Armageddon (23 page)

Stalin, of course, went beyond mere passivity towards the uprising. He informed the Western allies, in response to their appeals for aid to the Poles, that he would not lift a finger to preserve these “criminals” from the consequences of their folly. He refused to provide refuelling facilities in Russian territory for British aircraft attempting arms drops to the insurgents. Late in the Rising, he allowed just one force of American aircraft to land at Poltava after dropping supplies, most of which fell into German hands. “We don’t want British and American planes mucking about here at the moment,” Rokossovsky told Alexander Werth. The RAF lost an aircraft for every ton of supplies dropped to the Poles on the perilous 780-mile trip from Italy. Forty-one Allied planes were destroyed out of 306 dispatched to aid the Warsaw resisters, while the nearest Russians were a mere fifteen miles away.

As we shall see later, when the Red Army occupied Poland its forces launched a ruthless second front against the survivors of Army Krajowa. This struggle continued long after Hitler fell, almost unnoticed by the world, with substantial casualties on both sides. Poland’s destiny, to become a Soviet vassal state, was decided before the first shot of the Rising was fired. One of the German propaganda leaflets launched into the Allied lines in north-west Europe was directed at the Polish Armoured Division: “WHY DIE FOR STALIN?” it demanded; “. . . your soldiers are not dying for democracy or the preservation of the democratic form of government—they are dying for the establishment of Communism and a form of the Stalinist tyranny . . . so that Poland shall be a Soviet state.” From a Polish viewpoint, all this was perfectly true. “Within a very short space of time,” a modern Russian historian writes, “the Poles were translated from Russia’s enemies to its allies, and then once more into its enemies.”

It is unlikely that the full facts about Stalin’s actions in the autumn of 1944 will ever be known. Even the most distinguished Western historian of Poland, Norman Davies, writing in 2003 with access to considerable Soviet documentation, concludes that many aspects of Russian behaviour remain conjectural. There were real tensions between Moscow and its lackeys, the communist Lublin Poles, who seem to have shared the assumption of Bor Komorowski’s men that the Red Army would move swiftly to liberate Warsaw. Soviet policy wavered through August and September. In the early stages of the Rising, Moscow seemed merely sceptical and indifferent about its outcome. In late August, however, Stalin went much further, making a considered decision to allow the Germans to eliminate the Army Krajowa in Warsaw. He shifted troops from the Vistula Front to the Baltic and the Balkans, even while the Army Krajowa was in the midst of its agony a few miles westward. To confuse matters further, he allowed Soviet forces to make some trifling gestures of support for the beleaguered Poles, to appease the Western allies. But, while Rokossovsky busied himself establishing bridgeheads on the western bank of the Vistula to secure start lines for further advances, the Red Army made no substantial moves to enter the Polish capital. “The Soviet government do not wish to associate themselves directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw,” the Soviet deputy commissar for foreign affairs, Andrei Vyshinsky, told Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador in Moscow, on 18 August.

The story is rendered still uglier by the behaviour of some of those in the West. The socialist intelligentsia was still much enamoured of the Soviet Union. British media comment on the Rising was slight and massively ill informed. Some writers remained for weeks extravagantly sympathetic to Soviet passivity. The left-wing
New Statesman
dismissed the Polish resisters as “Macchiavellian
dilettanti
.”
The Times
observed indulgently: “It is not difficult to understand Russian unwillingness to supply arms to people who are opposed to friendly relations with Russia.” George Orwell, almost alone among his kind, denounced Russian behaviour towards Poland passionately and publicly, in a noble flight of prose in
Tribune:
“the ‘Lublin regime’ is not a victory for socialism . . . It is the reduction of Poland to a vassal state . . . Woe to those in a vassal state who want to maintain their independent views and policies . . . If they happen to lead a heroic rising that embarrasses the protégés of the great ‘Protecting’ powers, they will be stigmatised as ‘criminals’ . . . Please do not ask us to show enthusiasm for such policies.” Orwell castigated his compatriots who refused to consider whether a given Russian action was or was not defensible. Instead, they simply said to each other: “ ‘This is Russian policy; how can we make it appear right? . . . The Russians are powerful in Eastern Europe, we are not; therefore we must not oppose them.’ This involves the principle, of its nature alien to Socialism, that you must not protest against an evil which you cannot prevent.”

