* By the spring of 1944, the German-held portion of the Soviet Union had been reduced to Belorussia. Of course, driving the Fascist enemy completely out of the Motherland was at the top of the Stalin's agenda, resulting in yet another massive Red Army offensive, Operation BAGRATION. With Soviet power becoming increasingly overwhelming, Stalin's arrogance began to re-assert itself, and the strains in the alliance between East and West became increasingly apparent -- most obviously in the summer of 1944, when the Polish underground rose up against the Germans, and the Red Army indifferently stood by while the uprising was crushed.
* In the spring of 1944, a simple look at the battle lines in the East on a map would have suggested that the German Army Group Center, occupying what amounted to a huge salient in Belorussia, was the likely next target of the Red Army. However, German intelligence suggested that the Soviets were more likely to push in the south. Stalin had always had ambitions in the Balkans; the conquest of Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria would knock three German allies out of the war, and most importantly cut off oil supplies to the Reich. The Red Army could then advance into Germany up the Danube valley.
Hitler believed the intelligence, and looted Army Group Center of men and material to brace up the shaky line to the south. Army Group Center's commander, Field Marshal Ernst Busch, was in no good position to complain and went along with the transfers, which eventually reduced his command to 400,000 men, a shadow of its peak strength of a million.
German intelligence was wrong. Stalin clearly understood the benefits of a Balkan strategy, but eliminating the "Belorussian Bulge" had plenty of attractions of its own. The Germans in the bulge threatened the flanks of Red Army movements to the north and south, while the salient was vulnerable to being cut off and wiped out. There was also an emotional factor, in that Belorussia was the last major chunk of Soviet territory in German hands.
Preparations for an offensive into Belorussia -- codenamed Operation BAGRATION after Prince Bagration, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars and not incidentally of Georgian origin -- began in April 1944. Stalin was still a bit uncertain about ignoring the Balkans, fearing that the British and Americans meant to double-cross him and actually open up their second front there, blocking Soviet expansion in the region. In fact, the Rumanians, who were fed up with the Germans but distrusted the Soviets, had been making overtures to the Western Allies for a separate surrender. The exercise went nowhere, and Stalin's foreign intelligence service made it clear that the Western Allies were preparing to keep their word given at Tehran to invade France in the spring of 1944. Stalin grew less and less worried about being beaten to the Balkans.
BAGRATION was under the direction of Marshals Vasilevsky and Zhukov, who gradually accumulated a massive, well-equipped assault force. By the end of May, German intelligence finally began to sense that the Soviets were building up forces around Army Group Center. Busch was worried, but Hitler shrugged it off, possibly in wishful thinking, as yet another Soviet deception -- designed to conceal Stalin's true intentions to the south and pin down Army Group Center.
Hitler soon had other things to worry about. On 6 June 1944, the Western Allies landed at Normandy. Stalin now had his second front, and any lingering concerns he had about an Anglo-American invasion of the Balkans evaporated. Although the Germans would continue to keep the bulk of their forces in the East, with Allied armies advancing on two sides Hitler's Reich was in a vise that would soon exert crushing pressure and strain the faltering German war machine past its limits.
By mid-June, the last pieces for BAGRATION were being put into place. 2.5 million men were committed to the offensive, along with 5,200 tanks and assault guns, 7,000 aircraft, and 31,000 guns and heavy mortars. In response to the German Tiger and Panther tanks, Soviet industry had pumped great effort into building improved armor:
Huge stockpiles of food, supplies, and ammunition were accumulated, and an enormous fleet of American 6x6 trucks, was assembled to haul the material to the troops; without the 6x6, the Soviets would not have been able to maintain deep offensive operations. Four Red Army fronts would participate in the attack:
The plan was straightforward in overall concept, with the Red Army advancing in two huge pincers that would converge on Minsk, trapping whatever was left of Army Group Center that hadn't been smashed by the initial onslaught.
* BAGRATION jumped off as on 22 June 1944, the third anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The northern wing of the offensive went in first; the central element on 23 June; and the southern wing on 24 June. The staggered attacks threw the Germans into confusion, with the confusion greatly magnified by the actions of swarms of Belorussian partisans who rose up at the same time to attack German communications and supply lines, as well as seize bridges needed by the Red Army.
