The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (39 page)

With former resistants finally able to speak openly, Francis suddenly found himself heralded as a great man and Christine, his assistant, as a ‘magnificent woman’.
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Neither of them had sought or desired such praise, but for many Francis was as a brother or an uncle, and their doors would always be open to him. He was deeply moved, and maintained strong ties with the families he had once worked with, later making his home with them in the south of France.
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Christine, however, shared none of Francis’s feeling of belonging, or sense of closure. They had shared something fabulous in France, and his friendship was something she would always prize. But the liberation celebrations, and the many small dinners and tributes they received locally, brought home to her the great difference between them. To the people of France, and to some extent even to Francis himself, what mattered was that Christine was a woman of great determination and courage. Her endearing accent might have been Polish, or she might have been Irish, British or even French; her actions completely transcended the question of her nationality. But to Christine, she herself, her determination and her courage were all Polish. And, for her, the war was far from won.

In September, Christine finally hitched a lift on a small British plane flying to London. She was pleased to be wearing some new nylon stockings, then ‘as rare as snowballs in summer’, that had been given to her by Sylviane, and she was carrying the few British gold sovereigns she had not been able to put to good use.
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To witness celebrations in Poland similar to those taking place across France was perhaps a wish too far, but Christine was determined to now at least play a useful role in the liberation of her own country.

14: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

‘Please allot a code name urgently to Miss Christine Granville, who has been chosen to act as a courier in Poland’, an SOE memo of 9 November 1944 requested.
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‘Anxious for further work in the field’, Christine had volunteered to join three mission teams of British officers who were to be dropped into Nazi-occupied Poland to observe political conditions and attempt the rescue of prisoners held in German camps.
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Her proposal was gratefully accepted, and supported by both the British and the increasingly desperate Polish special services. She had been in Britain for less than a month.

