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Authors: Norman Davies

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #War, #History

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BOOK: Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw
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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:

It was all terribly hush, hush. The commander of the base [Terry Roper-Caldbeck] asked me to look after a visitor, who was not at all well. I was told that the visitor had polio, but I didn’t even know that he was a Pole until afterwards, let alone who he was. In those days, one didn’t talk about those things, and certainly didn’t chat. He was with us for twenty-four hours, and was said to be on a mission to Churchill . . . I had to help him eat . . . He couldn’t even walk . . . And he had this enormous sergeant with him . . . I was scared, I can tell you . . . I kept my revolver, a Luger, on the table . . .
80

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:

I, General Bielkin, confirm that the Polish soldiers fought well in the capture of Vilno. I express the gratitude of the [Soviet] Army. The [Polish] Brigade has earned the right to benefit from all necessary privileges.
84

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.

NKVD

A Home Army unit meets ‘friends of friends’ outside Warsaw

. . . the first T34s rumbled by the manor house. It was the spearhead of the 117th Stalin Guards Armoured Brigade . . . Meeting the Russian frontline troops was like meeting comrades-in-arms . . . [But] if one touched on non-military subjects, an invisible wall would arise.

Except for the tanks, all the heavy equipment was American, visibly stamped ‘U.S.A.’. The Russian explanation invariably was that they had stamped the equipment in this way because it was being shipped to the USA to help the war effort . . . It was no use trying to convince them [otherwise].

After the armour, the infantry came like lice, a mass of men moving on foot along every road and track. And with the rear echelons came the NKVD. The soldiers then stopped talking altogether . . .

[Our] rendezvous before crossing the mountains had been fixed for 1600 hours in a forester’s hut. Our sentries reported that a Russian major had come . . . with a message inviting all officers of [our] 2nd Division to attend a special meeting . . . ‘Raven’ asked me to accompany him [because] I spoke Russian . . .

At about 1930 we arrived at the [Soviet] Command Post. Two officers met us, both in field-brown uniform with NKVD collar flashes . . . They introduced themselves as
Politruks
. . . The older, a tall stout Jew, mentioned that he was from Bialystock in the north-east of Poland. The younger was from Kharkhov in Ukraine.

At once they asked Raven why the other [AK] officers . . . had not come. Raven explained that orders had been received to move to the German side of the front. The Russians did not like this at all.

One of the runners sat behind me and Raven’s runner stood under a nearby tree. Light was provided by a candle stuck in the neck of a bottle. Armed men could be seen moving around like ghosts. We were offered vodka. Raven [lied], saying that we were not used to drinking on duty . . . Cigarettes were then passed around, [amid comments about] their high quality and low price in Russia.

The elder of the two Russians was trying to pump us about . . . our numbers, equipment, ammunition, morale, and social class . . . And the younger [one] would interject questions about the Germans . . . With great aplomb, I told them that the Home Army was very well equipped from airdrops with PIAT antitank weapons. I told them that officers and other ranks all belonged to the working or peasant class . . . We implied that every battalion was in touch with Raven who in turn was in direct
contact with London four times a day. (Actually the contact was via the Dawn Station somewhere in Sweden.) . . .

Then they changed tactics. ‘Would you be willing to recognize the Lublin Committee [which is] truly representative of the masses?’

‘We know nothing of the Lublin Committee. We obey orders from the Polish government in London.’

‘But can you imagine fighting side by side with us without being under our command and members of General Berling’s Polish Army?’

‘The [former plan] has been superseded by an order to go to the rescue of Warsaw . . .’ I answered.

A plane droned overhead. The lights went out. I waited to pull my boot up. A torch at once shone on my hands.

The Russians now produced a huge poster [showing] twelve members of the Lublin Committee.

‘Do you know who he is? And this one?’ And so on.

‘We do not know any of them,’ I said. ‘But [wait] . . . [This] looks like an inmate from the Holy Cross Jail. I hope I’m wrong.’

On and on it went. The tension was becoming unbearable. Eventually one last question was put: ‘And if we give you an explicit command to join us, what will you do?’

‘We have our orders. And if you don’t mind, we have to leave . . .’

A heavy silence fell, broken only by the occasional explosion of heavy German artillery shells in the distance. The corner of my eye caught the slight movement of my runner’s hand towards the safety catch of his Sten. My own fingers slid to the safety catch of my Udet . . . If we have to go, I thought, the two of them will go first.

The two NKVD men looked at each other in silence for what seemed like an eternity. Eventually, the older one said, ‘
Nu chtosh. Puskay yedut
.’ (Well, nothing. Let them go!)

We all shook hands and said a very formal goodbye . . . We mounted our horses. Unaccompanied, we galloped into the darkness of the forest.
1

BOOK: Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw
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