World War II Behind Closed Doors (45 page)

Zbigniew's unit was part of a larger group ordered to attack a German military barracks. Lacking heavier weaponry, they were only armed with pistols, rifles and hand grenades. And as they prepared to fight the Germans, one of Zbigniew's closest friends, a young man called Zazek who was studying electrical engineering, stood alongside him. Zbigniew remembers how he had encouraged his friend to take part in the battle: ‘The recruitment of the Home Army was based on trust, absolute trust – you could
introduce someone to the army only if you knew them very well. This was my close friend, but he was not interested in the underground struggle. He was a pupil at the university and he was in love with a girl and he wanted to become a scientist. And in 1943, during a walk we took together, I told him something – and I regret it to this day. I was learning English from books at the time, and I borrowed a book about the First World War and there was [a picture of] a typical English living room, and there was a staff sergeant from the First World War sitting at the fireplace and he held a child on his lap and his child was asking: “Father, tell me what you did during the war?” And I told Zazek, “Look, the war will be over, your son or daughter will ask what you did, you'll say, ‘Nothing – I just studied'. And you'll regret it until the very end of your days”. So this was moral blackmail. [As a result] he said yes, and joined the Home Army’.

However, on 1 August, because there were not enough weapons to arm each of the Home Army volunteers, Zazek wasn't selected to take part in the attack. As the unit was about to leave on its mission, Zbigniew saw his friend watching from the window. ‘Ah!’ he shouted up. ‘You want to get out of it again!’ Stung by this remark, Zazek went to the local Home Army commander and begged for two hand grenades so that he could participate. Five minutes later, Zazek was alongside Zbigniew when the attack began. ‘He walked one step in front of me’, says Zbigniew, ‘and a series of bullets from a machine gun hit him in the chest and he fell on his back holding those two hand grenades…. The feeling that you see somebody alive – you're talking to a handsome, beautiful boy – and [moments later] he's lying there like this! And the worst thing was that I got him into it!’

It was a devastating introduction to the realities of battle for Zbigniew. As for Zazek's family, they never recovered from the loss of their son. After the war, when Zbigniew visited them, he saw in their apartment a ‘big photograph’ of his friend, draped in black and garlanded with flowers. His mother looked at Zbigniew and asked: ‘Why did he die? Why didn't you die?’ ‘These’, says Zbigniew, ‘are the most difficult things’.

Within the first few days of the rising, and despite their lack of heavy weapons, the Home Army managed to take control of a number of key districts of Warsaw, in particular the narrow streets of the old town in the centre of the city. However, on the east bank of the river Vistula the rising was much less successful, since this was the area of greatest German troop concentration. The Home Army knew that it would only be a matter of a few days before the Germans counter-attacked in strength. Moreover, the Polish fighters held only isolated pockets of the city and it was already proving hard to establish proper communications between them. What they needed now was what they had needed all along – help from outside.

The head of the Polish government in exile knew better than most that the Warsaw Uprising could not succeed without the practical assistance of the Allies. But Mikołajczyk had decided that it was best to approve the insurrection first and then – effectively as a fait accompli – push for cooperation. He ought, perhaps, to have known beforehand that this was not a strategy calculated to work on the predilections of Joseph Stalin.

Mikołajczyk, who had been active in the Peasants' Party in Poland since the 1920s and was still only forty-three, had travelled to Moscow to meet Stalin after authorizing the uprising but arrived on 30 July before it had been launched. For him, time was of the essence. He urgently needed to obtain an agreement from Stalin that the Red Army would help the insurgents in Warsaw. Unfortunately, both for Mikołajczyk personally and for the Home Army generally, Stalin did not see it that way at all. To begin with, as we have seen, the Soviets did not recognize the government in exile and were trying to break the power of the Home Army in the sections of Poland that the Red Army had liberated so far. And although Stalin realized that it would be seen as offensive to the British and Americans to refuse to meet the London Poles, he knew that he was under no obligation to be accommodating when he did see them.

The Poles were treated with great rudeness from the moment of their arrival – they were snubbed at the airport, and then told
that Stalin was ‘too busy’ to see them. When Molotov met them on 31 July he simply said: ‘Why have you come?’ and suggested that they meet with the Lublin Poles – Stalin's tame Polish government – instead. They didn't manage to get an audience with the Soviet leader until the evening of 3 August, by which time, of course, the rising was already in progress and lightly armed Poles were dying on the streets of Warsaw, desperately in need of help.