Christine had spent a miserable first night in London, pacing the wet September pavements and sitting for a while on a doorstep in Regent’s Street, as she refused to use the last of the SOE gold to pay for a room. She then moved into John Roper’s flat, which she shared with his aunt and, more conveniently, his cook. When that felt too crowded she stayed with the O’Malleys at their London house in Cheyne Walk. Roper was also in London, and within a few days both they and Francis visited SOE HQ in Orchard Court, just off Baker Street, to file their reports and be debriefed. Punctual as she was, Christine’s reputation preceded her. ‘All the bigwigs wanted to question her’, Noreen Riols, one of the SOE secretaries, remembered. ‘She was known to be an incredible woman.’
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Among those assessing Christine was Maurice Buckmaster, the Head of F (French) Section, who was particularly keen to hear the story of Francis’s rescue, and to praise what he called Christine’s ‘wonderful record’ of service.
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Vera Atkins, Buckmaster’s level-headed assistant, was more critical in her appraisal, finding Christine ‘very brave, very attractive, but a loner and a law unto herself’.
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Riols was more interested in what Christine wore: a well-cut tweed skirt, casually tailored open shirt and smart suede jacket. She looked ‘rather sporty’, with her hands in her pockets, but was distinguished, Riols decided, by her ‘casual elegance’.
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Christine was dressed like a typical well-to-do Englishwoman of the time, just up from the country, an image also cultivated by Atkins, who was usually found in ‘a twin set or tweed’.
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In fact both women came from part-Jewish families in Eastern Europe and, consciously or not, were repositioning themselves in wartime London. As Christine had arrived with no papers, she had to resubmit her personal details. With an eye to the uncertain future, she quietly listed her place of birth as ‘London’, appropriately entering it beside her equally fictitious date of birth.
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Christine did not feel much at home in London, however. Among her SOE friends there, Roper was still half in love with her, but had a local girlfriend and described his relationship with Christine as an exceptionally close ‘straight friendship’. ‘It would be absurd to say that her beauty added nothing’, he qualified, but ‘the fact of the matter was she was an exceptional person with an exceptional capacity for friendship’.
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Francis, meanwhile, had quickly left London to be reunited with Nan and his two young daughters and, although he and Christine always met when he was in town, their relationship would never be the same. A greater advocate of full disclosure than Christine, Francis told Nan about their affair, and even asked if she would be happy for him to continue it. She told him that she would not. Francis had imagined Nan’s war to have been ‘utterly empty … except for the babies’, while he felt that his own life had been expanded in every direction.
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Now he learned that she too had had an affair, with his own conducting officer, who would not return from active service. Somehow they had to find a way of rebuilding their marriage. Francis did, once, introduce Nan to Christine, contact that he felt to be ‘necessary’, but it was brief and never repeated.
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Christine’s focus was now entirely on Poland. A national ‘Rising’, timed to coincide with a major landing of regular forces or Western air support for a final push to freedom, had always been on the Polish agenda. By July 1944 the Red Army, now officially Poland’s ally, was marching from Russia to Berlin on its ‘westward flood’, as Gubbins ominously put it, and advancing rapidly towards Warsaw ‘like a swift rising tide’.
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The Polish Home Army aided their progress by attacking the German rear, and vital road and rail communications. At the end of the month Soviet troops had reached the River Vistula and the ‘sound of Russian guns could be heard in Warsaw’.
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The timing seemed compelling. Nazi Germany was still reeling from a bomb plot against Hitler; the Soviets had reversed the German advance; France was fighting towards liberation; and British SOE missions were increasing.
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Britain had warned Poland that flight logistics prevented them from sending in the Polish Parachute Brigade or significant arms, or even from bombing German airfields. However, for some years, Wilkinson later confessed, SOE had been so deeply committed to the Polish cause that ‘we funked facing them with the realities of their situation’, making the limits of British support now hard to digest.
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The citizens of Warsaw were impatient for action, hoping to welcome the Soviets into their capital as free citizens, and in late July the Polish government-in-exile authorized General Bór-Komorowski, commanding the Home Army, to announce a Warsaw Rising at his discretion. The Polish premier, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, then flew to Moscow to win Stalin’s support for what they hoped would be a short and decisive action. On 29 July, Moscow Radio broadcast an appeal for the citizens of Warsaw to rise up against their German oppressors, urging that ‘there is not a moment to lose’.
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On Tuesday 1 August, a light rain fell across Warsaw as women ‘bustled along the pavements’ carrying bundles of pistols and ammunition, while boys and girls ‘shouldered rucksacks full of medical supplies and food’ on their way to rallying points across the city.
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At five in the afternoon the Home Army attacked, forcing the occupying Wehrmacht troops out of large sections of the capital. Their aim was to hold their ground for four or five days until Soviet reinforcements were negotiated. After nearly five years of occupation, much of Warsaw was suddenly a free city. The Polish flag was hung from buildings and the national anthem and other patriotic songs were broadcast through the streets. The sense of euphoria carried across Europe to Christine in France, who used the news to press home her arguments with the Polish troops forced into service with the Wehrmacht in the Alps, and later with the Polish prisoners-of-war held at Gap. Before she left France six weeks later, however, reports were coming in of huge Polish military and civilian losses.

The Polish Home Army had around 45,000 soldiers in the Warsaw district, mostly armed with pistols and grenades. But there were few heavy weapons. They faced a well-trained German formation of around 25,000 men, armed to the teeth and supported by artillery, Panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe. ‘The action of the Poles is a blessing’, Himmler reported to Hitler. ‘We shall finish them off … Warsaw will be liquidated.’
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Hitler responded by ordering ‘every inhabitant to be killed … no prisoners to be taken … every single house to be blown up and burned’.
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On 5 August, German troops attacked the city’s western suburbs, sending units from house to house to shoot the inhabitants regardless of age or gender, in an attempt to crush the Poles’ will to fight. Estimates of those killed within a few short days range from 20,000 to 60,000 people, among them shopkeepers, office workers, the elderly, and mothers with their children.

