Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (108 page)

What is not known, however, is whether Stalin might not have been prepared to be more amenable if faced by a firm Western stand. It turns out that he had reopened unofficial feelers to the exiled Government in London in June and July 1944; and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that he might have reached a deal with Premier Mick in early August, if Mick had been properly briefed and supported. Nor is it inconceivable that he might have relented if Roosevelt had agreed to join Churchill’s intended showdown, or if the Western leaders had backed their Polish ally with determination. All one can say is that Stalin’s hard line hardened in parallel to the realization that his Western partners did not intend to propose an alternative line of their own. So long as Soviet domination of Poland could be imposed at no cost, Stalin was not going to back off.

One has to remember that the Soviet Union under Stalin had adopted a stance of extreme, formalized hostility towards everything outside its borders or beyond its control. Unless instructed otherwise, all Soviet organizations routinely treated all foreigners, including pro-Communist sympathizers, as suspects or enemies. They routinely arrested and eliminated any Soviet citizens, including prisoners of war, who had been abroad without permission or had been in unauthorized contact with non-Soviet persons. In this state of affairs, which was well known to the USSR’s neighbours, there was no possibility whatsoever that the Polish Underground could have reached a modus vivendi with the Soviet Army of its own accord. Equally, the exiled Polish Government, which in 1944 was not recognized by Moscow, could never have reached an agreement with the Soviets without the energetic backing of the Western Allies. No compromise was ever going to be reached on any Polish issue without intervention at the very highest level. In practice, this required a united policy pursued jointly by Roosevelt and Churchill and by the diplomats acting on their behalf. In 1944, no such united policy or joint action had been initiated. So Moscow’s hardline stance did not change.

From Stalin’s point of view, his Western partners were not just suspiciously ambiguous about Poland; they were extremely dilatory. Time and again, the opportunities for reaching an agreed, interAllied position were overtaken by events. For example, it would seem that Molotov told Ambassador Harriman in Moscow as early as 5 July 1944 that the Red Army expected to liberate Warsaw in conjunction with the (Communist) People’s Army.
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This piece of information might have provided an excellent opening for a discussion about the composition of the Polish Underground and the role of the Western-backed Home Army within it. Yet there is nothing to show in the following weeks that the British or the Americans took any steps to clarify the issue. The British in particular did nothing when, with four days to spare, they were officially informed by Count R. that a Rising in Warsaw by the Home Army was imminent. As a result, they passed over the last chance of establishing interAllied cohesion prior to the outbreak. More importantly, they despatched the luckless Premier Mick to Moscow to deal with Stalin alone, and on diplomatic ground that was completely unprepared.

Hence, whatever his own undoubted contributions to the crisis, Stalin had reason to feel aggrieved. In early August, he was obliged to take a major strategic decision about the Soviet Army’s next offensive in a climate of acute political tension. He was pushed by the Western leaders into
negotiating with Premier Mick over matters which he had been led to understand had already been conceded at Teheran. In this light, it is not very surprising that he chose to send his forces into the Balkans and to denounce the ‘adventure’ in Warsaw. Yet even then, he was not faced by evidence of determination or urgency from London and Washington. He was not pressed to recognize the Home Army as an Allied combatant force, or to give assurances about Soviet conduct towards it. He was not asked to share intelligence about the Rising. He was not asked to receive Premier Mick for a second time, even though the Premier’s revised plan was available at the start of September. All he saw was Churchill and Roosevelt giving priority to everything else except Warsaw. In the meantime, events moved on. Reserves were moved away from Rokossovsky’s front. The Lublin Committee was issuing its hardline decrees. And the Polish–Soviet exchange of population was put in motion. Every day that passed made it more difficult for Stalin to change his line.

British policy to Poland, in contrast, appears to have been seriously schizophrenic. Churchill, the war leader, showed much more commitment than many of his subordinates. He understood that Britain was indebted to its First Ally, and he did not flinch from ordering the Warsaw Airlift even when the cost in British lives was high. He spotted Stalin’s malice at an early stage; and he reached the point when he favoured a showdown with Moscow. The Foreign Office, meanwhile, repeatedly dragged its feet. It was much more impressed than Churchill was by the perceived imperative of not upsetting the Soviets. Indeed, it was close to appeasement. In August 1944, at the very time when Allied policy to Warsaw was hanging in the balance, Foreign Office officials produced an important position paper, recommending the compliant approach of Edward Beneš, the exiled Czechoslovak president, as the model to be followed.
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One does not have to be reminded of the fate of Beneš. In the last resort, however, Churchill was less deterred by the proposals and the malingering of the Foreign Office than by President Roosevelt.

