Warsaw Army
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Warsaw Army (Polish: Armia Warszawa) was one of the Polish armies to take part in the Polish Defensive War of 1939. Created on 8 September, eight days after the invasion begun, it was an improvised formation charged with the defence of the Polish capital of Warsaw (Warszawa).
Tasks
To defend the Polish capital Warsaw in the face of breakthrough by the German forces.
Operational history
On 3 September 1939 the Minister of the Army (Min. Spraw Wojskowych), general Tadeusz Kasprzycki, ordered general Walerian Czuma (the Commander of the Border Guards - Straż Graniczna) to organize a force to defend the city of Warsaw against a German attack. The city had been under constant attack by the Luftwaffe since the early morning of 1 September. Initially the only organized units available to him were four infantry battalions, anti-aircraft artillery and anti-aircraft machine guns detachments under colonel Kazimierz Baran, composed mostly of fire-fighter brigades and volunteers supervised by colonel Tadeusz Bogdanowicz and Julian Kulski, the deputy president of Warsaw. The AA artillery had 86 pieces of anti-aircraft artillery, as well as an unknown number of anti-aircraft machine guns. In addition there was an air force Pursuit Brigade which was equipped with 54 fighter aircraft. On the 5 and 6 September the air force and 11 batteries of anti-aircraft artillery were withdrawn to Lublin.
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This entry incorporates text from “Warsaw Army” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.