Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
Travelling within the Nazi realms was one thing, but travelling back and forth between Nazi-occupied Europe and the outside world demanded ingenuity of a still higher order. Border controls were severe. Documents had to be perfectly forged. The price of discovery was death. Indeed, the couriers of the exiled Government invariably carried cyanide capsules. Their journeys could take weeks, or even months.
In the course of the war, scores of Underground couriers maintained the links between Poland and the Free World. Their usual destination was London, which they could only reach with immense ingenuity via Scandinavia or Spain and Portugal. On the return leg, they could hope for a swifter journey with the help of the RAF and a parachute. Many of them remained virtually unknown and unsung, and quite a few were simply obliterated after being caught. But some who survived, like Karski, ‘Novak’, ‘Yur’, and ‘Zo’, became legends in their own lifetime.
Karski was the younger brother of the last pre-war superintendent of Warsaw’s police department, who, though becoming head of the Blue Police, was (rightly) suspected of contacts with the Underground, and cast into Auschwitz. A member of the PPS, Karski made three ‘runs’, and despite his own feelings of failure became famous for bringing the truth of the Jewish Holocaust to the West.
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Jan N., ‘Novak’, is the author of the bestselling memoir
Courier from Warsaw
(1978), which did much to popularize his and his colleagues’ death-defying work. Active in the Home Army’s department ‘N’ for psychological warfare, he, too, made three runs to London. He reached Warsaw at the end of his third run on 31 July 1944.
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Emissary Yur was parachuted into Poland by SOE in February 1943. He returned to England via Gibraltar in May 1944. Having evaded the Gestapo, the Vichy police and Franco’s Civil Guard for some two thousand miles under the guise of a rocket engineer, he was intercepted on the platform of the last station in Spain with the inimitable greeting: ‘How are you, George?’ In London, he became secretary to the last premier of the exiled Government.
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Emissary Zo was an Underground activist for whom the trans-Continental assignment to London was but one of numerous wartime episodes. A mathematics teacher, she had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army Service in 1936, and was a natural choice to be an organizer and trainer of the Home Army’s numerous women recruits. When her circuit in Silesia was betrayed to the Gestapo, her own need to disappear
coincided nicely with the Home Army’s search for a German-speaking courier. She left Warsaw in December 1942 as Elisabet Kubitza, administrator of a German oil company. The trip to Paris, via Strasbourg, passed off faultlessly in first-class trains, luxury hotels, and elegant restaurants, but the next stage, which involved crossing the Andorran Pyrenees alone, and waiting among snow-covered bushes for her Spanish guide, was less entertaining:
No knowledge of Spanish . . . No money . . . Foggy dawn, frozen to the marrow. I am coughing, which is fortunate because Gilbert was trying to find me. We descend cautiously in the direction of Seo de Urgel. Wonderful blooms in the almond groves. We run into helpful people, a teacher who was an officer in the Catalan Commune and is now a member of the Falanga . . . He sends a man to the British Consulate in Barcelona. But no one there will talk to him . . . Madrid . . . Gibraltar . . . A 19-ship convoy . . . and finally, the port of Bristol . . . [Then] two nights in prison. On 3 May, an officer of the Commanderin-Chief’s staff collects me . . .
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Zo spent four months in England. Having completed her parachute training, she returned to the Warsaw district with the papers of ‘Elizabeth Watson’ on 10 September 1943, with one perfect jump.
The Home Army (AK) developed a complicated structure in order to cope with the large variety of tasks undertaken. Its secret HQ in Warsaw was necessarily mobile, and commanded a countrywide force estimated in early 1944 at 300–400,000. In the early stages, the strategy concentrated on recruitment and training.
In the course of 1943, the exiled Government found itself confronted with mounting difficulties that were not of its own making. In April, as a result of the Katyn revelations, the USSR broke off negotiations unilaterally; in July, Gen. Sikorski was killed in the Gibraltar air crash, and in November, the Teheran Conference opened a Pandora’s box of problems that needed urgent attention.
