Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (39 page)

Intelligence and counterintelligence was the business of the Home Army’s famous II Bureau, which was a priceless asset not just to Poland but to the Allied cause in general. The II Bureau was the direct successor of the pre-war service, whose agents first broke the ‘unbreakable’ German Enigma system; and in 1941, it supplied London with the details of the forthcoming Operation Barbarossa, which Stalin, reportedly, did not want to believe. In the summer of 1942 it suffered a major setback when it closed down its entire network following penetration by the
Abwehr
. So it started again from scratch. Three discrete and watertight networks were established – ‘Arcadius’ for the General Government, ‘Pawnshop’ for the Reich, and ‘Laundry’ for the Soviet Union. All three survived to the end of the war. (It is hard to believe that their archive, which was handed to the British Foreign Office in 1945, was then destroyed by mistake.)
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In late July 1944, one of the II Bureau’s most dazzling exploits was reaching a climax. A year earlier, Polish agents had pinpointed the research centre of Germany’s rocket programme at Peenemünde on the island of Usedom, which was subsequently bombed by the RAF, and then they identified the secret test-range of the ultra-modern V2 rocket at a remote site in southern Poland. Still more excitingly, they contrived to spirit away an intact V2 rocket which had failed to explode after falling into a marsh near the River Bug. The rocket and its motor were disassembled, carted in pieces to Warsaw, copied in minutest detail onto technical drawings, and packed for shipment. Chemical specialists cracked a key problem by reconstructing the formula of the V2’s fuel. After that there remained the small matter of sending this priceless cache to London.
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During the long months and years when the Home Army was waiting for a Rising to mature, Polish patriots had to shrug off endless uncertainties. But on 1 April 1943, on the eve of Stalin’s break with Poland, the
Information Bulletin
said it all: ‘A National Rising cannot be declared every three months. One rising can be staged – and only one. And such a rising must unquestionably be successful.’
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The BBC was telling the French Resistance exactly the same thing at the same time.

The most unexpected compliment eventually emerged from the unlikeliest of sources. At the end of the war, when the Third Reich was facing defeat and occupation, the Nazi leaders turned to the head of German army intelligence in the east, Reinhard Gehlen, and asked him in desperation to advise on how to form a German Resistance movement against the Allies. Gehlen, who was not a Nazi, advised that they follow the model of the Polish Home Army.

One of the hardest burdens which the Home Army and its admirers had to bear was lodged in repeated slurs propagated by Soviet and Communist sources. Far from celebrating the Home Army’s achievements, Soviet commentators started to spread the word that the AK was ‘inactive’, ‘cowardly’, or even ‘pro-German’. In their enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and its victories, many elements of the British and American press unthinkingly followed suit. From the AK’s point of view, the only fitting response was: ‘We will show them!’

The Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto broke out on 19 April 1943, and, to general astonishment on all sides, lasted for twenty-seven days. It was
launched by two small groups of clandestine fighters, who had correctly foreseen the final liquidation of the Ghetto and had jointly decided to stand and fight, come what might. Hence, when
SS-Brig.Fhr
. Jürgen Stroop entered the Ghetto with a force of some 3,000 troops and armed police he was met with a hail of grenades and bullets. The defiance was unexpected. According to the prevailing stereotype, Jews were supposed to go like lambs to the slaughter.

