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Warsaw Rising
In August 1944, as Russian forces approached Warsaw, the Poles rose with enthusiasm to liberate their capital city from the German oppressors. They were confronted by a force of the SS thugs and convicts, using methods of appalling brutality. After two months of heroic resistance they surrendered. Could the Russians have intervened to prevent the disaster?
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Warsaw Rising is part of Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century, and is Book #5 in the Politics in Action book series.
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Warsaw Rising is part of Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century, and is Book #5 in the Politics in Action book series.
160 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1972
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 11, 2024
WARSAW RISING is the sad tale of how the Polish people were betrayed over and over again during World War II. That terrible global conflict resulted when Britain and France honored their commitment to Poland and declared war on Germany for the unprovoked attack on Poland. History turned pretty much a blind eye to the fact that Communist Russia also attacked Poland at the same time as well. That may be due to the fact that Germany later turned on their co-conspirator and attacked Russia. Being as Germany had knocked France out of the war rather quickly the British decided that, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." This unholy alliance seemed necessary for Britain's survival.
Communist Russia under Stalin had no use for a non-Communist Poland on her border so the NKVD, under Stalin's orders, began killing all the Polish officers they had captured when they invaded Poland with the Nazis. It wasn't that the Communists merely wanted to wipe out the officer corps but rather kill the men were were land owners, politicians, religious leaders, and anybody educated who might oppose them. The bodies of these dead officers were buried in Katyn woods. When the Germans uncovered this war crime it was blown off as German propaganda.
Many Polish servicemen had found their way to Britain where they carried on the fight. Back in Poland others had went underground and were referred to as the Home Army. The Polish government in exile was headed by General Wladislaw Sikorski who was against co-operation with Communist Russia for obvious reasons, and it was no surprise to some that he died under mysterious circumstances.
The tide of war eventually turned against Germany, and not without the massive Lend-Lease aid sent to Russia by the Allies. True, the Russian soldier paid dearly with their blood to free their homeland but they marched in boots from the west, were supplied with over 100,000 trucks, and had access to a host of other material aid and food sent at tremendous risk.
So as the tide turned the Polish Home Army decided to rise up in rebellion against the German occupier. They could hear the sound of battle as the Russians closed in on Warsaw and wanted to greet the Russians as allies. Unfortunately, they lacked everything other than dedication. Mistakes were made and as food and ammunition ran short the Germans contained and methodically reduced the liberated areas of the Home Army. The Poles radioed London for help and it was slow in coming. Two planes heroically made the long hazardous flight and dropped a small quantity of arms and ammunition. The Polish Brigade in Britain were hoping to be dropped as reinforcements but it was really out of the question. Appeals were made to Stalin who turned a blind eye to the plight of the Poles. It became quite obvious later that he preferred the Nazis wipe out the Home Army and underground government that was not really friendly to Communism. Stalin initially refused to have his armies move closer to assist the Poles, nor did he allow the Red air force to contest the German mastery of the air over Warsaw which allowed the German Stukas to pulverize Polish defenses. The British and Americans wanted to fly in aid to Warsaw with their bombers but needed to refuel in Russia as they did with their shuttle raids. Stalin refused. Only towards the end did he allow Russian supplies to be dropped, without parachutes, which resulted in weapons being damaged and ammunition that was useless in Polish weapons. The Poles eventually surrendered and survivors sent off to concentration camps. Those Poles that escaped became partisans.
Unfortunately, when the Russians liberated their areas they invited the non-Communist partisan leaders to a conference and promptly killed them all. Poland would suffer under Communist rule for decades after the war.
This book is full of pictures, diagrams of weapons and several maps. It is an important record of history.
Communist Russia under Stalin had no use for a non-Communist Poland on her border so the NKVD, under Stalin's orders, began killing all the Polish officers they had captured when they invaded Poland with the Nazis. It wasn't that the Communists merely wanted to wipe out the officer corps but rather kill the men were were land owners, politicians, religious leaders, and anybody educated who might oppose them. The bodies of these dead officers were buried in Katyn woods. When the Germans uncovered this war crime it was blown off as German propaganda.
Many Polish servicemen had found their way to Britain where they carried on the fight. Back in Poland others had went underground and were referred to as the Home Army. The Polish government in exile was headed by General Wladislaw Sikorski who was against co-operation with Communist Russia for obvious reasons, and it was no surprise to some that he died under mysterious circumstances.
The tide of war eventually turned against Germany, and not without the massive Lend-Lease aid sent to Russia by the Allies. True, the Russian soldier paid dearly with their blood to free their homeland but they marched in boots from the west, were supplied with over 100,000 trucks, and had access to a host of other material aid and food sent at tremendous risk.