For practical purposes, Stalin’s action in breaking off Soviet relations was potentially the most damaging. It was made on grounds that were 100 per cent false; and it created the prospect that the Red Army would soon be operating in territory where the local resistance forces would be considered illegitimate. The sequence of events is vital to any judgement of the issue. The break in Soviet–Polish relations occurred in April 1943. At the time, the Red Army was still battling deep inside Russia. The decisive
Battle of Kursk was still three months away. The Teheran Conference would not convene for seven months. If the ‘Big Three’ had seriously wanted to pluck this thorn from international politics, they had ample time to do so.
Nonetheless, Poland’s alliance with Great Britain, though strained, did not waver. And one of the fields in which Polish–British cooperation intensified was that of ‘special operations’.
SOE’s Polish Section was the oldest in the business. Indeed, a Polish officer was aboard the very first experimental ‘special flight’ that was sent to France in September 1939, long before SOE was thought of.
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And Gubbins was talking to Sikorski in Paris before the fall of France. What is more, as
résistants de la première heure
, the Poles (like the Czechs) were to enjoy special privileges. They were allowed unrestricted use of their own radio stations in Britain, and they were left to plan missions and to select agents on their own. Almost all of the Polish Section’s agents were Poles not Britons. In effect, the exiled Government used SOE for its own purposes, and not vice versa. The official historian of SOE was duly impressed by the political clout of Sikorski, who in 1941 managed to obtain a dedicated flight of Halifaxes at a time when ‘heavy bombers were more esteemed by the Air Ministry than pure gold’. But the Poles returned the favours. SOE was especially indebted to their Polish partners in many fields, notably in Continental intelligence, in the design and production of clandestine wireless sets, and in forgery.
The Polish agents flown into Poland by SOE were universally known as the
cichociemni
(pronounced
cheeko-chemny
), ‘the dark and silent ones’. Of the 316 despatched, only 9 failed to reach their destination. Of the nine, three were lost on 30 October 1942, when their Halifax flew into a cliff on the Norwegian coast; three more were killed on 15 September 1943, when another Halifax was shot down over Denmark; and three died individually when their chutes failed to open. Their success rate, therefore, topped 97 per cent: and they performed a priceless function.
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They landed with weapons, and kits for making weapons. They brought plans, orders, couriers, and large amounts of money for financing the Underground. (SOE’s grant to the Polish Section for its first year of operation in 1941–42 was £600,000.) Above all, they brought the knowledge that the Underground had allies, that it was not fighting alone.
The wartime airflight from Britain to Poland was never luxurious. It was cold, noisy, long, and full of uncertainties. The earliest venture was undertaken on 15 February 1941 in an ancient two-engined Whitley
equipped with long-range tanks and cruising at a maximum of 120 mph (190 kph). It took 11
1
/
2
hours to drop only three men and (365kg) 800 lb of stores. After that, a regular air bridge was established using four-engined Liberators that passed over Denmark or Sweden. From December 1943, a dedicated Polish air force flight (No. 1586) began to operate from Brindisi in Italy. (The plan to create an independent wing of twelve Liberators, to be used exclusively for liaison with Poland, was never realized.) Of all the ‘dark and silent’ agents whom SOE injected into the Underground, none could boast a biography to compare with that of Maj. Boleslas Kontrym, alias ‘White’ and ‘the Samogitian’. Kontrym bore witness to many of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution to the Blitzkrieg, from Bergen-Belsen to a Stalinist show trial. His early years resembled those of Marshal Rokossovsky. Born in Volhynia, the son of a Tsarist colonel, he was the grandson and great-grandson of Polish insurgents. He was schooled at the Russian Military Academy at Jaroslavl on the Volga, before fighting successively in the Tsarist army (1915–18) and the Red Army (1918–22). By the age of twenty-four, he held the Soviet rank of ‘kombryg’ (brigadier), and had been three times decorated with the Order of the Red Banner. However, when Rokossovsky chose to stay in the USSR, Kontrym chose Poland. Joining the Polish Army, he moved first to the Frontier Corps and then to the State Police. By 1939, he was the Chief Superintendent of Police in Vilno.
Kontrym’s wartime career began in September 1939 with a daring mission to Stockholm and back. It continued through arrest in Lithuania, escape to Norway, service in France, a return to Scandinavia with the expeditionary force to Narvik, and an adventurous journey via Spain and Portugal to Britain. In 1942, he was training in Lincolnshire with the Polish Parachute Brigade, preparing for the jump which, on 2 September 1942, brought him home.
