Our weakness was our flanks. On the right flank, the last building was 5 Przejazd Street, opposite the end of Długa Street. Beyond that, towards the north lay the levelled ruins of the ghetto destroyed in 1943; it was no-man’s-land. Further along to the north along Przejazd Street was Mostowski Palace, which was in Polish hands. On our left flank along Tłomacka Street, there were no buildings standing beyond the telephone exchange. The block between Tłomacka and Długa streets had been reduced to a 300ft long field of rubble after the siege of Warsaw in 1939. The facades of the destroyed buildings had been knocked down to one storey high and the window openings bricked up. The remaining ruins of the buildings between the two streets had been levelled. On the other side of the rubble field, the buildings facing Bielanska Street were still standing. The buildings on both sides of that street were defended by the Łukasiński Battalion. Opposite the rubble field, on the other (south) side of Tłomacka Street, was the ruin of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, dynamited after the 1943 Ghetto Uprising. That ruin, and the Hospital of the Knights of Malta behind it, was also no-man’s-land.
The hospital was overflowing with Polish and German wounded. By tacit agreement neither side occupied the hospital, but this situation could have changed at any moment as the area further south was solidly in German hands. The Germans held a large magazine of spirits at the hospital, which some civilians now began looting then returning to the old town through our positions. We received an order to stop the looters, confiscate the liquor and allow each person to keep one bottle. In this way we acquired a few cases of Hine cognac, some champagne and red wine.
That night an assault group led by Pobóg reached the Germans’ rear positions by moving across the roofs on Rymarska Street. In a surprise attack they recaptured the barricade closing Rymarska Street. Throughout the night German medics picked up their wounded and dead from in front of the Leszno Street barricade. We did not interfere. I spent most of the night following Nałęcz around as he organised defences, in this way becoming familiar with the locations of all our units. As we made our rounds German AA batteries across Warsaw opened up. We heard the heavy drone of multi-engine planes. Traces of AA fire and searchlights lit up the night sky. The long-awaited Allied airdrops were finally coming! The planes arrived singly, at very low altitude; we saw several white parachutes floating down from the direction of Kraśinski Square in the centre of the old town defence area.
At daybreak we returned to the ground floor of the building on Przejazd Street adjoining the telephone exchange, where Nałęcz had located his command post. Our first aid station was already there. After I summoned some of the officers for a meeting he told me to go and get some sleep. I could not find a suitable sleeping place as they were all taken. Then I spotted a very large pram with all the bedding. I squashed into it in a sitting position with my legs hanging over the edge and immediately passed out. Renewed artillery and mortar fire woke me up. It was the morning of 13 August. I got out of the pram and collapsed in pain. I had cut off the circulation to my legs and couldn’t get up.
Stukas had arrived, strafing our position and dropping bombs behind us. Before noon the Germans renewed their attack on Leszno Street. Groups of infantry advanced under cover of two assault guns. At the same time, the Germans occupied the Knights of Malta Hospital and attacked the Rymarska Street barricade. After an hour of heavy fighting we withdrew from that barricade and concentrated our defences on the barricade that closed off Leszno Street.
When the fighting subsided, I followed Nałęcz as he made the rounds of our positions. We moved through the ground floor of 1, 3 and into 5 Przejazd Street. Coming to a staircase adjoining the common wall with the entrance gateway we noticed the interconnecting passage was not protected. The two-man outpost that was supposed to be there was missing. Nałęcz chambered his machine pistol and I took out my grenade. As we cautiously approached the opening we heard German voices on the other side. We pressed ourselves to the wall on both sides of the opening. I slipped the finger of my left hand into the ring of the grenade pin ready to lob it. There were more voices, then footsteps, which subsided. We stood still and listened for a few minutes; no more sounds came from the other side. Nałęcz told me to stay by the opening and to throw the grenade and run if I heard any more German voices; he immediately left to get a replacement.
