The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (40 page)

Soon the insurgents took to navigating the city through its claustrophobic network of pitch-black sewers, the only safe route between the increasingly isolated pockets of Home Army personnel. At one point 1,500 fighting men, 2,000 walking wounded and 500 civilians including nurses and stretcher cases were navigating the filthy tunnels, slipping on the curved brick floors, wading through waste up to their shoulders – many drowning – while the enemy threw grenades down manholes and booby-trapped or blocked the exits. Sometimes the soldiers emerged from hours underground only to be rounded up at gunpoint as the German line advanced.

‘We do not ask for equipment’, the Home Army now desperately radioed London, keenly feeling the apparent injustice of failing to receive significant Allied support in their hour of need. ‘We demand its immediate dispatch.’
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Britain had warned the Poles that significant support could come only from the Soviets, and one Polish major now resigned in protest at the Polish administration in London continuing to give the Home Army too much reason to hope for material aid. His fears were borne out when Stalin’s promised support arrived in mid-August, with the drop of hundreds of leaflets encouraging the population to cease resistance and describing the Rising as the work of an irresponsible clique who would be punished for provoking civilian deaths.

When the Russians continued to refuse the Allies air clearance, Polish aircrews insisted on resuming flights from Bari, in the heel of Italy, 960 miles as the crow flies and much of that directly over Germany. Fighter protection for the bombers was out of the question and, flying both to the limit of their planes’ capacity and low over Warsaw’s rooftops in the teeth of intense anti-aircraft fire, they sustained huge losses for minimal impact. ‘You could see Warsaw from miles away, burning’, one pilot recorded, while another remembered that those who returned arrived in planes ‘holed like sieves’ and branded the missions a ‘suicidal waste of airmen’.
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As their commander continued to demand ‘the utmost will-power and self-sacrifice’, one Polish crew managed to make a further successful drop of supplies. The general rang to award the pilot the Virtuti Militari, but the whole crew had been burnt in the wreckage of their plane, which fell on roofs of Warsaw’s Old Town.
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‘The Poles just really committed suicide in an effort to … send supplies to Warsaw’, one FANY wrote in distress.
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Two squadrons of British Liberators followed, but when they arrived Warsaw was in flames. Only in mid-September did Stalin relent on air clearance and permit one group of American bombers to land. He even allowed Soviet supply drops, knowing it was too late. ‘The relatively small amount of real help given is humiliating’, Douglas Dodds-Parker wrote, voicing the thoughts of many in SOE.
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It was while ‘Warsaw was’, as Francis succinctly phrased it, ‘blowing up’, that Christine had arrived in London.
33
Her immediate instinct was literally to fly to the aid of her friends, family and country. Noreen Riols watched her storm into the SOE offices and demand to be parachuted back into Poland. ‘She presented her request as a fait-accompli’, Riols said, asking not whether but when it would happen.
34
The British hummed and hawed, not committing themselves either way. Riols assumed that they had no intention of sending Christine back, but in fact there was a possibility – not to drop her on to the burning roofs of Warsaw, but for her to join a long-anticipated uniformed military mission to Poland.