German front lines quickly crumbled. Busch was all but helpless to react, not only because he was so grossly outnumbered and outgunned, but because Hitler had denied him tactical flexibility, insisting that large numbers of troops hold "fortified places" near the front lines to the death. Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt's 3rd Panzer Army, confronting the attacks to the north and northwest, was forced to stand fast as Red Army forces hit them hard and flowed around their flanks.
On 23 June, Reinhardt asked Busch for permission to fall back. Busch, pinned down by the Fuehrer's obstinacy, could not grant the request. The next day, 24 June, Reinhardt went to the top, calling Zeitzler to ask for permission to withdraw, in particular saying that his 53rd Corps was in immediate danger of being surrounded at Vitebsk, one of the fortified towns. Zeitzler left Reinhardt on hold and talked to the Fuehrer, then returned to say that Hitler had refused to authorize the withdrawal. However, Hitler fidgeted over the matter for several hours and finally authorized a withdrawal that evening, though he insisted that one division remain behind to fight to the last. It was too late. The 53rd Corps was completely encircled, and the Red Army hammered it to pieces for three days, smashing desperate German attempts to break out. The corps commander, Major General Friedrich Gollwitzer, finally ran up the white flag.
While the 53rd Corps was being crushed, Hitler fussed over obedience to the letter of his orders, and on 25 June he passed an order down through Busch to Reinhardt to drop a staff officer by parachute into Vitebsk with written instructions emphasizing what they were to do. Busch was shocked when Reinhardt bluntly refused to do it. Why waste a single further life for such foolishness? Busch pressed Reinhardt on the matter, and Reinhardt -- who must have had a spine of tungsten steel -- replied that if Hitler really insisted, he, Reinhardt, would go himself. The Fuehrer backed down.
* This little farce took place against a backdrop of total disaster all up and down the line. In the center, General Kurt von Tippelskirch's 4th Army was being torn to pieces, having lost two full divisions in a futile attempt to hold the fortified towns of Orsha and Mogilev. His forces were mercilessly harassed by Red Air Force Sturmoviks and other attack aircraft of General K.A. Vershin's Fourth Air Army, which claimed the destruction of over 3,000 German vehicles.
Tippelskirch sent an order down to a reserve panzer grenadier division to move out and "plug the hole east of Mogilev". The division commander, a Major General von Steinkeller, reported to his corps commander, a General Martinek, who told him sarcastically: "Precisely what hole are you supposed to stop? We've got nothing but holes here. Your place is back on the Berezina River, so that we can have an interception line when we can't hold onto the Dnieper any longer. And that will be pretty soon."
Rokossovsky's assault, the last of the three to go forward, was proving just as brutally successful as the others. His forces drove forward on a two-pronged pincer movement, a scheme which he had sold to Stalin by being persistent when everyone else told him not to dare disagree with Koba. This took a lot of conviction, since Rokossovsky, unlike some other generals such as Zhukov, had personal experience of what it was like to be worked over by Beria's thugs.
The attack was meticulously planned and went off perfectly, smashing into the German 9th Army under General Hans Jordan. On 27 June the pincers closed, trapping 100,000 Germans around Bobriusk, another one of the fortified places. The 20th Panzer Division managed to punch a hole through the encirclement on 29 June, and 30,000 Germans were able to slip out of the trap. However, by the end of the day the Red Army had wiped out the rest of the pocket, capturing 20,000 Germans. The other 50,000 were all dead. Rokossovsky later described the pocket as a "huge graveyard strewn with mauled bodies and mangled machines."
In four days the Red Army had overrun four fortified towns, demonstrating the uselessness of the concept. The strongholds had possibly inconvenienced the Soviets by forcing them to expend the time, ammunition, and resources to wipe them out, but it was a much more straightforward exercise to smash an enemy who just sat there waiting to be encircled and destroyed than to bag one that was in motion, falling back in the face of blows and striking out when an opportunity presented itself.
Hitler knew that if he kept yielding ground, sooner or later the Red Army would march into Berlin -- but he failed to understand that he was accelerating the process, not delaying it. On 28 June, the Fuehrer had attempted to repair the damage in his own style by sacking General Jordan and handing his 9th Army over to General Nikolaus von Vormann, and then sacking Field Marshal Busch and assigning command of Army Group Center to, of course, Walter Model. Model also retained command of Army Group North Ukraine and promptly transferred divisions from there to try to brace up the defense in the center.
