Read Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History
The headline ran ‘Poland Bombed by U.S. Airforce’. It would have been read in conjunction with another piece immediately below headed ‘Furious Fighting in Warsaw: More Ground Gained by Patriots’. Ordinary readers must have drawn the obvious conclusion. If the Allies were bombing Gdynia, the bombing of German positions in Warsaw could not be far behind.
During these operations, the Americans frequently reported incidents of ‘friendly fire’. It was assumed that Soviet anti-aircraft gunners had standing orders to fire on any unauthorized flights. But that was only part of the explanation. On 15–16 June, Soviet Yak fighters had attacked two American F-5 reconnaissance planes, damaging one and destroying the other.
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Throughout August, Churchill and to a lesser extent Roosevelt strove to persuade Stalin to give landing rights in the USSR to Allied flights
heading for Warsaw. Stalin’s responses were uniformly hostile. Roosevelt’s interest was, at best, lukewarm. Churchill’s message to Moscow on 12 August was phrased in strong language:
We have practically no news from you, no information on the political situation, no advice and no instruction. Have you discussed in Moscow help for Warsaw? I repeat emphatically that without immediate support, consisting of drops of arms and ammunition, bombing of objectives held by the enemy, and air landing, our fight will collapse in a few days . . . I expect from you the greatest effort in this respect.
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This was countered by the extraordinary dressing-down of the US Ambassador in Moscow mentioned earlier. But Churchill persisted. On the 18th, he told Eden to check out the technical feasibility of the overflights, and he appealed to Roosevelt for joint action. Their message to Stalin, which Roosevelt drafted, was deliberately mild in tone. It started: ‘We are thinking of world opinion’. And it ended, ‘The time element is of the greatest importance.’ It did not evoke a definite reply. What was worse, at the next round Roosevelt casually told Churchill: ‘I do not see what further steps we can take at the present time which promise results.’
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Churchill was roused to undisguised anger. He proposed a draft message which commented less than diplomatically on Stalin’s earlier replies. ‘Our sympathies are aroused for these “almost unarmed people” whose special faith has led them to attack German tanks, guns and planes,’ he said; also ‘the [Warsaw] Rising was certainly called for repeatedly by Moscow Radio’; and ‘we propose to send the aircraft unless you directly forbid it.’
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This time, the President refused to join in. September arrived; and the question of using the Frantic system was unresolved.
Once the conflict inside Warsaw had reached virtual stalemate, and Western assistance was failing, all eyes turned to Moscow. Historians must equally turn their attention to the Kremlin, for the simple reason that Moscow was rapidly becoming the key player in deciding the Rising’s fate. Yet the task is a tricky one. All arguments are necessarily based on inadequate documentation, on deduction, and to some extent on speculation. At no point in the remaining decades of the twentieth century would all parts of the relevant archives in Moscow be freely opened to independent enquiry.
In mid-August 1944, Stalin’s approach to the Warsaw Rising would have been formed within the context of six factors – the news from Warsaw, the talks with the Polish Premier, Rokossovsky’s fortunes at the front, relations with the Lublin Committee, security assessments from the NKVD, and grand strategy. One can only surmise which might have been the determinant. For if Stalin’s actions may be discussed in outline, the exact timing and motives remain opaque. In essence, the sequence of Stalin’s decisions seems to have been first to wait and see, second to dissociate himself from the Rising’s political leadership, and last to withhold the Soviet Army. Why or precisely when he took these steps, it is impossible to say.
From Moscow’s standpoint, the news from Warsaw was baffling. The Rising had not been suppressed, even though it had received no significant reinforcements. This could only mean that early Soviet assessments were faulty, and that the Polish Communists had been telling stories. It did not provide the basis for confident decisions. Above all, it meant that the Home Army was a much stronger force then the Kremlin had reckoned on. From the Kremlin’s viewpoint, it was unsettling.
The Polish Premier, who had stayed on, was granted a second hour-long audience with Stalin on the evening of 9 August. Some accounts of the meeting suggest that Stalin turned nasty, repeating the outrageous claims of Bierut and Co. that ‘there was no fighting in Warsaw at all’.
