After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (48 page)

The Polish Resistance Army’s struggle continued. Later on 9 May another prison was stormed at Bialystok. On 21 May a large NKVD camp at Rembertow, on the eastern outskirts of Warsaw, was attacked and more than 300 political prisoners released. And on 27 May units of the Polish resistance joined forces with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which was fighting for the Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, stormed the town of Hrubieszow, burnt down the prison and killed all the NKVD troops stationed there.

For many Poles, the end of the Second World War had failed to provide a just settlement of their cause. Edward Szczepanik was a Polish officer who served with General Wladyslaw Anders’ Polish II Corps alongside British troops in Italy. These soldiers were fighting for the Polish government-in-exile in London and had no truck with the Soviet-sponsored Lublin regime set up as the Red Army ‘liberated’ their country from the Germans. The word ‘liberated’ remained contentious – the Soviet Union had invaded the eastern half of the country in 1939 and on its return had taken the whole of Poland under its effective control. In the meantime, Szczepanik fought for the Western powers at Monte Cassino and Ancona and his were some of the first Allied troops to enter Bologna in April 1945.

He said:

When VE Day arrived, it came at a price for the Polish people. The Yalta agreement left very little opportunity for us … I did not in any way celebrate the 8th May 1945. What was the point? Poland, and my people, were not free. Poland had already been occupied by Russia. It had not been liberated, like many of the western European nations – it had been annexed, purely because of its position between Russia and Germany. The Yalta agreement had done nothing to protect us from that, dragging us from one occupation to another, with no respite in between.

There was real truth in Szczepanik’s comments about the Yalta agreement – it was a view shared by many exiled Poles. Augustyn Buczek, a member of a Polish Air Force squadron based near London, said: ‘VE Day found us depressed – we did not celebrate at all. Yalta had left us high and dry and now the future of our country was highly uncertain.’ Tadeusz Krzystek, another Polish Air Force man stationed in Britain, added: ‘We had seen in Churchill a guarantor of our future. After Yalta such hope had faded away. On VE Day I felt sad and empty inside. The end of the war gave nothing to us. Rather, we feared it marked the end of the struggle to secure a free Poland.’

Winston Churchill chose to believe that a fair settlement for Poland had been achieved at Yalta, but the Soviet Union had subsequently reneged upon it. When President Truman first came into office he had strongly supported Churchill on this issue, but by May he had become more cautious. A number of his advisers warned him that the Yalta accord had been left with vague wording over Poland – wording that could be subject to the very different interpretations. And some had added that although the Soviet Union could be difficult and suspicious in its conduct of international diplomacy, once it gave a firm and clear commitment it did not usually break it. The broader question of trust between East and West remained the paramount issue.

General Anders cabled Churchill on 8 May 1945. The Polish commander congratulated the British prime minister on the victory against Germany, adding pointedly that he hoped for a peace ‘where justice would prevail’. For Anders, and many other Poles who yearned for self-determination for their country, it would be a long wait.

Britain and France went to war on behalf of Poland and Polish servicemen subsequently fought and died in Britain’s navy, air force and army. They sacrificed their lives for the cause of their country’s freedom. In the desperate battle at Monte Cassino, Polish troops had stormed the summit, displaying incredible bravery.

Field Marshal Harold Alexander, commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in Italy, paid General Anders and his troops a heartfelt tribute in the battle’s aftermath. He conferred the Order of the Bath upon the Polish general (on behalf of the British sovereign, King George VI), and then said: ‘It was a day of great glory for Poland when you took a stronghold that the Germans considered impregnable … I sincerely and frankly tell you all – men of the Polish II Corps, that if I had a choice of the soldiers I would like to command it would have been the Poles. I honour you all.’

At the end of the war, this heartfelt tribute was left suspended in the air. In the second week of May, the uneasy spectre of Poland hovered over the Grand Alliance. In the aftermath of VE-Day, Churchill spoke bullishly to General Sir Alan Brooke and Field Marshal Montgomery about the need to square up to the Soviet Union in order to ensure that a democratic government was installed in Poland. Brooke wrote after a war cabinet meeting of 13 May: ‘Winston … gave me the feeling of already longing for another war – even if it entailed fighting against the Russians!’