Kontrym’s career in the Underground was no less colourful. Initially assigned to Operation Fan, the Home Army’s abortive attempt to establish a conspiratorial network far to the east, he returned to Warsaw to head the Investigative Department of the State Security Corps (PKB). In this capacity, he was responsible for devising the strategy and executing the plans for contesting the sway of the SS and the Gestapo. It is said that he personally eliminated twenty-five Nazis or Nazi collaborators. Even so, the most active interlude of his remarkable life was yet to begin. Kontrym had a personal interest in the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front. In the
Nazis’ eyes, he was a bandit chief with a price on his head. To the Soviets, he was a deserter.
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The hair-raising adventures of the ‘dark and silent’ are scattered through their numerous memoirs. But occasionally the mission went like clockwork:
I was assigned to a four-man team. The cryptonym of the flight was ‘Spokeshave’. My carefree comrades were ‘Pawn’, ‘Eye’, and ‘Grove’. The captain of our flight was an experienced pilot born in Lida; and in his crew, apart from two brothers from [Lvuv], there was a former postman who manned the tail-gun of the Halifax of 138 Squadron . . .
Our clothes and equipment were checked by both Polish and British officers. They put two heavy money-belts round my waist, filled with dollars . . . One had to remember to hand over all compromising objects, like a London bus ticket . . .
At the airfield at Tempsford in eastern England, we were seen off by representatives of the VI Bureau and the Air Force and by our guardian angel, Lt.Col. Harold Perkins of British Intelligence, who as usual was in excellent humour. His cane, which never left him, often fulfilled the function of a conductor’s baton. ‘Tell the people in Poland,’ he said, ‘that here in England the Poles have faithful friends who will never abandon them . . .’
In Poland, the snow was beginning to thaw, so when we took off at 18.45 on 19 February 1943 we had changed our white snow suits for green-brown overalls . . . A full moon was shining, and we first caught sight of the silver Vistula, and briefly, of cloud-covered Warsaw. Our pilot said that the sirens would certainly be blaring down below, because the Germans would not be able to tell whether we were a so-called ‘little bird’ or a serious bombing raid. Our plane began to descend quietly over the River Pilitsa, and then to seek the reception point. What an emotional moment it was when, in the midst of the dark forest, we saw a cross of red and white flares impudently alight in a large clearing. ‘Hurray! They’re here and waiting for us,’ we cried. After all, the Home Army is not some sort of crackpot fantasy dreamt up by émigré propaganda . . .
The ‘Action Station’ lights flashed. I can’t remember who shouted ‘Go’. But the cases of arms went first. Twelve of them. ‘Grove’ jumped, and I as political emissary jumped second. Soon the chutes of ‘Pawn’ and ‘Eye’ were billowing above my head.
We had jumped from a mere 300 feet, so that the dispersion would be minimal. I flew past a tall pine tree and landed like a king on my feet, without the regulation roll. I realized that I was standing in a field of rich ploughed earth . . .
After a minute or two, an unprepossessing armed man in a helmet appeared. We exchanged the password . . . and then a strong manly handshake. Somewhere on the edge of the clearing, the commander sent from Warsaw called his team together. They were all locals who had joined the AK from the pre-war Rural Youth League. They removed all the boxes, and the parachutes from which the women would sew themselves silk blouses and underwear. According to instructions, we swallowed the regulation dose of Excedrin for increased alertness . . ., leaving the cyanide pills provided in case of torture in a special pocket in our trousers. I held the enciphered message from the Commanderin-Chief to the Commandant of the Home Army in the lining of my overcoat.
Under the care of local guides, we moved off beneath the starry sky for a couple of kilometres until we reached a school building. It would have been a wonderful walk except for the barking of farm dogs who could easily have attracted the attention of a nearby German guardpost. We were welcomed by the doughty village headmistress who served up a mouth-watering omelette with tomatoes and bacon. But haste was essential. The school had to be vacated by dawn. So we handed over our weapons and our money-belts to a delegate of the Warsaw AK. In this way, I never carried a pistol again, though I hoped that the gun which I had brought from England would be used by someone else in the Underground struggle . . .
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