THE LAST GOOD WAR: A Novel (43 page)

Why not let Hitler do his dirty work?

Hitler obliged. In seven weeks of heavy fighting, his troops crushed the uprising, killing 10,000 members of the Home Army and perhaps as many as 200,000 civilians. Week after week, Stalin refused to let British planes drop arms to the Home Army and then land at Soviet bases. He relented only after the sixth week of the uprising, when the outcome was no longer in doubt.

At the end, the proximate objective of the Second World War—a free Poland—remained unfulfilled.

That goal had to wait forty long years, for the peaceful revolutions of the 1980s. Then, the famous names would no longer belong to the aristocracy—names like Sikorski, Komorowski, or Raczynski—but rather to men of humble beginnings: a shipyard electrician turned labor leader, Lech Walesa, and a man who started his career as an obscure seminarian: Karol Wojtyla, Bishop of Rome. The Soviet leader, Gorbachev, also played a central role. In 1987, as part of his policy of
glasnost
(openness), he decided to shine light into one of the more gruesome corners of Soviet history. He appointed a joint Soviet-Polish board to investigate the Katyn Forest massacres, foreshadowing an end to the already-shaky legitimacy the Communist regime in Poland. It was the beginning of the final chapter of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

Field Marshal Günther Von Kluge was buried in a quiet military ceremony, unlike his erstwhile subordinate, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Hitler's most celebrated General was given a state funeral with full military honors, after he, too, was linked to the bomb plot and committed suicide. In each case, the official cause of death was the same: cerebral hemorrhage.

25
Epilogue
History, Fiction, and Lies

... mostly a true book, with some stretchers.

Huckleberry Finn, describing Mr. Twain's earlier work,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

T
he classical Greek word
plasma
means fiction. It also means forgery or “lies.” We may cringe at the word “lies.” But there is no denying: much of this book is not exactly true. Five of the main characters—Kaz, Anna, Ryk, Yvonne, and Jan—are fictional; they never existed.

Nevertheless, the main story is historically accurate. World War II was precipitated by Hitler's invasion of Poland, and by the decision of Britain and France to honor their commitment to Poland by declaring war on Germany. Yet Poland was beyond salvation, caught between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.

In addition, the fictional five participated in many real, historical events—the defense of Warsaw, the massacre in Katyn Forest, the exodus of the Polish army to North Africa, the significant role of Poles in the Battle of Britain, and, most of all, the early and indispensable Polish contributions to codebreaking.

A whole list of characters were real people, from the Polish codebreakers Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki to the main British characters at Bletchley Park—Alan Turing, Alastair Denniston, Alan Welchman, Harry Hinsley—to most of the German protagonists in France: von Kluge, Sepp Dietrich, von Stülpnagel, and Hofacker. They did approximately what they are reported to have done in this novel.

“Approximately.” There's the snag. How is the reader to know what is fact, and what is fiction? Interested readers may find footnote information at www.lastgoodwar.com. For the more casual reader, this epilogue will provide some guidance, some help in separating history from “lies.”

First, the flesh-and-blood
dramatis personae
should be identified, in addition to those listed above. Among the Poles, only Sikorski should be added to the real historical figures; the rest are fictional, although some of Anna's relatives are
very
loosely based on Polish diplomats of the 1930s. Bertrand, Lemoine, and Schmidt are real historical figures; they did meet in Verviers, Belgium, where Schmidt gave Enigma secrets to Bertrand.

At Bletchley Park, Yvonne joins Anna as a fictional character, but Mavis Lever was very real indeed. She did notice the strange absence of the letter L in an early Italian naval message; the result was the breaking of the Italian code and the British triumph off Cape Matapan. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham was indeed the victor in that naval engagement. When he came to BP to offer his thanks, he was backed into a newly whitewashed wall by Mavis and other vivacious, mischievous young women.