American policy had its own distinct priorities. Having refrained from entering the war during the Polish Crisis of September 1939, and having no formal treaty with Poland, US leaders felt no special obligations. At the same time, they were pursuing several vital projects where Stalin’s cooperation was urgently needed; and in general, they harboured many delusions about ‘the Great Leader’. Roosevelt’s only serious doubts lay with the reactions of Polish-American voters. Fortunately for him, the Rising broke out more than three full months before the presidential
election in November. His key meeting with Polish-American Democrats was not scheduled until October.

Crucially, in the summer of ’44, US foreign policy was already preoccupied with grander global concerns. Since the war in Europe was clearly being won – and Gen. George Marshall was predicting that it could be won by Christmas – the best minds in Washington were being turned to the post-war order and to the dominant role which the USA intended to play within it. Three urgent issues had come to the fore: the design of a new worldwide economic and financial system, the preparation of a worldwide political body, and the post-war settlement in the Far East, especially China. Each of these global matters came to a head at the time of the Warsaw Rising. The International Monetary Conference, which gave rise to the World Bank and the IMF, convened at Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) between 1 and 22 July 1944. The Draft Charter for the UN was drawn up at an international meeting on post-war security held at Dumbarton Oaks (Maryland) between 21 August and 29 September 1944. The Octagon Conference, to discuss the Far East, convened at Quebec, 10–16 September. The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) held its founding assembly at Montreal, 18–26 September. None of these key strategic matters was directly related to Poland. Yet they all involved the USSR. It was one of the ironies in the politics of ‘the Big Three’ that in order to elbow the fading British aside, the USA needed the help of Moscow. More immediately, the US administration was increasingly alarmed by the fact that existing Allied resources would be insufficient to defeat Japan when fighting moved to the Asian mainland. Stalin possessed the only available army in the world which possessed the necessary manpower. So, in the eyes of Washington, Stalin had to be courted; his misdemeanours were to be overlooked. Surrounded as he was by unabashed admirers of the Soviet Union, Roosevelt was never going to change course lightly, to encourage Churchill’s intended showdown, or to put his relationship with Moscow at risk. Nor did he possess sufficient time or imagination to consider intervening in some milder manner. Though he held the strongest cards in the diplomatic pack, he preferred to play none of them, and to let the tragedy of Warsaw run its course. Roosevelt’s inaction was every bit as detrimental as Stalin’s.

Such was the unpromising framework within which the exiled Government was obliged to operate. Here, one must insist that Premier Mick and his ministers be seen for what they were – men of moderation and conciliation. They were not the violent anti-Communist extremists or
ultra-nationalists, as portrayed by Soviet propaganda, nor were they the foolish romantics, the tank-charging cavalrymen, of the popular stereotype (and as repeated by Churchill in moments of exasperation). Their ‘policy of compromise’, which Roosevelt had backed with millions of dollars, always included plans for a national rising, but only in the context of unrelenting war against Nazi Germany, of unstinting loyalty to the West, and of a political deal with the USSR. In the last analysis, Premier Mick performed everything short of political suicide in order to meet his commitments. The same cannot be said about his more powerful partners.

The chemistry of international coalitions is a complex business: and the actions and reactions within them are by no means predictable. Their success or failure depends on the interplay of a long list of well-defined components ranging from personalities and political ideology to shared intelligence, divisions of labour, and practical coordination. The Grand Alliance of 1941–45, which triumphed in its main task, undoubtedly possessed many virtues. The Warsaw Rising revealed that it also suffered from numerous deficiencies.

The personalities of the Grand Alliance were dominated by the remarkable, larger-than-life figures of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Yet the unspoken convention whereby the ‘Big Three’ arrogated all major decisions to themselves put everyone else at a disadvantage. Gen. Sikorski may or may not have possessed the force of character and prestige to overcome this obstacle. But Premier Mick clearly did not. The head of a quarrelsome cabinet, he could not lean too far either to the left or to the right; and he depended to a large degree on his ability to work with Churchill. For this reason, he repeatedly bore Churchill’s intermittent rages with fortitude; and he accepted Roosevelt’s blandishments at face value. Such was his eagerness to please his patrons, he does not appear to have thought of insisting, for example, that no one in the coalition be permitted, quite openly, to treat his soldiers as ‘bandits’. Needless to say, playing away and alone he was no match for Stalin.

