Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (42 page)

At Brindisi, Salamander and two others left the flight. The Dakota was repaired, and flew off to London, via Rabat and Gibraltar, arriving on the 28th. According to his own account, the emissary carrying the V2 bag was approached by two British officers who threatened to shoot him if he did not surrender the bag immediately. ‘Mr Churchill has been waiting for this package for several days,’ they said. The emissary drew a knife, told them that the bag was destined for his own superiors, and retorted: ‘
We
have been waiting for Mr Churchill for four years.’
⁷⁹

Meanwhile, the paralysed Salamander was deposited in the base commander’s quarters at Brindisi. A British woman auxiliary (FANY), attached to SOE’s Polish Section, was ordered to tend to his needs:

Salamander was not on a mission to Churchill. He was hoping to meet his own Prime Minister, Mick, who would soon be passing through Egypt on his way to meet Stalin in Moscow. So, after the briefest convalescence, he flew off again for Cairo.
⁸¹

The last leg of his mission took him back to London. Twenty hours of flying in a bumpy, unheated Liberator must have been a major ordeal for an exhausted and paralysed man. But he made it. A luxurious
apartment in the Dorchester Hotel was waiting. So, too, was the British Foreign Secretary. Their conversation does not appear to have been recorded. But it cannot have differed much from Salamander’s talk with the Premier. The exiled Government was not exaggerating. The Soviets were well nigh impossible to deal with. The Polish people were no more eager to be occupied by the Communists than by the fascists. So the one gleam of hope lay in the Premier’s appointment with Stalin.

Contact between the Home Army and the advancing Soviet fronts was first established in Volhynia in February. Spearheads of Rokossovsky’s First Byelorussian Front briefly encountered elements of the AK’s 27th Infantry Division, and the local military commanders agreed the principle of tactical cooperation. Large-scale confrontation did not occur until early July, when Operation Tempest was put into full operation. Apart from the 27th Division in Volhynia, which numbered some 6,000 soldiers, under Lt.Col. ‘Oliva’, the two formations most actively engaged were, the consolidated Vilno Brigade of 12,000 men under Col. ‘Wolf’ in the north, and the 5th Infantry Division of 11,000 men under Col. ‘Yanka’ to the south. These formations were far inferior to the vast German and Soviet forces deployed around them, but they were strong enough to make their presence felt in local sectors.

In view of later developments, it was misleading when the very first contacts between the AK and the Soviets proved unexpectedly positive. On 23 March, Boor was able to inform London that the deputy AK commander in Volhynia had been received by Soviet officers ‘with demonstrative cordiality’. Three days later, Oliva succeeded in signing a detailed memorandum of cooperation with Gen. Sergeev, in which the 27th Division was described as a unit owing allegiance to its higher authorities in Warsaw and London. This memorandum would have been known to Gen. Tabor and was the inspiration for his optimistic remarks in Washington. Critics point out that clause five of the memorandum, which stated clearly that ‘the Soviet Command will not allow any partisan units in their rear’, was foolishly ignored by the Polish side.
⁸²

Of course, as soon as the Soviet Army occupied a district, the NKVD were not far behind. Their first task was to find out what underground units might be present. In this connection, a fascinating document was drawn up on 15 July in Vilno by Col. Serov, the head of NKVD forces, for immediate despatch to Beria and Stalin. Serov’s report, relates everything
from the weapons and uniforms of the Home Army to the attitude of the local population. But its most interesting characteristic is that practically every detail is either false or skewed. It starts by wrongly giving Col. Wolf’s surname as Kasplitski, and by saying that during the German occupation ‘he arrived here illegally from Warsaw by aeroplane as a representative of the London Government.’ Its description of the Home Army men’s appearance, was, to say the least, curious:

All soldiers of this Polish Army are dressed in uniforms
of the Polish-German type
[translator’s italics], with epaulettes and marks of rank; and they wear either
konfederatki
or forage caps on their heads, the majority with an eagle badge, and with a red-and-white brassard on their arms . . . Every soldier carries a printed certificate that he is a member of the Polish Home Army and belongs to a particular unit . . . The population (Polish) behaves in a very favourable and friendly fashion to these units; many of them wear a white and yellow cockade, the sign of a Polish patriot.
⁸³

Serov invented his own explanation of the fact that the Home Army commander had taken care to obtain a written recommendation from the Soviet general, with whom he had recently cooperated:

Serov thought that the recommendation was being used for some ulterior purpose, such as the claim that Vilno had been captured in a joint operation. It never struck him that it might have been obtained to defend the brigade against himself. He concluded by reporting that the NKVD regiments in the district totalled 12,000 men.

