Declassified documents indicate that Joseph Stalin had tactically halted his forces from advancing on Warsaw in order to exhaust the Polish Home Army and to aid his political desires of turning Poland into a Soviet-aligned state.

[36] On 27 July, the Governor of the Warsaw District, Ludwig Fischer, called for 100,000 Polish men and women to report for work as part of a plan which envisaged the Poles constructing fortifications around the city.

[47]Believing that the time for action had arrived, on 31 July, the Polish commanders General Bór-Komorowski and Colonel Antoni Chruściel ordered full mobilization of the forces for 17:00 the following day.

The scope and importance of the operations of the Polish resistance movement, which was ramified down to the smallest splinter group and brilliantly organized, have been in (various sources) disclosed in connection with carrying out of major police security operations.The Home Army forces of the Warsaw District numbered between 20,000,[3][50] and 49,000 soldiers.

[53] Other partisan groups subordinated themselves to Home Army command, and many volunteers joined during the fighting, including Jews freed from the Gęsiówka concentration camp in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The entire force, renamed the Warsaw Home Army Corps (Polish: Warszawski Korpus Armii Krajowej) and commanded by General Antoni Chruściel – who was promoted from Colonel on 14 September – formed three infantry divisions (Śródmieście, Żoliborz and Mokotów).

[56] The exact number of the foreign fighters (obcokrajowcy in Polish), who fought in Warsaw for Poland's independence, is difficult to determine, taking into consideration the chaotic character of the Uprising causing their irregular registration.

These people – emigrants who had settled in Warsaw before the war, escapees from numerous POW, concentration and labor camps, and deserters from the German auxiliary forces – were absorbed in different fighting and supportive formations of the Polish underground.

[70] As of 20 August 1944, the German units directly involved with fighting in Warsaw comprised 17,000 men arranged in two battle groups: The Nazi forces included about 5,000 regular troops; 4,000 Luftwaffe personnel (1,000 at Okęcie airport, 700 at Bielany, 1,000 in Boernerowo, 300 at Służewiec and 1,000 in anti-air artillery posts throughout the city); as well as about 2,000 men of the Sentry Regiment Warsaw (Wachtregiment Warschau), including four infantry battalions (Patz, Baltz, No.

[citation needed] The leaders of the uprising counted only on the rapid entry of the Red Army in Warsaw ('on the second or third or, at the latest, by the seventh day of the fighting'[87]) and were more prepared for a confrontation with the Russians.

[88] In saying this, Mikolajczyk was well aware that the USSR and Stalin had repeatedly stated their demand for recognition of the Curzon Line as the basis for negotiations and categorically refused to change their position.

The artillery cover and air support provided by the Soviets was unable to effectively counter enemy machine-gun fire as the Poles crossed the river, and the landing troops sustained heavy losses.

[109] The limited landings by the 1st Polish Army represented the only external ground force which arrived to physically support the uprising; and even they were curtailed by the Soviet High Command due to the losses they took.

[74] It was on the air three or four times a day, broadcasting news programmes and appeals for help in Polish, English, German and French, as well as reports from the government, patriotic poems and music.

[118] Among the speakers appearing on the resistance radio were Jan Nowak-Jeziorański,[119] Zbigniew Świętochowski, Stefan Sojecki, Jeremi Przybora,[120] and John Ward, a war correspondent for The Times of London.

[124] Nevertheless, from August 1943 to July 1944, over 200 British Royal Air Force (RAF) flights dropped an estimated 146 Polish personnel trained in Great Britain, over 4,000 containers of supplies, and $16 million in banknotes and gold to the Home Army.

The city was in flames but with so many huge fires burning, it was almost impossible to pick up the target marker flares.From 4 August the Western Allies began supporting the Uprising with airdrops of munitions and other supplies.

[129] The Soviet Union did not allow the Western Allies to use its airports for the airdrops[7] for several weeks,[130] so the planes had to use bases in the United Kingdom and Italy which reduced their carrying weight and number of sorties.

The aircraft landed at the Operation Frantic airbases in the Soviet Union, where they were rearmed and refueled, and the next day 100 B-17s and 61 P-51s left the USSR to bomb the marshalling yard at Szolnok in Hungary on their way back to bases in Italy.

[142] Although German air defence over the Warsaw area itself was almost non-existent, about 12% of the 296 planes taking part in the operations were lost because they had to fly 1,600 kilometres (990 miles) out and the same distance back over heavily defended enemy territory (112 out of 637 Polish and 133 out of 735 British and South African airmen were shot down).

[132] Most of the drops were made during the night, at no more than 30–90 m (100–300 ft) altitude, and poor accuracy left many parachuted packages stranded behind German-controlled territory (only about 50 tons of supplies, less than 50% delivered, was recovered by the resistance).

However, as a result of the initial battle of Radzymin in the final days of July, these advance units of the Soviet 2nd Tank Army were pushed out of Wołomin and back about 10 kilometres (6.2 miles).

[42] As a consequence, the Germans at this time were desperately trying to put together a new force to hold the line of the Vistula, the last major river barrier between the Red Army and Germany proper, rushing in units in various stages of readiness from all over Europe.

The Red Army geared for a major thrust into the Balkans through Romania in mid-August and a large proportion of Soviet resources was sent in that direction, while the offensive in Poland was put on hold.

On 20 June 1939, while Adolf Hitler was visiting an architectural bureau in Würzburg am Main, his attention was captured by a project of a future German town – "Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau".

According to German plans, after the war Warsaw was to be turned into nothing more than a military transit station,[101] or even an artificial lake[184] – the latter of which the Nazi leadership had already intended to implement for the Soviet/Russian capital of Moscow in 1941.

The 17,000 figure was first coined by a 1947 issue of a Warsaw historical journal Dzieje Najnowsze, allegedly based on estimates made by Bach Zelewski when interrogated by his Polish captors (and divided into 10,000 KIA and 7,000 MIA).

[221] A key argument supporting the 17,000 figure – apart from quotations from Bach and Gehlen – are total (KIA+MIA+WIA) losses sustained by Kampfgruppe Dirlewanger, one of a few operational units forming German troops fighting the Poles.

'By deciding to act without co-ordinating their plans with the Soviet High Command, authors of the insurrection assumed heavy responsibility for the fate of Warsaw and greatly contributed to the ensuing tragedy of this city and its people.

[255] The preamble of the act reads: In honour of the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising - those who, in defence of the state, fought for the liberation of the capital city with weapons in their hands, strived to recreate the institutions of an independent Polish state, opposed the German occupation and the spectre of Soviet slavery threatening the next generations of Poles[255] A moment of silence is observed at 5:00 pm to symbolize the sires of August 1, 1944 at 5:00pm that marked the start of the battle as a signal to resistance fighters.