the elderly woman, standing dazed before the remains of her house, clutching two silver spoons and a pair of scissors – all she had left.

  The most memorable of his images were taken when Bryan came across the aftermath of a German strafing raid on 13 September. In a small field, close to Powaązki Cemetery to the west of the city, a group of women had been digging for potatoes when a Luftwaffe plane raked the area with machine-gun fire, killing two of them. When he arrived, Bryan began photographing the bloody scene, but was interrupted by ten-year-old Kazimiera Mika, the younger sister of one of the dead, who seemingly couldn’t understand why her sister would not speak to her.

  ‘What has happened?’ she cried. Then she leaned down, touched the dead girl’s face, and drew back in horror. ‘Oh, my beautiful sister!’ she wailed. ‘What have they done to you?’ Then, after a few seconds: ‘Please talk to me! Please, oh, please! What will become of me without you!’ The child looked at us in bewilderment. I threw my arm about her and held her tightly, trying to comfort her. She cried. So did I and the two Polish officers who were with me. What could we, or anyone else, say to this child?24

  Bryan’s picture of Kazimiera pleading and bending over her sister’s dead body would become one of the most iconic images of the war.

  At the same time, the atmosphere in the capital was febrile, full of panic, conspiracy theories, and rumours of German spies and ‘diversants’. According to Wacław Lipiński, Polish propaganda – of which he was a primary exponent – was partly to blame by circulating wild stories of the Germans dropping poisoned sweets, or gas-filled balloons. By fostering anxiety and mutual suspicion, Lipiński believed, such stories were ‘nothing short of criminal’.25 They also produced some unintended consequences. Władysław Szpilman recalled an elderly spinster in his apartment block, with a German-sounding surname, who refused to go down to the air raid shelter, and instead remained in her apartment stoically playing the piano. Concluding that she must be a spy, signalling to the Germans via her piano-playing, the building’s staff decided to tie her up and confine her to the basement. In so doing, they inadvertently saved the old lady’s life, as her flat was destroyed a few hours later by an artillery strike.26

  As well as wrestling with their own paranoia, the capital’s defenders were outnumbered and outgunned. One sergeant recalled how the arrival of some thirty-five volunteers cheered his men; but then he noted that the new arrivals were armed only with old French rifles, ‘with only 60 rounds each … as well as one hand grenade each’. Though they lacked equipment, he said, they had ‘full and fervent hearts’ and a ‘desire to fight the ancient barbaric enemy’.27 Commanding the 21st Infantry Regiment in the defence of Praga, on the east bank of the Vistula, Colonel Stanisław Sosabowski told a similar tale, recalling that his men had so little artillery ammunition that, for every hundred shells the Germans fired, ‘we could return only one’. Often, enemy patrols would be allowed to advance right up to his positions before his men opened fire; and where possible they would engage the Germans with b
ayonets rather than waste bullets.28 Faced with enemy superiority, his men had to use every advantage they possessed. Thus, while lying low during the day, the soldiers would come to life at night, with patrols sweeping the area to ‘keep the Germans awake and guessing’. ‘We knew every street, every back alley, every garden,’ Sosabowski wrote. ‘We had maps showing plans of the drains and underground cables; we knew every entry and every exit; my men could go where they pleased. The Germans never knew where we would strike next.’29

  In truth, the German forces were biding their time. They had expected Warsaw to be surrendered without a fight, and now, though the air assault continued unabated, many of the armoured spearheads had been withdrawn to meet the Polish threat on the Bzura, leaving mostly infantry troops to hold the line around the capital. As General Halder noted in his diary on 15 September, with the city almost surrounded, his preference was to force a surrender through starvation rather than an all-out assault. After all, he wrote, ‘we are in no hurry, and we don’t need the forces now outside Warsaw anywhere else’.30

  Despite Halder’s brutal plan, efforts were made to induce the Warsaw garrison to surrender. On the morning of 16 September, a German staff car appeared in the Praga suburbs, flanked by two tanks and flying a large white flag. Under a ceasefire, a German officer approached the Polish lines brandishing a letter, containing a demand for the city’s surrender, which he asked be taken to the ‘Officer Commanding, Warsaw’. Receiving him, Colonel Sosabowski sent the note on to General Rómmel’s headquarters, blindfolding the German major until the reply arrived. When it did, some ninety minutes later, it was in the negative. ‘General Czuma’, Sosabowski recalled, ‘would neither talk with, nor see, the enemy emissary.’ With that, the German officer saluted and took his leave.31 Warsaw would fight on.