The two Americans at Bletchley Park, Bill Bundy and Lewis Powell, were also real people, although their role has been fictionalized. In later life, Bundy went on to become a senior official of the State Department, while Powell was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the Battle of Britain, the characters are fictional, with the notable exception of Sgt. Josef Frantisek. He was a Czech ace, who, in the words of Len Deighton
(Fighter)
“had flying and air-fighting skills in abundance but he lacked any kind of air discipline. Once in the air, he simply chased Germans. More than once this conduct endangered the men who flew with him. He was repeatedly reprimanded until finally the Poles decided to let him be a 'guest of the squadron.'“ He did decline to fly with his fellow Czechs, and he was credited with shooting down seventeen German aircraft before flying off, never to be seen again. His seventeen victims put Frantisek at the head of the list of allied aces at the time of his death, and the Polish 303 Squadron did shoot down more than twice as many German planes as the average RAF fighter squadron.

Among the Germans, most of the characters—apart from those mentioned above and well known individuals such as Hitler, Göring, Rommel, Himmler, and Dönitz—are fictional. Thus, Kurt Dietrich did not exist, even though his uncle, Sepp Dietrich, was indeed the commander of the Fifth Panzer Army and a favorite of Hitler. He did in fact stretch his orders to escape the Falaise pocket in spite of his closeness to the Führer; or perhaps
because of
his closeness to Hitler, which may have given him an extra degree of freedom. Nevertheless, when senior officers asked him to inform Hitler of the desperate situation in the Falaise Pocket, he did retort that such rashness was a good way to get himself shot. Likewise, Jeschonnek really was the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, whose concern over a relative on the
Bismarck
betrayed the battleship to the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. Incidentally, Anna's wish—that Jeschonnek never find out that his message had betrayed the
Bismarck
—came true, although not, perhaps, in the way she might have hoped. Under the crushing strain of allied air raids, he committed suicide on the night the allies bombed the rocket development station at Peënemunde.

People are not the only problem, but also events. In this book, real people do fictional things, and fictional people do real things. For example:

—The characters in the Warsaw Post Office are fictional, but their activities are real: the Poles did intercept and open a package with the Enigma machine.

—Churchill really was First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, and then again before he became Prime Minister in 1940. He could hardly have intervened in Anna's security clearance, however, as she is a fictional character.

—In this novel, Kaz plays a key role in the demise of German tank commander Wittmann. This is obviously untrue, since Kaz is a fictitious character. The Polish Armored Division was, however, attached to the Canadian Army, and the Poles played an important role in closing the Falaise gap. But they were not present at Wittmann's final, fatal encounter; he was trapped by five Canadian Sherman tanks.

—Anna's role in codebreaking is exaggerated, which is scarcely surprising, as she didn't exist and therefore played no role whatsoever. To fit the story, the work on Enigma has been greatly simplified. For example, the steckerboard was introduced at a much earlier date than this novel suggests, although the Germans did begin to use it much more heavily in 1938-39, and in this sense, the account in Chapter 6 is
very
loosely consistent with the facts.

In spite of the liberties taken to simplify the Enigma story, an attempt has been made to retain the flavor of how codebreaking actually worked: the meticulous, painstaking building of one small block upon another—interspersed with flashes of insight that unlocked parts of the code, and with windfalls from German misuse of the machine or from captured equipment or codebooks

Of course, real people also do real things in this novel. For example, Marian Rejewski did figure out the internal wiring of Enigma wheels in a brief period of several months in late 1932, aided by information provided by Schmidt and passed by French Intelligence officer Bertrand. Rejewski did repeat his feat by reconstructing the wiring of the fourth and fifth wheels in a more difficult setting, an achievement that Gordon Welchman “found hard to believe.” And Welchman himself was a mathematician.

The codebreakers did live with the nagging worry that the enemy would suspect that their messages were being deciphered. Observation planes were sent out, with the objective of being observed. But there were lapses. At one point, late in the war, the Allies used decryptions to sink two tenders that were scheduled to meet U-boats at obscure locations in the Indian Ocean. The Germans came to the conclusion that Allies must have known about the rendezvous points, either from a breaking of Enigma or from a traitor. Dönitz issued an emergency order. Rather than setting the rotors from their codebooks, U-boats were to use the initials of their radio operators. Unfortunately for Dönitz, this provided little protection. By then—March 1944—allied machines were so powerful and so numerous that they continued to break Shark.

