Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (11 page)

The political realignment of 1939–40 restored the First Ally’s credentials as a legitimate member of the democratic coalition. The pre-war
Sanacja
regime had been at best a semi-democracy, being dominated by a military element that had taken on a growing nationalistic flavour and had systematically excluded and harassed its opponents. It had also been thoroughly compromised by the catastrophe of September 1939, which many people blamed on its refusal to form an all-party Government of national unity. So now was the time for inclusivity. The reconstructed, exiled Government was headed, as Premier and C.-in-C., by Gen. W. Sikorski, who had kept apart from his former comrades and had played a prominent role in the democratic opposition. Both the National Council abroad, which acted as a sort of substitute parliament, and the political bodies associated with the ZWZ at home operated on the understanding that all democratic parties would be equally respected. The principal parties, in order of their support, were the Peasants (PSL), the Socialists (PPS), the Nationalists (ND), and the Christian Democrat Labour
Movement (SP). Other smaller groupings, such as the Jewish Bund, gave a measure of representation to minority interests.

Two marginal political movements, which had operated before the war, often without legal recognition, did not feature in the wartime arrangements. The extreme right-wing fascists (ONR), who admired Mussolini’s Italy but hated Hitler’s Germany, did not enjoy the confidence of their democratic compatriots. The extreme left-wing Communists (KPP), who never had many committed supporters, had fallen foul of their chief patron. Having established themselves on Soviet territory in the 1930s, they had been caught up in Stalin’s purges. Virtually the entire party
actif
, c. 5,000 men and women, many of them Jewish, were shot on Stalin’s orders. At the outbreak of war, no coherent Polish Communist movement existed.

In the spring of 1940, when Hitler unleashed a second round of Blitzkrieg, the Western powers suffered a catastrophe similar to that experienced by their First Ally the previous September. Denmark and Luxembourg surrendered in less than twenty-four hours. Holland capitulated after five days; Belgium, despite British and French assistance, after eighteen days. Norway held out for two months. In the French Campaign, which lasted for six weeks from 10 May to 22 June, the combined French and British armies performed much less effectively against the Wehrmacht than the First Ally’s forces had performed against the joint attack by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. 141 German divisions comprehensively overwhelmed the 114 French and British divisions deployed against them, a ratio of less than 3:2, compared to the ratio of 3:1 which the Wehrmacht had enjoyed in September 1939, not counting Soviet involvement. At the end of the fighting, 225,000 British and 115,000 French and Belgian troops were evacuated from Dunkirk, having lost all their arms and equipment. Over 2 million were taken prisoner.

During the debacle of 1940, the First Ally sent its forces into battle alongside the British and French. An infantry brigade went to Narvik in northern Norway, where three of the First Ally’s warships also served. The First Ally contributed four infantry divisions, an armoured cavalry brigade, and an air force of four squadrons to the French Campaign. An independent Carpathian Brigade was formed under French command in Syria. The soldiers did not see action until the end of the second week in
June, when Paris was already invested. But the airmen destroyed fifty German planes for the loss of eleven pilots. On 19 June, the C.-in-C. announced that he would fight on, despite the fall of France, and ordered his men to head for Great Britain. Some 80,000 attempted to make the crossing, mainly from Brest and Bordeaux. France, under Marshal Pétain, made its peace with Germany. But the First Ally, in the steps of Churchill, refused to do so.

On 3 July 1940, at the naval port of Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria, the Royal Navy executed one of the most ruthless acts of war to that date. Having called on the French fleet either to scuttle or to surrender, British battleships opened fire at their stationary targets, sinking several vessels and killing 1,300 sailors. No one who saw that demonstration of how the British could treat their former friends could doubt the seriousness of their intent.

The First Ally’s predicament at this juncture was extremely precarious. The home country was being devoured by the Nazi and Soviet Occupations. The army was posted to Scotland, whose east coast it was detailed to guard against a possible German invasion. The exiled Government was relocated to London, which was awaiting bombardment by the Luftwaffe at any moment.

It was during the darkest days in the summer of 1940 that the close relationship between Churchill’s new Coalition Cabinet and the First Ally was forged. Both the individual personalities and the corporate temper of the two sides were well matched. Churchill and Sikorski formed a two-man mutual admiration society. Both had active military service and distinguished political careers behind them – Sikorski had served in the Polish Legions of the Austrian army in the First World War, had played a decisive role as a field commander during the defeat of the Red Army at Warsaw in 1920, and had been Premier of his country in 1922–23. But both men had lingered in the political doldrums in the 1930s; both were unsullied by the failed policies of their respective Governments in the runup to war; and both had staked their all on the unequal fight against Nazi Germany. Both were leaders of multi-party coalitions, where dedication to the cause in hand counted more than factional politics.

Among the secondary figures, Churchill’s deputy, Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, also showed understanding for the First Ally’s plight. Indeed, he was less unpredictable than Churchill. An early and outspoken critic of fascism, he also harboured a healthy reluctance to do business with Communists, whom he regarded as a danger to democratic
socialism. (On this point, he had not hesitated in 1939 to expel one of his party’s most prominent politicians, Sir Stafford Cripps, whom Churchill would later recall to office.) Churchill’s Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, was rather less resolute than either of them. He had risen through the diplomatic ranks as Minister to the League of Nations and as the right-hand man of Halifax and Chamberlain. He was closely associated with those in the Foreign Office who had long worked for a rapprochement with the Soviet Union; and he ended up with the reputation of being ‘the Soviets’ favourite British statesman’.
¹⁵
Yet he was more of a vacillator than an appeaser; as portrayed in a famous post-war cartoon, the ultimate ‘sheep in wolf’s clothing’. Relations with the First Ally was an issue on which he vacillated regularly.