I was standing by the opening, straining to listen. ‘Sten’ arrived about five minutes later. He was only two years older than me and had also been in the Underground Boy Scouts before joining the battalion. He was armed with a 7mm Belgian FN pistol. We took positions on both sides of the opening. Nothing was happening and the sounds of fighting died down. Sten asked me if I knew how to strip an FN pistol. I said no, that I was familiar only with the VIS, Parabellum, P-38 and Nagant revolvers. ‘Come over and I’ll show you how.’ I crossed to his side of the opening. He removed the slide from the top of the pistol, exposing the barrel and the cocked firing pin on its spring. ‘You have to be very careful removing the firing pin,’ he said as the pin and the spring flew off, landing several feet away on the rubble-covered floor. ‘Guard the opening,’ he ordered as he frantically searched for the missing parts. We spent the next half hour taking turns standing guard, with the remaining armament of my solitary grenade, and systematically searching the floor on our hands and knees. Finally Sten found his missing parts. As he finished re-assembling his pistol, a properly armed, two-man detachment took over.
Later that afternoon, an assault group counter-attacked, cleared the pocket of Germans on the other side of the Leszno Street barricade and recaptured the Rymarska Street barricade. We took a few prisoners and since they were Wehrmacht, not SS, they were escorted to headquarters rather than being shot out of hand. We suffered more dead and wounded that day.
Nałęcz prepared a situation report, which I delivered to sector headquarters on Barokowa Street. Maj. ‘Sosna’, a new commanding officer, had taken command after Lt. Col. Kuba had been severely wounded. He called me in and asked several questions about the disposition of our forces, our losses and the status of our ammunition.
Returning around 6 p.m., I heard a tremendous explosion behind me from the direction of the old town. There were clouds of dust. It was definitely more powerful than a Stuka bomb or artillery shell. Later I learned what had happened. A German armoured vehicle was captured after its crew abandoned it close to Polish positions and it was brought to Kiliński Street in the centre of the old town. A jubilant crowd surrounded the vehicle when it exploded. It had been booby-trapped by the Germans. Over 300 people were killed. The most severe losses were suffered by the Boy Scout Company Orląt, which lost eighty. The carnage was so great that when I visited the site the following day, there were still pieces of human flesh stuck to the walls of the adjoining buildings.
When I returned I learned that there was no more water. The Germans had cut off the water supply. Electricity had long since disappeared. The only water we had access to was what we could find in bathtubs. As part of the air raid protection, the Germans had required all tubs to be filled with water at all times, although not everyone complied. The few full tubs we found were secured for drinking and cooking only. It didn’t make any difference to our hygiene as most of us had not had a bath since the Uprising began.
That night, once again, AA guns opened up and the skies were lit by searchlights and tracers from AA guns of all calibres. There were many more planes. From the top floor of the telephone exchange we watched parachutes floating down, some over Kraśinski Square. Unfortunately, none of them came down within our positions. There was great celebration – the long-expected resupplies were coming. However, what we did not know at that time was the high cost paid by the aircrews. That night three Liberator bombers were lost; eight the next night. Before the flights were abandoned two days later on 15 August by the British High Command, the overall losses of Liberator and Halifax bombers flying from Italy to supply Warsaw were fifteen Polish Air Force, twelve Royal Air Force, nine Sou
th African Air Force. Russia refused the Allies’ requests to allow Allied planes to land in the territories captured by the Russians. This would have significantly reduced losses since the majority occurred over Germany while the planes returned to their Italian bases in daylight.
During the night Pobóg led a sortie to collect weapons abandoned by retreating Germans. They ventured along Leszno Street, past the Protestant church, into the ruins of the ghetto. They recovered some weapons and equipment. Pobóg gave me a German military torch that was better than mine; it could change white light to green or red. They also returned with five Greek Jews who had been hiding in the ghetto. The Jews had escaped from a small concentration camp in the old ghetto called Gęsia when it was captured by the Zośka Battalion a few days before. Three of them stayed with the battalion, helping wherever they could. One of them was a baker and helped with the cooking. Another had a great voice and was always singing Italian arias and love songs. After the capitulation, one of them managed to survive for over three months, hiding in the cellars of Warsaw, until January the following year, when Warsaw was liberated. He returned to Greece.
