Russia at war 1941-1945

On August 2 the 1st Polish Army... attacked across the Vistula with three divisions in the Pulawa-Deblin sector. It suffered heavy casualties, but secured a bridgehead...

At Magnuszew a second bridgehead was established. The forces that crossed here

were ordered to advance along the road running parallel to the Vistula to Warsaw, but

they were stopped at the Pilica.

Guderian clearly believes that there was a serious Russian attempt to capture Warsaw in the first week of August. He then goes on:

The German 9th Army had the impression, on August 8, that the Russian attempt to

seize Warsaw by a coup de main had been defeated by our defence, despite the Polish

uprising, and that the latter had, from the enemy's point of view, been begun too soon

[ Guderian, op. cit., pp. 358-9. (emphasis added.)]

This is an important piece of evidence, which tallies, to an extraordinary degree, both with what was said in Moscow at the very beginning of August when the capture of

Warsaw by the Red Army was expected "at any moment", and with what was being said in Lublin at the end of August, at the height of the Warsaw tragedy.

The only conclusion this author, at any rate, has been able to reach is that in August and September 1944 the available Red Army forces in Poland were genuinely not able to

capture Warsaw which Hitler was determined to hold. For Warsaw was on the Russians'

shortest road to the heart of Germany.

It might, of course, be argued that if the Russians had wanted to capture Warsaw at any price, that is, by transferring whole armies to the Vistula from other fronts at short notice (not an easy task), they might conceivably have captured it. But this would have upset their other military plans like steadily advancing on East Prussia, routing the Germans in Rumania, joining with the Yugoslavs and breaking into Bulgaria and Hungary.

There is no question but that the Warsaw rising was a last desperate attempt to free Poland's capital from the retreating Nazis and at the same time to prevent the Lublin administration from gaining a foothold and establishing itself in Warsaw once the

victorious Soviet army had entered the city.

Once more in Poland's history this valiant struggle for independence was defeated by the overriding, although conflicting, great-Power interests of other states. Still, with Moscow determined, ever since the beginning of the war and especially since April 1943, to

control the future destinies of Poland, Bor-Komarowski would have been eliminated one way or another by the Russians, as they managed a few years later to rid themselves of Mikolajczyk.

The story of the end of the Warsaw tragedy, and of German bestiality under the

leadership of the notorious SS Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewsky, assisted by

equally notorious murder gangs like the Kaminsky Brigade, is well known, as is also

Hitler's maniacal order of October 11 to "raze Warsaw to the ground".

300,000 Poles lost their lives in Warsaw. When the Russians finally entered Warsaw in January 1945, more than nine-tenths of the city had been almost as completely destroyed as had been the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.

Chapter IX CLOSE-UP: LUBLIN—THE MAIDANEK MURDER

CAMP

It was a beautiful sunny day as we flew at the end of August 1944 from Moscow to

Lublin over those hundreds of miles of Belorussian fields, marshes and forests that had been recaptured by the Red Army in the great battles of June and July. Belorussia looked more wretched and ruined than any part of the Soviet Union, apart from that terrible

"desert" that stretched all the way from Viazma and Gzhatsk to Smolensk. There were scarcely any cattle to be seen outside the villages, most of which had suffered partial or complete destruction. This was mostly partisan country and, flying over Belorussia one realised once more how dangerous and precarious their life had been. Contrary to what is often believed, there are no immense forests in Belorussia stretching over hundreds of miles; there are mostly only patches of forest seldom more than five or ten miles wide.

Even many of these patches were yellow—set on fire by the Germans, to smoke the

Partisans out. A ferocious life-and-death struggle had gone on here for two years or more; one could tell that even from the air.

Then we flew over Minsk, and it all seemed a shambles, except for the enormous grey