The Catastrophe General knew perfectly well how desperate the situation was, but the Fuehrer would not give him freedom of movement either, insisting that Army Group Center hold a line on the Berezina River, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) to the east of Minsk. It was a fantasy, since many German units had already fallen back well to the west of the Berezina, and German communications, organization, and logistics in the region had effectively broken down.
The Red Army was converging relentlessly on Minsk in their planned pincer movement. Once the pincers closed, all the Germans to the east would be doomed. Soviet troops were determined and moving quickly. Hundreds of thousands of Belorussians had been slaughtered, and countless villages had been razed by SS Einsatzgruppen during the Nazi occupation; when Soviet soldiers saw what had been done there, they were filled with anger and hatred. Many German soldiers, demoralized and without leadership, surrendered in numbers to Soviet forces, even though Red Army troops had shown a strong inclination to kill Germans who tried to surrender. Other Germans frantically raced west to escape the trap. When their vehicles became bogged down in traffic jams, the soldiers got out and continued their retreat on foot.
Chernyakhovsky's Third Belorussian Front and Rokossovsky's First Belorussian Front finally met up on 3 July 1944. The ring was closed. The triumphant Red Army forces then prepared to move into Lithuania to the north and Poland to the west, while such German resistance as still persisted was mopped up.
* The mopping-up operation was complete by 11 July. 28 German divisions had been destroyed during BAGRATION, with over 300,000 German soldiers killed or captured. The total included most of the 30,000 that had escaped the trap at Bobriusk, only to find themselves in a bigger trap. Red Army soldiers who had survived long enough to remember the ghastly encirclements of 1941 could take satisfaction in handing back to the Germans what the Soviets had suffered a few years earlier.
On 17 July, 50,000 German prisoners were paraded through Moscow on their way to labor camps as a propaganda exercise. Some Western journalists had suggested that the Germans had withdrawn most of their troops from Belorussia before the beginning of BAGRATION, and Stalin wanted to prove that Hitler hadn't been that sensible. The prisoners were watched by crowds that remained silent -- whether as a measure of contempt, or out of an inability to further mock the pathetically humbled, is hard to say. The march was filmed from a special press truck. Street-cleaning trucks followed the parade, symbolically cleaning away the stain of their passage.
The prisoners would not find their captivity pleasant, but unlike the unfortunates taken earlier in the war, most would survive their imprisonment. The wheels of the Soviet apparatus had turned, and they would at least be given the minimal necessities needed to stay alive. It was more than what the Germans had ever done for Soviet prisoners.
* Any person with sense knew that final defeat in the East was now only a matter of time. Hitler, never the most balanced of men, sank into delusion, grasping at phantom opportunities for victories. He was struck a further, devastating blow on 20 July 1944 when members of the German officer corps attempted to assassinate him with a bomb, failing only by a freak stroke of luck that saved Hitler while four others in the room were killed. He took his vengeance on the plotters and anyone he suspected, with the Gestapo arresting them, torturing them, and then brutally executing them after brief show trials. Hitler watched movies of the executions.
Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was implicated in the plot. Admitting that such a great hero of the German people could have schemed to kill the Fuehrer would be a humiliation, so Rommel was ordered to take poison and then given a grand state funeral, his death being reported as due to natural causes. The Kremlin said little about the matter. An attempt to assassinate a tyrannical dictator, even one who was an enemy, may have made Josef Stalin uneasy.
Hitler had to take pleasure in the executions because there was nothing else to make him happy at the time. BAGRATION had been yet another disaster in the East; it was quickly followed by a comparable disaster in the West in mid-August, when Allied forces broke out of the Normandy beachhead. Thanks to the Fuehrer's predictable insistence that his generals stand their ground, the Allied armies swung around the German forces resisting the invasion and slaughtered them.
In the meantime, on 15 August 1944, Allied forces landed in Southern France under Operation DRAGOON. The British and Americans had argued over DRAGOON up to the last minute, Churchill having preferred a landing in the Balkans -- one of the objectives of course being to curtail Soviet ambitions in that region. That was precisely one of the major reasons why the Americans didn't like the idea, Roosevelt understanding that he had no mandate from the electorate to get into a fight with the USSR. Germany was the real enemy. The American view prevailed.