So as the tide turned the Polish Home Army decided to rise up in rebellion against the German occupier. They could hear the sound of battle as the Russians closed in on Warsaw and wanted to greet the Russians as allies. Unfortunately, they lacked everything other than dedication. Mistakes were made and as food and ammunition ran short the Germans contained and methodically reduced the liberated areas of the Home Army. The Poles radioed London for help and it was slow in coming. Two planes heroically made the long hazardous flight and dropped a small quantity of arms and ammunition. The Polish Brigade in Britain were hoping to be dropped as reinforcements but it was really out of the question. Appeals were made to Stalin who turned a blind eye to the plight of the Poles. It became quite obvious later that he preferred the Nazis wipe out the Home Army and underground government that was not really friendly to Communism. Stalin initially refused to have his armies move closer to assist the Poles, nor did he allow the Red air force to contest the German mastery of the air over Warsaw which allowed the German Stukas to pulverize Polish defenses. The British and Americans wanted to fly in aid to Warsaw with their bombers but needed to refuel in Russia as they did with their shuttle raids. Stalin refused. Only towards the end did he allow Russian supplies to be dropped, without parachutes, which resulted in weapons being damaged and ammunition that was useless in Polish weapons. The Poles eventually surrendered and survivors sent off to concentration camps. Those Poles that escaped became partisans.
Unfortunately, when the Russians liberated their areas they invited the non-Communist partisan leaders to a conference and promptly killed them all. Poland would suffer under Communist rule for decades after the war.
This book is full of pictures, diagrams of weapons and several maps. It is an important record of history.
September 27, 2025
Seldom in history has a people shown such bravery in the face of horror. The uprising by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 against the German occupation was a Spartacus event, bound to fail and more honorable for the effort. Without foreign allies, support from the Polish population, or modern weapons the ghetto was set ablaze with both fire and courage. Hitler had to reinforce the SS units guarding the settlement, who hunted down Jewish partisans block by block. In a sick joke, the SS Commander in Warsaw, Stroop, promised Hitler "the ghetto will no longer exist" by his fuhrer's birthday. Deschner has written a fiery study in urban warfare and fighting extermination with freedom.
April 28, 2024
A obra trata da revolta polonesa na sua capital, Varsóvia, na época ocupada pelos alemães. Destaca a atuação heróica o exército clandestino polonês, não tendo recebido apoio dos aliados. Outro aspecto importante, é o retrato do cinismo de Stálin que, às portas da cidade, recusou ajuda aos combatentes, deixando claro o que viria nos anos posteriores, durante a Guerra Fria.
May 26, 2023
3.5 stars. A solid military history monograph. Like many of the books in this series, it provides detail and historical analysis about a "minor" campaign of WWII which can only merit a few paragraphs in larger histories.
With a generous supply of maps (albeit rather small and hard-to-decipher ones in my edition), Gunther Deschner gives a clear, balanced, chronological account of the events of the Polish Home Army's tragic and doomed attempt to liberate their capital from the Germans before the arrival of the Red Army. In his analysis, he discusses the antecedents of this desperate gamble - the desire of Poland's government-in-exile to gain some political leverage to support Poland's desire for restored independence, the hostility of Stalin's Soviet Union to these aims, and the tensions created by this conflict of interests in the wider anti-German Alliance.
Militarily, the Rising was a worse fiasco than the equally-quixotic Easter Rising of 1916, and achieved only the wholesale destruction of large parts of Warsaw and the massacre of about 1/4 million of its citizens. The original intended commander, Stefan Rowecki, was betrayed and captured by the Germans over a year before it started. Despite this, Rowecki's successor, the brave but inexperienced Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, did not change the plan. The sites and even the timing of the Polish attacks were known in advance by the Germans, who were suitably well-prepared. The Poles also dispersed their attacks rather than concentrating their already-inadequate strength against a few vital points. The author speculates that the capture of one of the Vistula bridges might just have persuaded the Russians to change their attitude of hostile indifference. As it was, the Poles continued to hope for support from the Russians (although Stalin had consistently refused to countenance this) and from the US and Britain (in particular the despatch of the Polish Parachute Brigade) which was physically and politically impractical.
The Germans also made errors, particularly the licence given to irregular troops like the Kaminski and Dirlewanger detachments, whose barbaric atrocities in the Wola and Ochota districts actually stiffened the resistance of survivors by advertising the likely fate of anyone who surrendered. But once the Home Army had been split into a number of small pockets of resistance, their defeat in detail could only be a matter of time. Russian and Allied help was too little and too late.
In a final callous act of betrayal, none of the German commanders responsible for the civilian massacres was punished for war crimes. Kaminski was ironically executed by the Germans themselves, while Dirlewanger was extra-judicially killed in a POW camp. The major war criminal Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, already guilty of crimes elsewhere, saved his skin by turning State's Evidence and testifying against his former masters. Hans Reinefarth returned to his career as a lawyer and politician in post-war Germany, and Polish demands for his extradition were shamefully refused by the Western Allies.
So, a tragic, unnecessary campaign from which no-one except the ordinary soldiers of the Polish Home Army emerges with any credit.
Generally this was solid, stodgy military history, though the author makes some howlers which should have been picked up by the editors of the series:
In the introductory section about the perfidy of the Russians, General Ivan Chernyakhovski is said to have been the Red Army commander who took the salute with the German Guderian at the Brest-Litovsk victory parade in 1939. Er, no. That was Semyon Krivoshein. There are photos.
The refusal to drop the Polish Parachute Brigade into Warsaw is partly explained by "the Allies' experience at Arnhem" - Operation Market Garden took place after the Warsaw Rising.
