The Poles fight back

The momentum of the advance was not maintained by army units supporting the SS regiment, and as the afternoon dragged on the Leibstandarte men found themselves almost cut off in the town. The battle climaxed with a huge human-wave assault by Polish infantry that seemed to involve every one of the town's defenders. SS machine-gun crews and artillery killed hundreds of Poles as they charged forward in a last-gasp effort to drive out the invaders. With the charge defeated, the heart went out of the defence and by nightfall mop-up operations were under way to round up prisoners.

The Leibstandarte was now attached to the 4th Panzer Division to help it race eastwards in an attempt to set up a ring of steel around Warsaw. By 8 September the SS regiment had reached the southwestern suburbs of the Polish capital, and was quickly establishing a series of blocking positions to stop the escape of any of its defenders. For two days, parts of three Polish divisions and numerous brigades attempted to batter their way through the Leibstandarte's positions and out of Warsaw. Again, it was German artillery that inflicted most of the slaughter on the Poles as they gathered for their breakout attempts. The SS men were soon exhausted, and the fields around their positions were piled high with the corpses of men and horses.

The Poles now brought forward some of their tank reserves to effect a breakthrough, but the 4th Panzer Division had pre-empted the move and deployed its armoured regiment to counter the Polish threat. The tank duel did not last long because the Polish tanks were totally outclassed by the German panzers. Soon two columns of German panzers were moving forward with a battalion of Leibstandarte men following close behind, each one to mop up any pockets of resistance. Two Polish divisions were pushed back along the western bank of the River Vistula, further isolating the Polish capital. Heavy fighting continued for several days as the Germans moved to consolidate their positions west of Warsaw and mop up all remaining pockets of resistance.

The Battle of the River Bzura

To the west, the bypassed Polish Poznan Army was preparing for a last, desperate effort to relieve Warsaw, by turning around its combat divisions and sending them back eastwards towards the capital. Combat engineers from the Leibstandarte had just built a bridge across the River Bzura to allow the regiment to attack westwards against the rear of the Poznan Army when its spearheads engaged the SS men.

Soon the Leibstandarte and 4th Panzer Division found themselves outnumbered and outgunned by tens of thousands of fresh Polish troops. Heavy Polish artillery fire smashed the German positions and forced the SS troops and their supporting panzers to pull back. For three days the SS advance battalion and a large chunk of the 4th Panzer Division on the western bank of the Bzura were fighting for their lives. The 35th Panzer Regiment, backed by Leibstandarte units, was now launched on a relief operation that hit the flank of the attacking Polish units and eventually opened a corridor to the trapped Germans. At first the German High Command did not realize the significance of the Polish counterattack, but once this mistake was detected it coordinated almost 29 divisions to encircle and then destroy the Poznan Army.

The attack on Bzura was the high tide of Polish resistance. Even as Polish troops battled with the Leibstandarte along the banks of the river, Stuka dive-bombers were staging merciless raids on the Poznan Army's command posts, supply lines and artillery positions. It had no air cover and was soon reduced to a mass of individual units fighting their own separate battles. The Poznan Army was doomed from the moment its troops exposed themselves to German airpower.

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