Excerpt from The Second Great War by Anthony Beevor
The outcome of Operation Mars was essentially predetermined. The Soviet had 7 million men and thousands of tanks, artillery, and planes, compared to about 1.8 million German and 1.5 million Polish soldiers with only a fraction of the material. The only other soldiers the Axis could draw on were the 500,000 Volksfaust allocated to fight in the East and another 500,000 Obroncy[1]. The Soviet plan was to launch a three pronged attack, with the first prong taking Koeningsburg, the moving on Warsaw, and the third taking Krakow and Katowice before splitting in half (with one half taking Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Hungary and the other moving through southern Poland)[2]. Recognizing their disadvantages the Germans and Poles decided to engage in a fighting retreat through Eastern Poland and deploy the majority of their forces around Warsaw. To command these forces Hitler turned to Walter Model. An extremely blunt and ruthless man Model was also a man of no small strategic ability, which he would use to turn Warsaw into an impregnable fortress. Work on such a project had begun in August of 1941 when Marshal Rydz ordered the rebuilding and upgrading of the Tsarist-era forts that surrounded Warsaw, as well as the construction (also undertaken in Berlin at the same time period) of two large flak towers to guard against air raids. Model demanded even more fortifications, utilizing both Polish laborers and slaves from Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Thereseinstadt. In addition to rebuilding the forts Model also lined Warsaw with concrete foxholes (which Soviet troops took to calling Model Fortresses[3]) and a vast array of trenches, bunkers, roadblocks (often using dragon's teeth or Czech Hedgehogs), and blockhouses. Model planned to lure the Soviets into the city and inflict massive casualties on them.
It took the Soviets only two weeks (January 7th to January 21st) to advance to Warsaw. This was mainly because of the Axis strategy of fighting retreats. It is a sign of the importance of Warsaw that the Soviets threw 3 million men into taking it, against a German/Polish force of 1 million men. It would take another week and a half of brutal fighting to surround the city (as part of the Festung concept Hitler forbade his armies to retreat, and even Model decided to stay in the city even though it meant certain death. He showed much greater courage than Marshal Rydz, who fled the city on January 25th[4]). The bloody work of taking the city now began. The first step was to break through the ring of fortresses surrounding the city. Typical of this fight was the battle for Fort Czerniakow. As part of the rebuilding process a deep moat had been dug around the fort, making a frontal assault difficult, and the walls had been rebuilt and considerably strengthened. Soviet engineers worked to make bridges to get across the moat, and until those were built the fort was subjected to a withering barrage of artillery. One Soviet artilleryman remembered “The assault was seemingly endless. For two days guns of every caliber bombarded the fort. By the end the walls resembled a Roman ruin and many of the buildings inside were little more than rubble.” The February 3rd assault was still difficult however. A Polish howitzer, which had somehow escaped destruction during the artillery assault, scored a lucky hit on one of the bridges. The men fell into the moat, where a quickly brought up Polish machine gun massacred them. Inside the fort every building had to be cleared. The ferocity of the Polish defenders was described by one Soviet soldier: “We entered a building I later learned had been a munitions warehouse; inside were eight or so Poles. We made our way under heavy fire to the room in which most of them were in. We chucked several grenades in and fired a machine gun into the room, but they continued to cut down any man who attempted to move in. Finally a voice screamed out “We surrender.” Inside there were two men who had survived by taking the heavy wooden desk in the room and turning it into a makeshift blast wall. Both men were badly injured, but had managed to survive our onslaught, and only surrendered because they'd run out of ammunition.” Counting the artillery bombardment it took 4 days to take Fort Czerniakow, and a similar pattern was repeated in many of the other forts.
