Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (50 page)

Much of this bulletin was pure fiction, invented by overeager activists who had not yet heard of Stalin’s latest posture. The Soviet press indulged in still wilder fantasies. An article in the military paper,
Red Star
, quoted by Moscow Radio, was entitled ‘General Sosnkowski’s Black Hundreds at Work’ (the Black Hundreds were the most notorious of the Tsarist regime’s most repressive formations).
²⁷

Stalin faced a weighty strategic problem. Once his armies had occupied all the territory he was claiming for the USSR, he had to decide whether to keep them moving westwards on the direct road to Berlin or turn south into the Balkans. The Soviets stood a fair chance of conquering the capital of the Reich before the Wehrmacht could marshal its defences and before the Western powers could participate. If they turned south, they could probably overrun three or four countries in rapid succession, thereby denying the West access and ensuring Soviet control over half of Europe. In the best of circumstances, they might conceivably find the resources to do both. In the first week of August, however, Moscow could have had no certain information either about the roadblock in Warsaw or about
Rokossovsky’s exact predicament. So it was not unwise to stall until all aspects of the problem clarified.

Moscow was eager to hear news from its own political and security organs. On 3 August, for example, Beria forwarded an NKVD report to Stalin regarding the recent operation to disarm ‘so-called Polish Home Army units’ captured in Lithuania.
²⁸
Among other things, he was at pains to show not only that ‘the Polish nationalists are fomenting anti-Soviet activity’ but also that the captured men had little inclination to cooperate. Of the 7,924 persons arrested in that particular operation, only 440 had agreed to join the Berling Army. Not a single AK officer had offered his services. One may deduce that the Soviet High Command was not encouraged to rush into an involvement in Warsaw, where the Home Army might be much more numerous.

Beria’s correspondence is sufficient to show that Soviet policy was ruthless, inhumane, and coldly calculating. Yet one must also consider the possibility that another factor was coming into play: that Soviet calculations were simply confused. As Soviet forces moved into Poland, they were leaving the bubble of their rigid ideological world, and were finding that reality did not conform to existing analyses. Their hesitations may have been inspired as much by disorientation as by deliberate policy.

Poland’s Premier had arrived in Moscow on 30 July, and looked to an early meeting with Stalin. He was a man of determination and moderation, who was staking his career on striking a deal with the Soviets and their protégés. Unlike some of his colleagues, he was not assertively anti-Communist. Nor had he any connection with the pre-war
Sanacja
regime. He was a middle-of-the-road democrat, who, as head of the Peasant Party, could be confident of commanding the largest block of votes in a free, post-war parliament. Balding, rosy-cheeked, undemonstrative, he was known, as befitted a representative of the peasantry, for his stubbornness. He was under no illusion that his Western partners were anxious to see the deal clinched.

In judging the Premier’s mission, however, it is essential to consider what he knew in advance, what he learned in the course of his trip, and what he could not have known. For example, he knew that Stalin had been pressing for months for the restoration of the ‘Peace Boundary’ of 1939–41, that the Lublin Committee had been installed as an acting administration, and that the ‘Big Three’ had already discussed Polish
matters at Teheran. He did not know how far Stalin might be prepared to compromise on frontier matters, nor whether the PKWN was viewed in Moscow as Poland’s future Government, nor whether the Teheran Conference had reached any concrete decisions. He knew on departure that the Warsaw Rising was due to take place, that the Home Army was the only serious fighting force in the Polish Underground, and that the Home Army’s aim was to welcome the Soviet Army into Warsaw. He did not know how the Rising was faring. He had no information about the likely stance of the Communist Underground, nor about Rokossovsky’s intentions. Unlike many of his colleagues, he had no personal experience of Russia and Russian methods. But he would have heard far more hard fact about Stalin and Stalin’s country than any other Western statesman of the day. Above all, he would have been conscious of his Cabinet’s feelings, which were not as evenly optimistic as his own.

Stalin’s views of the Premier have not been recorded, but they can be surmised. He would have known that the visitor was ‘a peasant politician’. This can only have meant in Stalin’s eyes that he was a kulak – a member of the class of rural bourgeois which was destined to extinction and of which, at Stalin’s bidding, some 10–20 million had perished in the previous decade. He would also have known that the exiled Polish Government was resident in London, hence ultimately subject to British control. In Stalin’s view, this undoubtedly meant that the Premier’s proposals, whatever they were, would be rather less important than the strength of Churchill’s backing. It would have been in Stalin’s nature to act provocatively and to put these issues to the test.

From the start, therefore, Premier Mick and his entourage were left in no doubt about the pains of their task:

The visitor was received by Molotov on 31 July. ‘Why have you come here?’ he was asked, as if Molotov didn’t know. He was then told that Stalin was very busy, and that it would be better to talk to representatives of the Lublin Committee, who happened to be in Moscow. The Premier declined.

The Premier learned of the outbreak of the Rising by radio, sometime towards the end of the three days when he was kept waiting for his audience with Stalin. The development made him all the more beholden to Stalin’s goodwill. He would undoubtedly have preferred to negotiate with Stalin before the complications of the Rising arose.

Stalin finally received his visitor on 3 August. The Premier set out his agenda, including his wish to discuss the frontier issue. Stalin took the line that he was caught between the conflicting demands of two rival Polish bodies and that he could not deal with them properly until they had settled their differences. He was not inclined to listen to the Premier’s outline of frontier proposals as worked out with the British Foreign Office; but he intimated that Poland would receive land up to the Oder and Neisse in compensation. On the question of aid for the Warsaw Rising, he sounded sympathetic at first and then turned truculent:

The two men parted without it being clear whether substantial Soviet aid would be given to the Rising or not. But Premier Mick, as always, looked
for something positive. He told the British Embassy that Stalin had undertaken to give orders for providing assistance to Warsaw.

In the light of these difficulties, the Premier reluctantly agreed to meet the representatives from Lublin, headed by Boleslas B. and Vanda W. He saw them twice. On the 6th, they solemnly told him that there was no fighting in Warsaw, thereby contradicting their own communiqués. Vanda W. had supposedly talked to a person who had been in Warsaw only two days previously and who had not seen any fighting at all. On the 7th, the commander of the Polish People’s Army complained that the AK had created a terrible situation by starting the Rising without prior consultation with the Soviets. At least he was not denying the reality of the Rising. Boleslas B. then calmly suggested that the Premier should resign so that the Lublin Committee could officially become the Government and Boleslas B. could become the president. When the Premier hinted that he might return to Poland as a private citizen, Boleslas B. told him bluntly that he would be arrested. The Communist cat was playing with a poor and lonely mouse. In the absence of even symbolic support from British or American diplomats, the mission was going nowhere. The Premier prepared to pack his bags. Nothing had been achieved.

At least Premier Mick had succeeded in extracting from Stalin that one, rather ambiguous undertaking about Soviet assistance. And it was his duty to stay in Moscow to see if this important point could be clarified. He requested a second meeting.

Behind the scenes, the wheels were turning. On 5 August, the Soviet General Staff received a letter from the head of the British Military Mission, Col. Turner, requesting information about ‘the decision’ to fly in arms and ammunition to Warsaw. The Colonel was passing on requests which he himself had received both from London and, presumably, from Premier Mick. The next day, his letter was forwarded to the National Commissar for the Defence of the USSR. This Anglo-Soviet correspondence is curious on two scores. Firstly, in the Russian versions of the exchange, both sides use the formula ‘assistance for the illegal Polish Army in Warsaw’. Secondly, the National Commissar for the Defence of the USSR was Stalin.
³¹
All paths led back to him. [
BARRICADE
, p. 276]

In the first days of the Rising, the insurgents learned the hard way about the effective methods of attack and defence. In some instances, the pent-up urge to mount a frontal assault on German positions proved catastrophic.
At exactly 5 p.m. on 1 August, for example, ninety-eight men of the Stag Battalion, a mixture of pre-war cavalrymen and raw recruits armed only with revolvers, poured out of a tenement on the corner of Bagatelle Street and attempted to rush a complex of bunkers guarding the SS and Gestapo buildings on nearby Schuch Avenue. Only their commander and six men survived. During their retreat, they ambushed a German patrol, which had been searching some houses, and shot several soldiers. In revenge, the Germans returned that evening to kill every inhabitant of the houses concerned. Insurgent losses were approximately twenty times higher than those of the Germans.