Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (32 page)

The British Communists formed a small group, offering a raft of mainly unpopular propositions. They were the true believers of a political sect who were sworn to absolute obedience to orders passed down from above, and ultimately from Moscow. They were ultra-sensitized to the undoubted failings of British society but institutionally oblivious to Soviet failings. Since they were trained to act on the principle that ‘the party is always right’, they had been totally bewildered in 1939–41, when Moscow was expressing fulsome praise for the Third Reich, which until recently
they had been told to condemn. But they recovered their enthusiasm when Hitler and Stalin resumed hostilities. Indeed, 1943–44 was the time when the CPGB enjoyed its greatest (though still modest) standing in British life. It included a few intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm, who would later claim that he knew nothing about Stalin’s mass crimes,
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but consisted predominantly of dedicated proletarian activists from ‘Red Clydeside’ or from London’s East End who had little interest in foreign affairs.
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Extraordinarily, they were not seen by the British wartime authorities as a dubious element. Whilst British fascists were imprisoned, the British Communists were allowed to circulate freely and to promote their subversive designs in all quarters of British life. A comrade of the wartime vintage later admitted how between 1943 and 1945, when he was a serving officer in the British army, he spent his spare time writing brochures blackening the reputation of the Polish ‘militarists’, ‘fascists’, and ‘imperialists’ who were supposedly sowing such unwelcome discord in the democratic ranks of the Grand Alliance.
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There was, to quote a phrase, ‘an asymmetry of indulgence’.

A British writer with a personal interest in the puzzle of Western intellectuals deluded by Stalinism, has recently asked the question ‘How much did the Oxford comrades know?’ Having summarized the many repellent aspects of Soviet foreign policy, from the Nazi–Soviet Pact to the attacks on Poland, Finland, Romania, and the Baltic States, he made a list of the more appalling domestic horrors of Stalinism, which had been widely reported in the 1930s and which ought to have put all reasonably decent or intelligent observers on their guard:

There were public protests in the West about Soviet forced-labour camps as early as 1931. There were also many solid accounts of the violent chaos of Collectivisation (1929–34) and of the 1933 famine (though no suggestion, as yet, that the famine was terroristic). And there were the Moscow Show Trials of 1936–38, which were open to foreign journalists and observers, and were monitored worldwide. In these pompous and hysterical charades, renowned Old Bolsheviks ‘confessed’ to being career-long enemies of the regime (and to other self-evidently ridiculous charges). . . . And yet the world, on the whole, took the other view, and further accepted indignant Soviet denials of famines, enserfment of the peasantry and slave labour.
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As to the explanation of why the truth about Soviet reality was not believed, ‘it may well be that the reality – the truth – was unbelievable.’
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As revelations many years later would confirm, Soviet influence in the upper reaches of the British Government was far stronger that anyone then suspected. Christopher Hill, for example, who ran the Soviet desk at the FO’s Northern Department in 1944, having been seconded from Military Intelligence, was a Soviet mole and a card-carrying Communist, who had concealed his membership of the CPGB. Hill’s friend Peter Smollett, who held a similar position in the Ministry of Information, was an active Soviet agent who in due course defected. In turn, Smollett’s colleague Kim Philby, Soviet spy par excellence, ran the Soviet Section of counterintelligence at MI6 under the Foreign Office, thereby disabling Britain’s defences against Soviet penetration. The three of them seem to have organized an informal committee whose aim was to convince the public about the benevolence of Stalin’s intentions. Their contact/controller at the Soviet Embassy was probably Grigori Saksin, who departed London in a hurry in September 1944. Their views may be judged from a book, which Hill was writing, called
Two Commonwealths: the Soviets and Ourselves
. Published in 1945, under the pseudonym of K. E. Holme, the book maintained that the USSR was a full democracy with universal suffrage, and that the purges of the 1930s, comparable to the demands of the Chartists, were ‘non-violent’. The presence of such people in key positions may help to explain the strange lethargy in Polish matters which beset the Foreign Office whilst the Warsaw Rising raged.
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Completely unbeknown to the British Communists, the Soviet authorities maintained an extensive network of spies in Britain. They ranged from low-grade casuals like Melita Norwood, who passed on technical secrets from her employers in the metal industry, to highly trained professionals working under cover in the top echelons of the British establishment. In the mid-1940s, the Cambridge ‘Five’ – Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross – who had been recruited in the 1930s, were at the height of their powers, and misinformation about Poland would have figured prominently on their task list. Yet the really amazing fact about their story is the extraordinarily unguarded and congenial climate in which they were allowed to operate. Cairncross, for example, who worked for a time at Bletchley Park and sent Ultra secrets of the highest possible sensitivity to Moscow, didn’t even regard himself as a spy, but as an eccentric British patriot dutifully sharing intelligence with a British ally.
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The British press in 1944 contained a vociferous proSoviet contingent, which started with the
Daily Worker
and certainly included the Labourite
Daily Herald
. What most wartime readers did not realize was that many
conservative and right-wing papers, like
The Times
or the
Daily Express
, whilst keeping their distance from ideological issues, were similarly biased.