Nothing could better illustrate the mindset of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Everyone outside their own closed world was an alien and a potential enemy. The Germans were enemies; and these Poles had just arrived from the German-dominated planet. Ergo, the Poles and the Germans were essentially the same sort of alien, and must be wearing the same type of ‘Polish-German’ uniforms. Ergo, Polish resistance leaders could not be really engaged in resistance, and were free to fly around Nazi-occupied Europe in aeroplanes which they had presumably borrowed from the Luftwaffe. Or perhaps the Home Army possessed its own air force, for
which the Germans provided the facilities. The flight was inevitably ‘illegal’, since it had no clearance from the NKVD. Serov did not question that Wolf had been sent by the exiled Government in London. But he did not make the connection that London was the capital of Great Britain; that Great Britain was at war with Germany; and hence, that the exiled Government might be a British ally that was also at war with Germany. To the Soviet mind, the only war that counted was the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Ergo, anywhere beyond the Eastern Front must be in a state of relative peace. So there was no more problem in flying from London to Warsaw in 1943 or 1944 than in flying from Warsaw to Lithuania.
⁸⁵
One can read it in black and white.

Since Soviet intelligence was obliged to rely on analysis of this sort, it is not difficult to see how decision-making in Moscow must often have been based on false premises. But it is also fair to say that most British and American officials were little better informed. They, too, had serious problems in grasping the realities of a different world. They were pushing their First Ally to reconcile itself to a system whose outlook was so completely at odds with their own. Even the Poles who had been born in the Tsarist Empire and who could speak Russian were constantly taken aback by the apparently senseless hostility of the Soviet formations whom they met. [
NKVD
, p. 222]

In this situation, Operation Tempest appears to have been doomed before it began. The Home Army commanders were obliged to reveal their units to the Soviets. The Soviet military could welcome their appearance, and use their services. But the NKVD would treat them with the utmost suspicion. The AK’s Vilno Brigade, for example, made contact with Gen. Bielkin, and on 12–13 July mounted an assault on the Germans, playing their part in the capture of the city. They participated in a parade, which was led by a Red Army man, a Berling trooper, and an AK soldier, and for a couple of days, whilst Serov was preparing his report, they circulated freely. Then, suddenly, they were ordered to attend a meeting outside the city, and found themselves surrounded. They were unceremoniously disarmed at gunpoint. The officers were separated from the men. The former were marched off under guard; the latter were told that they were being sent to join Berling’s Army. The AK’s 5th Division experienced something very similiar following the capture of Lvuv on 27 July.

The fate of the 27th Volhynian Division was somewhat more protracted. In the spring, it had been a formidable force of some 10,000 men supported by cavalry and artillery. Mobile and well-armed, it had fought a pitched battle with the
Waffen
-SS in the vicinity of Kovel. Its commander, Oliva, was killed and much of its heavy equipment was lost. But it was not broken, and was able to withdraw in good order. After seeking in vain to replace its lost weapons from the Soviets, it decided on a fighting
withdrawal to the west, moving in the dangerous no-man’s-land that separated retreating Germans from the advancing Soviets. The country was covered with alternating forest and marshland. The few villages of the region were either burned to the ground or full of Germans. Supplies ran short. Constant skirmishes were fought both at the front and the rear. At one point a strong German antipartisan expeditionary force was narrowly avoided. At another, on the edge of the Pripet Marshes, they were fired on and trapped by the Soviets. After 300km (190 miles), and eight weeks, some 6,000 stragglers crossed the River Bug and entered the province of Lublin.