The Battle of Kołobrzeg is the largest urban battle in which regular units of the Polish Army fought [FRAGMENT]

The Battle of Kołobrzeg was the biggest meat grinder in urban conditions that regular units of the Polish Army had to experience. For the higher command of the 1st Army, the fact that Kołobrzeg was turned into a fortress by the Germans was an unpleasant surprise. In any case, Zhukov’s quarters did not know about it either. He ordered the commander of the 1st Army, General Stanisław Popławski, that he was to take the city within 24 hours. On March 6, he repeated the same order to the commander of the 6th Infantry Division. The next day, when the regiments of the 6th Division were decimated on the outskirts of Kołobrzeg, it was understood that it was no use. On March 8, Popławski was nervous and sent the 3rd Infantry Division into battle, followed by two artillery brigades, a mortar regiment, two anti-aircraft artillery regiments, and finally the 4th Heavy Tank Regiment. This list alone shows how hard it was for Polish soldiers to fight on the streets of Kołobrzeg with minimal support from the Red Army, which is also worth remembering. Capturing Kołobrzeg was actually an independent operation of the Polish Army.

One of the artillery brigades that was thrown into the street fighting was the 5th Heavy Artillery Brigade. Again, the howitzers fired straight ahead, cutting tunnels in barricades and buildings for infantry assault groups. The task of Józef Koleśnicki (already a second lieutenant) was to track targets and transfer data to the fire battery. The hellishly dangerous role of an artillery scout.

During the fight, Colonel Koleśnicki emphasized years later, a soldier focuses on the basic goal set for him by the command. It is only after the battle that one begins to analyze its course and arrange its individual stages, like building blocks. In this sense, for us, lower-ranking officers, non-commissioned officers and privates, the storming of Kołobrzeg was not a surprise, but the next stage of the fight, and that it would be bloody, we knew it well after previous experiences.

The streets changed hands many times. The German resistance points – as usual – were excellently prepared. Many of them were in heavily fortified buildings or newly built reinforced concrete bunkers. Koleśnicki and his soldiers searched for them, and when he gave the bearings over the radio, the rest was taken care of by howitzers… Each subsequent day of Koleśnicki’s team was like playing with death – Russian roulette. On one occasion, a lieutenant and his soldiers set up an observation post in a tall, several-story building. When they tracked down the targets and radioed in, they remembered how hungry they were – they hadn’t eaten in three days. So Koleśnicki allowed the soldiers to look for food. They found quite a lot of supplies in the cellar, brought them back upstairs with them, and when they had eaten, they fell asleep – not surprisingly, they were all sleepy and overtired. When they woke up, they heard that the Germans were already below them and they were pulling the cannons to the next floor. One of the soldiers – corporal Gruszka – in the blink of an eye clicked the grenade and threw it down. Those who survived the explosion fled, and Koleśnicki’s team ran after them, as the allied artillery began to destroy the building with its fire.

Polish soldiers on their way to Berlin. From the archive of Piotr Korczyński

Koleśnicki was a fluke, but his greatest luck was that Corporal Gruszka, a born soldier with the reflexes of a gunslinger, served with him. Particularly dangerous sorties were those when the scouts had to check which building was occupied by the Germans. At that time, Koleśnicki was always accompanied by Gruszka, as well as a radio operator – to immediately send a report via the radio station. During one such action, the corporal saved his commander’s life. As they ran close to the town hall, they came across a German grenadier ready to fire. Before Koleśnicki could react, the German had already collapsed to the ground, firing his empi in death spasms. It was corporal Gruszka who fired his pepesha. If he had been a second late, they would not have been among the living.

Koleśnicki had several such episodes, but he was seriously injured only once. When he and three soldiers suddenly found himself in the firing range of the Nebelwerfers, he tried to take refuge in the Kołobrzeg basilica. They were almost to the building when a bullet hit the door frame and all four were hit on the head with bricks. They lost consciousness. Fortunately, they found them and took them to a Soviet field hospital. As soon as the soldiers recovered, they returned to the brigade. The battles for Kołobrzeg lasted nearly two weeks and cost the 1st Army over four thousand dead, missing and wounded. In the Battle of Berlin, the Fifth Brigade fought in a classic way, as befits a heavy artillery unit, firing at German positions from a long distance.

On the streets of the capital of the “thousand-year-old” Reich, the 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Division fought, which was included in one of the last (but not the last) meat grinders of the Red Army. In the opinion of many people, Stalin allowed the Kosciuszko people to a general crackdown on Hitler primarily for propaganda reasons, in order to strengthen the authority of his puppets installed in Poland. That’s right, but there was also a strictly military reason – the Soviets lacked infantry to cover the tanks, which is especially important during street fighting. And not only the Kościuszko division fought in Berlin – there were other units as well.

On April 25, 1945, the Red Army completely encircled Berlin. The city was defended by about three hundred thousand German soldiers. It was a jumble of various broken units and the Volkssturm militia, but in street fights it was still a serious obstacle on the way to the Chancellery of the Third Reich, in the basement of which Hitler and his closest collaborators were hiding. Particularly dangerous for Soviet tanks were Volkssturms armed with Panzerfausts. On the barricades and among the ruins it was a deadly weapon. Therefore – as I have already mentioned – the soldiers of the 1st Army on the streets of Berlin primarily protected the advancing tanks.

The list of Polish units taking part in the Battle of Berlin starts with the 1st Independent Mortar Brigade. In the assault on the capital of the Third Reich, it supported the Soviet 47th Army advancing from the west through Spandau and Potsdam. The bloodiest battles of the brigade took place on April 29. On that day, the positions of the 47th Army were attacked by the cadets of the SS officers’ school. The Soviet infantry could not withstand this attack and the fanatical young Nazis were stopped only by the fire of the Polish 11th Regiment of Mortars. The second Polish unit that was included in the Berlin operation on April 27 was the 6th Warsaw Independent Motorized Pontoon and Bridge Battalion. Under this long name there was a unique unit in the Polish Army, because its sappers were almost completely equipped with American equipment, which the Russians gave them under the Lend-Lease Act. For this reason, the Germans often mistook them for Americans. In the attack on Berlin, they were subordinated to the Soviet 2nd Panzer Army. For her, under enemy fire, the battalion built crossings across the Havel, Spree and numerous Charlottenburg canals towards the center of Berlin. Simultaneously with the sapper battalion, the 2nd Pomeranian Howitzer Artillery Brigade was sent to fight. Initially, it fully supported the 2nd Panzer Army, and from April 30, part of its regiments were assigned to support compatriots from the 1st Infantry Division. The heavy howitzers of the brigade reinforced the assault teams of Kościuszko’s soldiers, firing straight ahead. One of the artillerymen was a Varsovian, Captain Andrzej Nusbek, then a fourteen-year-old bombardier. As he recalls:

As a resident of Warsaw and a former scout of the Gray Ranks, I was literally pumped up by the fact that I can avenge my city here in Berlin!

Piotr Korczyński’s book will be released on March 20 by Wydawnictwo Cyranka

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