In February 1944 Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the Polish prime minister-in-exile, had written personally to Churchill, asking for a team of observers to be sent to the Home Army. This was not a new idea; Andrzej for one had discussed it with a key Polish courier when he had been in London at the end of 1943. The plan was to provide Britain and the USA with an independent source of intelligence on the situation inside Poland, while monitoring the shifting balance of power within the country and relations between the Home Army, the Wehrmacht and, later, the Red Army. As the months passed, the Polish émigré community in Britain maintained that the advancing Russians were arresting and liquidating Polish resistance soldiers as they came out to welcome them. Even John Ward, hiding in a safe house, described the first Russian forces as ‘very drunk … they appeared to beat Polish men without provocation and some were shot’. Within a few days ‘they had raped every female in the district over fourteen years of age’.
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But the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, refused to consider any mission to observe ‘political conditions’ without Soviet approval, which was not forthcoming. Undeterred, Gubbins and SOE pursued the idea, getting ready for immediate action once clearance arrived. At the beginning of September, Churchill scribbled a note: ‘This is a good idea, why not?’
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A few weeks later Harold Perkins, Christine’s old friend ‘Perks’, who was now the head of SOE’s Central Europe section, received a pencil note saying simply, ‘mission granted’.
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The plan was to drop three teams into Poland under the codenames Freston, Fernham and Flamstead. Freston was purely an observation mission, but the other teams were also briefed for the armed liberation of Polish prisoner-of-war and forced-labour camps. As Soviet troops advanced, huge numbers of prisoners were being marched west by the Germans, killed in reprisals or shot so that they could not testify. Christine was to serve as the courier liaison officer between the three missions, dropping with either the first or second team. Her role was to advise the officers on the political conditions and personalities in their areas, and to explain – ‘without prejudice to her own position’ – British policy regarding Poland. ‘It is realized that this is a very difficult task’, her briefing paper informed her. ‘However, it is hoped that the Poles may be brought to an understanding of the expediency of the suggested solution.’
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Christine was in effect being asked in part to serve as an apologist for the British policy of asking the Poles to welcome the Soviet advance. ‘The Poles in Poland may be ill-informed…’, an addendum struggled to qualify the position; the missions were to bring an understanding of ‘the conditions ruling in world-wide politics today…’
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As Christine was to report back by wireless, she was then given her own ciphers and, in keeping with the overall theme of the operation, she was allotted the code-name ‘Folkestone’.
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The Warsaw Rising ended only when all hope was lost, on 3 October 1944, after sixty-three days of intensive street fighting. As well as German losses, more than 18,000 resistants and 180,000 civilians had been killed.
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In the last hours before capitulation tens of thousands of people fled into the countryside, many re-forming to fight on. Others were forced to surrender, held prisoner or dispatched to Germany as forced labour. General Bór-Komorowski was arrested and imprisoned in Colditz. Violating the terms of the surrender, German demolition squads then systematically dynamited those buildings still standing in the city. Over the course of the next four weeks they murdered another 33,000 Jews in camps across Poland.

The Rising had not been entirely without military impact, which almost added to the tragedy. Many much-needed divisions of the Wehrmacht had been tied to the city, sustaining heavy losses while unable to fight either on the Western Front against the Allies or in the East against the Red Army. ‘What the Polish Home Army achieved with heroic bravery … represented an important contribution to the Allied victory,’ Gubbins wrote, ‘but especially to the Russian victory.’
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Christine was determined that this should not be the final epitaph for Poland’s war. There was still much to be fought for, and both the Poles and SOE were increasingly desperate to send in Freston and its sub-missions while there was still hope for an independent future for Poland.

Christine was confirmed for the operation, and after some lobbying she managed to get John Roper selected as a member of Fernham, the second mission team.
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Her thoughts had also turned to Andrzej, now based in the Italian town of Bari, the centre of SOE activities directed towards Poland. On 19 October, Andrzej arrived in London and they had an emotional reunion. By the time he returned to Bari, two weeks later, he too was approved to drop with the Fernham team. Despite group briefings, his fellow team members never knew he had an artificial leg. The Freston team meanwhile, dressed in ‘splendid fur-collared coats’, was ready to drop, but it was repeatedly delayed by bad weather.
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At last allowing herself to believe, for the first time in months, that she was going home, Christine once again gave Poland as her place of birth on the mission ‘vetting forms’.
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A week later Perkins sent a ‘Top Secret’ letter to General Tatar informing him of the mission and of Christine’s ‘special role’. ‘I believe you are already conversant with her activities’, Perkins wrote, knowing that Christine had long been
persona non grata
with the Poles. ‘I would only state that she is one of the most intelligent and courageous operators with whom it has been my pleasure to work … and understands [the British] character and temperament as well as she understands that of her own people.’
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Tatar ran the plan past the Polish administration and confirmed their support, hoping the missions would validate their demands for weapons, get the Home Army recognized as an official Allied Force, and provide independent witnesses to the atrocities taking place.

