The 'First Ally' under Siege
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
The 'First Ally' Under Siege Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw By Norman Davies Viking. 752 pp. $32.00. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent The romantic freedom...
...The Rising, planned as a brief effort, carried on for 63 desperate days with no help at all from an ally that seemed content to let Poles and Germans slaughter each other...
...Some 100,000 troops who had fought in the September campaign escaped through neutral Romania and Hungary to join the British and French armies...
...Our) Rising is going under at a time when our armies abroad are helping to liberate France, Belgium and Holland...
...When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin switched from killing Poles to trying to enlist them...
...There was never a Polish Quisling...
...In the absence of outside help, "we should save what is most dear to us, namely, the biological substance of the nation.' Yet this was not to be abject surrender...
...Nevertheless, Rising '44 is moving testimony, delivered with passion...
...In a final blow against Polish democracy, the NKVD arrested 16 leaders who had remained underground in western Poland after the capitulation in Warsaw and subjected them to a show trial in Moscow...
...They disarmed and left the city for POW camps...
...The Soviets set about systematically decapitating the Polish intelligentsia and the officer corps of the Polish Army...
...But may the God of Justice pronounce a verdict on the terrible wrong which the Polish nation has encountered and may He punish the perpetrators...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent The romantic freedom of expression that has marked Poland's history inspires British historian Norman Davies' telling of the suffering its people endured during a heroic struggle against hopeless odds in World War II...
...The Home Army was still a fighting force and it stubbornly negotiated terms with the German commander...
...The aim was to liberate the city before the arrival of the Red Army and thereby establish both its Polish identity and the desire to help the Soviet forces defeat the Germans...
...In the forest of Katyn near Minsk, 4,500 Polish officers were murdered in cold blood...
...Those who refused his offer were dealt with as enemies...
...Later the underground sent London parts from an undetonated V2 rocket, Hitler's last secret weapon...
...Poland would have to wait 45 years to become a fully free democracy...
...At a meeting of Home Army leaders the chief delegate of the London government saw no alternative to capitulation...
...Guided by fellow travelers inside and outside the government, public opinion also came to resent Polish criticism of Soviet brutality and imperialist expansion...
...At the outset the Poles gave the alliance much more than they got...
...He would then leave the theater and go home...
...Still, a sizable Polish force was assembled in the USSR from a pool of deportees, refugees and prisoners of war...
...The civilian population was evacuated with assurance of humane treatment, clearing Warsaw for the final battle between the Germans and the Red Army...
...The Polish underground had an established hierarchy and an unquestioned legal framework...
...Davies puts the overall number of the NKVD's victims in the spring of 1940 at 25,000...
...Four Polish infantry divisions and four Air Force squadrons took part in the French campaign in the spring of 1940, crossing to Britain when France fell...
...Davies pays tribute to Britain's secret services, particularly the Special Operations Executive, without whose unstinting support "the secret state could not have been set up and maintained so effectively...
...All its members were recognized by the Wehrmacht as legitimate combatants under the Third Geneva Convention of 1929—a condition the Soviets refused...
...One brigade reached Palestine, then in 1943 joined the British Eighth Army to journey up the mountainous spine of Italy...
...But it was the gallantry of Polish soldiers and airmen on a dozen battlefields that defined their role in the larger struggle...
...We restrain ourselves from passingjudgment on this tragedy...
...The "peace boundary" between the two dictators remains Poland's eastern border to this day...
...By no means their smallest contribution was the anatomy of the supposedly impenetrable German "Enigma" encryption machine that allowed the Allies to read top secret German communications throughout the War...
...It was soon clear that Poland would not regain the territory Stalin had seized in 1939...
...Their disdain grew sharper in the second half of 1941, after Hitler's attack turned the Soviet Union into the great Eastern ally of the Western coalition...
...Britain and France declared war 48 hours later, making Poland—as Davies puts it—the "First Ally," but they offered little help...
...Meanwhile, Stalin was Hitler's faithful ally and partner in crime...
...No Nazi reprisals would follow...
...The first day's fighting cost 2,500 Polish lives...
...It begins on September 1,1939, with Adolf Hitler's invasion, coordinated with Josef Stalin's seizure of the eastern provinces, completing the fourth partition of Poland...
...Cardinal Stefan W., Primate of Poland...
...In the summer of 1944, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky's Soviet Army units, driving westward on a line running toward Warsaw and Berlin, approached the Vistula River...
