Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (81 page)

What Bear Cub’s captors made of all this the file does not record. They noted down his comments, and passed them on. But even they must surely have sensed a remarkable human being. For they would never break him. Bear Cub at bay was the ultimate
chevalier sans peur et sans reproche
, ‘a true knight without fear or stain’.

In May 1945, British intelligence finally caught up with RAF Sgt. John Ward – the only British serviceman to have been present in Warsaw during the Rising, and the author of numerous radioed reports, several of
which had been published in
The Times
. He was carefully debriefed, and an extensive report was written of his adventures.
⁴⁰

Ward, though an amateur in the world of intelligence, had all the qualifications of a first-rate agent. Aged twenty-six, he was fit, energetic, and, as shown by his repeated escapes, extremely daring. He was a fluent German speaker, and a trained wireless operator. His time as a POW in Germany had lasted from 10 May 1940 to 20 April 1941. It was mainly spent in a camp near Lissa where he was employed as an interpreter. He twice absconded, the second time successfully.

His time in the Polish Underground, after seven days on the run, began in the town of Sheradz, where he went to confession in a local Catholic church and was duly put in contact with members of the ZWZ. By May, he was in Warsaw and was put to work making transcripts of BBC broadcasts. He acquired a duplicator, and produced an English-language news-sheet called
Echo
.

The Warsaw Rising broke out shortly after he had recovered from a bullet in the thigh, received during a skirmish with the Gestapo. Another wound followed during the fighting in Mokotov. But it did not obstruct his work as a reporter and radio operator for the Home Army’s Office for Information and Propaganda.

Ward escaped from Warsaw on 4 October in the company of two Red Cross nurses. They evaded the Germans, but were robbed by a couple of Ukrainian deserters. They were heading south, where Gen. Boor had told him that he could pick up a clandestine RAF flight. The strategy did not work. And for two months Ward shared the ordeals and deprivations of the 17th AK Division, which was operating in the vicinity of Chenstohova. He endured several firefights against the Germans, and a clash with an AL unit, in which he was again robbed. After the arrival of the Soviets on 20 January, he was interrogated for several hours by the NKVD but was not detained.

Ward’s next move was to double back to the Warsaw District, and, with the help of former AK colleagues, to make contact with London by radio. It worked at the second attempt, and he learned that SOE was looking both for him, and still more desperately, for the Freston Mission, which had not been heard of for three weeks. London then ordered him to present himself to the Soviets, assuring him that Moscow had been informed of his whereabouts. His compatriots, ever trustful of their Soviet allies, seemed to think that he would be helped to track down Col.
Hudson’s party. But if the NKVD had been told where he was, he had little choice. On 5 March, he took the electric train in the direction of the city, no doubt gaped at the ruins, and, with great reluctance, reported to the authorities.

Ward’s British interrogation says little about his interrogations by the NKVD, except that they were rather lengthy. In fact, he was kept for two months. He did not have to track down the Freston Group, who in the meantime had shown up in Moscow. He was eventually sent by rail to catch a British ship in Odessa, whence he sailed on 16 May on the
Duchess of Bedford
, bound for Malta. From Valetta, he was flown to England by the RAF, arriving on the 20th, almost exactly five years to the day since he had taken off in his ill-fated Fairey Battle.

John Ward is an important figure in the history of the Warsaw Rising. He was a lonely symbol of the Anglo-Polish alliance on which the Rising had been predicated. Like Col. Hudson, he wrote a glowing account of the Home Army and its feats. These accounts were filed seven months after the Capitulation of the Rising and four months after the disbanding of the Home Army. By that time, they possessed nothing more than purely historical value.