While the merits and faults of DRAGOON are still debated, the end effect of the dual-pronged Allied assault on France was that the Germans were effectively run out of France as rapidly as they had conquered it in the spring of 1940. Paris was liberated on 25 August. By the end of August, the collapse of the Wehrmacht in France gave hopes to the Western Allies that the Reich was on its last legs, that the war would be over by Christmas. However, the momentum of the drive faltered as it stretched its thin supply lines, and as German forces fell back towards the Fatherland, they rallied and managed to stabilize a stubborn defense. Hitler had been given some breathing space, for all the good it could do him.
BACK_TO_TOP* While the Red Army was crushing German resistance in Belorussia, the Soviets and the Western Allies were engaged in a collaborative military venture that would prove less significant in terms of the damage it did to the Axis than it would in demonstrating the weaknesses of the alliance between East and West against Hitler.
After the Anglo-American invasion of southern Italy in September 1943, the Allies captured air bases there that could be used to perform bombing missions into Central Europe. There were still some targets that were out of reach, but some US Army Air Forces (USAAF) officers came up with a scheme to ensure those targets got their fair share of bombs: bases would be established on Soviet territory, allowing "shuttle bombing" missions between Italy (or England) and the Soviet bases.
In November 1943, an American military mission went to the USSR to discuss the idea, which was codenamed Operation FRANTIC. After the Tehran conference, Stalin passed down orders that six airfields should be prepared to support the effort. In February 1944, the USAAF got the bases, but it turned out only three were set up for the effort, consisting of airfields at Poltava, Mirgorod, and Piryatin, around Kiev in Ukraine. The bases were farther from the front lines than the USAAF liked, and they were also in a poor state of repair.
All that could be chalked up to the strains of war -- everything in the regions the Germans had evacuated was in a poor state of repair, if it hadn't been totally demolished -- but the American officers trying to direct the effort found themselves dealing with an unfriendly, suspicious, and not very cooperative Soviet bureaucracy. Allies or not, the Americans were foreigners, and the Stalin did not like having foreigners around at all. Winston Churchill had not been very enthusiastic about FRANTIC, believing that it reflected far more confidence in Stalin than was wise, and events were bearing that belief out.
However, FRANTIC went forward anyway, and the first shuttle bombing raid took place on 2 June 1944, with USAAF B-17 Flying Fortress bombers and their P-51 Mustang fighter escorts flying from Italy, raiding the railroad marshaling yards at Debreczen in Hungary, and then flying on to Ukraine. Despite the tensions between Soviet and Russian officials over FRANTIC, the American airmen were made to feel very welcome by the Soviet personnel assigned to support them.
Once FRANTIC got rolling it seemed to go well enough, or at least it did up to the fourth raid, on 21 June, which was the first shuttle bombing mission from England. The USAAF hit synthetic oil facilities in Germany and went on to the USSR, not realizing they were being shadowed from a distance by a Luftwaffe Heinkel He 111 bomber. At midnight, the Luftwaffe hit the Poltava and Piryatin bases, dropping flares and working the airfields over for about two hours. 43 B-17s were destroyed and 26 were badly damaged; 15 P-51s were destroyed as well, along with large amounts of fuel and other supplies. American crews reported that the Soviets failed to put up any effective resistance to the raid, and in fact the impression was that the passivity was deliberate.
In hindsight, given the occasional gross blunderings of the Soviet war machine, and the fact that in the Soviet military few dared take initiative without approval from the higher-ups, that impression might well have been wrong. Still, if it wasn't bungling, such treachery was perfectly in character for Stalin. The shuttle bombing missions were not abandoned for the moment, but they were suspended for a month until the mess on the ground could be cleaned up and the defenses of the airbases improved.
BACK_TO_TOP* Marshal Rokossovsky's First Belorussian Front led the Soviet advance into Poland, jumping across the 1939 Soviet-Polish border on the morning of 18 July 1944, preceded by the massive artillery bombardments favored by the Red Army. The immediate objective was Lublin, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) to the west and 170 kilometers (105 miles) southeast of Warsaw. Although Hitler had designated Lublin a fortified place, the garrison only numbered about 900 men. The Red Army entered Lublin on the afternoon of 23 July and quickly captured it.
