Warsaw airlift

Warsaw lay 1,311 km (814.6 mi) north east from the Allied bases in Apulia and Brindisi in Italy. The route from Italy was planned to take the aircraft north east from their home airfields over the Adriatic and Croatia at sunset to reach the Danube in Hungary in darkness. They would then climb north east over the Carpathians and into Soviet held territory, to approach Warsaw from the south east. The return leg was routed over eastern Germany and eastern Austria with the aircraft arriving back at their point of origin by mid morning the following day.[7] These aircraft flew without fighter escort and had to rely on their on-board armament to ward off German night fighters, who were able to vector in on their flight-paths with information from German ground-based controllers. A Luftwaffe night-fighter training school at Krakow presented a continual problem as did ground-based AAA along the route.[7] Aircraft also reported having been attacked by Russian fighters as well as Russian AAA close to Warsaw.[8] Major General Jimmy Durrant of No. 205 Group RAF was in command of operations from Italy and assigned No. 334 Special Operations Wing RAF (No. 148 and No. 624 Squadron RAF, each equipped with 14 Halifaxes and 1586 Polish Special Duty Flight equipped ten aircraft being a mixture of Halifaxes and B-24 Liberators) to supply Warsaw. No. 178 Squadron RAF was later also assigned to support the airlift when No. 624 Squadron was disbanded on 5 September 1944.[9][Note 4] 2 Wing SAAF contributed 31 and 34 Squadrons for operations, both equipped with Liberators.[11]

Air routes used for the airlift.
Black: Allied flights from Italy.
Black broken line: Later egress routes used back to Italy.
Blue: USAAF route

The first air-drops from Italy were conducted by 1586 Polish Special Duty Flight accompanied by seven Halifaxes from No. 148 Squadron RAF, successfully delivering their cargo to Krasiński Square and to Vola on the night of 4/5 August.[11][12] Flights continued through August and into early September when all flights were suspended due to bad weather. This time was used to test a new bomb-sight which would allegedly have permitted more accurate supply delivery from a higher altitude.[13] An aborted mission took place on 10/11 September with the last sorties taking place on 21/22 September, flown by 31 and 34 Squadrons SAAF as the Polish resistance was nearing total suppression by the Germans.[14]

At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, the Allied leaders had devised a new bombing strategy whereby American heavy bombers stationed in Britain and Italy would fly strike missions into central Germany and occupied Eastern Europe and would then land at secret American air bases (to be defended by the Soviets) located inside Soviet Russia. Here the aircraft would be re-armed and fueled and would return to their home bases attacking second targets on the way home. These operations went under the name of Operation Frantic.[15] However, on the night of 21/22 June 1944, German and Hungarian He 111 bombers had conducted a raid on one such airfield (Poltava in occupied Ukraine), destroying 43 B-17 Flying Fortresses on the ground.[16] This raid left the Soviets "smarting and sensitive" and left the Americans determined to send their own anti-aircraft defenses as protection for the future. With these preceding events, the request for landing facilities issued by President Roosevelt on 14 August 1944 met with a brusque Soviet reply that the re-supply operations were a British and American affair to which the Soviet government could not object, but that no landing facilities would be granted to British or American aircraft once they had completed their mission over Warsaw.[17] Only after three weeks of negotiation by both Churchill and Roosevelt, was the final Soviet reply delivered to the British Ambassador in Moscow on 9 September 1944, stating that the Soviet Union would take no responsibility for what was happening in Warsaw, that they themselves would commence with their own air-supply missions and that American and British aircraft would be granted landing rights with prior arrangement.[18] The single mission flown by the USAAF took place on 18 September and due to the high altitude of the drop as well as strong prevailing winds, only 288 of the 1,284 containers dropped,[19][20] reaching the besieged Polish forces.[21]

There was a strong disposition in Allied circles to approve a second USAAF mission; the Polish premier in exile in London, Stanisław Mikołajczyk appealed to Churchill who telephoned the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe on 27 September to request a second mission after which, Roosevelt too ordered a second Frantic delivery to Warsaw. The second supply mission was never cleared by the Russians and Stalin formally refused permission on 2 October 1944.[19]

On the night of 13 September 1944, Soviet aircraft commenced their own re-supply missions, dropping arms, medicines and food supplies. Initially these supplies were dropped in canisters without parachutes[22] which lead to damage and loss of the contents[23] - also, a large number of canisters fell into German hands. Over the following two weeks, the Soviet Air Forces flew 2535 re-supply sorties with small bi-plane Polikarpov Po-2's, delivering a total of 156 50-mm mortars, 505 anti-tank rifles, 1478 sub-machine guns, 520 rifles, 669 carbines, 41 780 hand grenades, 37 216 mortar shells, over 3 mln. cartridges, 131.2 tons of food and 515 kg of medicine.[24][21]