The Trial of the Sixteen, which took place in Moscow between 18 and 21 June 1945, was a key event in revealing the direction in which Soviet policy was moving. It confirmed both the incorrigible bad faith of the Communists and their determination to crush all political opponents. An archetypal show trial, replete with absurd accusations, brainwashed defendants, and suborned witnesses, it had nothing to do with real offences. It was staged to show that the Soviets were all-powerful, that ‘Soviet justice’ could perpetrate the most blatant injustices with impunity, and that the Western powers were impotent to prevent it. Indeed the performance was so orchestrated that the British and Americans were persuaded to connive in the public scourging of their former comrades-in-arms. For on two points, the libretto of Stalin’s pre-war show trials was not followed. Official Western observers were present; and the Soviet procurators made no demands for the death sentence. One is fully entitled to wonder whether these two features were not in some way connected.
⁴¹

Independent historians who have studied the Moscow Trial of the Sixteen have stressed a variety of its more scandalous aspects. The legalists stress the fact that the application of the Soviet Penal Code to foreign
defendants who had committed no offence in the USSR and who had been kidnapped in their own country was totally invalid in international law. The politically-minded stress the coincidence of the trial with negotiations for the formation of a Polish Government of National Unity, which were proceeding in the same city and at the same time. This coincidence ensured that delegates to the negotiations who were not connected with the Soviet or Communist interests could be intimidated, and could be persuaded to make concessions which they might otherwise not have contemplated. The British and American diplomats, including Dr George Bolsover, who observed proceedings from the gallery but did nothing more than file a confidential report, were participating in the ritual humiliation of the principles by which the Allied coalition had once been inspired.
⁴²

The British political elite were still so spellbound by Stalin that few cared to notice what was actually happening. In the weeks preceding the Trial, when questions had been asked about the fate of the Sixteen, the House of Commons had reverberated to opinions such as ‘the Poles are preparing the Third World War’ or ‘the Poles and the Russians are as bad as each other’ or another which revealed that the Foreign Office quite liked the Provisional Government in Warsaw because of its apparent commitment to agrarian reform. The London edition of
Soviet News
, which on 25 May announced preparations for the Trial, contained a vituperative attack on Gen. Boor and other ‘dirty adventurers’ who had ‘bravely surrendered to the Germans’. On 12 June, the Foreign Office had to respond to a British soldier from the 51st (Highland) Division, who had been a POW in a German camp and who had written a letter to confirm ‘the appalling behaviour of the Russians in Poland’. Lord Dunglass, then a rising official, wrote in the letter’s margin for his secretary’s guidance: ‘Could you devise some harmless stalling answer?’
⁴³

The proceedings of the trial, which was held in the same grandiose Hall of the Trades Union that had housed the pre-war show trials, produced few surprises. A well-known purge judge, Col.Gen. V.V. Ulrich, presided. The prosecutors sat at baize-topped tables. Huge chandeliers cast a brilliant light. The fixed bayonets of the guards glinted. Newsreel cameras whirred. All but one of the sixteen defendants were visibly cowed. Not waiting for a verdict, the headlines of the Soviet press announced ‘Polish fascist Bandits disguised as Democrats’, ‘Destroy German Fascist Agents’ and ‘Hitler’s Executors!’

Day 1 began with the indictments. The defendants were identified as
members of the ‘Home Army’, an ‘illegal organization’. They had been caught in possession of ‘illegal radio transmitters’. They had slanderously described liberation by the Soviet Army as ‘a new occupation’. They had disbanded the Home Army as ‘a cover for further activities’. They had been engaged in ‘terroristic diversions’ and ‘espionage’ in the rear of the Soviet Army. They had prepared ‘a plan for a military coalition and aggression . . . with Germany against the USSR.’ All the defendants except one pleaded guilty. Former Home Army witnesses supported the charges.

Day 2 was given over to cross-examinations. It had its moments. The defendants, for example, did not always grasp the Soviet terminology. When a lawyer was going on about ‘Western Byelorussia’ and ‘Western Lithuania’, someone asked, ‘Do you mean Poland?’ And the judge let it pass. Or again, the defendants would not accept the court’s assumptions about the Home Army’s alleged passivity or its supposed collaboration with the Germans. ‘The Commanderin-Chief’, said Bear Cub bravely, ‘specifically ordered the Home Army to fight the Germans to the end.’ But one of the defendants finally did agree to the proposition that the Home Army had been hostile to the USSR.

