Sixty years ago this week Poland was poised for one of the most dramatic (and as it turned out tragic) chapters in the war. With the Soviet tanks advancing on Warsaw - ostensibly to help liberate the city from the Nazis - it appeared that the tide had now turned in the war against Hitler. D-Day had already marked a breakthrough in the Allied advance from the West, and the Stauffenberg bomb plot signalled that thinking Germans themselves could see that the game was up.
And so it was that on 31st July 1944, at 5.30 in the afternoon, General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, head of the underground 'Home Army' in Warsaw, gave the command to launch Operation Tempest. The Warsaw Uprising would begin at 5 p.m the following day.
The decision to launch the Uprising was to have apocalyptic results for both the Poles and their capital. What was designed to be a short sharp operation, brought to its conclusion by the advancing Russians (whose tanks could already be heard outside the city), descended into a 63 day battle that left 250,000 civilians dead, and one of Europe's finest cities in rubble. For most of those 63 days the Russian army sat and watched as their 'allies' were gradually destroyed by German reinforcements. Hardly a single building was left standing when the city was finally 'liberated' in January 1945. How did it come to this?
August 1st will see the 60th anniversary of this little known chapter in the war, providing a chance to reflect on both the conflict and the legacy that it created for the West's Polish allies, whose independence it pledged to defend at the outbreak of war in September 1939. There are many uncomfortable truths. Whilst the sacrifices of all fighting nations were great, the experience of the Poles jars with the popular perception of a clearcut war, where the Allies defeated the forces of darkness and returned home, the sunset of victory swelling the horizon.
At the root of it is the strange alliance between the liberal democracies of the West and the totalitarian communist state of Russia. With regards to Warsaw, the Soviets had initially encouraged the Uprising, yet Stalin was not at all the kind of ally that anyone would ever have wished for. Experience had already demonstrated this.
From the outset, the Poles' conviction that it was Stalin, not Hitler, who was responsible for the execution of 15,000 Polish reserve officers near Smolensk - the infamous Katyn affair - was correct (Gorbachev finally admitted this in April 1990). The Poles' distrust of the Soviets provided reasons for both stalling and, conversely, launching the Uprising. The Home Army wanted both a hand in liberating their capital, as well as a chance to avoid placing themselves at the mercy of the communists.
As the historian Adam Zamoyski has written about the Rising: 'For Poles, it is the subject of a never-ending conundrum — was the rising an act of heroic if doomed self-defence, a historical imperative, or was launching it an act of criminal recklessness, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands and the destruction of the capital? The arguments on both sides are such that no intelligent and honest person can embrace either view wholeheartedly to the absolute exclusion of the other. '
As soon as the Uprising was launched Stalin backtracked and washed his hands of the 'bunch of criminals' that he claimed had started the Operation. Churchill pressed Stalin to act, yet the Soviet leader was reluctant even to let Allied planes onto Russian landing pads in their efforts to drop supplies onto Warsaw. Roosevelt did little to help, and seemed resigned to let the conflict play itself out. Of the dozen or so airdrops that did land, the majority fell into German hands.
Why did Britain and America not push Stalin harder to act? Fundamentally, they did not want to alienate their Soviet ally who had amazed all of Europe with the way it had beaten back the Nazis from the Russian heartlands. British historian and journalist Max Hastings, who was present at the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day last month, made some stark reflections on the balance of power in the Summer of 1944:
'In 1944, like Stalin himself, they (the Russians) regarded the Anglo-American contribution to the European land campaign as too little, too late. ‘We never felt any weakening of German pressure because of what the Western Allies were doing,’ said artillery officer Major Yury Ryakhovsky when I interviewed him ... a couple of years ago. ‘Indeed, we didn’t feel they were doing very much. Their campaign was merely a splinter in Germany’s side.’ Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov said almost contemptuously, ‘It was a pity the Americans and British did not start fighting sooner.’ He remarked that he himself had been wounded in action three times before the first Allied soldier stepped ashore on D-Day. A Russian history which remained an official sixth-form school textbook until at least the 1990s describes D-Day briskly: ‘In June 1944, when it had become obvious that the Soviet Union was capable of defeating Hitler’s Germany with her forces alone, England and the USA opened the Second Front ...The Anglo-American forces met with practically no opposition from the Hitlerites ...For these operations the Germans had diverted only 60 divisions to the Western front, while the Hitler command maintained 259 divisions and brigades on the Soviet-German front.’ There is enough truth in this to make Anglo-American triumphalists uncomfortable. Consider a statistic: in the second world war British and US ground troops killed about 200,000 German soldiers. The Russians killed more than three million.'
Thus in July 1944, the Americans and the British were not going to break their backs encouraging Stalin, who had been so instrumental in the collapse of Hitler, to do something that was against his wishes.
And so it was that messages such as this (which was for the Pope) emerged from Poland's fast disappearing capital, where several thousand civilians were dying each day:
'Most Holy Father, we Polish women in Warsaw are inspired with sentiments of profound patriotism and devotion to our country. For three weeks, while defending our fortress, we have lacked food or medicine. Warsaw is in ruins. The Germans are killing the wounded in the hospitals. They are making women and children march in front of them in order to protect their tanks. There is no exaggeration in reports of children who are fighting and destroying tanks with bottles of petrol. We mothers see our sons dying for freedom and the Fatherland. Our husbands, our sons, and our brothers are not considered by the enemy to be combatants. Holy Father, no one is helping us. The Russian armies which have been for three weeks at the gates of Warsaw have not advanced a step. The aid coming to us from Great Britain is insufficient. The world is ignorant of our fight. God alone is with us. Holy Father, Vicar of Christ, if you can hear us, bless us Polish women who are fighting for the Church and for freedom.'
The rest of the story was straightforward. The Germans, who were given time to bring in reinforcements eventually crushed the rising, and afterwards they dynamited the city street by street. The Russians delayed their entrance for a further four months, and then marched into the ruins, relatively unhindered.
The reality was that Polish casualties in Warsaw represented another chunk of the undesirable 'Old Guard' that both Hitler and Stalin had been covertly wiping out since 1939.
In the post-war settlement, Churchill and Roosevelt consented to Poland remaining in Stalin's sphere of influence. Before long the Berlin Wall had gone up and the Poles were to remain behind it for fifty years. This was in spite of the fact that 'the Poles tipped the balance in the Battle of Britain,' that 'Polish cryptographers were first to break the Enigma code,' and that Polish divisions fought alongside us with distinction at Narvik, Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Arnhem and in Normandy.
For many of the remaining survivors, next month's anniversary will be the last major anniversary that they will witness. However, largely thanks to Professor Norman Davies, (quoted above) who has devoted much of his life to studying Poland and has now published a book about the conflict, it is a subject that is beginning to be studied in the West. The reasons why it was swept under the carpet (and remained there for so long) are not difficult to understand, however shameful they may be. This week is a time of remembrance for those who gave all and lost all.
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