Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (91 page)

The defence of Conrad – and by implication of the Home Army – was bravely and calmly undertaken by a well-known writer, Maria D. She rejected the idea that Conrad’s heroes were self-obsessed or servants of foreigners, stating instead that they were inspired by universal values. ‘We have to be moral beings irrespective of sanctions, obligations, rewards or punishments,’ she wrote, ‘but simply from a sense of responsibility towards our own fate and that of others.’ In conclusion, she ensured that her comments would not be mistaken for abstractions:

Today’s world has seen all the bounds of human decency breached and the authority of all beliefs, doctrines and dogmas broken. It stands, in fact, before the test of the Conradian ethos. We are not in a position yet to say whether it will pass the test. But we can say with absolute certainty that things will be better if the world does not dismiss Conrad’s approach completely.
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One has to wonder how many outsiders, had they encountered this rarefied literary argument, would really have grasped its meaning.

For the time being, the most interested party to the debate, the ex-insurgents themselves, had no voice. But many years later, when they could speak out, they were more than ready to recognize their debt to Joseph Conrad:

Such were the intellectualizations. Most insurgents were content with the simple conviction that ‘there was no other way’.

In the years that followed 1945, London was a city of austerity and anxiety. It was the capital of a country that was virtually bankrupt, and of an empire that was visibly disintegrating. Londoners recovered pre-war standards of living very slowly. They faced food rationing, housing shortages, and unemployment. If they thought about problems abroad, they thought of the places where British troops were still coming under fire – in Trieste, in Greece, in Palestine and in India. With very few exceptions, they were not thinking much about Poland. Their First Ally had slipped almost completely from the active political agenda.

Yet the Polish Question was still present. The exiled Government, which had now become the Government-in-Exile, had taken up residence in Eaton Square. Despite the departure of many individuals, the Polish community in Britain was actually growing. Indeed, when the Anders Army and its dependants arrived in 1946, a Polish Resettlement Corps had to be formed to manage the influx and to prepare them for absorption into civilian life. The Poles and their troubles had not gone away.

The Polish Embassy in Portland Place was taken over by diplomats from Warsaw as soon as the Government of National Unity gained diplomatic recognition on 27 July 1945. On that day Count R., Ambassador to St James since 1934, was obliged to leave, relinquish his post, surrender his credentials, and be replaced by a Communist nominee. He would not set foot in the building again for forty-five years. The Warsaw regime’s mission then arrived in force. Their tasks were to obfuscate what was really happening in Poland, to mount surveillance on the exiled community, and, by hook or by crook, to persuade as many as possible to go home. The new Ambassador, who did not last long, was Henry S., a pre-war industrialist who had been Minister of Trade in Sikorski’s Government.

Gen. Boor, who reached London in May 1945, did not seek to shine in the Government-in-Exile. He held on to his position as Commanderin-Chief for little more than a year, then resigned in favour of Gen. Anders. He accepted one or two token ministries, including the Ministry of Sea Transport, and served for a time as Prime Minister, but was not interested in the notorious political feuding of his compatriots. He is remembered as a quiet, polite, and extremely modest man. His main concerns centred on
his young family, and on the Home Army Association, of which he was president. His memoirs were published in 1951. His visits to the USA, where he was well received, brought much satisfaction. But he sought no profit for himself. When presented in New York in 1946 with a cheque for $12,000, he kept $300 for a deposit on a small terraced house, and gave away the rest to his soldiers’ association.
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Intensified espionage was one of the central features of the intensifying Cold War, and London was one of the spies’ favourite playgrounds. It was a game at which the Soviets excelled, not least because they had successfully penetrated the higher reaches of British Intelligence. The 1940s, both during and after the War, was the decade when the ‘Cambridge Five’ – of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, and Cairncross – were shopping state secrets to Moscow with impunity. London also became a destination of skulduggery through the continuing presence of the Polish Government-in-Exile, which had no reason to be reconciled to the post-war order and which, rightly or wrongly, was suspected in some quarters of pressing for a showdown with Stalin. The Warsaw regime was bound to send a strong team of security and intelligence officers to help the Soviet resident in London keep tabs on their exiled compatriots.