Soviet troops entered Warsaw proper on February 7th, at which point the bloodletting moved to a whole new level. “It seemed as though every meter of the city was fortified” Shaposhnikov later wrote. By now the Soviets were experienced at urban warfare, and tried to encircle the defenders in small pockets and use their overwhelming advantages in men and material to overwhelm the defenses. One of the symbols of this strategy was the 203 mm howitzer, nicknamed “Sverdlov's Sledgehammer” by the Germans. The Soviets would get these massive guns as close as possible to German fortifications and fire. As one Soviet artilleryman wrote of a bombardment “When the dust cleared the Model Fortress was basically gone except for its foundations.” The heaviest fighting in Warsaw was around the city center, in particular around Pilsudski Square. The square was dominated by the flak tower, which was one of the strongest points of the German defense. The novelist Issac Izhvitsky fought in Pilsudski Square, and described the battle for the tower in his magnus opus Into the Pit of Sheol[5]: “Even the 203 mm howitzer (the Goliath of artillery) had little effect. Although Lev could see that the constant shelling was wearing the tower down[6] at the current rate his beard would turn gray before the tower was destroyed. The tower left several kilometers on either side as no go zones, filled with ruined and tanks and bodies of those that had entered it and been destroyed by the flak guns.” When on March 15th a shell tore a hole in the tower the Soviet artillerymen celebrated with champagne. Inside the tower (part of which had been turned into Model's headquarters) the atmosphere was grim. Some 25,000 Warsaw residents were using it as a shelter, and thus there was little room to move or air to breathe. In theory the Pilsudski Square Tower should have had enough supplies to last 6 months, but a variety of logistical problems meant that by March 20th there was only 3 weeks' worth of supplies. By that point most of Warsaw was under Soviet control, and there was no hope of relief. Even Model recognized the need for surrender, telling his subordinates “The only thing fighting will accomplish is killing more innocents” and “If we surrender there is a chance that the soldiers will survive.” Model was not however prepared to see a post-Reich world. On the evening of the 20th he blew his brains out in his office. Panic gripped the besieged denizens of the tower. Rumors spread that the Soviets were planning to massacre everyone, but not before raping the women en masse[7]. The garrison was mostly Waffen-SS and Volksfaust, who were indoctrinated with the ideal of death before surrender. Thus March 23rd-25th (the day the tower surrendered) saw the largest mass suicide of the war. One German anti-aircraft gunner remembered “A stream of people throwing themselves off the roof. I saw soldiers issue one last “Heil Hitler before jumping, parents jumping with their children in their arms, and families weeping and hugging each other before taking the plunge together.” Other soldiers turned their guns on themselves, with some even agreeing to shoot entire families before killing themselves. In all some 4,500 people committed suicide in those three days, leaving the tower and the area around it strewn with corpses (the reaction of the Nazi leadership to the news of this was one of glee, with Goebbels even taking time out of his broadcast to praise the suicides and castigate those who chose to live).
On March 28th the last Axis units in Warsaw surrendered. It was the last massive battle of war. The Soviets had taken some 400,000 casualties, while about 1 million Axis troops were either killed or taken prisoner. The Axis were unable to put up much resistance to the Soviets as they marched on Berlin. Warsaw was almost completely destroyed, with up to 90% of it in ruins. Of the 1.3 million people living there pre-war 700,000 were either dead or permanently displaced[8]. With the fall of it's capital and the death of it's leader Poland's days as an independent country were over.
[1] Short for the Polish for "Defenders of the Homeland." Essentially the Obroncy were the Polish Volksfaust.
[2] Koeingsburg fell on March 1st, while Krakow and Katowice fell on January 25th and February 1st respectively.
[3] IOTL these structures were called Tobruks, because the Allies first encountered them in North Africa.
[4] Rydz never arrived at his destination. A Soviet fighter strafed his car about 30 miles outside of Poznan, killing him. There's a story that a family fleeing Warsaw discovered the critically injured Marshal, and the father declared "Why should we save the man who killed Poland?" so the family left him to die. Even if untrue the story shows just how hated Marshal Rydz was by the end.
[5] The book documents the Battle of Warsaw and was banned for anti-war themes (Sheol is the Jewish afterlife).
[6] Unlike IOTL the towers were built even more hurriedly and with shoddier materials, so while strong they weren't nearly as impregnable.
[7] The Soviet policy towards rape was different. Sverdlov didn't condone it, saying "Rape is a symbol of oppression, and thus is unbefitting a liberating army." This didn't always translate into stopping it however.
[8] Including 200,000 Warsaw Jews who were massacred by the SS and angry Poles as the Soviets closed in on the city. The majority of Polish Shoah victims died in the Warsaw Massacre.
) the USSR he could not have done a better job.