Very early on the morning of 14 August we received a case of 9mm ammunition and a PIAT (Projector Infantry Anti-Tank). This was our share of the supplies dropped the previous night on Krasiński Square. The PIAT was a British-made, very portable hand-held weapon, about 3ft long and weighing only 30lb. A PIAT could fire an anti-tank projectile an effective distance, about 100yd. The projectile was launched by the force of a spring and a propellant charge in its finned tail. It required considerable strength to cock it and, as we found out later, it had a recoil like the kick of a mule. The projectiles came in cardboard tubes in sets of three; unfortunately, we only got two packs, giving us a total of six projectiles.
That same early morning a wounded boy, about two years older than me, was carried in on a stretcher. He had joined only a few days before and had been accepted, despite not having a weapon, because he was a distant nephew of Holski. Early that morning, when it was still dark, he had gone over the barricade in search of an abandoned German weapon. He was shot, managed to crawl to the barricade and was picked up. Since I had gotten to know him I went over to him, and as I leaned over the stretcher he grabbed my hand. The nurse cut open his shirt. Under his left collarbone was a small entry hole, a typical rifle wound with no blood. A nice clean wound, I thought. When the nurses turned him over there was a lot of blood on the stretcher. When the rest of his shirt was cut off there was a huge, jagged bleeding hole, the size of a saucer. Baśka attending him shook her head and mouthed, ‘Dum-Dum’. I kneeled holding his hand as his grip slowly loosened and he died. I never knew his name and have forgotten his code name. He was one of many who joined our battalion and are now referred to only as ‘NN’, not known.
Ryszard Budzianowski included a list of soldiers who went through the battalion during the Uprising in his book Battalion KB ‘Nałęcz’ in the Warsaw Uprising (pp. 111–27). There are 378 entries: 340 men and thirty-eight women, mostly nurses (the equivalent of ‘medics’ in the United States Army). Of the first 302 entries, forty-eight have code names only, no family names, including eleven killed and nineteen wounded. Entries 303 to 378 are ‘NN’: these seventy-five soldiers, forty of whom were killed in action, are listed with neither family nor code name.
From the morning onwards, heavy artillery and mortar fire fell on our positions. The Stukas were bombing around us. The building on the south side of Leszno Street in front of the barricade took a direct hit and caught fire. Fires were impossible to put out as there had been no water since the previous day. The wind carried the heavy smoke and the stench of the bodies decomposing in front of our positions. The men in the front positions protected themselves with handkerchiefs across their noses and mouths.
Later in the morning the Germans renewed their attack along Leszno Street. Again, their infantry was supported by two assault guns, 75mm StuG IIIs. From a short distance the guns opened fire directly on our barricade and the telephone exchange. We were forced out of our forward positions and away from the barricade. We retreated to the telephone exchange. Finally the guns came close enough to test our new PIAT. I led Nałęcz and the PIAT crew up the back stairs to the fourth floor of the telephone exchange. That floor, like the two below, had a ‘forest’ of steel angles bolted to concrete slabs from floor to ceiling. The steel angles supported a labyrinth of wires and switching equipment, and provided additional support for the building, and cover for us.
The PIAT crew loaded the weapon and fired. The sound was no louder than a rifle shot and there was no telltale smoke. I looked in disbelief as the projectile hit the first assault gun and bounced off without exploding. The gunner let out a string of obscenities, realising that he had not armed the projectile. Checking the carrying tube, he found the fuse still in the container attached to the lid. Even though the projectile did not explode the German crew immediately started backing out, realising that we had an anti-tank weapon. Our second shot was much more satisfying. It exploded, immobilising the gun. The second assault gun pulled the disabled one out. The Germans abandoned their attack. Later that day we destroyed two other assault guns.