All seemed to be going to Stalin's satisfaction. Poland was not merely the road to Berlin, it was a valuable piece of property in its own right, and Stalin took steps to make sure it would remain Soviet property after the war. On 22 July, the Soviets announced the formation of the "Polish Committee of National Liberation", which became known as the "Lublin Committee". The committee was played up in propaganda broadcasts as a representative selection of free Polish leadership -- but it was just a tool of the Kremlin, for example endorsing a new border that would cede large amounts of Polish territory to the USSR. The fact that the prewar Mikolajczyk government was still operating in exile in London was not much of an inconvenience; Moscow ignored the London Poles.
By the end of the month, the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts had begun a push into Rumania, the door to the Balkans, while Marshal Konev's First Ukrainian Front moved out to support Rokossovsky's First Belorussian Front along its southern flank. The move into Poland, however, was beginning to bog down as the Red Army stretched its supply lines and encountered stronger German resistance.
Soviet soldiers advancing into Poland found more ghastly evidence of German cruelty. Nazi rule had been, first to last, the very worst in Poland, while the extermination of the Jewry and other "undesireables" had been mostly conducted in the six great "murder factories" the SS had established on Polish soil. On 23 July, the Red Army had captured the death camp at Majdanek, just outside Lublin. Soviet propaganda took full advantage of the opportunity to trumpet atrocities that were almost beyond imagination. For the moment, Hitler's crimes proved so monstrous that they masked suspicions in the West that Stalin was every bit as big a monster. Stalin himself would now do much to verify that all the suspicions about him were true.
* On 29 July, as the Red Army approached Warsaw, Soviet radio broadcasts issued appeals for the Poles to rise up, that the moment of liberation was at hand. Communism, the creed of the Soviet state that most Poles regarded as a menace to their national existence, had never been popular in Poland, and the Communist underground there was weak. The main resistance group was the Polish Home Army, the resistance arm of the Polish government in exile in London. The Home Army was led by "General Bor", the nom de guerre of Tadeusz Komorowski, leading a force said to be in the hundreds of thousands. The Warsaw branch of the Home Army was led by "Colonel Monter", actually Antoni Chrusciel, who led 40,000 resistance fighters. Soviet propaganda had very little good to say about the Home Army.
With Soviet tanks not far away, the Home Army wanted to be able to liberate Warsaw by themselves to make it much more difficult for Moscow to set up the stooge Lublin Committee as the government of Poland. The Home Army wasn't really strong enough to beat the heavily-armed Germans in a stand-up fight, but if the Poles could clear the enemy out of the city and then let the Red Army move in, the Germans would not have time to send in reinforcements. Such an uprising assumed a certain cooperativeness on the part of the Red Army, and skeptics might have wondered just how sincere the Soviet radio broadcasts had been in calling for an uprising. Churchill, definitely a skeptic of the Soviets, encouraged Mikolajczyk to fly to Moscow on 31 July and try to sort things out with Stalin.
However, the Warsaw Poles did not wait on the outcome of the visit. Taking action without assurances from the Soviets was taking a big risk, but it would have been a big risk to do nothing as well, and so the order came down to rise up. The fighting was to begin at 5:00 PM on 1 August 1944, but squabbles and shooting with the Germans started after 3:00 PM. The insurgents, wearing red-and-white armbands in reflection of the colors of the Polish flag, quickly captured the center of Warsaw. Things seemed to be going well, though the Germans were able to hold their main installations, denying the insurgents supplies, weapons, and ammunition. Still, there were only about 13,000 German troops in the city and their commander, Lieutenant General Reiner Stahel, was surrounded in his own headquarters in the center of town. The Home Army fighters set up barricades in the streets to hold the ground they had taken. They were enthusiastic and excited. Pictures show pretty Polish girls kitted with captured German weapons and gear, smiling broadly.
* Responsibility for fighting partisans actually fell to Heinrich Himmler and the SS. Himmler even welcomed the uprising to an extent. It would provide a pretext for the total destruction of Warsaw and teach the Poles the lesson that their national aspirations were a delusion. Inspired by this noble vision, Himmler promptly ordered that General Stefan Rowecki, General Bor's predecessor and a captive of the Germans since June 1943, be taken out and executed on 1 August.
The next day, 2 August, Himmler ordered SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski to crush the uprising. Von dem Bach was far from happy with the assignment, since all he had was two battalions and a regiment of German Army troops, plus two brigades of SS troops. Both of the SS brigades were scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. The Dirlewanger Brigade was led by SS Colonel Oscar Dirlewanger, basically a drunk and a thug who had recruited criminals and other sorry sorts much like him from concentration and prison camps. The Kaminski Brigade, led by Mieczyslaw Kaminski, a Soviet citizen recruited into the SS to fight partisans, was of much the same low level of quality.
