Warsaw Uprising Controversies
Although I don't doubt that Stalin had no love the Polish Home Army and wanted them wiped out, it seems unlikely that the Red Army could have saved the Poles from the massacre that resulted and the main issue was hardly political, but military. Here are the accounts of David Glantz and Richard Overy on the Warsaw Uprising. The David Glantz account is a bit less detailed for it is not from a book, but an article.
Richard Overy (Russia's War):
The Polish capital was no stranger to war. In September 1939 the German air force flattened large parts of it in an effort to force Polish capitulation. In April 1943 the surviving population of the Warsaw Ghetto rose in revolt, only to be destroyed by 2,000 troops of the Waffen-SS in a savage act of reprisal which reduced the area to rubble and left over 20,000 men, women and children dead. The 49,000 who survived were sent to the camps, some for a quick death from gassing, some for a slow death in the labour colonies. In August 1944, with the Red Army in full pursuit of an apparently beaten enemy, fighting broke out in Warsaw again. The Polish resistance, organized as the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), launched a rising in the capital on August 1 in an attempt to liberate it before the Soviet armies arrived.
The revolt was led by General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski and 20,000 poorly armed patriots. At five o’clock in the afternoon of August 1 the signal went out to the fighters of the Home Army. Germans found themselves all at once under a hail of fire from doorways, windows and balconies. Home-made bombs and mines exploded around the city. Parts of the German garrison were overwhelmed and large parts of central Warsaw were seized, but the rebels failed to capture the railway stations or any of the bridges over the Vistula. Lacking artillery, tanks or even adequate quantities of hand weapons and ammunition, they were worn down in two months of fighting against German troops under orders to raze the city and exterminate its people. Some 225,000 civilians died, in the largest single atrocity of the war. The German troops went on a rampage. They were led by the same Bach-Zalewski who had commanded the Einsatzgruppen in 1941 and run the brutal anti-partisan war behind the front. Hospitals were burned down with staff and patients imprisoned inside; gas was used to flush out Poles fleeing through the sewers; women and children were murdered in their thousands. On October 2, to save his city further suffering, Bor-Komorowski surrendered. His men went into captivity and Warsaw’s remaining population was deported to German camps. Stone by stone, street by street, the ancient city was utterly demolished.
It has long been conventional in the West to hold Stalin and the Red Army responsible, indirectly, for the horrors that befell Warsaw. Churchill in his memoirs berated his former ally for lack of ‘considerations of honour, humanity, decent commonplace good faith’, characteristics with which Stalin was indeed poorly supplied. It is said that the Polish Home Army expected help from the Soviet Union. Instead the Red Army sat on the Vistula and watched the destruction of the city in front of them. Churchill was only one of many who assumed that Stalin did this in order to let the German army liquidate Polish nationalists instead of having to do so himself. In this sense the agony of Warsaw could be regarded either as the final flourish of the Nazi-Soviet Pact or as the first battleground of the Cold War.
The truth is far more complicated than this. The Warsaw rising was instigated not to help out the Soviet advance but to forestall it. Polish nationalists did not want Warsaw liberated by the Red Army but wanted to do so themselves, as a symbol of the liberation struggle and the future independence of Poland. This ambition was all the more urgent because only days before, on July 21, a Communist-backed Polish Committee for National Liberation was set up with Stalin’s blessing. At Lublin on July 22 the Committee was declared to be the new Provisional Government; four days later a pact of friendship was signed, with the Soviet Union recognizing the new Government. All of this was at least technically within the terms agreed at Teheran, where Churchill and Roosevelt had half-heartedly acquiesced to Stalin’s request to keep the frontiers of 1941 and his share of Poland as divided in the German-Soviet pact. What Polish nationalists and the Western Allies could not tolerate was the almost certain fact that any new Polish state born of German defeat would be dominated by the Soviet Union. The Polish Government-in-exile in London, led by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, urged the Home Army to launch a pre-emptive nationalist insurrection and remained unalterably opposed to any idea that the Soviet Union should keep the territory seized in 1939.
The real issue was not political - there was nothing new about the hostility between Soviet leaders and Polish nationalists - but military. Could the Red Army have captured Warsaw in August 1944 and saved its population from further German barbarities? The answer now seems unambiguously negative. Soviet forces did not sit and play while Warsaw burned. The city was beyond their grasp. In the first days of August the most advanced Soviet units were engaged in bitter fighting on the approaches to the city; the small bridgeheads over the Vistula were subject to a fierce German onslaught. To the north both sides desperately contested the crossing of the Bug and Narew rivers, which might have opened up another avenue to the Polish capital. This was hardly inactivity, though it could little benefit the Poles. Stalin was completely, and no doubt correctly, dismissive of the military potential of the Polish army. ‘What kind of army is it?’ he asked Mikolajczyk, who was visiting Moscow in early August, ‘without artillery, tanks, air force? In modern war this is nothing…’ Soviet commanders knew that this was not like Kiev or Minsk; their forces were tired and short of arms, and the Germans had made the defence of the Warsaw district a priority. Late in August 1944 General Rokossovsky, whose troops were tied down on the Warsaw front, told a British war correspondent that ‘the rising would have made sense only if we were on the point of entering Warsaw. That point had not been reached at any stage… We were pushed back…’ When Zhukov was sent to the Warsaw front in early September to report to Stalin on the confused situation there, he concluded on military grounds that the Vistula could not yet be crossed in force. German war memoirs, which are less suspect as a source, confirm that the Red Army was prevented from helping Warsaw by the sudden stiffening of the German defence.