From Casablanca onwards, the politics of the Grand Alliance in Europe were reduced to the single-minded purpose of forcing the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, this policy coincided in large measure both with the Soviet-driven ideology of anti-fascism and with the similarly dialectical tendency of the Americans to believe in Manichaean concepts of Good and Evil. The effect was to turn Stalin miraculously into
a benevolent Uncle Joe, and to dismiss all who opposed him as troublemakers. To put it at its crudest, the mass murderer who was leading the fight against the fascist mass murderer ceased to be a villain in the minds of Western officialdom; and the millions he continued to kill during the war became both invisible and unmentionable. Churchill, whose mental map of the world long antedated the Soviet Union, was pretty resistant to this way of thinking, but it infected many influential quarters of Anglo-American opinion. It is hard to quantify. But it has to be one of the major factors in explaining the strange paralysis which overcame the Allied coalition whenever – as in the case of the Warsaw Rising – Stalin needed to be restrained or at least to be talked to. One of the few contemporary voices who described this mental mechanism at work was that of George Orwell. But Orwell’s was a voice crying in the wilderness.

The anti-fascist model was certainly responsible for the erroneous assessment of the divisions within the exiled Government in London. In accordance with their dialectical thought processes, the Soviets had long demanded the removal of several leading figures who were said to be ‘anti-Soviet’, ‘reactionary’, ‘right-wing’, ‘pro-German’, and generally undesirable. When the Rising broke out, it was these same supposedly ‘anti-Soviet elements’ who were blamed for inciting it. In later Commo-speak, the authors of the Rising were said to be ‘national romantics’ whilst the ‘realists’ were those who ‘wished to cooperate with the USSR’. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Nonetheless, the British diplomatic service appears to have accepted the scheme, and huge pressure was exerted to make Premier Mick comply with this ‘right thinking’ of the day. On 30 July 1944, for example, when the Premier flew into Moscow on the eve of the Rising, the British Ambassador urged him to accept four points: the exclusion from the Polish Government of ‘certain elements thought to be reactionary and anti-Soviet’; the acceptance of the Curzon Line as a basis for negotiations; a withdrawal from the suggestion that the killing at Katyn was done by the Russians; and a working arrangement with the Polish Committee of National Liberation. In retrospect, every single one of these points must be judged unjustified. The British Ambassador was not acting as honest broker, let alone as the patron and protector of Britain’s ‘First Ally’. He was not assisting the Premier’s desire to enter into meaningful negotiations and to reach a satisfactory compromise. In effect, he was telling the leader of an Allied nation that he must either swallow Stalin’s lies and demands in full or that he was on his own and must take the consequences.
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Time and again – before, during, and after the Warsaw Rising – Western officials insisted that Poland lay within ‘the Soviet sphere of influence’, and that no activity there could be countenanced without ‘the cooperation of the Russians’. On the surface, their insistence looked perfectly sensible, yet in practice the idea can be seen to be hopelessly misguided. For no one seems to have defined precisely where the spheres of influence lay, nor under what terms they were supposed to function. No clear distinction was made between a military ‘theatre of operations’ where the relevant Allied power was expected to dictate military priorities, and a much more comprehensive ‘sphere of influence’ where the relevant power would be entitled to control all aspects of political, social, economic, and ‘security’ policy. No one paid attention to the obvious fact that the concept of spheres of influence might conflict with other equally valid principles, such as the sovereignty of other Allied powers. Lastly, it never seems to have struck British or American officials that it was up to them to try and secure the rights of their Polish ally in Poland or, in the absence of a firm understanding, that the well-known totalitarian practices of the Soviet juggernaut would automatically prevail. As a result, they were constantly taken by surprise. They were deeply shocked when the Soviets denied landing rights to the RAF and the USAAF in Warsaw’s hour of need. They were similarly nonplussed when Rokossovsky was halted before Warsaw. Throughout the period of the Rising, they wondered in vain about the ‘rumour’ that the Soviets were rounding up the Home Army. In short, they simply refused to believe bad news about the Soviet system when it stared them in the face. Mesmerized perhaps by Soviet power, and deeply committed to an ethos of team-play, which the Soviets did not share, they shied away from playing their own powerful cards, fearful of provoking a negative reaction. Hence Stalin’s own cynical view of a sphere of influence was installed without protest, and democracy was doomed.