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The protocol of the conversation, however, does not support such an interpretation. On the contrary, it shows that Stalin was unusually genial. In response to various comments, he repeatedly said: ‘That would be very nice.’ With respect to aid for the Rising, he did say at its first mention that the suggested moves ‘looked unrealistic’. He explained that Rokossovsky’s front had been pushed back and that Soviet capabilities were limited. But he appeared to take a detailed interest in the technicalities of airdrops. And he waxed quite lyrical on the subject of Polish–Soviet relations. He said that the aim of Soviet policy was ‘to have friendship between us’. He wanted ‘all Poles to understand that the present leadership of Soviet Russia differed from the leadership of Tsarist Russia’. In his conviction, ‘the Polish nation should go hand in hand with the Soviet Union, not against it.’ He even said that he had been in Warsaw, and knew the narrow streets of the Old Town. The Premier had stated that everyone fighting in Warsaw was united, both in the Home Army and the People’s Army. And Stalin twice confirmed his readiness to provide Warsaw ‘with the most rapid assistance possible’. The two men warmed to the theme of the German
menace. Stalin expressed his pleasure that the Premier was ‘so anti-German’. And, in closing, made his famous comment about communism suiting Germany ‘like a saddle fits a cow’. Contrary to later accounts, this meeting was not a sullen confrontation. If anything, it was suspiciously hearty. The two men passed an hour amidst a cloud of pleasant platitudes.
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The Premier believed that he had extracted Stalin’s ‘promise’ about the Rising. He left Moscow immediately. [
REFUGEE
, p. 317]
Rokossovsky had clearly suffered some sort of setback, whose political implications could be no doubt exaggerated and exploited in Moscow. But the setback was not critical. His plan of 8 August, for restarting the Western offensive, was approved by Zhukov and showed that there was no serious military obstacle to crossing the Vistula and rescuing the Rising. The capture of Warsaw would be the first step on the road towards Berlin. Stalin was being offered the means of striking a war-winning blow in record time; and the advice was proffered by the two men whose knowledge of the Eastern Front was unrivalled.
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Stalin’s own clients, in the Lublin Committee, were almost more trouble than they were worth. They were slavishly obsequious but they had no discernible standing either in Poland or abroad. And they did not always stay in line. On 13 August, in Order nr. 6, the Committee’s Army Commander gave an unmistakable signal to his soldiers that they would be marching into Warsaw in the very near future:
Soldiers! The moment has arrived for the liberation of our capital. Warsaw, the symbol of the unbending, five-year struggle of the Polish nation, is watching you . . . The great honour of taking part in the liberation battle and of ending the torment of your murdered compatriots has fallen to you . . .
The whole world is waiting for Warsaw’s liberation, for the victory which you will win, arm in arm with the greatest fighting force in the world, the Red Army . . . You must show the world that Poles are fighting for their capital. Forward to Warsaw! For Poland!
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All the indications are that the Lublin Committee and its generals had been talking with Rokossovsky.
One reason for Moscow’s caution might be found in the torrent of vitriol that was pouring out of the Lublin Committee and its associated bodies. At the very time that the Committee’s leaders had been pretending in Moscow that there was no such thing as a Warsaw Rising, their comrades in Lublin had been preparing to denounce the Home Army for supposedly usurping control of it. A decree to this effect was published on 8 August by the Central Executive of the Communist PPR:
REFUGEE
Refugees unable to return home take cover for many days then decide to flee
During our two weeks of forced internment . . . I dug out a volume of sociological essays about prewar Poland,
The Young Generation of Peasants
, and plunged into a sorry reckoning with my own and my country’s past, from time to time dropping flat on the floor as bullets traced long patterns across the plaster.
[We found] a kind of well in the cellar . . . big enough for two to stand in comfortably. But there were eleven . . . men in the house. We hid in it when the rumble of huge SS tanks sounded in the vicinity. The women closed the metal cover over us, and . . . we immediately began to suffocate. It was quite theatrical. In the light from the electric bulb I saw the mouths of fish thrown up on the sand and heads withering on stems of necks. A struggle also went on between those who preferred to suffocate and those who wanted to lift the cover. I suffocated, but with a nervous giggle. And anyway I did not know how real the danger was until one of us was picked up by the SS one day. He died running with upraised arms in front of a tank . . . as a human buffer in an attack on the insurrectionists’ barricades.
