Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (10 page)

Throughout the war years, the Czechs planned for the day when their people would rise against the Nazi oppressor and welcome their exiled rulers back home. They were to have many setbacks, and a long wait. Yet in the end their patience was rewarded. A rising broke out in Slovakia in late August 1944, and in the first week of May 1945 a popular rising in Prague immediately preceded Liberation. An understanding was reached between the Western Allies and the Soviets to avoid friction. It was swiftly
followed by the homecoming of President Beneš and the restoration of the exiled Government with the blessing of all the Allied powers.

At the other end of the Continent, the victory of Gen. Franco’s fascists in Spain had incalculable consequences for British attitudes. For three years, from 1936 to 1939, the Western powers had anxiously watched as the Spanish Republic gradually submitted to the fascist onslaught. Their sympathies undoubtedly lay with the Republic. But they could no more rejoice at the overthrow of the democratic republicans by the Communists than at the bolstering of Franco’s cause by forces sent by Hitler and Mussolini. So their judgement long swung in the balance. If Stalin’s proxies had triumphed in Spain, the West might well have come to see international communism as the more serious threat. As it was, the triumph of the fascists cemented the belief not only that international fascism had to be stopped but also that the Communists, for all their faults, might have to be recruited to the Allied camp.

Britain’s relationship with the country where the Second World War in Europe started, its First Ally, inevitably had its ups and downs. It was born from the collapse of appeasement and of the shared determination to stand and fight against Nazi Germany. It generated a genuine comradeship-in-arms, especially in 1940–41, when Britain faced the prospect of the same national catastrophe by which the First Ally had already been engulfed. It also generated much genuine affection, especially among the diplomats, administrators, and military personnel on both sides who worked and fought in harness. At the same time, like a love affair that faded, it came under growing pressures. Britain found new and more powerful partners. The First Ally was reduced to the ever-growing company of minor clients and hopeful petitioners. It was not abandoned, but it had every right to feel increasingly neglected. In late 1944, a state of informal separation emerged. Formal divorce did not occur until July 1945.

During the September Campaign of 1939, when the First Ally was attacked by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviet Union, the weaknesses of the Allied camp were cruelly exposed. Despite their declarations of war, neither Britain nor France thought fit to activate assistance. And the First Ally was left to face its enemies alone. The RAF dropped leaflets over
Berlin urging the Nazis to desist. The French army crossed Germany’s western frontier to test the response, but retreated in haste after coming under fire and advancing less than 10km (six miles). Its complicated mobilization procedures meant that Gamelin’s promises could not be kept. At Franco-British staff talks on 12 September, no senior representatives of the First Ally were present, and it was decided that no major action could be taken. The First Ally’s fate was thereby sealed. Fighting lasted for five weeks. A German
panzer
column reached the outskirts of the Capital, Warsaw, on 9 September; and repeated reports falsely announced that the defenders had surrendered. In fact, the First Ally continued to resist a merciless siege by land and air until the 27th. A fierce counterattack to the west of the Capital inflicted heavy losses on the Germans in the third week of September; and some spirited skirmishes on the frontier held up the Red Army before it swarmed through the undefended eastern provinces. A joint Nazi–Soviet victory parade was held at Brest-Litovsk whilst the Capital was still holding out. The last fighting ended on 6 October in the marshland wilderness beyond the River Bug. In all, the Germans had suffered 60,000 casualties, the First Ally 216,000, and the Soviets 11,500. Two images of the conflict stand out. One is that of encircled cavalrymen charging tanks in order to escape. The other is of two Allied planes, reinforced with sticking plaster, taking off for the very last sortie of the campaign.
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The diplomatic fall-out of the September Campaign was considerable. Somewhat belatedly, the British Government clarified its understanding of its obligations. When pressed by the First Ally’s Ambassador in London, Count R., the Foreign Office explained that according to the secret protocol, the clause in the treaty of 25 August concerning common action against an ‘attack by a European Power’ could not be used to refer to the attack by the USSR. It also explained that the British guarantee referred only to the First Ally’s sovereign status, not to its frontiers. In other words, even if Nazi Germany were defeated, the First Ally could not expect any help in recovering its full pre-war status and territory. The mean-spirited sophistry of British diplomats on this occasion did not bode well for the future.
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At the end of the September Campaign, the most important development was the signing on 28 September of the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Demarcation, and Cooperation, which superseded the secret protocols of the earlier Nazi–Soviet Pact. It divided the First Ally’s territory into two parts and introduced a slightly modified frontier between the
German Zone in the west and the Soviet Zone in the east. This ‘Peace Boundary’ was the frontier that the Soviets henceforth, throughout the war, claimed to be rightfully theirs. Nazi and Soviet propaganda was obliged to present Hitler and Stalin as admiring friends and to suppress any hint of incompatibility. The security machines of the Reich and of the Soviet Union were pledged to cooperate against any attempt to resurrect the First Ally’s fortunes. Himmler and Beria were handed a joint enterprise venture.