One of the unsolved mysteries of that era relates to the intelligence archives of the exiled Government, which were handed over to the British Foreign Office at the end of the war. Both the Home Army and the General Staff had maintained extensive networks of agents both in the Third Reich and in the USSR, and, at the onset of the Cold War, the records must have been of prime value. Some of the records were burned in the yard of St Paul’s School in London, where the II Bureau was based, but the rest were duly handed over to the British as the unspoken price of allowing the Government-in-Exile to stay. Forty-five years later, a liberated Polish Government requested the return of its archive, only to be told that the files had been ‘inadvertently destroyed’. Most specialists thought the explanation ingenuous.
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The work of the Warsaw mission specially targeted the émigré military circles, among them the former Commanderin-Chief, Gen. Boor, and, when he arrived with his troops from Italy, Gen. Anders. Yet it was one of the ironies faced by a now divided nation that many of the watchers had once been colleagues or subordinates of the watched.

Marcel R. came to London at a slightly later date. He was a regular officer of the Ministry of Security, seconded, as cover, to the Consulate General. He must have known much about the Warsaw Rising, for in
1943–44 he was sheltered in the right-bank Warsaw home of the Catholic couple to whom he owed his life. In London, Marcel R. was one of several intelligence agents working out of the Consulate. He had a spacious flat, a large American car, and lots of time to go to concerts and the theatre. He was to remember Furtwängler and Laurence Olivier. He wrote a report on the British re-education centre for top-class German prisoners at Wilton House, and made light of his work collecting information on his compatriots. In due course, he came under suspicion as a ‘cosmopolitan’, returned to Warsaw, and resigned. ‘I myself had no contact with the Poles in London,’ he commented.
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In 1945–46, ‘Salamander’, duly recovered, was still active in London in Polish affairs. Through his personal acquaintance with Stafford Cripps, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, he obtained a huge grant of £5 million for reconstruction work in Poland. He made three trips to Warsaw to distribute the largesse, which came mainly in the form of military trucks, pontoon bridges, road-making equipment, boots, and balaclavas, all purchased at discount prices from British Army surplus stores. The regime’s officials were ready enough to accept the gift. But they incensed Salamander by refusing to acknowledge it publicly. They did not want Britain to be cast in the light of a friendly power. On his final trip, in 1946, Salamander was further incensed to find that his faithful assistant ‘Celt’, who had carried him aboard the rescue plane two years earlier, had been ‘detained’. He was eventually able to secure Celt’s release in inimitable style, by placing a direct call to Molotov in Moscow.

Salamander, however, had many other irons in the fire; and, as his Polish interests faded, his pan-European interests bloomed. During the war, he had established close links with a number of politicians, such as Paul-Henri Spaak, who were active in other exiled Governments and who subsequently formed the core of the future European movement. Salamander not only joined them, he set about coordinating their schemes; and he seems to have acted as a key go-between with powerful interests in the USA, which sought to guide the European movement onto its own tracks. He was one of the organizers of the Hague Congress of 1948. And in 1953, he co-opted Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and founded the so-called ‘Bilderberg Group’. In this role, in the eyes of the ‘anti-globalizers’, he became the unrecognized genius who set up the secretive society of power-brokers who have ruled the world ever since.
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Initially, the Warsaw regime had hoped that the Polish military in Britain would be repatriated en masse. When this step was ruled out, and
HMG refused to envisage anything other than ‘voluntary and individual repatriation’, Gen. Mo. returned to Warsaw, and his underlings were left to report on the formation of the Polish Resettlement Corps and on the toings and froings of the émigrés. Yet the British authorities remained largely unsympathetic. In 1946, the Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin issued a circular addressed in Polish to all Polish citizens urging them ‘to go home to Poland’. He was still not fully aware that the majority of those who stayed had homes in Poland’s former eastern provinces, which were now (with full British acquiescence) occupied by the USSR. Despite their war service, Polish officers who declined either to join the Polish Resettlement Corps or to be repatriated were forcibly interned as ‘recalcitrants’.
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The Warsaw regime was eager to lay its hands on Nazi war criminals, and the Foreign Office records contain seventeen files headed ‘War criminals wanted by Poland’. Each file lists thousands of names of suspects, victims, and witnesses.
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Unfortunately, Communist ideas of who was a Nazi and who was a Nazi sympathizer or collaborator were often rather fanciful. Nonetheless, several suicides occurred among German prisoners who felt that they would be sent to Warsaw. The Polish Mission in London would undoubtedly have known of the semi-secret interrogation centre at 8 Kensington Palace Gardens, known as the London Cage. According to the account of the cage’s director, all available tactics were used – which presumably included physical violence. All the interrogators were fluent German-speakers, many of them German Jews. Cells were bugged; stooges were placed among prisoners who pretended to be from the same town in Germany; and in really stubborn cases, a man dressed as a KGB officer sat in on interrogations demanding extradition to the USSR.
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These proceedings may be seen with a certain irony.