The author repeats the error of larger histories by describing the 1939 Polish Army as "having a romantic belief in the effectiveness of the horse". This is unfair. In Poland's most recent experience of warfare, their cavalry had routed the Red Army at Warsaw in 1920. And the much-derided "cavalry charging tanks" is trotted out again. Polish cavalry were attacking not the tanks themselves but the Panzer infantry following up the tanks (frequently with success). The British Army's approach of simply putting its former cavalrymen into tanks without altering their tactical doctrine was also unsuccessful against the German Army early in the war.
The writing can perhaps be excused by the fact that the author is a German writing in English.......but that doesn't excuse the proofreading and editing. And some of the characteristic grammatical and linguistic oddities of this series appear in this one too. For such a short book, there are a lot of prolix passages of the "no less than", "quite simply", "by no means" variety. The random punctuation often requires several readings of a sentence to grasp the meaning. Perhaps that's how all military historians wrote in the 1960s. Even German ones.
Not the best of this series but well worth reading for anyone interested in the small print bits of WWII.
With a generous supply of maps (albeit rather small and hard-to-decipher ones in my edition), Gunther Deschner gives a clear, balanced, chronological account of the events of the Polish Home Army's tragic and doomed attempt to liberate their capital from the Germans before the arrival of the Red Army. In his analysis, he discusses the antecedents of this desperate gamble - the desire of Poland's government-in-exile to gain some political leverage to support Poland's desire for restored independence, the hostility of Stalin's Soviet Union to these aims, and the tensions created by this conflict of interests in the wider anti-German Alliance.
Militarily, the Rising was a worse fiasco than the equally-quixotic Easter Rising of 1916, and achieved only the wholesale destruction of large parts of Warsaw and the massacre of about 1/4 million of its citizens. The original intended commander, Stefan Rowecki, was betrayed and captured by the Germans over a year before it started. Despite this, Rowecki's successor, the brave but inexperienced Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, did not change the plan. The sites and even the timing of the Polish attacks were known in advance by the Germans, who were suitably well-prepared. The Poles also dispersed their attacks rather than concentrating their already-inadequate strength against a few vital points. The author speculates that the capture of one of the Vistula bridges might just have persuaded the Russians to change their attitude of hostile indifference. As it was, the Poles continued to hope for support from the Russians (although Stalin had consistently refused to countenance this) and from the US and Britain (in particular the despatch of the Polish Parachute Brigade) which was physically and politically impractical.
The Germans also made errors, particularly the licence given to irregular troops like the Kaminski and Dirlewanger detachments, whose barbaric atrocities in the Wola and Ochota districts actually stiffened the resistance of survivors by advertising the likely fate of anyone who surrendered. But once the Home Army had been split into a number of small pockets of resistance, their defeat in detail could only be a matter of time. Russian and Allied help was too little and too late.
In a final callous act of betrayal, none of the German commanders responsible for the civilian massacres was punished for war crimes. Kaminski was ironically executed by the Germans themselves, while Dirlewanger was extra-judicially killed in a POW camp. The major war criminal Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, already guilty of crimes elsewhere, saved his skin by turning State's Evidence and testifying against his former masters. Hans Reinefarth returned to his career as a lawyer and politician in post-war Germany, and Polish demands for his extradition were shamefully refused by the Western Allies.
So, a tragic, unnecessary campaign from which no-one except the ordinary soldiers of the Polish Home Army emerges with any credit.
Generally this was solid, stodgy military history, though the author makes some howlers which should have been picked up by the editors of the series:
In the introductory section about the perfidy of the Russians, General Ivan Chernyakhovski is said to have been the Red Army commander who took the salute with the German Guderian at the Brest-Litovsk victory parade in 1939. Er, no. That was Semyon Krivoshein. There are photos.
The refusal to drop the Polish Parachute Brigade into Warsaw is partly explained by "the Allies' experience at Arnhem" - Operation Market Garden took place after the Warsaw Rising.
The author repeats the error of larger histories by describing the 1939 Polish Army as "having a romantic belief in the effectiveness of the horse". This is unfair. In Poland's most recent experience of warfare, their cavalry had routed the Red Army at Warsaw in 1920. And the much-derided "cavalry charging tanks" is trotted out again. Polish cavalry were attacking not the tanks themselves but the Panzer infantry following up the tanks (frequently with success). The British Army's approach of simply putting its former cavalrymen into tanks without altering their tactical doctrine was also unsuccessful against the German Army early in the war.
The writing can perhaps be excused by the fact that the author is a German writing in English.......but that doesn't excuse the proofreading and editing. And some of the characteristic grammatical and linguistic oddities of this series appear in this one too. For such a short book, there are a lot of prolix passages of the "no less than", "quite simply", "by no means" variety. The random punctuation often requires several readings of a sentence to grasp the meaning. Perhaps that's how all military historians wrote in the 1960s. Even German ones.
Not the best of this series but well worth reading for anyone interested in the small print bits of WWII.
October 22, 2024
Another good Ballantine book
April 11, 2016
This one is dedicated entirely to the Polish chapter of WW2.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews