Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (77 page)

The propaganda of the Lublin Committee in this period was absolutely merciless. Not content with denouncing Boor as a traitor, the Home Army as a whole was presented as a Nazi agency. Boor was the friend and drinking-partner of von dem Bach. The Home Army was full of fascists, ‘native Hitlerites’, and
Volksdeutsch
, an element of an imaginary
‘AK–NSZ–Gestapo network’. The Commanderin-Chief was Hitler’s puppet. And these ‘reactionaries’ were stirring up civil strife against the rule of law.
⁹

At the same time many aspects of ordinary life were being restarted after a five-year break. The German occupiers had been cleared out, and all the public talk was about ‘the victory over Fascism’. In education, for example, schools and universities which had done no teaching since 1939 opened their doors again to pupils and students. Lublin’s
Liceum
No. 1, which had been founded in 1580 but had been used until recently as a German military hospital, took in its cohorts of boys and girls on 1 September 1944. It did this when the Rising was still raging less than a hundred miles away. The Catholic University of Lublin, which had not been allowed to function during the war, reopened for the new school year on 1 October – again, while the Rising was still in progress. On 23 October, a completely new institution of higher learning, the Marie Curie University (UMCS), received its founding statute. Refugees were flooding in. Jewish people reappeared. Fortunate families were being reunited. The smart grasped new opportunities. The unobservant could have been forgiven for imagining that things were returning to normal.

In London, meanwhile, the British press was seeking to come to terms with the Capitulation in Warsaw. Some editors continued to take a cautious line, praising the insurgents’ bravery whilst waiting for a clarification of political aspects. Yet a surprising number, from different points of the spectrum, were shocked into making bold statements of opinion from which, throughout the Rising, they had long refrained. They were particularly offended by the denunciations of Gen. Boor that were pouring from the Communist camp. On 6 October, for example, the
Spectator
commented on ‘the completely outrageous and the apparently mendacious declarations of the head of the completely negligible Lublin Committee’ and ‘their despicable strictures on the man who has been fighting in Warsaw with the courage and tenacity of the defenders of Stalingrad.’
The Economist
followed suit next day. After noting that ‘the conciliatory steps’ of the exiled Government had, to ‘everybody’s surprise’, received ‘an unworthy and obstructive reply’, it rounded on the Lublin Committee:

Various members of the Soviet-sponsored Committee of Liberation chose . . . to launch a vituperative attack upon the Polish Government
and upon . . . the Commander of the Rising in Warsaw . . . The General was branded a criminal . . . The leaders of the Committee have apparently taken no notice of the joint British and American statement, in which both Allied Governments recognise Gen. [Boor’s] Army as a combatant force protected by the Allies. Does the Soviet Government endorse these threats?

The same day, the journal
Time and Tide
pointed to the Lublin Committee as the source of all the trouble. ‘This Committee’, it wrote, ‘. . . has no legitimate authority and is unsupported by any considerable section of the Polish people.’

Once again, however, it was George Orwell’s voice in
Tribune
which pronounced the most damning verdict:

During the sixty-six days when the Warsaw Rising was in progress, the fighting on all other fronts of the Second World War was developing very strongly in favour of the Grand Alliance. On the Western Front in Europe, the British and Americans had liberated both France and Belgium. They had not crossed the Rhine; but they were closing on the heart of the Reich from the Netherlands, the Rhineland, and Alsace. On the Eastern Front, the Soviets had taken over both Romania and Bulgaria. They had not moved on from the Vistula; but they were closing on both Belgrade and Budapest and were threatening to break into the Reich both from the Baltics and from the Balkans. In the Far East, the Americans had cleared the Japanese from much of the South Pacific, and by landing on Okinawa were about to lay siege to the home islands of the Rising Sun. The time had come for the Grand Alliance to finalize thoughts about the post-war order.

For this reason, Winston Churchill travelled to Moscow to talk in person with Stalin at a conference that opened on 9 October and was appropriately codenamed Tolstoy. He had failed to persuade Roosevelt to
accompany him. The top item on his agenda was the future of Eastern Europe as a whole. But he also wanted to press Stalin for help in the final attack on Japan; and he was eager to reach agreement on Poland. For this last purpose, he invited Premier Mick to fly out and join the party.

The Soviet advance into the Balkans had ruined Churchill’s earlier plans for the region. Ever since the disastrous Dardanelles Campaign in the First World War, which in part had been his brainchild, he was fascinated by the idea of striking at Germany and Austria through ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’. Three decades later, he was still playing with it. For a time, for example, he was obsessed with the largely mythical ‘Ljubljana Gap’, which was supposed to be ‘the keyhole to Vienna’s back door’ and which would offer a brilliant finale to the Italian Campaign. But by October ’44, all these schemes had been outflanked. The western armies of Gen. Alexander were several hundred kilometres short of Ljubljana whilst Marshal Tolbukhin’s forces were already entering the Danube Gap on the historic pathway to Vienna. So Churchill was flying in on a damage-limitation exercise. The most he could hope for was a share for the Western Allies in the post-war Balkan arrangements, and, if he was lucky, a dominant share in the one country which interested him most – Greece. Hence, at a critical moment during his meeting with Stalin, he pulled a battered old brown envelope from his inside pocket, and scribbled the following table on the back:

	Russia	Others
Romania	90%	10%
Greece	10%	90%
Yugoslavia	50%	50%
Hungary	50%	50%
Bulgaria	75%	25%

The percentages referred to proportions of intended involvement. Stalin puffed on his pipe, and in a gesture which some took to mean assent, he placed a blue pencilled tick on Churchill’s ‘naughty document’.
¹¹

Apart from confirming Churchill’s preoccupation with Greece, the Percentages Agreement was significant for saying nothing about Poland. The country whose fate was most in the news at that juncture did not rate a mention. Yet the omission was unavoidable since so many vital issues had remained in suspension. In the fourth year of the Grand Alliance, no consensus had been reached about the precise implications of
‘spheres of influence’, about Poland’s post-war Government, about Poland’s Underground army, or about Poland’s eastern frontier. This is where the Polish Premier intended to participate.

It is not true that nothing was said about the Warsaw Rising during these discussions. Stalin was aware of Churchill’s bruised feelings, and at one point he made a gesture which could have been mistaken for an apology. He was keen to explain why Soviet forces had not responded to Churchill’s pleas and had not moved to Warsaw’s rescue. He now told Churchill that Rokossovsky had suffered a major reverse on the Vistula sector during August, and that the extent of the reverse had to be kept secret at the time for operational reasons. He did not try to explain why a temporary setback on the ground could have justified his own decision to obstruct British and American assistance to Warsaw coming by air.

The discussions about Poland began on 13 October, barely ten days after Warsaw’s capitulation. They provided one of the most heart-breaking moments of modern diplomacy. The Polish Premier entered the meeting with Stalin and Molotov fully aware of the weakness of his position and of his adversaries’ implacable demands for the ‘Peace Boundary’ of 1939, now called the Curzon Line. But, with Western help, he still hoped to reach some sort of a compromise, and he started the talks in good faith. For the first time, he was attended by British and American diplomats, and he had been specifically assured in advance by Eden that his plan of 30 August was ‘endorsed’ by Churchill. In fact, he had been lured onto a stage with an open trapdoor, whose existence he may not even have suspected. At the crucial moment, when he started to explain his position on frontiers, Molotov rudely interrupted him and told everyone that Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed to the Curzon Line the previous year. The Soviets could not understand why the Poles were continuing to quibble:

‘But this was settled at Teheran,’ [Molotov] barked. He looked from Churchill to Harriman, who were silent . . . And then he added: ‘If your memory fails you, let me recall the facts. We all agreed at Teheran that the Curzon Line must divide Poland . . . President Roosevelt agreed to this solution and strongly endorsed the line. And then we agreed . . . not to issue any public declaration about our agreement.’