The task of encouraging the coordination of Britain’s proSoviet chorus fell mainly to the Soviet Embassy. The Soviet Military Mission received extensive intelligence from the British and Americans. Yet in spite of the vast quantities of Western aid flowing to the USSR, not least through the Arctic convoys, the Soviets did not reciprocate in kind. They enjoyed a virtual monopoly on information from the Eastern Front, maximizing the kudos of their military victories whilst suppressing all accurate reports of political, economic, or social conditions. The Soviet Embassy worked hand in glove with the British Communist Party (CPGB), with the Soviet spyrings, and with all sympathetic collaborators. It was a sign of the times that the Embassy’s press officer found little difficulty in obtaining an influential lectureship in Russian Studies at London University.
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Britain’s wartime Foreign Office was to gain the reputation in later years of having been culpably soft on Stalinism. Certainly, there were a number of figures like Geoffrey Wilson, who worked in the Northern Department on Soviet and Polish affairs, who can only be described as ‘tireless apologists’. Yet the unashamed Sovietophiles were not in command; and their most blatant schemes did not go unchallenged. In January 1942, for example, a memorandum was received from E. H. Carr, proposing that Britain formally recognize a Soviet sphere of influence. ‘It should fall to Russia’, he said, without a hint of irony, ‘to interpret and apply . . . the guiding principles of the Atlantic Charter in Eastern Europe.’ Reviewed by one of Eden’s deputies, Sir Orme Sargent, it got short shrift. It was, minuted Sargent, ‘a policy of appeasement’, and ‘a formula for abdication.’
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Even at that early stage, he was not alone in warning against Soviet ambitions. His colleague, Roger Makins, the Head of the Central Department, agreed. The general trend of Soviet policy, he argued as early as 1942, ‘is an extension of exclusive Russian influence in Eastern Europe to be effected by the occupation of Finland . . ., the crushing of Hungary and the encirclement of Poland.’
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The War Office was markedly less ambivalent, however, than the diplomats. In 1942, it published a pamphlet entitled
On Dealing with the Russians
authored by a Brig. Firebrace. It described Soviet officers as ‘childish barbarians’, ‘inordinately proud’ of the Red Army’s achievements. It brought down cries of ‘Russophobia’ and ‘anti-Russian extravagances’. True to form, the FO’s Geoffrey Wilson called for the British officers responsible to be purged.
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Already in April 1944, a debate was launched on the make-up of post-war Europe, and a Post-hostilities Planning Committee was set up. The War Office and the Foreign Office did not present a united front. The former refused to assume that Germany would be Britain’s sole conceivable enemy. And the FO’s Central Department proposed keeping armament production high, to allow for a possible confrontation with the USSR. The Northern Department was vehemently opposed. Wilson called for Anglo-Soviet staff talks.
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The typical stance of British diplomats towards the USSR, therefore, may be likened to that of post-war ‘revisionist’ historians, who were not entirely devoid of knowledge, but who could not bring themselves to believe the basic facts. It may best be characterized as a state of bemusement, brought on by alternating moments of admiration and fear, and by being ‘isolated from any real idea of the realities of life’ in the USSR: ‘There were two recurrent but mutually exclusive fears: that Russia might rest on its laurels after driving the invader back to the frontiers of 1941, or, conversely that it might defeat Germany virtually single-handed. . . .’
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According to one critic, British diplomats preparing to improve Soviet relations with Poland were ‘impelled . . . by a state of mind which was somewhere between a determination to be optimistic and pure wishful thinking’.
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The proSoviet lobby in the USA was similar in make-up to that in Britain, though it possessed some more flamboyant enthusiasts and was opposed by some fierce Conservatives. After the war it emerged that there was also a sprinkling of Soviet spies. But there was no one to match the breathtaking fatuity of Joseph E. Davies (thankfully no relation), who had served as US Ambassador to Moscow in 1936–38, at the height of Stalin’s Terror, and who had learned absolutely nothing. In 1941, Davies published a memoir called
Mission to Moscow
, which, with the help of Warner Bros., he then turned into a popular film over which he retained complete control. Hiring the team of Michael Curtiz and Howard Koch, who had recently directed and scripted
Casablanca
, he set out without shame to win the American public over to his vision of a happy, prosperous, and friendly Russia. With Walter Huston as his ambassadorial self, Gene Lockhart as Molotov and Dudley Malone as Churchill, he fabricated a fable for the screen, which praised the purges, vilified the victims of the show trials, justified the Nazi–Soviet Pact, and classed the invasions of Poland and Finland as ‘self-defence’. Released in April 1943, after a private preview for President Roosevelt, it opened to critical acclaim and to only a muffled
chorus of protests. Stalin, when shown it a month later, presumably could not believe his eyes. He immediately ordered it to be released in a Russian version – the first American film to be passed for screening in the USSR for over a decade. One thing it did not show was Davies’ luxury yacht
Sea Cloud
, which he kept moored in Leningrad and which was loaded with food and drink for himself and his family.
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Whilst assiduously cultivating receptive people in Britain and America, the Soviets kept the exiled Polish Government at arms’ length. They appeared to stick strictly to the break in diplomatic relations, which they had maintained since the Katyn affair in April 1943. Yet it is fascinating to note that the break was not total. In June and July 1944, the Soviet Ambassador in London was conducting highly secret talks with Stanislas G., a former Polish minister. The aim was to sound out the possibility of resuming official relations. Concealed from the world at large, Stalin was keeping his options open.
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In the summer of 1944 the Soviet Union’s prestige was approaching its peak. For three years, it had borne the brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany with little but logistical assistance from the Western powers. Now, after superhuman sacrifices, it was coming out on top. In the eyes of many people in Britain and America, irrespective of political convictions, it had earned their unstinting gratitude.

