Power on the Flanks

Still another German nightmare was in the process of becoming a horrible reality. Villages on German soil were burning under Russian cannon fire and Stormoviks were ranging up & down the main roads of East Prussia. A German news agency announced prematurely that the Red Army had rolled over the border onto German territory. But the Russians were in no hurry to make that claim; it would come soon enough.

All along the 800-mile main front, from the gulf of Finland to the Carpathian passes, the Red Army was busy at methodical, swift grinding of German strength. If its forward progress seemed to have been slowed somewhat by week's end, it was mainly by contrast with the speed of the past six weeks.

The Sea & the River. Actually the week had brought three striking successes: 1) General Bagramian's drive to the Baltic Sea coast, which cut off the isolated northern German army group in Estonia and Latvia; 2) the development by Marshals Rokossovsky and Konev of three bridgeheads across the Vistula River south of Warsaw and a forward thrust to within 30 miles of ancient Cracow; 3) capture of Drohobycz, Poland's greatest oil center, by the Fourth Ukrainian Army under Colonel General Ivan Petrov.

All these advances were on the flanks of the overall offensive, where the main weight of Russian power seemed to be concentrated. The hard-driving army of General Chernyakhovsky, operating west of Bialystok and Grodno and spearheading the drive to East Prussia, was clearly running into greatly stiffened German resistance. Fresh Nazi troops had been rushed up, including the 6th Panzer Division from Germany and the 18th Panzer Grenadiers from Hungary; they were fighting fanatically under orders to halt an invasion of the "holy soil" of the fatherland.

In the center, before Warsaw, the Soviet forces were regrouping for a major assault on the Polish capital, while Red Army troops crossing the Vistula about 60 miles to the south were striking out from the bridgehead and advancing northward, threatening an encirclement of the city.

Underground War. Within Warsaw, meanwhile, one of the war's strangest battles was in progress. Polish underground fighters rose up to seize whole sections of their city and beat off savage attacks by the German garrison. Fragmentary reports getting out to the world by radio or courier told a story of gallant resistance startlingly like the brave, hopeless siege of Warsaw in 1939, when Mayor Stefan ("The Stubborn") Starzynski led the defenders.

Stubborn Stefan had long since been done to death by the Gestapo, but now in his place the Poles had a 48-year-old ex-cavalryman, General Bor (probably a pseudonym; "bor" means "deep forest" in Polish).

Code word for the long-planned Warsaw uprising was "Tempest." On Monday night, messengers (most of them women) took the message, "Tempest tomorrow, 5 p.m." to underground groups of no more than ten men each. Next day the fighters assembled, got their orders, and launched their attack. They had only small arms--rifles and pistols hidden in 1939, some Sten guns smuggled to them by the British, a fair assortment of light automatic weapons sold to them by obliging and shortsighted German soldiers. They also had the advantages of complete surprise, complete recklessness.

War in the Street. First objectives were the barracks of the hated SS in Zoliborz, a northern suburb, and along Rakoweiecka Street in a Warsaw residential section. Then the Poles seized control of the suburbs of Ochota and Mokotow. At week's end the fiercest fighting was raging in the center of the city, where the underground patriots were dug in around the Saski Park and were battling for control of the main public buildings.

The German garrison, badly surprised by the uprising, called in aircraft to bomb Polish-held sections on two days, and sent tanks against the patriots' roadblocks; Poles risked their lives to burn the tanks with homemade Molotov cocktails.

But for all their bravery, the Poles were a 19th-Century army fighting a 20th-century war. Late in the week an ominous message came from General Bor: ammunition was running low. Polish officials in London, following the course of the fighting with desperate interest, feared that the uprising might have been called prematurely, before the Russians were ready to start their own drive.

But after a week of fighting the Poles were still holding out, and with something to sustain them that their comrades of 1939 had never had: the hope of rescue, by an army that hits hard and fast.

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