Shocked, and remembering the earnest assurances which he had personally received from Roosevelt at the White House, [Premier Mick] looked at Churchill and Harriman, silently begging them to
call these damnable deals a lie. Harriman looked down at the rug. Churchill looked straight [ahead]. ‘I confirm this’, he said quietly.
¹²

The Polish Premier had been well and truly conned, not so much by the Soviets, who had been brutally direct, but by the Western allies. There was nothing for him to do, but to keep his dignity and to announce that he was returning to London to consult his Cabinet.

Churchill, too, felt deceived. He had regarded his earlier talk with Stalin about the Curzon Line as a proposal not as a firm agreement. Hence his enormous efforts over the year since Teheran to push the exiled Government into a compromise. He now found not only that the ground had been cut from under him by Roosevelt, but also that his American colleague had not even bothered to tell him. It turned out that in a separate private meeting at Teheran, the American President had coolly assured the Soviet dictator that Churchill’s proposal would pose no problems. So Molotov, though not entirely accurate, had
not
been lying. It was an object lesson in the relative weight of the British and American leaders and in Roosevelt’s devastatingly casual habits.

If the fate of several million people had not hung in the balance from the underhand dealings now revealed, the discussions at Moscow might well be regarded as a simple farce. One such moment was reached in the plenary session, when Bierut, on behalf of the Lublin Committee, managed to keep a straight face in a presentation of grotesque obsequiousness. ‘It is the will of the Polish people’, he said, ‘that [Lvuv] shall belong to Russia’; and no one from the Western side of the table protested. Another moment occurred in private, when Churchill flew into a mad rage over the attitude of Premier Mick, whom he had just admitted deceiving. The rage was that of a man found out:

You are no Government if you are incapable of taking a decision. You are callous people who want to wreck Europe . . . You have no sense of responsibility . . . You do not care about Europe’s future . . . You only have your own miserable selfish interests in mind . . . It is a criminal attempt on your part to wreck agreement between the Allies by your ‘Liberum Veto’. It is cowardice . . .
¹³

The really exquisite moment, however, came when Eden, who had brought Premier Mick to Moscow under false pretences, suddenly suffered a comical
crise de conscience
. Eden’s anguish was observed by a British diplomat serving in the Moscow Embassy:

Eden’s belated soul-searching, and Churchill’s rage, were undignified symptoms of their impotence. Both British statesmen had fallen into a pit of their own making; and they did not enjoy it.

Stalin’s intransigence on the frontier issue is usually explained in terms of his unbending personality and his territorial ambitions. This may be so. But archival documents show that he was under pressure from a quarter which was hidden from the British delegation. In the middle of the Moscow Talks, Beria sent Stalin the copy of a report which stated that elements of the Polish population of western Byelorussia were resisting ‘repatriation’ to Poland because Premier Mick’s Government was thought to be holding out against acceptance of the Curzon Line.
¹⁵
The implications of this document are fascinating. For one thing, the NKVD had pre-empted any diplomatic settlement, and, in October 1944, was already engaged in a programme of population exchange. For another, if the programme was already in motion, it was almost impossible for it to be reversed and already too late for any minor modifications of the Curzon Line to be relevant. It is evident, in fact, that Stalin must have taken a decision, earlier in the year, to start demographic engineering as soon as the Red Army occupied the Borders. If so, he must have been genuinely convinced about the final settlement of the frontiers at Teheran; and he must have been genuinely appalled in October to find the whole process being questioned. One cannot say how he might have reacted to Premier Mick’s propositions if they had been put to him under Churchill’s patronage in the first part of 1944. But one can say
with confidence that by October, Churchill, Eden, and Premier Mick had well and truly missed the boat.