Far more serious than the behaviour of British communist fellow-travellers, however, was the refusal of President Roosevelt to exert wholehearted pressure on Moscow. The secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, argued that the U.S. should seek to send aid to Warsaw, if remotely feasible. Roosevelt appalled Churchill, however, by the cold-bloodedness of a note drafted by his Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, on 5 September: “I am informed by my officers of Military Intelligence that the fighting Poles have departed from Warsaw, and that the Germans are now in full control . . . The problem of relief for the Poles in Warsaw has therefore, unfortunately, been solved by delay and German action.” In reality, of course, while the Poles had been driven out of Warsaw’s Old Town, they were still fighting fiercely in the centre of the capital. But Warsaw was scarcely discussed at the Anglo-American Octagon conference in Quebec in mid-September. The Russians continued to treat the Poles’ lunge for freedom with cold contempt. Rokossovsky likened the Rising to “the clown in the circus who pops up at the wrong moment and only gets wrapped up in the carpet.” The marshal later asserted that, if the Poles had delayed their revolt until his forces had gained the Praga suburb of Warsaw east of the Vistula in September, the liberation of the city might have been achieved. This seems implausible.

Churchill described Soviet behaviour at this period as “strange and sinister.” The prime minister recognized Stalin’s determination to impose Soviet hegemony upon every state liberated by his armies. The Russian leader perceived this as natural justice. He also cherished a bizarre expectation that such a polity would be welcomed by the proletarians of eastern Europe. The absence of such sentiment fuelled his animosity towards the Poles. American attention was fixed upon the military defeat of the Nazis. Washington displayed a remarkable indifference to the political future of the eastern battlefields until it was too late. Roosevelt’s most recent biographer seeks to acquit his hero of the charge of naivety towards the Soviet Union in 1945, pleading the inevitability of Soviet domination. This argument seems unconvincing. Too many of those closest to Roosevelt at this period have testified to their dismay about his behaviour towards Stalin, and about the president’s conviction that he could do business with the Soviets if the British imperialists were circumvented. Yet it is unmistakably true that the Russians already stood on Polish soil, beyond any conceivable reach of Anglo-American forces. Even if the Red Army had hastened forward to relieve Warsaw in August or September, the fate of the insurgents would have been no different. Those who resisted Soviet mastery, as many later attempted to do, would merely have been killed by Russian bullets rather than German ones.

Polish behaviour was characterized from beginning to end by a heroic spirit of self-immolation. Even when the Poles recognized that the Soviets were disinclined to aid them, they rejected Stalin’s demands. The Soviet leader indicated to the Polish prime minister, leader of the London Poles who visited Moscow early in August, that before he could expect anything from the Russians his government must resign; the Soviet seizure of eastern Poland must be recognized; and the London Poles must publicly accept Moscow’s preposterous claim that the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn was the work of the Nazis, not the Soviets. When Bor Komorowski in Warsaw heard of all this, he signalled proudly on 26 August: “Poland has not been fighting the Germans for five years, bearing the greatest losses, just to capitulate to Russia. Our fight against the Germans has shown that . . . we love freedom more than life.” Here, indeed, reality matched rhetoric in the most dreadful fashion.

There was a tragic romance about the mood in Warsaw, even as the city was battered into ruin. The Poles, determined to celebrate the resurrection of their national culture amid catastrophe, staged recitals, concerts, plays in the public buildings within their perimeter. A profusion of pamphlets, newspapers and political treatises was written and published. There was a plan to stage an opera, until the leading players were killed in action. An engaged couple, a lieutenant and a girl courier, asked to be married in the city’s cathedral. One of the two witnesses could not walk, having been wounded by shrapnel. He was carried into the cathedral sacristy for the wedding on the back of his fellow witness. The twenty-three-year-old bride and groom were buried alive by a Stuka strike a few days later.

The Red Army observed the last thrashings of the Rising with detached contempt. “The British and Americans are supplying the Germans, not the insurgents,” reported an officer of 1st Belorussian Front after watching an Allied parachute drop on 30 September. A Soviet agent codenamed Oleg who was sent to make contact with the Rising’s leaders in the last days reported afterwards to Moscow: “The interview was not particularly friendly. I could sense their suspicion and hostility towards me, as a representative of the Red Army.” The Russians had little enough compassion to spare for their own people. Why should they waste it on Poles?

