The Delegatura consulted their superiors in London, who advised against a rising, warning that the Allies would be unable to support it in any way, but left the final decision up to them. The Delegatura left it to the military. After a meeting of senior officers, the commander of the AK, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, made his decision. With the advance units of the Red Army only twelve kilometres from Warsaw, and the thud of their guns rattling the windows, he gave the order to start on the following day.
At 5 p.m. on 1 August 1944 units of the AK went into action. Their initial aim was to clear the enemy from the city and seize arms. This might have been feasible in the volatile atmosphere of the last days of July, but by 1 August the Wehrmacht had re inforced its outposts throughout the city and was moving fresh Panzer divisions across the Vistula.
The AK units failed to take a number of their primary object ives, or to expel the Germans from a crucial east-west axis running between the Old Town and the city centre. Over the next couple of days they extended the area under their control, but failed to take the airport, the main railway station, or any of the Vistula bridges. By 6 August they had fought to a standstill, and from then on could only defend themselves. This they did for a total of sixtythree days.
The Germans mobilised a special force to deal with the rising under the command of General von dem Bach. It included the SS Viking Panzer division, an assortment of military police battalions, a brigade composed of German convicts, the SS Azerbaijan battalion and several units of Russian prisoners-of-war drafted into the ‘Russian National Liberation Army’ (RONA).
Over the next weeks the Korpsgruppe von dem Bach pushed the AK back, house by house, slaughtering the civilian inhabitants as they went. Following their capture of the Wola quarter, they indulged in a butchery of the civilian population which shocked even the German command. The Luftwaffe dive-bombed Polishheld areas, while long-range artillery pounded them. Conditions were indescribable. Short of ammunition, medical supplies, food and even water, the soldiers of the AK fought on with ingenuity (the German high command reported that the fighting was as hard as at Stalingrad, and casualty figures of 17,000 dead and only 9,000 wounded testify to the care taken with every bullet). They managed to capture several tanks and a quantity of other weapons, but they desperately needed air-drops of arms, ammunition and medical supplies and a Soviet advance against the Germans if they were going to regain the initiative.
An attempt to drop arms was made on the night of 4 August, but the price paid was enormous. The planes flew a round trip of 2,500 kilometres from northern Italy, and of the 196 sorties by British, Polish and South African crews over the next few days only forty-two made it to Warsaw. Churchill suggested a shuttle operation and requested landing facilities on Soviet airfields for the RAF and USAAF, but Stalin refused.
A couple of days after the outbreak of the rising, Moscow Radio denounced it as a conspiracy against the Soviet Union. Stalin told Mikołajczyk, who was still in Moscow, that ‘The Soviet command dissociates itself from the Warsaw adventure and cannot take any responsibility for it.’ The Soviet armies facing Warsaw ceased fighting and stood idle for the next six weeks.
On 20 August Churchill and Roosevelt sent a joint appeal couched in the strongest terms, to which Stalin replied that since the Poles had started the business they must bear the consequences, and described the AK as ‘a handful of power-seeking criminals’. He invoked a number of technical reasons why his armies did not go to the aid of Warsaw, but while there were certainly military difficulties involved, the real reason was political. It would have been madness for him to interfere while the Germans were liquidating the very elements that would be hostile to his purpose of turning Poland into a Soviet satellite.
After increasingly forceful demands from Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin eventually agreed to a shuttle operation. On 13 September his own air force appeared over Warsaw to drop supplies. Soviet forces at last occupied Praga, the east-bank suburb of Warsaw, and on 16 September Berling’s Polish troops attempted to cross the Vistula. On 18 September 107 B-17 Flying Fortresses of the USAAF carried out the first shuttle drop, but by then the Polishheld areas of the city had shrunk so far that most of the canisters fell into German hands.
The AK held the Old Town to the north, the city centre, and the large residential district of Mokotów to the south, as well as several smaller pockets. Communication between these was poor, while the large and well-armed units which had congregated in the countryside outside the city could not break through the ring of Germans surrounding their comrades within.