This was inflammatory stuff. General Anders believed that a fresh war between Russia and the Western powers was the only way to restore an independent Poland. It was a noble aspiration, but General Sir Alan Brooke said of the Polish commander: ‘He wishes to take part in the occupation of Germany and then has wild hopes of fighting his way home to Poland through the Russians! A pretty desperate problem the Polish Army is going to present us with.’

Churchill himself briefly got caught up in these ‘wild hopes’. He commissioned ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a top-secret war plan drawn up by the Combined Chiefs of Staff to explore using military force against Russia to secure a free Poland. The British prime minister instructed them that ‘with the Russian bear sprawled all over Europe’ they should consider the possibility of pushing the Red Army back eastwards and ‘impos[ing] upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire’ in order to secure ‘a square deal for Poland’.

In reply, the chiefs of staff made it absolutely clear that such a course of action would be almost impossible to execute militarily and an utter disaster politically. Churchill rapidly backtracked from this fantastical scenario, reassuring his military advisers that ‘by retaining the code-word “Unthinkable” the staffs will realize that this remains a precautionary study of what, I hope, is still a purely hypothetical contingency’. General Sir Alan Brooke had discouraged his political master from one of his wildest schemes. Even as a hypothesis, it was a most dangerous one, founded on a deep fear of Russian intentions in Europe.

Churchill confided in President Truman on 13 May: ‘I have always worked for friendship with Russia but, like you, I feel a deep anxiety because of their misinterpretation of the Yalta decisions and their attitude towards Poland …’

Harold Macmillan, the British Minister Resident in the Mediterranean, amplified Churchill’s concerns: ‘We had already seen the terrible blow to Poland implicit in the Yalta decisions, even with its minor concessions,’ Macmillan remarked. ‘We had little expectation of the Russians carrying out either the letter or the spirit of the bargain. My meetings with Wladislaw Anders, commander of the Polish forces in Italy, convinced me that any more hopeful view was mere wishful thinking.’

Macmillan believed that ‘Russian statesmen cannot be cajoled; but being strong realists they can be dealt with on the basis of frankness and truth.’ And yet, it was uncertain how such a diplomatic formula would work in practice, for one side’s ‘frankness and truth’ might not coincide with the other’s. South Africa’s Jan Smuts, whose father had been appointed president of the General Assembly at the San Francisco Conference, took a more belligerent view, observing of the Soviet Union’s international role:

Russia will make little attempt to co-operate, in fact the opposite appears more likely at present … her part in the Polish dispute and the fact that she has already gone against her Yalta word and that she is actively fomenting trouble cannot be doubted. Our request to be permitted to send observers there to see for themselves has been flatly refused. Likewise our wish to send observers to Czechoslovakia and Vienna (both in the Russian zones) has been flatly turned down … Is that trust and goodwill?

Smuts concluded bluntly: ‘Appeasement will never pay with the Russians. They understand only one thing – straight angry talk, with military might in the background to back it up if necessary.’

As Smuts himself acknowledged, these were strange words to be writing during a conference dedicated to securing world peace.

However, underneath the bullish rhetoric Winston Churchill was tired and frequently downcast. He had once told his private secretary, John Colville, that he would fight for a free Poland even if it meant going to the brink of war with the Soviet Union. But on reaching that brink, Churchill confessed to feeling overwhelmed by ‘the dark cloud of Russian imponderability’.

At the beginning of May 1940 – with British operations in defence of Norway collapsing – Churchill had confided to Colville that he believed May to be an unlucky month for him. At the start of May 1944 an abrupt and surly telegram from Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, claiming that Britain was plotting behind the Soviet Union’s back in Romania, caused the British prime minister to ‘set off on gloomy forebodings about future tendencies of Russia, adding “I have always disliked the month of May”’.