Everyday communication between the two Governments was not facilitated by the language barrier. Most members of the exiled Government spoke French, German, or Russian, but not English. No senior Britons spoke Polish; and they had serious problems pronouncing and remembering names, which, lacking a basic knowledge of Polish diacritics and orthography, they could not even read. They could almost cope with Sikorski, and with simple names such as Stro
ski, Grabski, or Zaleski. But many other examples, like
migły-Rydz, or Bohusz-Szyszko, proved quite impossible. As a result, Britishers usually referred to their counterparts either by shortened forms or by their pseudonyms and nicknames. Hence all the Stanisławs became ‘Stan’; and Mikołajczyk, even when he became Premier, was widely known as ‘Mick’.

The Battle of Britain, which began on 10 July 1940 and came to an end in early October, has gone down in history, in Churchill’s words, as ‘their finest hour’. It took the form of a protracted air battle in which the RAF successfully thwarted the German attempt to win air supremacy over the Channel in preparation for the planned invasion of the British Isles. After some ninety days of combat, the RAF proved more resilient than Göring’s Luftwaffe, forcing their adversaries to withdraw through unsustainable losses. Hitler postponed Operation Sealion indefinitely. But it was a closerun thing. By the time that the Germans disengaged, the RAF’s reserves of planes and pilots were on the brink of exhaustion.

The First Ally’s contribution to the victory was well appreciated at the time, but later forgotten or minimized. Their pilots served both in RAF units and in their own squadrons, operating under British command. They
represented 10 per cent of the total fliers employed, and accounted for 12 per cent of the enemy aircraft destroyed.
¹⁶
Most impressively, they incurred only one-third of the average casualty rate, whilst being maintained by a ground crew ratio of only 30:1 as compared to 100:1 in the RAF and 80:1 in the Luftwaffe. Their achievements were particularly valuable in the critical days of mid-September. On the 15th, they accounted for 14 per cent of enemy losses, on the 19th, 25 per cent, and on the 26th, 48 per cent. On one occasion, British officers present were astonished to see a wing commander kissing his fitter’s hands. ‘Were it not for these hands,’ he declared, ‘I’d be dead.’
¹⁷
The last word lay with Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the RAF’s fighter chief. ‘Had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by [the First Ally’s] squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry, I hesitate to say that the outcome of the battle would have been the same.’
¹⁸

Mention should also be made of the key role played by the First Ally’s cryptologists. Britain’s near hopeless military position in 1940 was greatly strengthened by the growing ability to read most of Germany’s encoded radio signals and the accompanying directives. This ability, which was to be perfected at the secret intelligence centre at Bletchley Park, had been greatly facilitated by the pioneering work of the First Ally’s specialists, who had presented the British in July 1939 not only with two working replicas of the first-generation Enigma machine, but also with the mathematical formulas for reconstructing its signals.
¹⁹

Once Britain had survived the onslaught at home, it could afford a modest show of strength abroad. In December 1940, Lt.Gen. Wavell moved against a far larger Italian army in the Libyan desert. The First Ally’s Carpathian Brigade, which reached Tobruk in August 1941, formed almost one quarter of Allied troops in North Africa.

Most importantly, the American President felt confident enough to launch his clandestine programme for supplying the ‘fortress of democracy’. His actions were particularly welcome to the First Ally, which, with the growing prospect of American involvement, was able to consider the possibility of ultimate liberation. The text of the Atlantic Charter, which contained a clause condemning territorial aggrandizement, looked particularly pertinent. If it meant anything at all, it meant that all the territory which had been seized in 1939 would eventually be restored under Western auspices.

Nonetheless, Stalin also felt confident enough to make further gains. Whilst Germany was preoccupied in the West, Soviet troops occupied and
annexed the three Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia – and large tracts of Romania. They had Berlin’s approval. During the currency of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, eight countries were absorbed by German aggression and five by Soviet aggression.

On 22 June 1941, the Third Reich attacked its erstwhile associate, the Soviet Union, and with the launch of Operation Barbarossa started the German–Soviet War – the most extensive and the most savage of modern military campaigns. To begin with, the Wehrmacht carried all before it. Within a matter of weeks, millions of Soviet prisoners had been taken; Vilno, Minsk, and Kiev had been captured; and, using its hold on the Baltic states, the Wehrmacht laid siege to Leningrad. By Christmas, a Soviet collapse seemed imminent.

Almost to a man, Western commentators announced that Germany had attacked ‘Russia’. The general assumption, worldwide, was that the territory seized by the Wehrmacht was somehow Russian by right or by ethnic composition. In reality, the difference between the ‘Soviet Union’ and ‘Russia’ was even greater, and every bit as important, as that between ‘the United Kingdom’ and ‘England’. Yet it was almost universally ignored. The Nazis also ignored it, boasting that they were conquering ‘
Russland
’. For once, Soviet propaganda was not to blame. All the Soviet maps of the period marked a clear boundary line dividing Soviet Russia (the RSFSR) from the other Soviet republics which made up the USSR. They showed beyond any doubt that the lands which the Wehrmacht entered in June 1941 did
not
form part of Russia but of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. In the end, one can only fall back on the argument of inertia and complacency. ‘Russia’ had been the accepted shorthand for the Tsarist Empire during the First World War; and it now stuck as the accepted shorthand for the Soviet Union during the Second World War and after. For the peoples who inhabited the disputed region, the consequences were dire.