Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (13 page)

The British Eighth Army in Italy was a wonderful microcosm of the Allied cause. Fighting alongside the US Fifth Army and commanded by Gen. Oliver Leese, it was composed of three British army corps, containing two Indian and two Canadian divisions, Gen. Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps, Gen. Freyberg’s New Zealand Corps, and Gen. Anders’s 2nd (Polish) Corps.

Monte Cassino held out against three desperate Allied assaults, and only succumbed to the fourth attempt. In the first battle (11 January to 7 February), the French and the Americans struggled in vain against both a determined enemy and atrocious weather. In the second battle (15–18
February), which was marked by the pointless bombing of the Benedictine Monastery, the New Zealanders led the unsuccessful attack. In the third battle (15–25 March), the Indian Division tried and failed. In the fourth battle (11–18 May), the precipitous slopes of Monastery Hill were finally stormed by three frontal, uphill charges undertaken with enormous loss by two divisions of Anders’s men. A British officer, later an Oxford professor, who watched them, said that he had never seen such a display of fearless courage. The victory opened the road to Rome, which was captured three weeks later. For the soldiers who had carried their red-and-white pennants to the summit of Cassino, it was celebrated as a stage on the much longer road to their own capital.

For the first six months of 1944, the Red Army was advancing across a wide stretch of politically disputed territory. It crossed the pre-war Polish–Soviet frontier on 4 January. But it did not reach the ‘Peace Boundary’ on the River Bug until July. Throughout that time, it was engaged in a vast and crucial military operation, namely the destruction of the German Army Group Centre. So politics, in Europe’s most war-devastated zone, did not yet come to the fore. But the Red Army’s highly trained political officers were fully aware of the stakes. So, too, were the First Ally’s exiled Government and its local Underground representatives. The local population was not consulted. The Western powers were not specially interested. Very few of their most expert specialists would have been sufficiently well briefed to know that this was exactly the part of Europe which was home to the two divisions that were preparing to storm Monte Cassino.

Nomenclature is revealing. In Soviet usage, the lands in question were known as Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. In the First Ally’s usage, they were known as the
Kresy
, or ‘Borders’. To most British and Americans, if they could be located at all, they were known, anachronistically and quite inaccurately, as Western Russia.

Once the Red Army was approaching the Borders, the First Ally’s Government in London felt obliged to react and to issue instructions to its people on the spot. It decided on a strategy under the name of Operation Tempest. The Red Army was to be welcomed. The Underground Resistance movement was to come out of hiding whenever the German–Soviet front approached, and the retreating Germans were to be attacked. Wherever possible, local officials were to take control as the Germans left
and to make friendly provision for the safe passage of the Soviet forces. Nothing could have angered the Soviets more.

The D-Day Landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944 finally opened up the Second Front which the Western Allies had repeatedly postponed. Operation Overlord was the largest amphibious operation in world history. But it took almost two months for it to be firmly established. The British did not capture Caen, one of the initial D-Day objectives, until 18 July. The Americans did not break out into open country until the end of the month. The German defenders of Normandy were not forced to retreat en masse until the Battle of the Falaise Pocket (19–21 August). The signal contribution of the First Ally to these operations lay with the 1st (Polish) Armoured Division, which landed in Normandy in the second wave and which took up station to the south of Caen as the forward element of the First Canadian Army. At Falaise, they were 1,244km (773 miles) from Berlin.

The main consequences of the Normandy landings were twofold. The liberation of Paris and of northern France was at hand. And the Western armies could move into position as the second arm of the colossal pincer, which, in conjunction with the Soviets in the east, would gradually crush the Nazi Reich to death.

In the first half of 1944, the relative weight of Great Britain within the Grand Alliance declined, whilst that of the USA and the USSR increased. The American and the Soviet stars were manifestly in the ascendant. The First Ally’s position was affected accordingly.