The tales of the First World War are factual: the Zimmerman Telegram, which is described in fascinating detail in Barbara Tuchman's book with that title, and the story of the drunken German commander in the Middle East who sent out season's greetings in a number of different ciphers. The term “snookered santa” is, however, invented. Other codebreaking terms, such as “kisses,” are not.

The story of the real Polish codebreakers after the outbreak of the war is also factual. Rejewski, Zygalski, and Rozycki did flee to Romania, where they offered their services to the British embassy, only to be rebuffed; they could come back in several days. The Poles thereupon went to the French embassy, where they were cordially welcomed. When the Germans occupied Vichy, Rejewski and Zygalski escaped to Britain—Rozycki having lost his life when his boat went down between Algeria and Vichy France, perhaps as a result of a mine. In Britain, the talents of the two survivors were in fact wasted; they were given low-level decryption tasks.

Their sad history did not end there. At the end of the war, Rejewski and Zygalski were finally promoted to the elevated rank of Lieutenant. Rejewski joined the trickle of Poles returning from Britain to Communist Poland, where he searched without success for a position teaching mathematics at a high school. Having lived in England, he was considered untrustworthy. For decades he was ignored until, in a tardy act of contrition, a Polish University offered him an honorary degree in 1978. By then, just two years before his death, he was not interested. Zygalski's story had a happier ending: he stayed in England and became a college teacher in London.

The hopeless situation of the Polish people, trapped between Hitler and Stalin, was one of the great tragedies of the war. The barbarism of Hitler is well known, particularly the horrors of his extermination camps. Perhaps less well known is the ruthlessness of Stalin. The murders at Katyn Forest may have made some sort of perverted sense, as they helped clear the way for a Communist regime in postwar Poland. But Stalin was equally ruthless with fellow Communists. As mentioned in the novel, most of the leaders of the Polish Communist Party were shot during the purges of 1938.

Wladyslaw Gomulka was a notable exception; he had the good fortune to reside in a Polish prison, thus escaping Stalin's purges. When he was released in the early months of the war, he moved from the Soviet-occupied sector of Poland to the German one. Why, is not clear. Perhaps he wanted to build a Communist resistance to Hitler; perhaps he preferred to take his chances with Hitler's storm troopers rather than his treacherous Soviet “comrade.” It was only later that he came to an uneasy, unstable truce with Stalin—a truce that was scarcely reinforced by Gomulka's sad postwar observation: "The masses do not regard us as Polish Communists at all, but just as the most despicable agents of the NKVD" (an earlier incarnation of the KGB). From the Soviet viewpoint, he had misplaced loyalties; he looked on Polish Communism as a shield against Soviet imperialism. He went on, after Stalin's death in 1953, to head the Government of Poland. Soon, it was threatened by a Soviet invasion. In a tense confrontation, Gomulka stared down Nikita Khrushchev.

The list of enigma seizures by the British Navy is accurate, although not exhaustive. Some details have been embroidered.
HMS Gleaner,
under the command of Lt. Cmdr. Price, did sink the U-33, but the rest of the yarn is fictional, particularly Price's interview of the U-boat captain. Liberties have also been taken with the encounter between
HMS Petard
and U-559 in the eastern Mediterranean, although in this case, the story is closer to the truth. Three British naval men did swim to the foundering U-boat, and two of them—Fasson and Grazier—died as the submarine slipped below the waves. They were awarded the George Cross for their heroism. The Honours and Awards Committee judged that their “gallantry was up to the Victoria Cross standards,” but they were not granted that highest of British awards because their heroic acts were not, as required, “in the face of the Enemy.”

The stories of the bizarre characters at Bletchley Park are based on fact, except when they are interacting with fictional characters like Anna. Josh Cooper did jump up and say “Heil Hitler,” returning the salute of a German pilot. Turing was an eccentric genius who wore a gas mask as protection against asthma, he did bury silver bars as a hedge against inflation, and he was said to have chained his coffee cup to a radiator. Frankly, there is reason to doubt that last story. A teacup, perhaps, but it is hard to believe that anyone would cherish a cup from which he would drink the horrid British coffee of that era.