During the attack there was another new and very dangerous development on our left flank. The Hospital of the Knights of Malta, which had been a no-man’s-land, was evacuated by the Germans. The hospital and the ruins of the Great Synagogue were occupied by the SS Dirlewanger Brigade. The newly placed machine guns in the ruins had a clear field of fire along the whole of Tłomacka Street and the rubble field behind our positions. We were cut off.
Late in the evening our counter-attack regained most of the positions, securing the barricade, the corner building and 1 and 3 Przejazd Street. The Germans retained control of the buildings on Leszno Street behind the barricade.
During the night an equally dangerous situation developed on our right flank. Past 5 Przejazd Street, towards Mostowski Palace, were the ruins of the ghetto. The Germans occupied this area and made firing positions for machine guns that controlled the square in front of the Arsenal, Długa Street and part of the rubble field behind us. We were now boxed in.
Throughout the night we witnessed the largest Allied airdrops to date. The huge four-engine planes were coming singly from different directions towards Krasiński Square, the designated drop point. The sky was illuminated by searchlights and traces of AA guns firing from all directions. The falling parachutes were only visible for a brief moment as the drops were made from very low altitudes. There was an explosion and a ball of fire. Some time later, a second explosion and a fireball came from the same direction. Two planes were shot down during the drop and crashed on Miodowa Street. The feeling of euphoria upon seeing the airdrop left us as we watched the fires from the downed planes. The total losses that night were eight planes (one Polish, three South African and four RAF). The other six planes were lost over Germany in daylight, while returning to their bases in Italy.
The day of 15 August began with the customary mortar fire at 8 a.m. The Germans were very punctual. Later that morning one of our soldiers ventured from Przejazd Street towards the Arsenal and was shot, falling face down. As I watched, one of the nurses ran out from the first aid station, brushing past me. As she reached the fallen soldier she was shot herself and fell on top of him. A few minutes later, another of our soldiers ran out; as he tried to pick up the girl he was shot and fell down with her. After a few more minutes our only male medic, ‘Pigularz’, stepped out with a Red Cross flag and slowly moved towards them. When he reached them and leaned over, a shot was fired and he too toppled onto the others. As I continued to watch there was an explosion and all four bodies were lifted about 3ft in the air, landing spread out. ‘Ninka’ and ‘Pigularz’ were the first two medics from our unit to be killed in action. We later speculated that the first man had a grenade under him, which somehow exploded.
Later that morning the Germans renewed their attack, shifting the axis of attack nor
th from Leszno Street (where we were) to Nowolipki Street, about 380yd away. They were trying to capture Mostowski Palace, shelling the whole area heavily and setting 5 Przejazd Street on fire.
Around noon, I followed Nałęcz to Długa Street on the edge of the rubble field, to the last building still in our hands. On the east side of the interior courtyard there was a wall about 10ft high abutting the rubble field. There was a two-man post there. One of them reported that earlier that day a civilian man had tried to run to the other side; he was cut down by machine gun fire, his legs literally cut off. The German machine guns on top of the ruins of the synagogue had a commanding view. Later on that morning a boy of about 12 also tried to make it across and he too was killed. We could see both bodies ahead, the man about a third of the way across and the boy closer. I recognised the boy. I had spoken to him before; he had lived in this building and his father was a POW in an oflag.
As we stood on two adjoining ladders Nałęcz asked me, ‘Do you think you can make it?’ ‘Yes, Capitan, sir!’ (Nałęcz had been promoted captain). He took a small notebook from his pocket and scribbled a note. ‘Deliver this to Maj. Sosna and report that we urgently need a surgeon as we cannot evacuate our wounded; we are critically low on ammunition and we have run out of PIAT projectiles; we are holding and will not abandon our position.’
My Boyhood War Page 12