...Davies has written a detailed, complex account of the nation's crucifixion...
...In his recent biography of the tyrant, Simon Sebag Montefiore writes: "Stalin loved to attend his favorite opera, [Mikhail] Glinka's Ivan Susanin, but only waited until the scene when Poles are lured into the forest by a Russian and freeze to death there...
...But Rokossovsky did not arrive, and efforts to communicate with him failed...
...Winston Churchill persuaded Franklin Delano Roosevelt to ask Stalin to join in doing "the utmost to save as many of the patriots here as possible...
...They viewed the Polish exile government in London's Rubens Hotel as an awkward, even quasi-Fascist nuisance lobbying constantly for aid...
...Heinrich Himmler established the death camp at Auschwitz...
...Although Stalin's paranoia was reason enough, it seems too that he, like Hitler, was fired by personal animus...
...This grew into a secret state, with a Council of Home Ministers that had no parallel in occupied Europe...
...At that hour, some 40,000 men grouped in 600 teams attacked German positions in the city...
...on August 1, expecting a quick denouement...
...Somewhat disturbing is his strange practice of referring to almost all Polish figures by their different noms de guerre, nicknames and positions, or in many cases by only the initial of their family name—e.g...
...As a final gesture, 11,668 soldiers, including 2,000 women of the auxiliary service, marched through Warsaw with their weapons (many of them captured from the Germans) and their heads held high...
...RAF and Polish planes flying in supplies and weapons from a base in Italy more than 800 miles away found themselves under attack from Soviet as well as German forces, and the Kremlin refused to let RAF supply missions land in Soviet territory...
...Western outrage soon abated as Washington and London urged Stalin to join in the War against Japan...
...The Home Army leaders in Warsaw, in the face of strong dissent, ordered the Rising for 5 P.M...
...Given the length of many Polish names, this may save space, but constantly consulting the index and the 35 appendices hobbles the narrative...
...Some Poles went along with the Soviets but most refused...
...But the Poles' skeptical attitude toward Moscow would prove prescient...
...The book is a labor of love and an elegy for their tragic sacrifices...
...The Nazis pursued Jews and cracked down on every sign of opposition...
...Under increased German pressure, Warsaw's people had sunk from pitiable to impossible condirions...
...Two Polish divisions ended the long battle for Monte Cassino, the heavily fortified Benedictine monastery on the road to Rome whose monks, a thousand years earlier, had converted Poland to Christianity...
...Stalin responded with what Davies calls "a crude denunciation of 'the group of criminals'" in Warsaw...
...Its contact with London by radio and courier remained unbroken during the quest to overthrow the German occupation...
...Rising '44 describes the efforts, 60 years ago this summer, of the Polish underground Home Army to wrest the capital city from German occupation...
...Ironically, many of the 40,000 Polish Communists who had been consigned to the Gulag in an earlier purge joined this force that was under tight Soviet control...
...They fought in Norway, in North Africa's Western Desert, and at Arnhem in the abortive Rhine crossing...
...One defendant, Major General Bear Cub, the last commander of the Home Army, died in Lubyanka Prison just as the Charter of the United Nations was being drafted in San Francisco...
...The whole cultural and scientific elite of society is concentrated in Warsaw," he said...
...It takes its bitter theme from the final declaration of the Home Council of Ministers on the day of Warsaw's capitulation: "We received no effective support__We have been treated worse than Hitler's allies in Romania, Italy and Finland...
...During the crucial weeks of the Battle of Britain that followed, Polish pilots, 10 per cent of the fliers engaged, brought down more than their share of enemy aircraft...
...At the end of July, PKWN broadcasts called for an uprising in the Polish capital...
...They did not, for instance, even talk about sending the kind of expeditionary force they would soon consider sending to Finland when it came under Soviet assault...
...In London, a legitimate Polish government in exile held on to the reins of authority, guiding Europe's largest organized resistance movement from afar...
...Other British quarters—the Foreign Office, some members of Parliament and much of the press—were less helpful...
...As the War neared its end, Stalin strengthened the PKWN and folded it into a Communist-dominated Government of National Unity, promoting its international acceptance at the Yalta Conference in February 1945...
...On the political side, Moscow formed the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), the first step toward creation of a puppet government...
...Soviet aircraft dropped leaflets urging the people to take up arms...
...In February 1942 it adopted the name Home Army as a branch of the regular Armed Forces...
...The Gestapo and the NKVD worked together at genocide...
Vol. 87 • May 2004 • No. 3
