Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (14 page)

The ill-concealed rivalry of Britain’s Intelligence Service and SOE was one of the facts of British wartime life. The former, old-established and global in scope, was officially subject to the Foreign Office. The latter, which was created by Churchill in July 1940 ‘to set the Continent ablaze’, answered directly to the Prime Minister and was inevitably regarded as a dangerous upstart and interloper. It quickly became Britain’s principal instrument for organizing secret missions into Nazi-occupied Europe.
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The personalities who counted most in this complicated relationship were not always the ones who held the top offices. Of course, when it came to crucial decisions, the leading figures could not be circumvented. Churchill as Prime Minister, Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary and Gen. Brooke as CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) featured prominently on the British side throughout the war. By 1944, the most active members of the exiled Government were the Premier, Mick; the
Commanderin-Chief, Gen. S.; the Foreign Minister, Thaddeus R.; and the Chief of the General Staff, Gen. Ko.
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It was a great misfortune that the exiled President suffered serious health problems and was unable to prevent the growing rift which developed between the Prime Minister and the Commanderin-Chief. The rift caused indecision in the First Ally’s Cabinet, and bewilderment among their British friends.

Four or five Britons enjoyed close, everyday contacts with the exiled Government. Maj. Bryson of MI6 had been the original UK liaison officer in Britain’s Military Mission to the First Ally in France in 1939–40. His colleague, Cmdr. Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, who reported straight to ‘C’, the head of MI6, ran a small unit that worked with the II Bureau. Col., later Gen. Colin Gubbins, the founder and director of SOE, had very strong Polish connections. He had worked in Warsaw in 1939 as a member of Carton de Wiart’s team in the British Military Mission, spoke Polish, and sympathized strongly with the First Ally’s fate. So, too, did his companion from 1939, Lt.Col. Peter Wilkinson, who became one of SOE’s most influential officers. Col. Harold Perkins, the commander of SOE’s Polish and Czechoslovak Section, the son of an industrial family with wide Continental interests, had actually been brought up in Silesia, had served in HM Consular Service in Warsaw, and spoke the languages fluently. Above them all was Sir Owen St Clair O’Malley, who since February 1943 had held the position of HM Ambassador to the exiled Government. O’Malley stood out in the foreign service for his secret despatch to Churchill of 24 May 1943, which demolished the Soviet case for regarding the Katyn Massacres as a Nazi crime, and for his repeated appeals for a more ethical approach to foreign policy. ‘O’Malley reminded the policymakers that the Soviet alliance was simply a matter of grim necessity: they should not deceive themselves or others that it was built on anything more fundamental, like shared values. In the circumstances prevailing . . . this was a highly inconvenient message for all concerned’.
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Two Polish citizens deserve special mention. Gen. Stanislas T. was widely known in London by his Underground pseudonym ‘Tabor’. He only reached England in April 1944, when he surprisingly walked straight into the directorship of the VI Bureau with the high rank of Deputy Chief of the General Staff. Before that, he had been number three in the hierarchy of the First Ally’s Underground Resistance movement. His background was interesting. During the First World War, having distinguished himself in the mathematical department of the Imperial Russian University in Warsaw, he had been schooled as a cadet in the Higher
Artillery School in Odessa, and had received a commission from the Tsar. Subsequently, as a graduate of the Higher Military School and of the École Superieure de Guerre in Paris, and commander of successive artillery regiments, he belonged to the cream of the pre-war military elite. At the same time, he was a passionate opponent of the
Sanacja
regime, and an unrelenting critic of Marshal Pilsudski. Brusque, arrogant and secretive, he kept many of his opinions to himself. But he came to be described by one of his biographers as that rarest of creatures – a Polish Titoist: a proponent of a national brand of Communism, independent of Moscow.
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(It was Tabor who, as duty officer at HQ at the end of July 1944, had set aside the two controversial telegrams forwarded from Barnes Lodge.) Joseph R., known to his friends as ‘Recio’, was a still more curious character. He was best known in wartime London as Gen. Sikorski’s personal secretary. But his official position covered a multitude of less public connections, which all led back in one way or another to the Allied intelligence services. Born an Austrian subject in Cracow, the son of a prominent barrister, he had moved to Western Europe as a young man, studying at both the Sorbonne and, like his contemporary Lewis Namier, at the LSE. The protégé of aristocratic and influential Franco-Polish Catholic families who had taken care of his education after his father’s death, he had learned to glide with ease in the highest social, political, and cultural circles. His favourite
nom de guerre
was ‘Salamander’.