The last shot of the Warsaw battle was fired on 2 October 1944, sixty-seven days after it began. Throughout September, while the Resisters in Warsaw were negotiating with the Germans through the Red Cross for a ceasefire, they rejected capitulation and insisted upon terms, notably the recognition of Poland’s fighters as combatants, entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. In this they achieved some small measure of success. An officer of the Army Krajowa, Major Kazimierz Sztermal, confronted von dem Bach-Zelewski, Nazi high priest at Warsaw’s sacrifice: “You, the nation which gave your Goethe and Schiller to the world, have tried through terror to take the rights of freedom and existence from us.” The German shrugged: “This is war.” So indeed it was, in Hitler’s universe. The survivors—11,668 Polish combatants including 2,000 women, together with countless thousands of civilians—marched out in their columns of misery, to face imprisonment or mere destitution. Some shot themselves rather than accept captivity. After the insurgents had made their last broadcast from their own Radio Lightning, they smashed its transmitter with a sledgehammer. “We have been treated worse than Hitler’s allies in Romania, Italy and Finland,” declared the Polish Home Council of Ministers in its final statement on 3 October. “[Our] Rising is going under at a time when our armies abroad are helping to liberate France, Belgium and Holland . . . may the God of Justice pronounce a verdict on the terrible wrong, which the Polish nation has encountered, and may He punish the perpetrators.”

The Germans claimed to have lost 17,000 dead. The Rising was the ultimate heroic folly of the European Resistance movement nurtured by Churchill since 1940. For all the succour which Resistance gave to the soul of occupied Europe both during and after the Second World War, except in Yugoslavia its military achievements were negligible, and purchased at a grim price in blood. The Allied Chiefs of Staff would have done well to recall an observation of Wellington, derived from his experience of guerrilla warfare in the Iberian peninsula 140 years earlier: “I always had a horror of revolutionizing any country . . . I always said, if they rise of themselves, well and good, but do not stir them up; it is a fearful responsibility.”

There is just a grain of truth in Stalin’s self-serving remark: “These people [the Home Army] have exploited the good faith of the inhabitants of Warsaw, throwing many almost unarmed people against the German guns, tanks, and aircraft. A situation has arisen in which each new day serves, not the Poles . . . but the Hitlerites who are inhumanly shooting down the inhabitants of Warsaw.” The Warsaw Rising was of a piece with the Polish people’s long history of acts of passion, courage, misjudgement, succeeded by repression at the hands of forces beyond their power to resist. When Rokossovsky’s forces at last seized the eastern suburbs of Warsaw, the NKVD began rounding up the fighters of Army Krajowa with the same ruthlessness as the Germans. “Nazi and Soviet repressions were proceeding simultaneously in one and the same city,” observes Norman Davies. For the Western allies, the conduct of the war was overwhelmingly a military matter. For the Soviet Union, it never ceased to be also a political one.

“WE WERE DIFFERENT PEOPLE IN 1944”

M
ILOVAN
D
JILAS
met a Soviet soldier on a road in Yugoslavia one day in October 1944. The Russian was driving a horse-drawn cart loaded with sacks, pots and bedspreads. He hailed the Yugoslav partisan and asked: “Is this the road to Berlin?” This was the only destination the man recognized, or had thought of since Stalingrad. The soldiers of the Red Army had seen too much destruction and misery in their own country to be shocked by what they found in eastern Europe. For days after Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko crossed the Polish border in August 1944 with troops of 1st Belorussian Front, he did not see a single civilian. All had fled, save those too old to move. There were only burning buildings, and abandoned German vehicles and equipment. A few Russians recognized that something especially shocking had happened. “We knew that Warsaw was once the most beautiful capital in Europe,” said Alexandr Markov, a twenty-one-year-old Soviet bomber pilot. “Now, when we flew over it we saw huge palls of smoke, and even from the air we could smell burned flesh. My spine crawled, to see so much beauty transformed into ruins . . . all those golden bell towers gone.” Yelena Kogan, serving as an interpreter with the NKVD, said long afterwards: “I felt terrible about what happened in Warsaw. I still don’t know the truth about what happened politically.” Yet few Russians harboured love or sympathy for Poles. Stalin had been shooting them in tens of thousands since the Purges of the late 1930s. His people regarded them with no greater pity after the horrors of the Rising than before. A Soviet girl soldier wrote to a friend about the Poles: “When you look at them, you feel such anger, such hatred. They’re having fun, loving and living. And you are fighting to liberate them! They just laugh at us Russians. Bastards!”