At the official level, American attitudes to the exiled Government had always been correct, and often cordial. Polish officials were warmly and frequently received in Washington. Yet, as time passed, any careful observer could have seen that the American facade of back-slapping bonhomie concealed a strong desire to avoid serious commitments. The US Government never shared the hostile political views of certain influential voices within American opinion, such as that of the publicist and commentator Walter Lippmann, who saw no reason why the First Ally’s republic should be restored.
²⁷
At the same time, it did not regard assistance to the First Ally as one of its responsibilities. Instances of prevarication
multiplied. For over a year, for example, the exiled Government had been urging Washington to replace Ambassador Drexel Biddle, who had left his post in London in mid-1943. But the State Department showed little sense of urgency. A replacement, Arthur Bliss Lane, was found in July 1944; but he was kept waiting throughout the summer for confirmation by the Senate, and he never reached London in time to present his credentials.
²⁸
Repeated delays over the supply of twelve long-range aircraft were still more frustrating. Ever since Gen. Sikorski’s visit to Washington in December 1942, the exiled Government had been expecting delivery of these planes, which were intended to form an independent wing for liaison with the Polish Underground. Considering that the US was ferrying hundreds of new aircraft to Britain every month, the request was very modest. Indeed, it appears to have been accepted in principle. But it generated any number of excuses, and was never actually met. Instead, the exiled Government was informed of the availability of other types of equipment:

S/Ops/4391

1st July 1944

To: Maj. M. J. T. Pickles [War Office]
From: Lt. Pudding
We have received a signal from our representative in the USA, that he can obtain through Lendlease a Motion Picture Sound Projector, Automatic Motion Picture Camera Portable Film Recorder . . . together with single Film Recording System all 35mm, but before making further arrangements it is necessary that clearance be made through the War Office for these goods . . .
²⁹

This letter from Lt. ‘Pudding’ to Maj. Pickles needs no commentary.

When Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the First Ally in April 1943 over the Katyn affair, he did so suddenly, brutally, and, as it later proved, on totally unjustified grounds. Since he had personally signed the order to execute the Polish officers, he knew exactly what he was doing. He was testing the political waters of the Grand Alliance to see just how far he could go. If he was right in believing that he could push the British and Americans to connive in a monstrous falsehood about the mass murder of their friends, he could be confident about pushing them to the brink on many less sensitive matters. British officialdom found itself in a quandary. The secret report on Katyn, prepared by Sir Owen O’Malley, ambassador to the exiled Government, pointed to the probability of Soviet guilt. But it proved so unpalatable to the proSoviet prejudices of the majority of his colleagues that they preferred to feign confusion and to
admit nothing. All the Western information services were instructed to follow the Soviets and to describe Katyn as a German crime.
³⁰

In mid-1944, a second problem arose. It concerned Moscow’s demands for the repatriation of ‘Soviet citizens’ who were falling into Western hands in ever-increasing numbers. Whenever British or American armies overran districts relieved of German Occupation, they invariably captured men and women from Eastern Europe who had either been used by the Nazis for slave labour or who had served under German command in one of the collaborationist formations. Some Allied officials thought the matter quite straightforward. ‘The Russians want their people back, just as we want our people back.’ But others could spot a trap. For one thing, many of the alleged ‘Soviet citizens’ were not Soviet citizens at all. For another, those who came from the First Ally’s eastern provinces continued to be recognized by the Western powers as Polish citizens. And lastly, if Soviet practice were to run to form, all persons handed over to the NKVD for repatriation could be given a very short expectation of life.

The British Cabinet discussed the matter briefly on 17 July 1944, and one of the Cabinet ministers, Lord Selborne, passed his reflections to the Foreign Secretary. He talked with some distaste about ‘the prospect of sending many thousands of men to die either by execution or in Siberia . . .’; and ‘in the interests of humanity’ he raised the possibility of ‘absorbing them in some of the less populated countries of the world’. Eden gave the idea short shrift. ‘If the men don’t go to Russia’, he minuted, ‘where do they go? We don’t want them here.’ He then realized that numbers of British prisoners were in Soviet care, and his stance hardened:

To refuse the Soviet Government’s request for the return of their own men would lead to serious trouble with them. We have no right whatsoever to do this, and they would not understand our humanitarian motives . . . [it] would arouse their gravest suspicions.
³¹

The repatriation affair had numerous repercussions. One of them was to make forceful intervention on the First Ally’s behalf so much more delicate.