In the last week of July 1944, the Soviet Army was not only attaining its objectives on the central sector of the Eastern Front, it was exceeding them. After forty days of relentless fighting, it had covered most of the ground between the Berezina and the Vistula, and though the tempo of the advance was slackening, the front line was moving forward inexorably. The Germans were digging in on the eastern approaches to Warsaw, where they were expected to defend the vital Vistula bridges. But on either side of those approaches, weakly held positions were waiting to be attacked and punctured. The 1st (Polish) Army had already reached the right bank of the Vistula on 25 July, and repeatedly tried to force a passage. The key breakthrough occurred on 27 July when elements of Gen. Chuikov’s Eighth Guards Army scrambled across a narrow stretch of the river in armoured amphibians 50km (thirty miles) south of Warsaw near the Vistula’s junction with the Pilitsa. They were the advance guard of two major river-crossings which were soon supported by tanks and which created the unplanned bonus of twin bridgeheads on the Vistula’s
left-hand bank. On 28 July, Rokossovsky received updated objectives for the armies of his front. The orders foresaw the capture of Praga by 2 August at the latest.

The Varka–Magnushev Bridgehead, as it came to be known, defied all the Germans’ desperate attempts to dislodge it. Exposed, with his forces astride the river, Chuikov was subjected to a cunning and determined counterattack: