Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (78 page)

For Premier Mick, who had risked so much and worked so hard for a compromise, the Moscow meeting came close to a political knock-out. The ‘optimist faction’ in the exiled Government was discredited. They had not been able to deliver. So the ‘cynics’ took the upper hand. After the Premier’s return from Moscow, his Cabinet collapsed. On 24 November he resigned his post in favour of the socialist leader Thomas, who had been flown to England four months earlier with Salamander. Henceforth, he could only pursue the path of compromise in his personal and party capacity.

Premier Mick fell from power six weeks after the Capitulation in Warsaw. His fall was the inevitable consequence of the failed strategy that he had pursued throughout his tenure of office – namely, of relying on the Western Allies to help restore a working relationship with the Soviet Union. His successors, headed by Thomas, did not share Mick’s uncritical trust of Roosevelt and Churchill, nor his determination to do business with the Communists on the Communists’ terms. In the light of history, one can say, in an abstract sense, that they were perfectly right. Yet, in the realm of practical politics, they were dangerously isolated. Like Mick’s group, they were very largely dependent on the British, who – whether they liked it or not – were not in sympathy with their views. And, on their own, they had few means of influencing international developments. Above all, they had reached office at a most inopportune moment. A year or eighteen months earlier, before the Rising, before Teheran, before Stalin’s entry into Poland, their realism might have had an effect. As it was, they arrived on the scene virtually as liquidators, seeing out the terminal phase of a failing firm.

In the eyes of its Communist opponents, and of all too many Westerners, the new Cabinet was made up of a gang of anti-Soviet extremists. It was nothing of the sort. The hard line was coming from Moscow and Lublin, not from London. The gang was made up of genuine democrats, patriots, and social reformers, who were hoping against hope that something could still be salvaged of the independence of their country. Yet the weakness of their position was manifest. They were beholden to the Western powers, who were no longer prepared to protect or even to consult them. At the same time, by refusing to bow to Soviet dictates, they were cutting themselves off from the international process that was now heading for the decisive conference at Yalta.

Thanks to the impasse, several pressing issues were allowed to fester. Nothing was done, for example, to help establish a modus vivendi between the exiled Government and the Lublin Committee, which the USSR could now promote without heed or hindrance. On 31 December, in anticipation of the Yalta Conference, Moscow unilaterally recognized the Committee as ‘the Provisional Government’. Nor was anything done to regulate the status of the Home Army within the Allied camp. After the Warsaw Rising, well over 200,000 AK soldiers remained in the field, and continued to harass the Germans. They answered to the replacement Command under Gen. Bear Cub which had successfully extricated itself from Warsaw and which had set up a new secret HQ. Yet their predicament was rapidly becoming untenable. They were the long-standing formal allies of the Western powers; they were now accepted as legal combatants both by the West and by Germans: but they continued to be treated by the Soviets as common ‘bandits’. One can only wonder what Western intelligence knew of all this. If Western analysts didn’t know, they were incompetent. If they did know, they could only have been overruled by their political superiors, who must thereby take responsibility for the torrent of deaths and blighted lives which ensued.

Soon after the ‘Tolstoy’ talks in Moscow, the Soviet Army scored another sensational success. On 21 October, elements of the Second Byelorussian Front broke into East Prussia from Lithuania. They had finally seized a patch of the Third Reich, thereby raising headlines across the world. Although their advance was repulsed, they stayed long enough to create still more headlines of a particularly repulsive sort. At the village of Nemmersdorf they committed numerous rapes and atrocities. Goebbels sought to exploit the incident and to strengthen German resolve by sending in a camera team and publishing pictures of the women of Nemmersdorf who had been stripped, raped, and crucified upside-down on barn doors. He achieved the opposite of what was intended. Most of the inhabitants of Germany’s eastern provinces determined that if and when the Soviet Army returned they would flee.

Throughout 1944, the exiled Government had been pressing their British patrons to join them in sending fact-finding and liaison missions to the home country. They had not made much headway. It was devilishly
difficult in London to find out what was really happening. The Soviets and their numerous mouthpieces were saying one thing, and the exiled Government and its agencies were saying the opposite. Fortunately, Poland still had enough friends in high places who thought it worthwhile to seek out the truth. The result, highly belated, was a mission that was given the codename of Freston.

The Freston story had begun while the Warsaw Rising was still in progress, or even before. Deeply frustrated by the negative stance of the Foreign Office in general and in particular of Anthony Eden, who had repeatedly blocked the scheme since Premier Mick’s proposal in February, the leaders of SOE decided to make preparations on their own initiative. Their earliest approaches to prospective personnel were made in July. But their progress was painfully slow. They were encouraged by Churchill, who on 4 September made the comment ‘Why not?’, but were again set back by a meeting on the 19th with Foreign Office representatives, who were still maintaining that the mission required Soviet approval. That same week, with the Warsaw Rising at its most critical phase, Col. Perkins’ file reveals a scribbled note, probably from Churchill’s office, saying ‘Mission granted, further papers unnecessary’.
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The obstructions had lasted for seven months.

The difference of opinion between SOE and the FO, as aired in the meeting of 19 September, deserves closer examination. The SOE spokesman, Col. Keswick, had come armed with a letter from a Home Army commander urging the despatch of British and American officers ‘to prevent the Russians from liquidating our COs and disarming our units.’ In this light, the FO’s insistence on prior Soviet approval for the mission looks decidedly perverse. The presence of ‘C’, the nameless head of MI6, had no visible effect, though it is not inconceivable that ‘C’ subsequently set the wheels in motion and inspired the mysterious note of permission which SOE received some days later.
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Freston was to consist of six members, each identified by a three-letter personal code:

These men were thought to be exceptionally experienced. Hudson had been in Yugoslavia, the first British officer to find Tito. Morgan had been in charge of Operation Torment. Kemp had fought in the Spanish Civil War. And Solly-Flood, a diplomat turned intelligence officer, had been added at the suggestion of the Embassy in Moscow. Currie, nicknamed ‘the Prof’, was actually a Pole who spoke fluent German; Galbraith was a dour Scot. They were to carry 300 gold dollars and £1,000 in notes, and they were to be paid £1 per day danger money. They each carried a grotesquely inaccurate identity card, marked in makeshift Russian, and took off from Hurn airport near Bournemouth on 13 October – the day that Premier Mick was being diplomatically mugged in Moscow. When they landed at Monopoli near Bari, no one was expecting them.

No less than ten weeks of further waiting followed. Their pathfinder agent, Grp.Capt. ‘Rudko’, whose task was to prepare the landing zone, had already left wearing a gold hat – ‘quite the best dressed agent we ever sent into the field.’ The weather, both in the sky and in the Foreign Office, was less impressive. Two flights were aborted; and Eden twice tried to intervene and stop the mission in protest against the formation of the new ‘Anti-Soviet’ Government in London. Eventually they took off on the afternoon of Boxing Day, 26 December, and landed successfully, but with some hard knocks, in a frozen field in the countryside, near the village of ‘Ducks’ Mud’, east of Chenstohova.

On arrival, the Freston team spoke with a Soviet partisan officer – probably Capt. Fedorov – who had been parachuted like them behind German lines, and who announced that local relations with the Home Army were good. They also met three British ex-POWs, who had escaped from Lamsdorf and who were serving with the Polish Underground. Billeted on the country estate of ‘Madam R.’, they spent a boisterous New Year’s party to the accompaniment of vodka, canapés, patriotic songs, wild shots fired through the ceiling, and shouts of ‘Down with the Curzon Line’ and ‘To hell with the Lublin Committee’.

On 3 January 1945 the mission travelled by horse-drawn sleigh to visit Gen. Bear Cub in his secret retreat. Grp.Capt. ‘Rudko’ was there. Bear Cub presented the Britons with a detailed résumé of German forces in the region and with his views on the Soviets, ‘who were more concerned with politics than with defeating the enemy quickly’. He had no objection to communism in principle, only to Russian domination. The British and the Americans, he thought, would soon be obliged to halt further Soviet aggression.

At another meeting, Col. Hudson proposed a toast to ‘Churchill, Roosevelt, [Mick] and Stalin’:

The district was saturated with German troops, German officials, and German settlers. Cossack cavalry under German command were foraging in the villages. Fiesler Storch reconnaissance planes flew over twice a day. Local peasants were losing their homes to make way for the
Volksdeutsch
. On one day, the Freston team’s Home Army bodyguard had to fight off a patrol of four German tanks, losing a man. On another occasion, in the middle of a forest, they walked straight into a group of some 200
Waffen-SS
men, who were hiding from the advancing Soviets and whose ‘energies were totally spent’.

Col. Hudson had always known that the mission was likely to end as soon as the Soviet allies appeared. His orders on this point were simple. He was to present himself directly to the Soviet CO and impress on him that the Soviet High Command was aware of his presence, and to request immediate transport to the British Embassy. As foreseen, the expected encounter duly occurred, but at a moment on 15 January, when members of the team happened to be in two different places.

Mur and Cur were riding in a peasant cart when they met a huge Soviet column rumbling slowly westwards. They reached their destination only to find it overrun with ‘Soviet Mongolian troops’ belonging to a tank brigade. ‘These are British officers’, their companion said, ‘They have been fighting with the Underground and are our allies and friends’:

Hudson and the rest of the team were taken to the same cottage the following day:

The whole team was then driven under guard to the farm where they had been staying. The farmer told them that all his livestock had been confiscated, and that his farm-workers had been formed into a committee to run the estate. Inside the farmhouse, ‘the Russian troops . . . stole anything they could and smashed the furniture, and befouled every part of the building with their excreta . . .’ In the evening, the farmer’s wife, ‘a grey-haired old lady . . . sat at the piano playing Chopin. She played the Revolutionary Study, op. 10 written after the Russians’ defeat in the Rising of 1831 . . .’:
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