RISING '44. The battle for Warsaw. Norman Davies. 752pp. Macmillan. Pounds 25.
- 0 333 90568 7.
Poles fought the Nazis from the beginning of the Second World War to the end, fought as allies of Britain and the United States and did them great service, fought on the side of the victors but suffered a fate far worse than that of the vanquished. The Polish state was destroyed, in 1939, by the joint invasion of Germany and the Soviet Union. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, all of Poland fell to Hitler. When the Red Army pushed back the Wehrmacht, all of Poland fell to Stalin. Polish citizens were ethnically cleansed by Berlin and deported by Moscow, sent to German camps in their millions, and Soviet camps in hundreds of thousands. Auschwitz, built to hold Poles, became Auschwitz-Birkenau, a death camp for Jews. Polish Jews were about half the total victims of the Jewish Holocaust.
It is well known that Warsaw Jews staged an important uprising in the ghetto, in spring 1943. Less celebrated is the rising in summer 1944, in which the Polish Home Army fought the Germans for the city. The Home Army was a hybrid force, recruited from volunteers in Occupied Poland, but subordinate to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. It faced a special predicament. Stalin had changed from open foe to nominal ally when Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. After the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, it was clear that the Red Army would return to Poland. Stalin quickly broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile on the most spurious of pretexts.
As Soviet forces moved westwards, the Home Army launched Operation Tempest, a national rebellion against German rule, designed to demonstrate Polish sovereignty to Moscow. On August 1, 1944, Operation Tempest reached Warsaw. The Red Army halted its own advance.
Stalin allowed the Poles to battle the Germans alone. This was the Warsaw Uprising. During nine weeks of intense fighting, the Home Army fought German forces almost to a standstill, liberated a death camp and provided some hope to the citizenry of Warsaw. Supplies and ammunition were short. As Norman Davies demonstrates in his majestic account, the Royal Air Force flew risky supply runs from Italy. Yet Stalin prohibited Allied aircraft from refuelling in the Soviet Union, preventing supply runs from airfields in Britain. The United States did less than Great Britain. Roosevelt and Churchill had already conceded that eastern Poland would be annexed by the Soviet Union. Had they fully explained their attitude to the Polish Government, the Poles would have had a better idea of the risks they faced.
The Home Army fighters who launched Operation Tempest in eastern Poland, in lands Churchill and Roosevelt had already conceded to Stalin, might have been spared.
Information is a major theme of Rising '44. There was little knowledge of eastern Europe in the West. The leading role of the Red Army in the European theatre made it seem "churlish" (in Davies's term) to criticize the Soviets. In excellent sections dealing with Soviet propaganda and espionage, Davies demonstrates just how easily a press and public (British in this case) can be fooled during a short military campaign.