The suppression of the Uprising proceeded day after day with unparalleled savagery. The fighters were well prepared. Their light weapons, which had been supplied in modest quantities by the Polish Underground, were no match for the firepower of Stroop’s professionals. But they inflicted casualties. What is more, a warren of hidden bunkers and invisible escape routes had been put in place. In the end, Stroop preferred fire to the sword. Water, gas, and electricity were cut off. Buildings were torched, block by block. Occupants, when forced out, were mown down. Cellars were cleared with ‘smoke candles’. Over 20,000 persons were killed. A mere 16,000 were left for transport to Treblinka. The insurgents’ HQ, in a bunker on Pleasant Street, was destroyed on 8 May, together with their commander, Mordechai A. A week later, Stroop was able to report to Berlin: ‘The Ghetto is no more.’
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One can read about the Ghetto Uprising from many sources. Stroop’s report is full of reluctant admiration for his adversaries. ‘Jews and Jewesses shot from two pistols at the same time . . . Jewesses carried loaded [weapons] in their clothing . . . At the last moment, they would pull out hand grenades . . . and throw them at the soldiers . . .’
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Another participant, Mark E., a Bundist who was the only recognized leader of the Uprising to survive the war, wrote an account that is free of post-war ideology.
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Leon Uris, meanwhile, wrote the sort of fiction that can often be mistaken for fact.
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Not all commentaries care to emphasize that in great part the heroes of the Ghetto were Poles. For, just as American Jews would see themselves as being American as well as Jewish, so the majority of young Polish Jews of the wartime generation would
not
have accepted the assumption that ‘Poles’ and ‘Jews’ belonged to two distinct and separate species. For they were not just Polish citizens. Unlike their elders, they had largely been educated in Polish schools; they spoke Polish; and to a high degree they shared Polish patriotic values. They had not been segregated from their non-Jewish compatriots by choice but by Nazi fiat.

When the Ghetto Uprising was being suppressed, no one on the
‘Aryan Side’ of Warsaw could fail to notice what was happening. They couldn’t follow the action in detail, but everyone saw the flames, smelt the smoke, shuddered at the gunfire, and sometimes heard the screams. Those who caught sight of the Red-and-White flag fluttering alongside the Star of David on a high building were deeply moved. But they were largely helpless. They had been cut off from the Ghetto for two years, and were obliged to face other daily horrors on their own side of the divide. Their apparent passivity should not necessarily be equated with indifference. A poet who was present and who saw the incongruity of a fairground beside the Ghetto Wall was reminded of the lonely death of the dissident ‘heretic’ Giordano Bruno in Rome three centuries before:

I thought of the Campo di Fiori
In Warsaw by the sky carousel
One clear spring evening
To the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody
Drowned the salvoes from the ghetto wall,
And couples were flying
High in the cloudless sky.
. . .
Those dying here, the lonely,
Forgotten by the world,
Our tongues become for them
The language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend,
And many years have passed
On a new Campo di Fiori
Rage will kindle at a poet’s word.
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The Ghetto Uprising left a residue of bitter emotions, rage, guilt, and frustration among them, but it also left a more tangible legacy for those Varsovians who had seen it happen and who were ready to learn the lessons. The moral lesson was unmistakable. It stated that some things in life are more important than life itself. The Ghetto fighters faced a more extreme predicament than many other Varsovians would face. Yet their resolve could only command respect. The cause was hopeless: their courage magnificent. They set an example: some would say, a very Polish example.

The political lesson concerned the inaction of people who might have
rendered assistance. By 1943, the outside world knew a great deal about Nazi treatment of the Jews. The problem was to find someone who might give it priority. For Great Powers have ‘interests’. They were in the middle of a vast war; they couldn’t be persuaded to set their own plans aside for something which, from their point of view, was a local sideline.
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The Polish Underground had its own pressing problems. It was ready to extend limited assistance but not to put its entire operation at risk. The Ghetto fighters, through no fault of their own, were left to wage their battle in terrible isolation.

The military lesson centred on the extraordinary effectiveness of urban guerrilla warfare, of which the Ghetto was one of the earliest examples. The half-armed, poorly trained but unusually resourceful and motivated fighters were only defeated with great difficulty. They had successfully held out against all the heavy weaponry used against them, not for days but for weeks. They were only overcome when the enemy demolished the entire urban environment in which they operated. These facts prompted reflections. If a few hundred fighters could hold up the Nazi war machine for nearly a month, it was not unrealistic to calculate that a force thirty or forty times their size, in a battleground twenty times bigger, might conceivably achieve still more extensive results.

