On 1 August 1944, at 5 p.m., the hour the insurgents called W-hour, the Polish Home Army rose against the German occupiers of Warsaw. Tens of thousands of fighters, only a fraction of them armed, attacked German positions across the city. By nightfall they held parts of the center and the Old Town, but the German garrison had kept the Vistula bridges, the railway stations and the airfields, and about 2,000 Poles had been killed. The rising, planned to last a few days, went on for 63.
The order
In the last days of July 1944 the Red Army was approaching Warsaw, and the underground Home Army, loyal to the Polish government in exile in London, wanted to free the capital before the Soviets arrived. On 31 July its commander, General Tadeusz Komorowski "Bór", ordered Colonel Antoni Chruściel "Monter", commander of the Warsaw district, to begin the uprising at 5 p.m. on 1 August. Couriers carried the order to the units early that morning.1
Historians quoted by the Polish Press Agency put the insurgent force at about 50,000 soldiers of the Home Army's Warsaw district and other groups, and Britannica gives the same figure; a chronicle of the day published by Polish Radio Kielce gives about 30,000. Both Polish accounts agree that only about one in ten had a weapon, and that the German garrison numbered some 20,000 well-armed troops, police and SS, backed by armor, artillery and aircraft.2
W-hour
The fighting did not wait for five o'clock. Shooting broke out in Żoliborz in the early afternoon, around 1.30 p.m. according to the Polish Press Agency and about 2 p.m. according to the Radio Kielce chronicle, and in Wola before 4 p.m.. At W-hour the rest of the city rose.3
The results of the first day were mixed. According to the Radio Kielce chronicle, the insurgents took the Prudential building, the city's tallest, the Military Geographical Institute and the Stawki supply depots, and set up Monter's headquarters in the Victoria hotel on Jasna Street. East of the Vistula, in Praga, they took the railway directorate building but were cut off from the left bank, because no bridge had been captured. The Vistula bridges, the railway stations, the airfields and many barracks stayed in German hands, and only in the Old Town did the insurgents hold a larger area free of the enemy.4
Among the wounded that afternoon was the poet and Home Army nurse Krystyna Krahelska "Danuta", hit while tending a wounded soldier during the attack on the Press House; she died the next morning. The German garrison commander, General Reiner Stahel, reported about 2,000 Polish and 500 German dead on the first day; the number of civilians killed is not known.5
Sixty-three days
The rising was meant to last a few days. The Red Army halted across the Vistula and gave little help, Allied supply flights from Italy could not deliver enough, and the Germans answered with mass murder of civilians. The Home Army capitulated on 2 October 1944, after 63 days; the Ministry of Culture puts the dead at about 150,000 to 200,000, most of them civilians, and the city was then systematically destroyed. The whole story is told in our article on the Warsaw Uprising.6
Every year at 5 p.m. on 1 August Warsaw commemorates W-hour. Among the insurgents who fought from the first day was Witold Pilecki, whose life we tell in our biography of Witold Pilecki.7
Also on this day
- 1664: Battle of Saint Gotthard. On the Raab near Szentgotthárd in western Hungary, Raimondo Montecuccoli's imperial army, with German and French contingents, met the Ottoman army of Grand Vizier Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed.