  That evening and into the following day, Warsaw was subjected to a determined bombardment, which specifically targeted the city’s infrastructure – gas, electricity and water works – as well as the General Military Inspectorate, the War Ministry, the Royal Castle and the Citadel, barracks, artillery positions and Polish command centres.32 In the process, much of the city found itself under sustained aerial and artillery attack, which seemed to exceed all that had gone before. Marta Korwin recorded the bad news arriving from the city centre: part of the Royal Castle destroyed, fires burning in the parliament building, the vaulting of St John’s Cathedral collapsed. ‘It seemed’, she wrote, ‘as if every third house was in flames.’ Maria Komornicka’s concerns were a little closer to home. She and her family were huddled in the stairwell of their apartment block in Mokotów when ‘suddenly there was a terrible noise, the rattle of broken glass and the smell of rotten eggs. I was sure that our building was hit, but as we found out No. 18 across the street took a large hole in the front wall; glass was shattered in our windows and our window frames were damaged.’33 One Varsovian’s diary was darkly laconic: ‘Sunday. God’s day, yet more shells have fallen on Warsaw today than on any other. Gradually everything is being destroyed.’34 That day, Sunday 17 September, would bring momentous news, but nothing to cheer the defenders of Warsaw.

  *

  Events in the Polish capital received varying degrees of scrutiny abroad. Though the British and French governments were busily concerning themselves with the sham offensive on the Saar, and with the inevitable problems of rationing, evacuation and mobilisation, there was strangely little focus on Poland’s agony. The press was distracted by the domestic implications of the war, and privately one British MP even sought to blame the victim, complaining in his diary that Poland’s resistance against the Germans had amounted to ‘nothing at all’.35 In Berlin and Moscow, on the other hand, the progress of the war was being watched very closely, with both sides wary of one another and watching for any sign of backsliding on the territorial arrangement agreed in the Secret Protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact.

  Already on 3 September, Joachim von Ribbentrop had written to the German ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, to ask when Soviet forces might be expected to occupy their ‘sphere of influence’ in Poland, as had been agreed in the treaty discussions. As Ribbentrop explained, the defeat of the Polish army was expected ‘within a few weeks’, and it was in everybody’s interest for the Red Army to ‘move against Polish forces’ at the proper time.36 The Soviets, however, though keen to lay claim to the territories promised to them under the Secret Protocol, were wary of undermining their dubious claim to neutrality in the ongoing conflict, and so were unwilling to openly ally themselves to the German cause. As Vyacheslav Molotov told the German ambassador: ‘We are of the view that the time to start concrete action has not yet come … it seems to us that through excessive haste we might injure our cause and promote unity among our opponents.’37 For the time being, it seemed, Germany would fight Poland alone.

  The Red Army had not been idle in the interim, however. Already on 2 September, a state of alert had been declared on the Polish frontier and the border detachments present in the area had been brought up to battle readiness. Then, on 6 September, a partial mobilisation of the Red Army was ordered, covering all the western military districts, and requesting what was euphemistically called a ‘large-scale training drill’. Five days later, the military districts contiguous with the Polish border were ordered to concentrate their forces close to the frontier, again, on the pretext of a drill. The following day, the Soviet Union’s western rail network was effectively put at the disposal of the Red Army: civilian traffic was reduced, engines and rolling stock were requisitioned, and coal reserves were secured.38