The day before the meeting with Stalin, Churchill had given a resolutely upbeat assessment of the situation in a speech in the House of Commons. He talked of having done ‘our best’ to get Stalin to receive the Polish Prime Minister, pointing out that the ‘Russian Armies…bring the liberation of Poland in their hands’ while ‘we have several gallant Polish divisions fighting the Germans in our Armies’. Now, he said, ‘Let them come together’.
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But a necessary precondition of this togetherness, he went on to say, was the old proviso that ‘there should be a Poland friendly to Russia’. Given the immensity of the gulf between the Polish government in exile, who thought the Lublin Poles were stooges, and Stalin, who had asserted that the London Poles had collaborated with the Nazis, Churchill's statement in the House of Commons was wishful thinking of the most momentous kind.

The detailed minutes
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of the meeting between Mikołajczyk and other representatives of the Polish government in exile on the one side and Stalin and Molotov on the other make for insightful – if painful – reading. Almost certainly, given the entrenched positions of each of the parties present and the massive disparity in real power, it was destined to be a failure. But what is remarkable is the way in which Mikołajczyk seems to have misjudged the reality of the situation. He knew that, as he talked to Stalin in the Kremlin, the fate of millions of people in Warsaw rested on the result. Yet in his initial long and somewhat ponderous statement he mentioned a four-point ‘programme’ that he wished to discuss with the Soviet leader – and the Warsaw Uprising was only listed as point 4, after such matters as ‘the widening of the scope of the Polish-Soviet Agreement of 1941’ to relate to the administration of the liberated Polish territories. And even when the Warsaw
Uprising was mentioned, it was in the context of a desire to carry out elections in Poland based on ‘universal suffrage’. At the end Mikołajczyk did say directly to Stalin: ‘I now have to ask you to order help to be given to our units fighting in Warsaw’, but the force of the appeal had been blunted by all the preceding verbiage.

Stalin replied: ‘I shall give the necessary orders’. (Those who were familiar with Stalin would have noted the presence of the word ‘necessary’ – after all, what constituted a ‘necessary’ order in these circumstances would be a matter of individual interpretation.) He then remarked that he had noticed the absence in Mikołajczyk's remarks of any reference to the Committee of National Liberation – the Lublin Poles – with whom the Soviets had already concluded an agreement. ‘Could you not’, asked Stalin, ‘possibly realize the importance of this fact?’

Mikołajczyk's reply was lengthy and emotional, including the plea that: ‘The four main Polish political parties which are represented in this government [the London Poles] and have for five years carried on the struggle against Germany should have a say in the matter’. But all this was wasted on Stalin, who, when Mikołajczyk had concluded, coldly asked: ‘Have you finished?’

Stalin then said that he had agreed to meet the Poles, at the instigation of Churchill, in order to discuss a ‘union’ with the Lublin Poles. Mikołajczyk answered with the extraordinary request that he be allowed ‘to go to Warsaw’. It took Stalin to remind him: ‘The Germans are there’.

Stalin and Mikołajczyk essentially then restated their respective positions. Stalin wanted the London Poles to deal with the Lublin Poles, and Mikołajczyk reiterated that, although he was willing to cooperate, the Lublin Poles ‘represent but a very small section of Polish opinion’.

The two sides may have been talking to each other, but there was certainly no meeting of minds. Stalin felt he could speak progressively more frankly, openly revealing his scorn for the Polish Home Army: ‘What is an army without artillery, tanks and an air force? They are even short of rifles. In modern warfare such an army is of little use. They are small partisan units, not a regular
army. I was told that the Polish government had ordered these units to drive the Germans out of Warsaw. I wonder how they could possibly do this – their forces are not up to that task. As a matter of fact these people do not fight against the Germans, but only hide in woods, being unable to do anything else’.

Just over an hour into the meeting, Stalin showed his contempt for the Poles by taking a phone call from one of his colleagues. When he had finished, he reiterated his position that what the Soviets faced was the danger that ‘the Poles quarrel amongst themselves’, adding ominously that: ‘We shall never allow this’.

