Chapter 203: The Capital Battlefield

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The siege of the Polish capital, Warsaw, had entered its second day. During this time, the people of Warsaw had suffered unprecedented hardship. The Polish government had decided to defend Warsaw at all costs, and they had repelled the Germans’ first few probing attacks. However, the German army immediately launched retaliatory actions. They began to treat the civilians of Warsaw as if they were soldiers. This practice caused the civilian death rate to rise sharply.

At the end of a street, a soldier was talking with his wife and their one-year-old child. The defensive line this soldier was to protect was just a few thousand meters north of their meeting spot. The once-beautiful brick-paved street had now been dug up, and on both sides of the road were deep trenches dug to counter the German army.

Almost all the soldiers were hoping to meet with their relatives and families and were worried about their safety. Because up to now, civilian casualties had been greater than those of the soldiers, the question of whether a husband could return home alive from the battlefield was not very different from the question of whether the other members of his family could survive the shelling and bombing.

A few minutes ago, a German bomber had been shot down. It had crashed with a trail of thick smoke into a street in Warsaw, leaving a huge crater. A temporary inspection team composed of citizens and reservists went to check the crash site and found that the four German pilots on the plane were all dead.

The surrounding Poles cheered when they saw the wreckage, because they had seen the mangled bodies of the German pilots. That someone had died made the people around them cheer with excitement. This, perhaps, was the effect of war on humanity.

The entire population of Poland seemed to have been mobilized. Two Polish soldiers and several temporarily conscripted citizens were digging pits in the street. They then dismantled the nearby tram rails, stood them up in the pits, and buried them with earth to form anti-tank barricades. The main streets of all of Poland were protected by this kind of barricade.

And in the middle of another, wider street, the Poles had thrown a destroyed and overturned bus sideways. Both sides were piled high with stones, forming a natural defensive line. With this simple defense, the Poles had repelled one of the German army’s probing attacks, but in the afternoon, the German retaliatory artillery fire became even more intense.

Dead horses were a very common sight in a besieged city, at least in 1937. These dead horses provided food for the starving Poles, allowing people to get through the most difficult days. Even if the bodies of these dead horses had begun to rot and spoil, people would still cut off large pieces of meat and eat them to stave off hunger.

The experience of a 9-year-old boy named Pajewski perfectly embodied what the war that had made them homeless had brought upon the civilians. Now, he sat sadly beside a twisted bed frame, the ruins of his bombed-out house behind him. His older brother was under the rubble. However, this was only the beginning of his suffering. That afternoon, his father was killed in action at the front, and his mother also left him after eating the rotten meat of a dead horse.

A hospital in the south of Warsaw was hit this afternoon by one of the five bombs dropped by the German army, a 500-pound aerial bomb. This bomb left a huge crater more than ten meters in diameter and at least two meters deep next to the building. The hospital was completely destroyed by this bombing. A dozen or so patients and one doctor died, and many more people were injured.

Another bomb was dropped near a Catholic church not far away, directly turning this wooden structure into a pile of rubble. The wooden planks, scattered in disarray, bore witness to the immense power of the explosion. However, because the people here had evacuated in time, the people in the church had fled to a safe place before the air raid arrived.

An American journalist witnessed firsthand the scene of Warsaw besieged by German soldiers. Refugees sat on horse-drawn carts, piled high with all their possessions, searching everywhere on the road for a relatively safe haven. Approximately 10,000 Polish civilians died in the siege of Warsaw. Most of these people died at home, unattended.

In his report sent back to his home country, this American journalist claimed: “No one knows where to hide. Often, a person runs to a place they think is safe, only to find that it was abandoned by the previous person who thought it was unsafe. Everywhere there are people with bundles and babies. They are severely frightened, desperately searching for a place that can offer refuge.”

This American journalist later died in an air raid. A piece of shrapnel the size of a palm pierced his lung, and he had stopped breathing before he could be sent to a hospital. Slightly luckier than him were the infants in this hospital: a shell hit the maternity ward but miraculously did not explode. Only a few infants’ arms were injured by broken glass and wood splinters, which made the nearly mad mothers weep with emotion.