Some effort was made to help the insurgents. Churchill and Roosevelt were shocked by Stalin’s attitude to the rising; they began to drop arms and supplies from heavy bombers, but the quantities were tiny. On August 4 two aircraft managed to reach Warsaw; on August 8 only four. The accuracy of high-altitude parachute drops was negligible, and it is likely that most of the material fell into German hands. This was Stalin’s reason for not dropping supplies. There was little military realism behind the Western plan. It is out of the question that Allied air drops could have sustained Polish resistance in Warsaw for long; they were gestures prompted by humanity certainly, but by politics as well. When Stalin finally relented in September and began to drop supplies into the surviving pockets of resistance in Warsaw, he was almost certainly motivated by politics alone. No doubt he did welcome the destruction of anti-Soviet Polish nationalism, which was certain by this stage. But even his Polish Communist allies wanted some kind of gesture towards the fate of their future capital, and by early September the military situation had altered. The Polish 1st Army under General Berling joined the front line opposite Warsaw on August 20. On September 10 the attack was renewed; this time the Praga, the eastern suburb of Warsaw on the Soviet side of the Vistula, was captured. Air shipments by low-level parachute drops began. The Polish 1st Army then launched its own attack across the Vistula into Warsaw itself, but after heavy losses was forced on September 23 to retreat back across the river. Even at this late stage the Polish Home Army distrusted their pro-Communist compatriots so profoundly that they refused to co-ordinate their operations with the new attacking force. A week later they surrendered, victims not so much of cynical Stalinist calculation but of their own nationalist fervour: love of their country and hatred of the two great powers at either shoulder which had conspired to crush it.
Bagration did not lead to the liberation of Warsaw, for it had not been part of the original plan. In all other respects the operation was a resounding success. Belorussia was liberated, as was eastern Poland. In August the last of the five offensives was unleashed in the southern sector of the front, at the point where German and Romanian forces had been poised to absorb the Soviet punch in June. Now Axis forces were much weakened by the effort to reinforce the fighting further north, as Zhukov’s plan had intended. Soviet forces were larger than the armies they attacked, but the two months of fighting to the north had drained their reserves also. Some of the men were poorly trained, recruited hastily from the very areas the Soviet army had liberated only a few months before. Here too, the remodelled Red Army relied on tanks, guns and aircraft rather than on raw manpower.
David Glantz (German-Soviet War 1941-1945: Myth's and Realities)
No case of Red Army action or inaction on the Soviet-German front has generated more heated controversy then its operations east of Warsaw in August and September 1944 during the Polish Home Army’s Warsaw uprising against German occupation forces. While most Western historians have routinely accused Stalin of perfidy and deliberate treachery in permitting the Germans to destroy the Warsaw Poles, Russian historians counter by asserting the Red Army made every reasonable attempt to assist the beleaguered Poles.
In fact, in late July 1944 the Stavka ordered its 2nd Tank Army to race northward to Warsaw with the 47th Army and a cavalry corps in its wake. After encountering two Wehrmacht divisions defending the southern approaches to Warsaw, the tank army tried to bypass the German defenses from the northeast but ran into a counterstroke by four Wehrmacht panzer divisions, which severely mauled the tank army and forced it to withdraw on 5 August. During the ensuing weeks, while the Warsaw uprising began, matured, but ultimately failed, the forces on the 1st Belorussian Front’s right wing continued their advance against Army Group Center northeast of Warsaw. For whatever motive, however, the forces on the 1st Belorussian Front’s right wing focused on defending the Magnuszew bridgehead south of Warsaw, which was being subjected to heavy German counterattacks throughout mid-August, and the forces on the front’s left wing continued their advance to the Bug River north of Warsaw and attempted to seize crossings over the river necessary to facilitate future offensive operations.
Throughout the entire period up to 20 August 1944, the 1st Belorussian Front’s 47th Army remained the only major Red Army forces deployed across the Vistula River opposite Warsaw. On that date the 1st Polish Army joined it. Red Army forces north of Warsaw finally advanced across the Bug River on 3 September, closed up to the Narew River the following day, and fought their way into bridgeheads across the Narew on 6 September. Lead elements of two Polish divisions finally assaulted across the Vistula River into Warsaw on 13 September but made little progress and were evacuated back
across the river ten days later.
Political considerations and motivations aside, an objective consideration of combat in the Warsaw region indicates that, prior to early September, German resistance was sufficient to halt any Soviet assistance to the Poles in Warsaw, were it intended. Thereafter, it would have required a major reorientation of military efforts from Magnuszew in the south or, more realistically, from the Bug and Narew River axis in the north in order to muster sufficient force to break into Warsaw. And once broken into, Warsaw would have been a costly city to clear of Germans and an unsuitable location from which to launch a new offensive.
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Originally Posted by Dark Elder
had purely political matters. It was an attempt to break Poland: morally, intelectually and politically.
) and pretended to gain control over it. To gain control over AK was to gain control over independent Poland. Soon after that this whole desperate attempt to show Soviets 'who's rocking there' was cancelled by all Polish officials, including 'Bur', the main Komendant himself. The goal was to welcome the Russians as an independent people, not their servants. 