Then the houses nearby caught fire . . . The only logical way out was across the fields. After much debate . . . our group, having made it over vegetable gardens, oat fields, and stubble, took shelter in an isolated grain store not far from the airport . . . From the attic, we had a magnificent panorama of a white city on a plain over which masses of black smoke billowed, pierced through with red tongues of flame. The noise of battle reached even to where we were: the rattle of machine guns, the laborious hammering of tank artillery, the flat sound of anti-aircraft guns, bomb explosions.
Since our home neighbourhood was very close . . . I could make out our house, where my desk, the witness of so many inner struggles, stood. Under the artillery fire its facade wrinkled like a face rapidly growing old. It was probably then that all my worldly goods fell through to the floor below.
At night, dots of varicoloured lights moved over the city: they were Germans firing . . . at [the] Polish and British planes . . . [which were] flying in to drop supplies . . . We passed several days and nights in the granary, while the nearby highway was patrolled by so-called ‘Vlasovians’ (soldiers from auxiliary German army divisions) recruited from various nationalities of the Soviet Union . . . They were taking advantage of their idleness to learn how to ride the bicycles they had captured. Of all things on earth, this, for some reason, seemed to me the most extravagant. They had chosen the slaughter of civilians as their vocation because, as their officers had told
them, Warsaw was a ‘bourgeois city’. Those bodies of dead women we had passed in the fields were their work.
Among our group . . . there was one specimen who looked as if he had just emerged from the Tertiary, or at least the Victorian, era. A corpulent man with a short black moustache . . . a black suit and a bowler. He raised his finger, sniffed, and said: ‘Bad. It smells of a corpse in here.’ And he was right. We could not prolong our rodent’s life, flattened out between the sacks of grain . . . Some held that it was worse to go, others that it was worse to wait. Since we belonged to the latter, we set out whilst the grasshoppers were singing . . . in the warmth of a sunny afternoon.
Is it possible to surround a city of over a million with a cordon of guards? We found out that it was when we were caught and put behind the barbed-wire fence of a camp. ‘Camp’ is saying too much: it was nothing more than the yard of some construction firm, with sleepy German soldiers guarding the gates. Every morning the daily catch was sent to another camp in nearby . . . [Prushkov]. There people were sorted into transports . . . [for] concentration camps in Germany. We had to get out of there at all costs. I wrote secret notes . . . handing my appeals for help through the fence and trusting to the local children . . .
Human solidarity. Rescue showed up that evening in the form of a majestic nun. She commanded me severely to remember that I was her nephew. Her quiet, authoritative tone and the fluency of her German forced the soldiers into unwilling respect. Her conversation with the officer lasted an hour. Finally she appeared on the threshold: ‘Hurry up, hurry up.’ We passed through the main gate. I had never met her before and I never met her again. Nor did I ever know her name.
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Czesław Miłosz
First Revolutionary Decree to the Fighters and Citizens of Warsaw
[Boor], the chief commandant of the so-called Home Army, has betrayed the Rising in Warsaw against the Hitlerite murderers. The coward and traitor Boor has dared to swindle the fighters. He wants to capitulate!
Hence, as from today, the Central Executive Committee of the PPR has assumed leadership of the insurrectionary movement in Warsaw. It is the only genuine and responsible source of authority before the people.
To this end . . .
- All orders of the so-called Home Army must be disobeyed.
- All officers of the so-called Home Army must be arrested and handed over to the incoming Red Army. Any officer who resists must be shot.
- All insurgents must immediately replace their red-and-white armbands with red armbands.
- As from 12.00 noon, units of the People’s Army and PPR will shoot anyone still wearing red-and-white armbands.
- After entering Warsaw, the Red Army will also treat all such fighters with red-and-white armbands as traitors . . .
The Bloody Scourge of Fascism must be denounced.
Long Live Marshal Stalin! Long Live a free socialist Poland!
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