On 1 May 1945, with the news of the death of Hitler, and the end of the war imminent, the dark cloud had lifted. A week later, VE-Day had been a personal triumph for Winston Churchill. But now the cloud seemed to have returned. ‘Russia shows no willingness to compromise over Poland,’ Churchill lamented. He wondered whether he had the strength to carry on. The prospect of having to negotiate directly with Stalin over the issue left the prime minister feeling ‘overpowered by it all’.

Over 200,000 Poles fought within the British armed forces during the war. The hard-won military achievements of these men and women deserved better reward. And yet, the only way for Britain and America to secure stronger negotiating leverage over Poland would have been to open the Second Front in north-western Europe a year earlier and push their forces deeper into Europe. This was not a realistic option for the Western Allies – Germany was too strong at this stage of the war. Even if the initial landings were successful they would then have sustained massive casualties as they moved inland – a cost that democracies could not easily bear. In the event, the Red Army carried the main burden of fighting against the Nazi state – and its successes earned the Soviet Union its power over Poland’s fate.

‘I have done all I can for Poland at this time,’ President Roosevelt admitted to the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, at the end of the Yalta Conference. Charles Bohlen, the State Department Russian expert who translated for Roosevelt at Yalta, and thus heard every word uttered by the American president and Stalin, said simply: ‘Stalin held all the cards and played them well. Eventually we had to throw in our hand.’

On matters of trust, and keeping to agreements, the Soviet Union behaved very differently over Greece, as Churchill himself acknowledged. Stalin and Churchill had apportioned areas of influence in eastern Europe – and the Soviet leader conceded to the prime minister a predominant role in overseeing the future of Greece. When Britain crushed a communist uprising – led by the Greek partisan movement and enjoying widespread popular support – Russia did not interfere. Churchill reported to the British war cabinet on 12 February 1945: ‘As regards Greece the Russian attitude could not have been more satisfactory … Stalin has most scrupulously respected his acceptance of our position … the conduct of the Soviet Union in this matter has strengthened my view
that when they make a bargain they desire to keep it
’ (emphasis added).

The impasse over Poland might show something rather different: a Soviet world-view of cynical realpolitik, where Russia kept to smaller agreements but was ready to break the important ones if they endangered her interests. Alternatively, the Soviet Union and the Western Allies might have very different understandings of what the Yalta accord on Poland actually meant.

A British ATS clerk wrote in her diary on 17 May:

It is little more than a week since VE Day, but already the reaction is setting in. I find the news extremely depressing. Britain and America seem at loggerheads with the USSR over nearly every controversial point, and the US isolationist press, in its usual unhelpful way, is fomenting this state of affairs … There seems to be nothing but strife and confusion ahead when we should be seeing the bright skies of peace – and we are all feeling tired and hardly capable of coping with it.

However, in military affairs there was a new-found spirit of cooperation where only days earlier there had been suspicion and mistrust. When the Red Army approached the Czech capital, General Eisenhower did not pre-empt it – and instead kept to the agreed halt line. As Soviet troops moved into Prague, SS general Carl Pückler-Burghaus led the last German soldiers out of the city. Pückler-Burghaus and his men hoped to escape Russian captivity. Czech partisans forced him away from the direct road to Pilsen and he turned south-west, towards Pisek. He was hoping to reach the US demarcation line and surrender to the Americans, but the Red Army was in fast pursuit.

A few days earlier, the Soviet High Command had insisted that American troops should not cross the halt line. Now they asked for help. Marshal Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front was ordered to overtake Pückler-Burghaus and the Soviets asked American forces to move across the demarcation line and assist them, closing the escape route west. General Eisenhower agreed. The Germans were overhauled at the small town of Minin-Slivice, 40 miles south-east of Pilsen. On 11 May American units from the US 4th Armored Division (part of General Patton’s Third Army) blocked Pückler-Burghaus’s path, insisting that he honour the unconditional surrender and capitulate to the Russians. The SS general refused. With troops of the Soviet 25th Guards Rifle Corps rapidly approaching from the east, his men took up a fortified position in a stretch of woodland between Minin-Slivice and Cimelice and prepared to fight it out.