Due to hunger, many Poles went to the fields in the suburbs to dig for potatoes. It was a large farm that had been opened up before the war, so many people risked going there to find food. But the danger was that the German troops had already set their sights on it.

Because people were frequently active in this open area, German Air Force fighter units that couldn’t find other targets began to fly at low altitude near this open space. They strafed the crowds on the ground, wiping out the targets they believed should be eliminated.

Soon, these fighters achieved their results. An Fw-190D fighter seized an opportunity and hit more than a dozen Polish civilians in one pass. After the plane had left, a little boy, clutching his bundle, sat silently beside his mother’s body, desperate but without shedding a single tear. And just a few steps away from this little boy, a little girl was squatting beside her older sister’s body, crying loudly.

Her sister was another victim of this attack. A 13mm machine gun bullet had gone straight through her shoulder blade, taking half her shoulder with it. The little girl who was still alive squatted down, reached out to touch her blood-covered sister, but as soon as she touched the dead girl’s face, she snatched her hand back in fright. Then she began to cry uncontrollably, screaming hysterically, “My sister! What have they done to you? My God!”

War makes people indifferent, but that is only when facing the enemy. The moment a loved one leaves, we all discover that the heart we thought was incomparably hard is actually so soft it is fragile.

And at the same time as these people were leaving this world, the German Führer, Akado Rudolph, was in a trench on the west side of Warsaw, listening to his generals explain the specific steps for the attack on the city. To better coordinate with the propaganda, Akado was wearing a red armband with a swastika symbol on it today—it was just like a national flag tied to his arm.

“My Führer,” List said, pointing to the map. “We are using the captured Polish 203mm cannons and our own 150mm cannons to attack here, here, and here… to drive the Polish defenders into the southern part of the city.”

“Then our sniper teams can enter the northern part of the city and attrit the counter-attacking Polish defenders there. Soon, they will suffer huge casualties,” another general continued. “After that, tanks and armored cars will help the infantry consolidate these occupied areas, repeating these tactics until the Poles are driven out of Warsaw.”

The air force liaison officer following behind Akado also pointed to the map and added, “My Führer. The air force will dispatch 40 Stuka dive bombers to participate in the attack. We will bomb all threatening areas.”

Akado listened to these offensive plans, having no real concept of such a brutal scene. He pressed his face to the scissor periscope placed on the side of the trench and carefully observed the still-burning buildings on the outskirts of Warsaw, not asking any more questions for a long time.

Even Akado had to admit that war was much crueler than he had imagined. Those fantasies of his youth, those wishes to command a vast army to achieve victory, now seemed too naive. War did not only bring glory and achievement; it also brought death and destruction.

“I hear the civil administration department has a Polish resettlement plan. Most Poles will be sent to specific resettlement areas to engage in specific work, is that right?” Akado suddenly asked after watching for a while.

“That is the case, Führer,” an official in a suit standing behind Akado replied. “Because according to the wartime ‘Act on the Disposal of Captured Personnel’ and the ‘Ordinance on the Supplementation of Personnel for Homeland Enterprises,’ these Poles are to be relocated in batches to German territory to engage in productive labor. They can only be converted to a hired system after completing three years.”

“Then continue the shelling,” Akado said, straightening up from the periscope and looking at General List. “In any case, this area will have to be rebuilt in the future. Since I have already paid for the weapons, I do not intend to pay for demolition as well.”

With Akado’s instructions, 70 150mm howitzers fired 450 shells in half an hour. The Polish defenders were forced to abandon an entire district before gradually stabilizing their lines. Several thousand civilians died in this shelling.

For Akado, there was another piece of good news that reached his temporary command post as evening approached. The 3rd SS Panzer Division had reached Błonie, which was the final demarcation line agreed upon with the Soviet Union for the partition of Poland. Many units had already reached their final objective in their eastward advance.

However, the next day, they received an order from the Führer and continued to advance another 10 kilometers to the east before halting their offensive. And at this moment, in western Poland, with the exception of Warsaw, which was still resisting, all areas had fallen into German hands. Akado, in his temporary command post, ordered that more than half of the troops were to immediately switch to operations to mop up scattered Polish units and to maintain local security.