In his final report, the last British Ambassador to pre-war Poland, Sir Howard Kennard, expressed the desire that ‘the whole Polish people should at the end of the war have the right to an independent life.’ One might consider the sentiment fairly routine. In the event, it proved so dubious in the eyes of the British Foreign Office that the report was not published. As an official, Frank Roberts, noted in the margin: ‘I see little prospect of those sections of the Polish people included in the areas taken over by Russia ever being given such an opportunity.’
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Hence, right from the start, British support for the First Ally was less than complete.

For the majority of the 1.5 million personnel whom the First Ally had mobilized, the war ended there and then. But a considerable number escaped death or captivity, and lived to fight again. They assumed false identities, or took to the woods, or lived quietly in the countryside, biding their time. Almost all used pseudonyms. Col. Thaddeus K. (1895–1966), for example, who had been trained as an Austrian cavalry officer, had commanded a cavalry brigade in the September campaign. Speaking perfect German, he was able to give the slip both to the German military police and to the Gestapo, and lived under a series of false names in Cracow and Warsaw. In due course, he emerged in the Underground as Gen. ‘Boor’. Col. Thaddeus P. (1892–1985), a recruit to Pilsudski’s Legions during the First World War, had commanded the 19th Infantry Division in September 1939: he was eventually known as Gen. ‘Gregory’, having used numerous other pseudonyms. Lt.Col. Antoni Ch. (1895–1960) distinguished himself both in 1917–18 and in 1939, when he had commanded the 82nd Regiment of the Siberian Rifles and was then imprisoned. After release, and calling himself variously ‘Adam’, ‘Guardian’, ‘Strand’, ‘Rice’, ‘Hawk’, and ‘X’, he would emerge as Gen. ‘Monter’,
i.e.
the electrician. Lt.Col. Leopold O. (1898–1946) was the officer who, on desk duty with the General Staff on the night of 31 August/1 September 1939, had personally received the flood of telegrams from frontline units announcing the Wehrmacht’s undeclared invasion. He was later involved in the siege of
Warsaw. Having lived openly as ‘John Ant’ and ‘Johann Müller’, he was known to most of his wartime comrades only as ‘Yan’, ‘Cobra 2’, ‘Bullet’, ‘Vulture’, or ‘Termite’. In due course, he became the famous Brig.Gen. ‘Bear Cub’. Maj. Emil F. (1895–1953) commanded the 51st Infantry Regiment in 1939. Circulating as ‘Lutyk’, ‘May’, ‘Sylvester’, and ‘Weller’, he eventually settled for the pseudonym of Gen. ‘Nile’. All these men had once seen Austrian service and in 1919–20 had fought in the Polish–Soviet War. For them, to enter the wartime Resistance was simply to follow their patriotic duty and to continue their career.
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Western Europeans remember the winter of 1939–40 as ‘the Phoney War’. But there was nothing phoney about the war in the East, where Hitler and Stalin were both actively pursuing their conquests. The Finno-Soviet Campaign, for example, began soon after the September Campaign finished, and continued until the eve of Hitler’s next major venture. As usual, the Western perspective is rather partial and misleading.