After a direct appeal to Churchill from the Polish president, on the night of 4/5 August fourteen RAF bombers flew from Italy to Warsaw. ‘As the epic battle raged on, we did everything in our power to assist’, Gubbins later wrote, but, although a limited amount of equipment and ammunition was dropped successfully to the insurgents, the high casualty rate forced the air commander-in-chief, John Slessor, to cancel further flights.
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His ban was rescinded after huge pressure from the Polish aircrews under his command. The pilots who had fought so bravely and effectively for the Allies in the Battle of Britain refused to be forbidden to fly to the aid of their own nation and people. ‘Cannot accept RAF losses of 50% as being unacceptable, there are times when 100% is necessary’, General Tatar, the Polish deputy commander for home affairs, based in London, supported his men. ‘We do not ask for British crews, but Polish ones.’
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Polish, British and South African aircrews went back into action, but losses mounted, and although the few successful drops brought hope to the insurgents they were far too few to affect the eventual outcome. Two weeks later any further flights were banned.

Churchill now appealed to Stalin for aid, or at least for the use of Soviet air space and airfields where RAF planes could land and refuel. Stalin refused, responding that ‘the information given to you by the Poles is greatly exaggerated and unreliable…’
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Having reached the banks of the River Vistula, only a few hundred yards from the action, the Red Army now abruptly came to a halt and stood idle for six weeks while Stalin denounced the revolt as the work of ‘criminals’ that was ‘doomed to fail’.
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The Soviets blamed military difficulties for their sudden lack of progress, but the real reasons behind what Gubbins called their ‘callous and calculated refusal’ to advance were political.
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Stalin had no intention of relieving Warsaw while the Germans were doing such a good job of weakening Polish resistance. In late July he had appointed what the Soviets called the ‘Lublin Polish Committee of National Liberation’, as a rival authority to the Polish government-in-exile. This new Communist-backed ‘government’ took its seat in Soviet-liberated Lublin on the first day of the Warsaw Rising, leaving little doubt as to Stalin’s intentions for post-war Poland.

Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had in fact already mapped out Poland’s future at the Tehran conference of November 1943, at which Polish leaders were not present. Unknown to Christine in Algiers as she trained to drop into France, or to Poles fighting beside the British for what they believed to be a common cause, the conference did not recognize Poland’s territorial claims to its pre-war borders, and only Churchill committed himself to Polish independence. Roosevelt was angling for Soviet support in the Far East, and was almost literally already in bed with Stalin, having turned down an offer of hospitality at the British Legation in favour of an invitation from the Russians. At the end of the conference Stalin got out a map and the ‘Big Three’ carved up Poland along the ‘Curzon’ line, which was soon being described in
The Times
as ‘the old Polish frontier’.
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‘I have intense sympathy for the Poles…’, Churchill told Parliament, ‘but I also have sympathy with the Russian standpoint’.
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A few idealists, such as Sir Owen O’Malley, who argued that the real choice was between ‘selling the corpse of Poland to Russia’ or ‘putting the points of principle to Stalin in the clearest possible way and warning him that our position might have to be explained publicly with equal clearness’, presented only the politest of threats.
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Tehran had shown Stalin that he had nothing to fear from either Britain or the USA.

By the second week of August it was clear that, far from being a decisive action, the Warsaw Rising had descended into a relentless battle of attrition. Street barricades were built from rubble and broken furniture, pavements were torn up and trenches dug. Families of all social classes were caught in the fighting, lugging suitcases, blankets and food between the soldiers and the ruined buildings, and begging the fighters not to pull back. The resistance units were hugely resourceful, brilliantly improvising defences and weaponry, and supported by an efficient auxiliary service largely run by women and children. But medical supplies quickly ran out and dysentery was rife, food was scarce and horses, cats and dogs were soon being eaten. Day after day, despite their almost unbreakable spirit, Christine’s compatriots were being slaughtered in scores on the hastily constructed barricades, and in the streets and ruins of their city. The Germans advanced steadily, demolishing buildings and mowing down the insurgents in the streets and courtyards by machine gun until there were tens of thousands of corpses across the city. The ‘worst of all’, wrote John Ward, the only British officer on the ground in Warsaw, ‘is the smell of rotting bodies, which pervades over the whole of the city centre’.
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