A final coda to the story of the Ghetto Uprising can be found in the fate of its chief chronicler, Dr Emanuel R. He had been smuggled out of the Ghetto in March 1943. For twelve months, living in a hideout on ‘the Aryan Side’, he devoted himself to his writings. The hideout was then discovered. Dr Emanuel R., his family, and the Catholics who had been sheltering him, were hauled off to the Paviak and shot.
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For Polish officialdom, a national Rising was always on the agenda. It was discussed from the day the country was forced to surrender in 1939. Some civilians did not like the idea, and many military men questioned its practicality. But the Government never wavered; and the majority followed their lead. Throughout the war, therefore, the main questions were simply when and how. Three distinct variants were proposed: a general Rising, Operation Tempest, and ‘the Battle for the Capital’.

When Gen. Sikorski first came to London in October 1940, he authorized a plan for a general Rising, which would coincide with a major landing of regular forces. He had included this sort of scheme in the founding statute of the ‘Union of Armed Struggle’, which was ordered to
prepare for an armed Rising as soon as it was appropriate.
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The assumption seems to have been that the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force would be strong enough to ferry the landing force to a suitable point on the Continent, and that the insurgents, operating principally in rural areas, would be able to obstruct German counter-measures.

Plans inevitably changed once the German–Soviet War had broken out. Operational Report Nr. 54, in autumn 1942, foresaw a general Rising in central Poland but not in the western or eastern provinces. The signal was to be preceded by a fourteen-day ‘period of vigilance’, and was to be decided on by the Commander of the Home Army. The long list of aims was headed by the toppling of the German occupants, and the capture of arms and ammunition to permit the further expansion of the Rising.
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Regarding the USSR, Gen. Arrow noted: ‘I only include [Russia] among the allied states for formal reasons. In reality, I maintain the view that Russia will assume a clearly hostile posture towards us . . . and will camouflage this posture so long as she remains feeble.’
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None of these plans was withheld from the British and Americans. On the contrary, Poland’s military missions in London and Washington were constantly pestering their British and American counterparts for material support. On 2 July 1943, for example, a summary of the Home Army’s intended action was placed before the Combined Chiefs of Staff, together with an accompanying shopping list. Col. M., the head of the military mission in Washington, was duly grilled by Lt.Gen. Gordon Macready, a British member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In answer to a question about the best moment for launching the Rising, Col. M. replied that the entry of Allied armies into the Hungarian Plain would suit well. He was obviously aware of Churchill’s dream of a lightning march from Italy and through the so-called Ljubljana Gap. In answer to a question about the implications of a possible Soviet offensive into Poland, the reply was unequivocal. ‘In that case there would be no Rising, and the Home Army would stay in the Underground.’
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At Poland’s insistence, interAllied discussions regarding the ‘Secret Army’ in Poland proceeded through 1943 and into 1944. As shown by the voluminous papers of Col. M. in Washington, they were based on two assumptions – that the ‘Secret Army’ would at the least receive Western air support, and that Poland’s Parachute Brigade, which was being trained in Britain under the direct command of the exiled Government, would be made available.
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By the autumn of 1943, however, the Western powers had still not
established a military presence on the Continent outside Italy, whilst the victory of the Red Army on the Eastern Front was forging rapidly ahead. After Kursk in July, the exiled Government had to face the likelihood that its territory would not be liberated by the Western powers, but by Stalin’s armies. The result was Operation Tempest.

Proof that knowledge about Poland’s plans for a Rising were circulating at the very top of the Coalition is contained in a telegram from Secretary of State Hull to President Roosevelt dated 23 November 1943. Hull was passing on information that had been received from Premier Mick. ‘A rising in Poland against Germany’, he wrote, ‘is being planned to break out at a moment mutually agreed upon with our Allies either before or at the very moment of the entry of Soviet troops into Poland.’
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The statement is there for all to see. It was produced in advance of Teheran, two months prior to the Red Army’s entry into Poland, nine months prior to its advance on the Vistula. A key phrase was ‘a moment mutually agreed upon’. A key question for historians is what happened to this information in subsequent months.