Although MI5 had already given Christine clearance in 1940, she was ‘put through the cards’ again, and on 21 November 1944 she was granted an honorary commission in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and matching WAAF identity papers. SOE had described her as ‘one of the most distinguished of our female agents’ and ‘a woman of very considerable influence … [who] should not be treated as a junior officer’.
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As a result she was given the rank of Flight Officer, the equivalent of a Flight Lieutenant, although, irritatingly, no grant to pay for the uniform.

That same day Christine flew to Bari, buttoned up in her new uniform, and with John Roper at her side. She was delighted to see Andrzej’s Opel at the airport. Although Andrzej thought Christine looked terribly thin, ‘a bag of bones’ as he called her, she was also ‘glowing with success’ at having engineered their return to Poland.
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But Christine did not stay long. Her knowledge of her country and the Polish administration was needed back in London, and she returned a few days later leaving the men to check into the
trullo,
the conical stone house, traditional to Puglia, where they were to be lodged until the operation got final clearance. The worst winter in thirty years was just setting in.

The SOE base at the little fishing port of Monopoli, halfway between Bari and Brindisi, had been set up in late 1943, mainly by experienced hands from Algiers and Cairo. As soon as the Brindisi airbase was secured, the ‘handsome and dashing’ colonel Henry Threlfall was sent out as commander, reporting to Perkins.
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For a while Andrzej had served as Threlfall’s liaison officer at a Polish training school, and the two men had formed a strong friendship. Throughout the Warsaw Rising, Threlfall had fought a desperate battle to get more support sent to the insurgents, constantly pressing the Polish point of view with the Air Force authorities. It was, he said, ‘exhausting and heart-breaking’ work that brought limited results.
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Eventually he was reprimanded for submitting ‘undesirable memoranda … which are essentially political in character’.
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Undeterred, he now turned to supporting plans for Freston and its sub-missions.

The prospects for the operation improved in December, prompting Christine to make financial arrangements for an elderly Skarbek aunt living in France. Touchingly she also specified that ‘if a sum of money is needed’ it should be given to her husband Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki, who, she was informed, had applied for aid to the Association of Polish War Refugees in Montreal, Canada.
52
Francis once said that Christine ‘had no interest in money, for her it did not exist’, but she also clearly had no illusions about the personal risks her mission involved, and wanted to settle her affairs as best she could.
53
She was now on a tax-free salary of £511.12.0 per annum, well above the national average and at the high end of the scale for a female agent. When she had been in France her expenses had been fully covered, so she had built up some savings. Now she would receive not only her salary but also danger and field pay. And yet she tried to secure even more. ‘The claim for clothing lost by enemy action amounting to (gross) £240.7.0 is out of all proportion for such losses which can be allowed … The items included therein are on a luxury scale both as to quality and quantity’, the finance department informed her curtly when she submitted a ‘Misadventures of Jane’ style claim for lost outfits.
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Given Christine’s penchant for a few plain skirts and well-cut shirts, she was definitely trying it on, but she received £155, to include her RAF outfit grant, while a junior officer reporting to Dodds-Parker was quizzed more thoroughly as to ‘the circumstances leading to the loss of Miss Granville’s Operational clothes’.
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Meanwhile, on 23 December, Christine signed out two white diamonds, $1,000 in gold, $500 in bills, and some thick Polish winter clothes for her ‘Folkestone’ mission.
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SOE knew, however, that Christine’s worth was not all tied up in diamonds and lost dresses. Accordingly, they now attempted to extract what further value they could from their asset, inviting her input into a new ‘Agent Training Manual’, and arranging for her to liaise with the Polish Military at their London headquarters, where Christine was now received with the ‘greatest respect’ and the traditional kiss on the hand accorded by Polish gentlemen to ladies in lieu of a simple handshake.
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