Stalin was, of course, deliberately misrepresenting events – as the Poles in the room with him knew very well. Mikołajczyk had stated the truth. There was no comparison in terms of political experience or political popularity between the representatives of the Polish government in exile and the group that the Soviets had sanctioned in Lublin. Stalin was not comparing like with like. But the Soviet leader never had any problem with basing an argument on a falsehood and then forcefully sticking to it. It was brutal politics based on enormous military power – and immensely effective. Indeed, so intransigent was Stalin on the question of the need for the London Poles to negotiate with the Lublin Poles that the conversation reached a point where the minute-taker felt compelled to write: ‘There is a general feeling that the discussion has become futile…’.

Next, Mikołajczyk tried to reason with Stalin on the question of the position of the eastern border of Poland after the war. But Stalin, who had proved firm on this question in the face of Roosevelt and Churchill, was certainly not going to alter his position on the modified Curzon Line now. Flying on a wave of self-righteousness, he remarked portentously that: ‘I am too old to act against my conscience’.

Then, once again, Stalin interrupted the meeting to take a phone call. Shortly afterwards he asked, clearly wanting to end the meeting, if the Poles had ‘any other subjects to discuss with me’? Mikołajczyk said he hadn't, ‘apart from these two major issues concerning Polish-Soviet relations and the frontiers’. And so the meeting ended just before midnight.

It had been a remarkable encounter. The relatively inexperienced Mikołajczyk had been humiliated by Stalin, but he himself had been partly to blame. Instead of focusing the meeting on the one practical measure that was needed at that moment – support for the Warsaw Uprising – he tried both to pretend he was dealing with an equal, one political leader talking to another, and to use this encounter to discuss matters that he already knew from a briefing from the British ambassador to Moscow were anathema to the Soviets.

In sharp contrast to Stalin's reticence to help the Poles, Churchill reacted quickly to the plight of the inhabitants of Warsaw. Their fight in the streets and parks of the city was precisely the sort of romantic endeavour that would appeal to him. On 4 August, the day after Stalin had met the Polish delegation in Moscow, Churchill sent a cable to the Soviet leader saying that: ‘At the urgent request of the Polish underground army, we are dropping, subject to weather, about 60 tons of equipment and ammunition into the south-western quarter of the city, where, it is said, a Polish revolt against the Germans is in fierce struggle. They also say that they appeal for Russian aid, which seems very near. They are being attacked by one and a half German divisions. This may be of help to your operations’.
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Tadeusz Roman
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was one of the Polish RAF pilots who tried to help the insurgents in Warsaw. Twenty-five years old, he had served time in a Soviet prison after being caught trying to flee from eastern Poland. After the armistice of 1941 he had made his way west and, always a keen flyer, joined RAF Bomber Command. He was now based at Brindisi in southern Italy as part of the Polish Flight. For him it was a matter of honour – and familial love – to help: ‘They were my friends there [in Warsaw]. My brother was there [in Poland] in the underground army – he could have been [though he wasn't] in Warsaw. Nobody refused [to help], not a single person’.

It was a long and dangerous flight from southern Italy to Warsaw – one of the longest and most dangerous of the war, taking between ten and eleven hours. Starting on 4 August, flights left both Bari and Brindisi, with the airmen of the 1568th Polish Flight
initially dominating the operation. Between then and the end of September more than two hundred flights were made – dropping a total of more than 100 tons of supplies.
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Around 80 Polish airmen lost their lives in the operation, together with more than one hundred other Allied flyers – many of them South African.

The danger for the bombers was not just the air defences around Warsaw but the lengthy and tortuous route over German-occupied territory on the way to the Polish capital and back again. ‘It was a long trip’, says Tadeusz Roman, ‘and the Germans knew we were coming’. Tadeusz's own luck ran out early in the morning of 28 August. Just after he and his comrades had dropped their supplies over Warsaw – flying low, at around 2000 feet – and as they began the journey back, anti-aircraft fire smashed into one of their engines. They kept going, but near Kraków they were hit again. Even so, Tadeusz and his crew managed to coax the plane back to base in Italy, crash-landing on the airport perimeter – with just five minutes' fuel left in the tanks. ‘I went on my knees’, says Tadeusz, ‘and kissed the mother soil. You know our Pope [John Paul II], when he was going to various [places] always kissed it [the ground]. I said he took this from me!’ For his skill and bravery in piloting the damaged plane home, Tadeusz Roman was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. The other three planes that accompanied him on the mission to Warsaw that night never returned.