Day 3 was largely taken up with defence statements, especially with that of Bear Cub. The court was told that Bear Cub’s one defence witness had unfortunately been delayed by bad weather (in June). But it did not stop Bear Cub from presenting what must be the most courageous speech in the whole wretched history of Stalinist mis-trials. ‘The Home Army was an organization of the Polish nation,’ he maintained to the ill-concealed displeasure of the judge; ‘therefore the accusations of the court are directed against the whole Polish people.’ The exiled Government in London was ‘lawful’. Contrary to the court’s assertions, he was neither a landowner, nor a servant of the
Sanacja
regime. He was ‘the son of a peasant’ and ‘an opponent of the
Sanacja
’. ‘The Warsaw Rising’, he insisted, ‘was
not
a political adventure.’ It was ‘necessary’ and ‘heroic’. Finally, he said, ‘Yes to Polish–Soviet friendship’, but ‘No, to enslavement’.

Closure came in the early hours. The defence lawyers begged for leniency. The defendants were ‘dupes’. The prosecutors stuck to the script and agreed. Three of the accused should be acquitted. The others should be given mild sentences. The judge acquiesced. By Soviet standards, the verdicts were indeed indulgent. Bear Cub received ten years’ hard labour; Sable received eight years’. The three ministers were each given five years’. Seven of the party leaders were handed down short terms of eighteen, twelve, eight, six, or four months’. The other three and the
interpreter were released. The Soviet press resounded to paeans of praise for the boundless humanity of Soviet justice.
⁴⁴

Three days later, Stalin hosted a reception at the Kremlin. His guests were the Polish delegates who had just agreed on the composition of the Government of National Unity. They were due to assume office within the week. The leading lights of the former Lublin Committee were there. So, too, was the former Premier Mick – the only senior member of the former exiled Government to participate in the exercise. So, too, were the British and US Ambassadors. As they ate their caviar and drank their
Shampanskoye
, Bear Cub, Sable, and eleven other convicts were starting their prison terms.

With some delay, the British diplomatic machine reviewed the Trial of the Sixteen, and pronounced its own assessment. The leading analysis was provided by HM Ambassador to Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, who composed a long paper that was circulated to the British Cabinet. As befitted a ‘mandarin’, Clark Kerr’s opinion was beautifully balanced. On the one hand, he warmly approved of ‘the courage, dignity and honesty of the Poles’ who ‘plainly were not fascist reactionaries or landlords but good democrats and patriots.’ He specially praised the ‘courage and tenacity’ of Bear Cub. On the other hand, he made no attempt to question the totally unproved contention that the accused had been guilty of ‘anti-Soviet activities’. The purpose of the Trial had been twofold: to discredit the exiled Government in London and to destroy all potential opposition to the incoming Government in Warsaw. Clark Kerr’s final remarks were exquisite. Since it did not foster reconciliation, the Trial was ‘a failure’, an example ‘of bad Russian psychology’. Yet it was redeemed by the lenient sentences. ‘The Trial was a blunder’, the Ambassador concluded, ‘but not a crime’.
⁴⁵

The last word on this prime exhibit of British cynicism was appended when it went the rounds of the FO departments. A minute of supreme smugness was added by an official who, fortunately, omitted to sign it:

If proof were needed that Bear Cub and other authors of the Warsaw Rising were wrong to place their trust in their British allies, this is it. There was no such thing as ‘a Polish–German orientation’. Equally, there
was no sense of obligation to Bear Cub, whom the British had originally flown in. He was destined to die in Soviet captivity, in mysterious circumstances, in December 1946.

At the time of the Moscow Trial, the exiled Government published an eighty-seven-page booklet in English entitled
Poland during the First Half of 1945
. It was a masterpiece of erudition and compassion, and opened with an idea from Eurypides: ‘Events cast their shadows before them.’ The shadows of forecoming events, it said, are lying gloomily over almost half of Europe.
⁴⁷

The author of the booklet, alas, remained anonymous. Indeed, it could well have been a collective work. At all events, it was written in polished, faultless English; and its judgements and descriptions were supported by an amazing array of quotations: from the classics of Marxism-Leninism, from the decrees of the Lublin Committee and Provisional Government, from radio transcripts, from the press at home and abroad, and from eyewitness accounts. Despite the self-evident political stance, one could not hope for a better summary.