A polyglot and a polymath, Salamander seems to have pursued at least three careers. One, as a literary author, was helped by his long-standing connection with Joseph Conrad, who had attended the same
Gymnazium
in Cracow, and who probably introduced him to the British intelligence services. The second, as an international negotiator, began in 1917, when he was involved on the Allied side in the secret but abortive talks for a separate peace with Austria. The third, as a Latin American specialist, began shortly after, when for undisclosed reasons he left Paris in a hurry for Mexico. Thereafter, variously suspected of being an agent of the Vatican, the Bolsheviks, the Americans and the Freemasons, he cropped up time and again in all sorts of unlikely places. He played an active part in the creation of the international Trades Union movement, where he made friends with British socialists like Ernest Bevin and Stafford Cripps. He was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. But in 1939 he was observed living in considerable poverty in a dingy one-room flat off Baker Street. His fortunes revived with the outbreak of war. It was Salamander who flew to France in July 1940, and on Churchill’s express orders accompanied
Gen. Sikorski to England.
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In 1941, he worked hard with Sikorski to forge the Polish–Soviet agreements. He even stayed on in Moscow as chargé d’affaires to oversee the establishment of the exiled Government’s embassy. At this time, he became a personal acquaintance of Molotov.

Salamander’s association with MI6 remains a closely guarded secret, though it is hardly in doubt. A recent study based on official sources named him as an ‘agent of influence’ of MI6, thereby confirming what many had always suspected.
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But the label may not suffice. In some eyes, he was an overambitious fantasist.

After Sikorski’s death in July 1943, Salamander was to some extent a faithful dog without a master. He certainly shed copious tears at the General’s funeral. He was a man looking for a mission, and in due course he found one. In January 1944 he embarked on an enterprise whose exact purposes have remained obscure to the present day. He prepared to be parachuted into his home country. For a man aged fifty-six and of no great athletic ability, it was a risky step, not least because he refused to take the usual course of practice jumps for fear of losing his nerve. What is more, his task was so secret that he intended to wear a mask to hide his identity both from his companions and from the aircrew that would fly him out. He travelled to an RAF base near Brindisi to await the flight. He was repeatedly kept waiting, and read Plato to pass the time. The only person in the exiled Government who had been informed of his departure was Premier Mick. Meanwhile, rumours began to circulate in the corridors of the Rubens Hotel that Salamander had too many enemies and would be killed on arrival.
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On present evidence, the full extent of British involvement cannot be gauged. But the mission was important in that it provided the only sign that the First Ally’s British patrons were taking trouble to gather authoritative intelligence on the ground. Early in 1944, strong British missions were operating with the Underground both in Yugoslavia and in Greece, but Salamander was the only known British agent to be directed at that time to the banks of the Vistula.

The First Ally had relatively few British friends of long standing, though their number grew rapidly in the early years of the war. The most obvious circle of supporters lay within the Roman Catholic constituency and with literary people, such as the late G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. At Court, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, who had spent their pre-war honeymoon in Warsaw, founded a coterie of well-connected sympathizers.
In Government, the War Office, which was better informed than most about the First Ally’s contributions and sacrifices, could usually be counted on. So, too, could the representatives of cities and counties, especially in Scotland, where the First Ally’s troops were stationed. Furthermore, an outspoken company of prominent individuals had been deeply inspired by the First Ally’s determination to stand and fight. They were not always the likeliest of Polonophiles. One of them was Lord Vansittart, by then retired, but until recently the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. A second was Philip Noel-Baker MP, a Quaker and a pacifist, who nonetheless was often moved to defend the First Ally’s interests. A third was the leading journalist J. L. Garvin, editor of the
Observer
for over thirty years, who was not impressed by the lack of impartiality adopted by many papers, especially
The Times
. Others included Maj.Gen. Sir Alfred Knox MP, sometime chief of the British Military Mission to Siberia, and Mr John McGovern, a doughty protester and Labour Party MP.

