Stocznia Gdańsk S.A.: Poland Marks Anniversary of 1944 Warsaw Uprising

Poland Marks Anniversary of 1944 Warsaw Uprising

It's better to die standing than to live on your knees.

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 — a heroic and tragic 63-day struggle to liberate World War 2 Warsaw from Nazi/German occupation. Undertaken by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), the Polish resistance group, at the time Allied troops were breaking through the Normandy defenses and the Red Army was standing at the line of the Vistula River.

Warsaw could have been one of the first European capitals liberated; however, various military and political miscalculations, as well as global politics — played among Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) — turned the dice against it.

This site is dedicated to all those who fought for their freedom in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 as well as all those who, as civilians, perished in the effort.

Battle of Warsaw
Warsaw uprising (1944), tragic attempt by the Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa) to overthrow the German occupation as the Red Army closed on Warsaw. By 28 July 1944 citizens of Warsaw could hear the sounds of the battle between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. The Soviets were concerned about a German counter-attack and ordered their troops onto the defensive on 1 August.

The Home Army was sponsored by the British and the Polish government in exile in London, but the British turned down requests for active assistance from RAF aircraft and the Polish Parachute Brigade because Warsaw was beyond normal aircraft range and lay within the Soviet sphere. The USSR had its own plans and government-in-waiting, Rada Narodowa, and sponsored a different Polish army, the Armija Ludowa, which was unified with the Polish army that had been formed in the USSR. Nonetheless, the charge that the Soviets sat back and waited for the Germans to crush the uprising is baseless; there were four German armored divisions between them and the city and Marshal Rokossovsky, commanding the Soviet First Belorussian Front (army group), needed to regroup before continuing the offensive. The lamentable fact is that the uprising was intended to present the advancing Soviets with a fait accompli and was launched without prior consultation with either London or Moscow. It should also be noted that the Home Army did little to support the equally heroic and doomed uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943.

On 1 August Home Army underground units opened fire inside Warsaw, beginning two months of bitter fighting. The lull in Soviet operations permitted the Germans to send in overwhelming force, backed up by Einzatzgruppen extermination squads, and even if the Soviets had co-operated with earlier British efforts to airdrop supplies, it would not have made much difference. The Soviets themselves dropped supplies in the second half of September, but much of it fell into German hands. By 24 September the Germans had forced the isolated Polish units into small pockets and escape through the sewers was the only option. Fifteen thousand fighters of the 30, 000-40, 000-strong Home Army were dead, and 120, 000-200, 000 civilians were killed. On 2 October the fighting stopped, the remaining Poles were rounded up for slavery or extermination, and the Germans began razing Warsaw to the ground.

(1/5) Timewatch Battle for Warsaw World War II