The consequences for the First Ally were unspeakable. Its territory was devoured, its population enslaved, its Government separated from its people. The Nazi zone of occupation was divided into two parts. The western section was directly incorporated into the Reich, from which all ‘racial undesirables’, mainly Slavs and Jews, were expelled. The eastern section was set up as a separate, lawless General Government, variously dubbed ‘Gestapoland’ or the ‘Gangster Gau’. The Soviet zone of occupation was formally annexed to the USSR, but was cordoned off and administered as a separate region. The northern section, renamed Western Byelorussia, was attached to the existing Byelorussian SSR, and the southern section, renamed Western Ukraine, was attached to the Ukrainian SSR. The Wehrmacht protected its officer prisoners from the SS, and sent them off to regular POW camps in Germany. Many common soldiers were released. The Red Army too sorted officers from other ranks. Both sides filtered the entire population through police measures, which classified different groups according to ideological principles. The Nazis used a pseudo-racial system, which hived off German ‘Aryans’ from Slav and Jewish ‘subhumans’ and introduced numerous subdivisions, which put
Reichsdeutsch
at the top of the heap and people of supposedly unmixed Jewish descent at the bottom. The Soviets introduced a pseudo-social system, where political and ethnic discrimination overruled all attempts at
genuine class analysis and where Communist party membership opened the gates to the only master class. Everyone was declared a Soviet citizen. Russians and other East Slavs enjoyed preferential treatment, as did so-called ‘workers and peasants’. Twenty-one categories of ‘enemies of the people’, varying from gamekeepers to philatelists and including all ‘bourgeois’ politicians, all state employees, all private employers, and all religious leaders, were targeted for elimination. In those early months, the Nazis shot 50,000 civilians in so-called reprisals, 15,000 political and religious leaders, and 2,000 Jews. They also created ghettos for Jewish settlement in each of the main cities. They founded several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, for local political suspects, removing tens of thousands of innocent people, including priests, from circulation. The Soviets were better prepared. The NKVD arrived with huge lists of names and addresses for immediate arrest. Their state concentration camp system, or Gulag, had been operating for twenty years. In that first winter, they started the vast operation of deporting 1.8 million either to the Arctic camps or to forced exile in Central Asia. Within a year, many of the deportees were dead. In line with usual Soviet practices, the entire families of persons sentenced to the Gulag were deported to distant exile from which many would never return. About 25,000 captured army and police officers, mainly reservists, were interned by the NKVD, and, after several months’ investigation, shot in cold blood.

For obvious reasons, the First Ally watched events in Finland with the keenest interest. Admiration for the Finns, whose tiny army outclassed the largest military force in the world, was mixed with growing excitement at the prospect that the Western powers would intervene. If they did, then Britain and France, like the First Ally, would be simultaneously at war both with the Third Reich and with the USSR. For some time, the prospect looked imminent. After expelling the USSR in December 1939 for aggression, the League of Nations called on its members to give assistance to Finland. Britain and France made preparations for an expeditionary force to which the First Ally was asked to contribute a brigade of 5,000 men drawn from troops already in the West. They were considering an assault on northern Norway, which would have given them the dual benefit of access to Finland and control of Sweden’s valuable ore exports. British planes painted with Finnish markings were already standing by on airfields near London when the Finns decided to cut their losses on 12 March 1940 and make peace. The expedition was called off. The First Ally
remained in the anomalous position of being fully supported in its struggle against the German oppressor whilst being completely ignored in its struggle against the Soviet oppressor.

Three events of great importance for the First Ally occurred during the period of the Phoney War. Firstly, over 100,000 troops, who had fought in the September Campaign and had taken refuge in Romania and Hungary, undertook the perilous journey via the Balkans and the Mediterranean to southern France or to French possessions like Syria. They arrived in dribs and drabs. But there were enough of them to contemplate the reformation of a new Allied Army under French operational control. Secondly, the First Ally’s Government, which had been interned in Romania at the request of Berlin, resigned, thereby permitting the construction of a fresh Government in France, with a new president, a new national council, a new premier, and a new commander-in-chief. The reconstituted authority was established first in the Regina Hotel in Paris and then in the town of Angers. Thirdly, the original Underground Resistance movement (SZP), which had been set up on the capitulation of the Capital in September 1939, was successfully subordinated to the new exiled Government. It was replaced by a new organization, which at first was called the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ), and which took its orders from the new C.-in-C. It was an integral part of the First Ally’s armed forces.