Among British residents of Polish origin, there were four prominent names. Joseph Conrad had died in 1924, and had no equivalent successor. The two men with the highest profile in the 1940s came from a very different milieu. Both were ‘non-Jewish Jews’ and both for different reasons had fairly jaundiced views about the land of their birth. Isaac Deutscher had been Secretary of the Polish Communist Party (KPP) before fleeing in 1932 to escape the warning signs of Stalinism. Whilst preparing groundbreaking political studies, which culminated in his biographies of
Trotsky
(1954/1959/1963) and
Stalin
(1949), he was very active in left-wing journalism. Lewis Niemirowski Bernstein, who took the surname of Namier, had carved out a career as Britain’s foremost eighteenth-century historian. But he, too, wrote widely as a contemporary publicist, though arguing from a Zionist, as distinct from Deutscher’s Marxist, standpoint. His collection of essays entitled
Conflicts
(1942) was an influential book of its day.

Namier, of course, had once worked in the Foreign Office, and many friends of the First Ally were tempted to think that he belonged to a deeply unsympathetic, institutional tradition. The generalization was not entirely fair. In Britain’s diplomatic circles, the First Ally had both advocates and detractors. But there was a majority of British diplomats who were so preoccupied with other things that they were apt to regard the First Ally as a bit of a nuisance. Most of them were not so much hostile as otherwise engaged. Most would have agreed that the First Ally’s problems should not be allowed to impinge on what they regarded as more important issues. Anthony Eden’s personal secretary, Pierson Dixon, was certainly of this opinion: ‘It is obvious’, he recorded in his diary in February 1944, that no Englishman is going to war with Russia . . . for Poland . . . Poland as a continental power does not excite the same sympathies in English breasts as does an island power like Greece . . . The consensus is clear: . . . we offer to back a reasonable solution and go no further [even if the alternative is the absorption of Poland into the USSR].
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To people of his persuasion, the ‘First Ally’ was fine so long as it fitted in with their pet schemes. If it didn’t, it was ‘intransigent’. Intransigence was often seen as the First Ally’s most prominent characteristic.

Nonetheless, Britons and Americans who were interested in learning more about the First Ally would not have been short of reading. Twenty years earlier, when the ‘New Europe’ had emerged from the First World War, a flood of books had been published to present the restored or newly independent countries to the English-speaking public. The quality varied. But for those who cared to explore, the libraries contained a substantial collection of titles recounting the history, geography, politics, economics and cultural life of ‘The Lands Between’. A body of the First Ally’s main literary works was published in English translation. And in the late 1930s, the first volume of a major history of the First Ally was produced in Cambridge to match the older volume written in Oxford by the sometime Professor of Slavonic History. No one who read either of the latter books could have retained the widespread illusion that the First Ally was a new country or that it had somehow usurped the rights of ancient German or Russian lands. It was not difficult to disabuse the readership of the illusion that the familiar map of Europe as created in the nineteenth century was somehow a permanent fixture.
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On the very eve of the Second World War, in the summer of 1939, a ‘Penguin Special’ appeared, addressing a wide public with a concise and readable summary of the First Ally’s past and present. Rarely can a small book have been more topical. Starting with the crowning of the first king in the tenth century, it worked its way through the ‘Golden Age’ of the sixteenth century, the Partitions of the eighteenth, and the ‘Ordeal’ of the nineteenth. The events of 1918 were presented as ‘the Restoration’. But most of the space was devoted to contemporary problems – to the struggle for democracy, to education, to economic development, to the minorities, and above all to geopolitics. The First Ally was labelled ‘the most exposed
country in Europe’. Its citizens were characterized as ‘the coolest and least flurried of all the neighbours of the Reich – because their minds are made up’: ‘If attacked they will fight, asking no one for advice, and expecting no quarter. The spirit in which they are facing [the] crisis in their existence . . . is beyond praise.’
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The author was a Canadian Evangelical, and Professor of London University, William J. Rose. (See Appendix 3.) From 1940 onwards, the exiled Government in London put out a stream of publications to keep the public informed. Apart from the Black Book
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and the White Book,
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which documented both the diplomatic events leading up to the outbreak of war and the Nazi atrocities that followed it, a large range of official pamphlets and statements were published. As often as not, the aim was to put the record straight with regard to the facts of history and policy. The First Ally’s British friends were equally eager to take up the pen,
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and a number of English-language newspapers and information sheets were circulated.
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So no one with the energy to study could plead ignorance.