Von dem Bach tried to make do with what he had. The fighting for the town went back and forth in a more or less haphazard fashion for two days, but then on 5 August the SS attacked in force, with orders passed down from Himmler to kill every Pole -- all men, the women, the children -- and to destroy everything. The Dirlewanger and Kaminski Brigades made little real progress. The Dirlewanger Brigade did follow their orders to the extent of rounding up tens of thousands of Polish civilians and shooting them, but they were not as energetic in dealing with Poles who were shooting back. The Kaminski Brigade was, blessedly, even less diligent than the Dirlewanger Brigade, with its soldiers mostly focused on loot and rape. They were stopped cold when the Poles cleverly placed a vodka distillery in their path.
Von dem Bach immediately realized that these troops were worse than useless; in fact, the Germans would become so disgusted with Kaminski's notions of soldiering that they would simply shoot him a few weeks later. For the moment, von dem Bach took the measure of passing down an order that the mindless slaughter of the defenseless was to cease. Von dem Bach was absolutely no saint, having been doing the Reich's dirty work in directing SS Einsatzgruppen in the occupied regions of the USSR until the Red Army managed to encourage the Germans to leave. He gave the order at least partly to focus his force of thugs on actually fighting instead of amusing themselves with idle killing. It must have also registered in the back of his mind that the time was coming soon when Germans would have to answer for their conduct. Unfortunately, his order was often ignored.
* In the meantime, in Moscow Stalin was giving Mikolajczyk the run-around, even insisting that there was no evidence of fighting in Warsaw. The Home Army was screaming for supplies and weapons, and so on the night of 4 August the British Royal Air Force sent 14 bombers, half of them piloted by Poles, from southern Italy to drop weapons and supplies by parachute.
The goods were delivered in three-meter (ten-foot) metal cylinders and included Sten submachine guns, rifles, pistols, ammunition, and the British "Portable Infantry Anti-Tank (PIAT)" weapon. The PIAT consisted of a launcher with a big spring that fired an anti-tank bomb; it was a crude weapon, but it was particularly useful to the Home Army in close-quarters fights with German panzers. Niceties such as clothing, chocolate, cigarettes, and coffee were also crammed into the cylinders.
However, five of the bombers sent on the mission didn't come back, and the RAF decided to discontinue the supply flights. The London Poles protested loudly, and the supply flights were resumed on 8 August. In the meantime, the USAAF had come up with a scheme to perform supply drops and land at the bases in Ukraine, but when Averell Harriman, now the US ambassador to the USSR, asked Molotov for permission, Molotov flatly refused, saying that Moscow didn't want anything to do with the Warsaw "adventure". Harriman, who had no illusions about the Soviets, shot back that Soviet radio broadcasts had encouraged the uprising. Molotov replied in his usual bland way that he hadn't heard about any such broadcasts.
* On 12 August, von dem Bach renewed his assault on the Home Army. This time he relied on artillery, lots of it -- even using oversized siege guns designed to crush major fortifications -- supported by armor. He began to grind methodically through the areas of the city held by the insurgents, though it was slow going since some of the ancient buildings in the city were extremely solid, and Home Army resistance was very stubborn.
The fighters included teenage girls, as well as young boys who normally acted as couriers, often crawling through the sewers to reach their objectives, but who occasionally took active part in combat as well. The Home Army had little food or water and the weather was very hot. Tens of thousands of Poles had been killed, and though great efforts were made to bury them it wasn't possible to bury them all, and the air swarmed with flies that carried disease.
Von dem Bach launched a particularly heavy assault on 19 August. On 20 August, Roosevelt and Churchill sent a joint appeal to Stalin to either allow the Allies to perform supply drops to the Home Army, or to provide direct assistance to the uprising. Stalin flatly refused to do anything, calling the London Poles a gang of "power-seeking criminals" who had foolishly led their people into a hopeless undertaking.
By 6 September, the Germans had surrounded and isolated the Home Army in the city. On 7 and 8 September, short truces arranged by the Red Cross took place, with von dem Bach allowing tens of thousands of civilians trapped by the fighting to leave unmolested. On 9 September, Bor sent messengers to von dem Bach to ask for terms of surrender.
