Word: warsaw
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...Warsaw Mayor Stefan Starzynski struggled valiantly to rally the city's defenders, leading volunteers in digging trenches, taking to the radio to broadcast instructions. And crowds gathered outside the British and French embassies to greet their declaration of war by singing God Save the King and La Marseillaise. The crowds' hopes of rescue were doomed, however, for the British military effort during these first days consisted mainly of dropping propaganda leaflets on German military installations (among the cautious Britons' other preparations for war: killing all poisonous snakes in the London zoo). The French attempted only one feeble probe against Germany...
...early as Sept. 4, the Polish government began evacuating Warsaw. The Bank of Poland sent its gold reserves south, to a haven near the Rumanian border. On Sept. 7 the Foreign Ministry told all diplomats that President Ignacy Moscicki, Premier Felicjan Slawoj-Skladkowski and their Cabinet ministers were leaving immediately by truck convoy for Naleczow, a resort 85 miles southeast of Warsaw. Finding no telephone lines working and almost no electricity, the ministers and diplomats trekked onward the next day to Krzemieniec, some 200 miles farther southeast. Throughout this flight, they were repeatedly attacked by German planes, for the Germans...
...Sept. 6, Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, the supposed strongman who had insisted on Poland's forward strategy, evacuated his military headquarters from Warsaw and kept retreating until he crossed into Rumania. After Sept. 16, no further general orders went out from either the marshal or his headquarters. Local units maintaining pockets of resistance throughout Poland -- about 250,000 men in all -- were simply left on their own, to fight on as best they could...
...over, except for the fact that besieged Warsaw still stood unconquered. German panzers and infantry had surrounded the capital since Sept. 14, but every time they tried to smash into it, they were blocked by overturned trolley cars, heaps of rubble, sniper fire, homemade gasoline bombs. Luftwaffe bombers swept over the city almost continually. Civilian casualties numbered in the thousands, many of them buried inside collapsed buildings. Food and medicine began to run out. "Everywhere corpses," one survivor later recalled, "wounded humans, killed horses." As soon as a horse fell, said another, "people cut off pieces of flesh, leaving only...
...German officer entered Warsaw under a flag of truce on Sept. 16 and delivered an ultimatum: surrender in 24 hours or artillery would begin shelling the entire city. The Polish commandant refused to receive the message. German planes dropped leaflets with the same warning. Then the shelling came...