The Warsaw regime was also specially keen to learn the inside story about the Warsaw Rising from the leading participants now in London. The task was coordinated by a security officer who knew many of the ex-insurgents from his days as a POW in Germany. He interviewed most of the big names in person, assuring them of total discretion before conveying the text of their conversations to his masters. In due course, his report was published in Warsaw. In good Marxist fashion, his analysis was predicated on a dialectical split between the ‘irresponsible adventurists’ led by Monter and the advocates of caution. His main witnesses were Monter and Tabor. Revealingly, the former told him that at the time of the Rising’s outbreak: ‘The problems of cooperation with the Red Army, of the despatch of the Parachute Brigade, and of supplies both for the insurgents and for civilians
had all been settled in London beforehand.’
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One wonders who was kidding whom.

By far the biggest coup achieved in those years centred on the departure for Warsaw of a key group of officers led by Gen. Tabor. This complicated affair can only be understood by reference to several other matters, belonging to the murkiest passages of émigré politics. Suffice it to say that Tabor had surrounded himself with a small secret group of like-minded officers soon after the collapse of the Warsaw Rising, and that their activities gradually alienated them from the rest of the military and political leadership of the Government-in-Exile. Tabor, however, did not resign as Premier Mick did. On the contrary, he kept his post, and his commission, whilst privately pursuing Mick’s goal of an accommodation with the Warsaw regime. Yet he did not participate openly in Mick’s campaign. Nor did he join the five generals who in 1945 openly declared their intention of returning to Poland. Whatever Tabor’s purposes were, they were extremely well concealed. They involved the collection of large amounts of money, gold bullion, and houses. And they increasingly attracted the suspicions of his compatriots, both in London and in Warsaw. When, with much delay, the authorities in Warsaw eventually condemned the ‘Tabor organization’, few people were inclined to believe in the organization’s existence.

Tabor’s ‘unofficial’ activities spanned 1944 to 1949. They began in autumn 1944, when the dismissal of the Commanderin-Chief and the resignation of Premier Mick radically changed the external predicament and the internal make-up of Polish London. In this period, many wartime structures, including the VI Bureau, were in a state of disintegration. Tabor and his associates were able to take control not only of some financial bodies, such as the Polish Self-Help Foundation, but also the ‘Hel’ network of couriers and foreign liaison stations. Their ‘Committee of Three’ seems to have invested some money in houses – notably 11, 13, and 15 Cornwall Gardens SW7, whose cellars served as a strong room where safes containing gold bars and cash could be stored. Their stock gradually fell with the Government-in-Exile, not least when Gen. Anders arrested one of their associates, who committed suicide. Their contacts with the Warsaw regime, and with the regime’s agents in the West, intensified correspondingly. Whether, by transferring assets to Poland, they were simply following Salamander’s example and assisting in the country’s reconstruction, or were engaged in something more sinister, is difficult to judge. (Who is to say whether a consignment of beagles was
designed to restock Warsaw’s decimated pet population or to present the militia with trained police dogs?) At all events, though clearly at odds with Premier Thomas and the Government-in-Exile, they were not merely biding their time. In 1947 they accepted consular passports from the regime. Tabor paid extended visits to Warsaw in 1947 and 1948. And in October 1949 he went there permanently. It did not do him much good.