In early July 1944, the Soviets unleashed a ferocious offensive in the central sector of the Eastern Front. It was designed by agreement to coincide with the expected Allied breakout from Normandy and hence to prevent the
Germans from boosting their defences in France. Gen. Rokossovsky’s First Byelorussian Front surged through the German front line in a hailstorm of men and machines. It rapidly reached the fortress of Brest-Litovsk, where the German–Soviet War had begun three years earlier, and surged across the River Bug. Beyond the Bug, the Vistula waited. The Red Army had reached a new territorial sphere which even Stalin did not claim as part of the Soviet Union – so it changed its name to the Soviet Army. At Lublin, they were only 650km (405 miles) from Berlin.

The military situation was very fluid. The Germans were pulling back. But they were quite capable of mounting counterattacks, as indeed they did. Observers on the spot could hardly gauge what was happening. Column after column of weary but disciplined German soldiers trudged towards safety on the far side of the Vistula. The frontline echelons of Soviet troops pressed hard on their heels.

The political situation was particularly bewildering. The Soviets were not behaving as they had done five years before. In 1939, their main message had been ‘Your country is finished.’ Now, they were going out of their way to proclaim ‘Your country will rise again.’ Moreover, they had brought a separate army with them made up of local lads. It had been recruited from former refugees and deportees, whom no one had expected to see again; and it was commanded by a pre-war officer. The National Liberation Committee, which they also installed, did not look like the usual Communist-type organization. It was not headed by a Russian or by a known Communist, but by an unknown little man, who was presenting himself both as a local and as a non-party figure. His colleagues seemed to include a peasant, a priest, a prince, and another pre-war officer. It was all strangely moderate. Like the British Labour Party at the time, the Committee advocated the nationalization of industry and promised agrarian reform. But it did not talk of ‘Five-Year Plans’ or the collectivization of agriculture. Above all, it did not claim to be a Provisional Government. So the inevitable suspicions were accompanied by gaping mouths. At all their political meetings, the Committee’s representatives were careful to hang the First Ally’s national flag alongside the Hammer and Sickle, the Stars and Stripes, and the Union Jack.

Shortly after entering Lublin, the Soviet authorities took the frontline press corps to view a dreadful sight. Nine whole months before the Western armies could reveal the secrets of Belsen and Buchenwald, the Soviets showed the world the horrors of Maidanek. For the very first time, outside cameras zoomed in on a major Nazi concentration camp,
highlighting the sinister watchtowers, the electrified wire, the piles of abandoned clothes and suitcases, and the heaps of rotting corpses. Distressed correspondents interviewed the emaciated survivors, and recounted their barely credible stories. Nothing could have given greater weight to the official Soviet contention that its army was the bearer of true Liberation.

During Gen. Sikorski’s lifetime, Britain’s relations with its First Ally were often conducted at the very highest level, since, to the envy of many lesser fry, the General enjoyed regular and direct access to Churchill. Contacts were greatly facilitated by the exiled Government’s presence in London. The British Foreign Office was in daily touch both with the much respected ambassador to St James, Count R., and with the exiled Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Officials from the British War Office could talk directly to and arrange meetings with their opposite numbers in the exiled Ministry of National Defence. For obvious reasons, Britain’s external intelligence service, MI6, enjoyed specially close relations with the II Bureau, which ran a notably far-flung and effective intelligence service of its own, particularly in the Third Reich and in the USSR.

As time went on and the First Ally organized an elaborate Resistance movement, the VI Bureau of the exiled Government’s General Staff gained prominence. The VI Bureau was charged with the supervision of contacts with the occupied country in general and with underground military formations in particular. It rapidly became the focus of attention both for the British intelligence service and for the Special Operations Executive.