  Despite that partial mobilisation, the Kremlin was evidently alarmed by the speed of the German advance.39 Molotov expressed his concern that the Soviet Union would not be able to ‘start a new war’ if an armistice with the Poles were to come too quickly. Nonetheless, the Soviet foreign minister outlined to his German opposite number the political justification that would be used for the Soviet invasion, explaining that ‘the Soviet Government intended to take the occasion of the further advance of German troops to declare that Poland was falling apart and that it was necessary for the Soviet Union, in consequence, to come to the aid of the Ukrainians and the White Russians’. This argument, the Kremlin believed, would ‘make the intervention of the Soviet Union plausible to the masses and at the same time avoid giving the Soviet Union the appearance of an aggressor’.40 Like clockwork, an article then appeared in Pravda on 14 September, written by the Politburo’s propaganda chief, Andrei Zhdanov, in which the reason for Poland’s looming defeat was explained to have been the Warsaw government’s oppression of its Byelorussian (White Russian) and Ukrainian minorities.41

  In fact, it is doubtful whether this argument was found to be plausible by the Soviet masses at all. The Soviet authorities had struggled over the previous three weeks or so to explain the political volte-face of the Nazi–Soviet Pact to its citizens, and those agitators that attempted the feat were often met with incomprehension or even hostility.42 Some days before the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Polish military attaché in Moscow, Stefan Brzeszczyński, witnessed one such speaker address a crowd in Gorky Park. After a speech full of hostility towards the Poles, which Brzeszczyński considered was received by the crowd ‘rather coolly’, the agitator ended by asking whether the Soviet Union should ‘stand by and watch our Byelorussian and Ukrainian brethren suffer’. In response, the crowd – having clearly failed to understand the thrust of the argument – began loudly demanding that the Red Army march westward, to engage ‘the evil Germans’.43

  More important than persuading the Soviet people, wider geostrategic concerns were also assuaged around this time. The French action in the Saarland, which had been half-hearted at best, finally fizzled out, and the Soviets signed an armistice with the Japanese, with hostilities in eastern Mongolia scheduled to cease in the coming days. Then, on 14 September, Molotov told Schulenburg that the Red Army was mobilised and the Soviet invasion of Poland could now take
place. However, to confirm the ‘political motivation’ for the invasion, it was essential for the Red Army ‘not to take action until the government centre of Poland, the city of Warsaw, had fallen’. Consequently, Molotov asked to be informed ‘as nearly as possible … when the capture of Warsaw could be counted on’.44

  The following day, 15 September, Ribbentrop telegraphed Schulenburg again, requesting that he ‘formally communicate’ to Molotov that the occupation of Warsaw was expected ‘in the next few days’. He went on to reiterate the agreement reached in Moscow regarding ‘spheres of interest’, and to welcome the prospect that the Soviet Union would now ‘take a hand militarily’, as it relieved the Wehrmacht of ‘the necessity of annihilating the remainder of the Polish Army’. He appended the draft text of a joint communiqué, explaining that Moscow and Berlin saw it as their ‘joint task to restore peace and order in … their natural spheres of influence’. A day later, Molotov confirmed that the ‘military intervention by the Soviet Union’ was imminent, and in the early hours of 17 September Schulenburg was summoned to the Kremlin to be informed by Stalin himself that the Red Army would cross the Polish frontier at dawn.45

  With his de facto ally thus apprised of the imminent Red Army invasion, Stalin now informed the Poles of his intentions. Thus, the Polish ambassador in Moscow, Wacław Grzybowski, was also summoned to the Kremlin in the early hours of 17 September, where he was met by the Soviet deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Potemkin. Though he had served in Moscow for three years, and must have been well versed in the Kremlin’s machinations, Grzybowski was still surprised by what followed, not least as he had only recently been speculating on the apparent readiness of the Soviet Union to assist in Poland’s defence.46 That night, he was presented with a note from the Soviet government, signed by Molotov and outlining the reasons for the Red Army’s intended intervention. ‘The Polish government has disintegrated’, it read, and with the Polish state having ‘ceased to exist’, ‘all agreements concluded between the USSR and Poland ceased to be in effect’. Given this collapse, and the threat that it constituted to the USSR, the Soviet government was unable to ‘remain indifferent’ to the fate of its ‘brothers of the same blood, the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, residing on Polish territory’. Consequently, the Red Army had been instructed to ‘cross the border and take under their protection the lives and property of the inhabitants of western Ukraine and western Byelorussia’.47 ‘Western Ukraine’ and ‘western Byelorussia’, of course, meant eastern Poland.