Now Stalin went back to playing cat-and-mouse games. On 11 September, he gave the Americans authorization to use the Ukraine bases for the shuttle supply flights. The next day, elements of Rokossovsky's First Belorussian Front evicted the Germans from their holdings to the east of the Vistula where it ran through Warsaw, the Germans blowing the bridges across the river behind them as they pulled out.
Soviet radio broadcasts encouraged the Home Army to fight on. Stalin also ordered airdrops of supplies to the insurgents, using the little low-and-slow Po-2 biplanes, with the cargoes simply heaved out without parachutes and smashing to the ground. On 16 September, a few companies from the First Polish Army, an element of the First Belorussian Front composed of Soviet citizens of Polish extraction and Poles who had been imprisoned after Stalin's occupation of their country, paddled across the Vistula and set up a bridgehead. They would only stay about a week and had no effect on the battle.
The American airdrop took place on 18 September, with 110 B-17s dropping a total of 1,284 supply containers. The Home Army only managed to recover 288 of them, which still gave them much more supplies than were provided by the faint-hearted Soviet airlift. The Americans would not perform another drop on Warsaw; there would be a shuttle bombing raid on the railroad marshaling yards at Szolnok in Hungary the next day, 19 September, but that would be the end of FRANTIC. Stalin refused to authorize further use of the bases, and the shrinking of the battle fronts around the Reich rendered them pointless anyway. Operation FRANTIC had not been a good use of Allied resources. The Germans judged it to be a propaganda exercise to impress the Soviets, but all it really accomplished was to make the strains in the alliance more obvious.
* The airdrop did persuade the Home Army to hang on a little longer, which in turn convinced the Germans that they had to crush the uprising once and for all. Elements of the German 9th Army began a final push against the Home Army on 24 September, crushing the Poles district by district.
On the evening of 30 September, General Bor sent an officer to von dem Bach once more to discuss terms of surrender. A cease-fire followed on the next day, 1 October. General Bor radioed London and Soviet forces across the river, saying he would try to hold out a few more days if the Red Army were willing to move into the city immediately. The message to London was relayed to the Soviet ambassador to Britain, who rejected it, and so Churchill forwarded it to Moscow. There was no response from Stalin.
There was, however, a hasty response from von dem Bach, whose listening posts had intercepted the message. He saw every prospect that Stalin would go through one more cycle of his games, and further prolong the uprising. As a result, von dem Bach was extremely reasonable when he sat down with a Home Army delegation at his headquarters on 2 October. The Poles insisted that they be treated as prisoners of war; that they would be granted amnesty for all actions against the German occupation; and that they be guarded in the prison camps by German Army troops, not SS thugs. Von dem Bach agreed to it all with little or no argument, and the surrender was signed that evening.
The Home Army surrendered the next morning, 3 October 1944. About 15,000 Poles went off to POW camps, with citizens lining the streets to watch them go. The bystanders were weeping, shouting, singing the Polish national anthem, falling to their knees. A picture survives of General Bor shaking von dem Bach's hand, Bor with his head bowed, von dem Bach looking surprisingly gracious and kindly.
In fact, von dem Bach seemed to have something of an entirely out-of-place streak of charisma for an SS general. Hitler had once commented on this, calling him "clever", or what in more modern times might be called "slick". At the surrender ceremony, von dem Bach praised the "magnificent soldiers of the Home Army" and suggested the time would come when Germans and Poles would fight together against their true enemy. After the war he would be tried, but escaped the hangman by taking a very cooperative line with his captors and confessing to crimes, though almost certainly not remotely close to all of those he actually committed. He ended up with a ten-year prison sentence, and some sources claim it was suspended.
* About 200,000 Poles had died in the uprising, about a tenth of them Home Army fighters. It had not been a walkover for the Germans, who had lost about the same number of troops as the Home Army. To Stalin, it was neatly done. He had let the Germans eliminate potential opposition to his own rule over Poland, while the Poles helped exhaust the Germans in turn. The only flaw was that the veil of lies he presented to the outside world was now badly tattered.
The Red Army simply sat across the Vistula for the rest of the year while the Germans completed the demolition of Warsaw, as ordered by Himmler. When the Soviet troops finally entered the city in mid-January 1945, they found little but rubble and cinders.
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