Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (12 page)

Even so, Operation Barbarossa brought significant benefits to the beleaguered First Ally. With Hitler and Stalin in cahoots, the First Ally had been effectively marginalized; but with Hitler and Stalin at war, she became an important player. As the Wehrmacht pressed on towards Moscow, Stalin desperately needed help. The result was a Soviet–Polish treaty signed on 30 July, and a corresponding military agreement. In essence, the USSR agreed to annul the German–Soviet treaties of 1939, to
restore diplomatic relations, and to permit the formation of an army drawn from the millions of the First Ally’s subjects who were being held as Soviet prisoners. For its part, the First Ally agreed to cooperate with the USSR in the prosecution of the war. The British were delighted. For the first time in the war, they had
two
eastern allies.
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The military agreement followed on 14 August. It stated that the First Ally’s new army should be organized on Soviet soil, that it would owe allegiance to the exiled Government in London, and that it would operate on the Eastern Front under Soviet command. The army’s commander was to be appointed by the exiled Government, but with Soviet approval.

Unfortunately, the frontier question was left in a state of considerable inprecision. Despite the desperate plight of the Soviets, no one on their side would accept the formula that the First Ally’s eastern frontiers should return to pre-war positions. A clause in the treaty of 30 July seemed to point in that direction. The Soviet Government recognized that ‘the Soviet–German treaties of 1939 relative to territorial changes . . . have lost their validity.’ The British Foreign Office confirmed in a note that it did not recognize any territorial changes after August 1939. Yet that same day, when pressed in Parliament, the Foreign Secretary replied that the note ‘does not involve any guarantee of frontiers by HMG.’ In the midst of the double negatives and the contorted diplomatic verbiage, nothing had been properly agreed.

On 11 December 1941, in an act of supreme folly, Hitler announced in the Reichstag that Germany had declared war on the USA. He was reacting to the news from Pearl Harbor. At the time, having already caught sight of the gleaming spires of the Kremlin, a German
panzer
group was fighting on the outskirts of Moscow. Hitler was counting on the chance that the critical phase of the European war would be finished before the Americans could intervene effectively.

The creation of the Grand Alliance inevitably handed precedence to the dealings of the ‘Big Three’. On the other hand, if the Red Army could avoid defeat, and if Britain could keep the Atlantic lines of communication open, there was now a real chance of constructing a winning coalition. And, as the First Ally well knew, the comprehensive defeat of Germany, which now occupied all parts of her territory, was the
sine qua non
for the restoration of the country’s independence.

What is more, the Americans, unlike the British, could be expected to
keep the Soviet Union’s expansionist ambitions in check. They appeared to be resolutely opposed, as their spokesmen repeatedly stated, to ‘all forms of expansion by conquest.’ They were ruled by a Democratic president, whose party was specially sensitive to a large block of immigrant voters with close ethnic ties to the First Ally. Most importantly, since they produced a large part of the war material on which Soviet survival depended, they possessed the most powerful instrument for ensuring Stalin’s good conduct.

From the psychological point of view, however, the entry of the Americans recoloured the emotional climate of the Alliance. They had none of the cynical, world-weary reserve of the British imperialists, and they had an infectious, childlike desire to see the Alliance as one great happy family. Churchill, the old anti-Bolshevik, was well aware that he had been obliged to make ‘a pact with the Devil’. The British socialists, whose influence was growing, knew all about the incompatibility of communism and democracy. But few Americans shared such inhibitions. They wanted something more than a workmanlike partnership to see the war through. They wanted a moral crusade, the victory of Good over Evil. It was they who introduced the dominant mood, in which the Soviet dictator became ‘Uncle Joe’, in which, in discussing the Soviet Union, one talked only of the Red Army’s heroism, in which ‘the Russians’ could be seen as ‘freedom-loving democrats’, and in which events before 1941 were not mentioned. Indeed, since the Americans had played no part in the first stage of the war, they were genuinely uninterested in events prior to their involvement. Nothing could have suited Stalin better.

In this new diplomatic configuration, the First Ally’s Premier left London to visit both Stalin and Roosevelt. From Stalin, he obtained final details for organizing the army in Russia. But he did not obtain any credible information about his 25,000 missing officers, whom Stalin suggested might have fled to Manchuria. From Roosevelt, he received a warm welcome, and the prospect of benefiting, via Britain, from Lend-Lease. But he did not receive a separate treaty of alliance. The USA was keeping its formal commitments to a minimum.

1942 was the year in which the Grand Alliance mobilized the means of its survival. The German–Soviet War hung in the balance. The Wehrmacht had been repulsed from the gates of Moscow and had still not captured Leningrad. But in a vast summer offensive in the south, it set off for the
River Volga and the oilfields of the Caucasus. The Western powers were in no state to open a second front. The naval war in the Atlantic between the convoys and the U-boats was at its height. The ‘Western Desert’ in North Africa was the only place where the Allies were capable of mounting an offensive.

The fighting in the Western Desert took place over enormous distances but with tiny forces. The Italian army had been greatly strengthened by the arrival of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. It faced the British Eighth Army based in Egypt. Some violent swings of fortune that brought Rommel over Egypt’s borders were terminated by the second Battle of El Alamein in October, when Lt.Gen. Montgomery broke down Rommel’s guard and mounted a victorious drive all the way to Tripoli. By that time, the Americans had landed in Morocco and a second British force was in Algeria. The Afrika Korps was trapped between Allied armies advancing from east and west. It surrendered in Tunis on 13 May 1943. The North African Campaign was dismissed by some as a peripheral sideshow. But it gave the beleagured Allies a great boost of morale. Churchill called it ‘the end of the beginning’.

Meanwhile, the First Ally was meeting endless organizational difficulties in Russia. Its army there, which was supposed to possess 96,000 men, received rations for only 44,000. The NKVD was obstructing recruitment, especially of Jewish, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian nationals. Suitable armaments were not forthcoming, and comradely relations were soured. In due course, the commander, Gen. Anders, moved his troops from the Volga to Uzbekistan. In April 1942, convinced that the Soviets would not respect their obligations, he evacuated en masse to Persia and then in August to Palestine, where they were assigned by the British to the reserves of the Eighth Army.

Tens of thousands of civilians accompanied the evacuation of the Anders Army. Most of them were former deportees, victims of the Gulag or of forced labour. They were on the point of death from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. They included some 40,000 ragged orphans. Their first-hand knowledge of Soviet realities conflicted starkly with the rosy Anglo-American picture of Uncle Joe’s heroic paradise.
²¹
They were told in no uncertain terms to keep their mouths shut.

The prospect of a Polish army making for Palestine reminded politicians of the Jewish issue. In January 1942, Gen. Sikorski told Eden of his hopes that the end of the war would see large numbers of Polish Jews emigrating to Palestine. The idea was not well received. The British were
still aiming to keep Palestine as a predominantly Arab country. A Foreign Office minute expressed the hope that as many pre-war Polish Jews as possible would be confined in the USSR ‘where Zionism is not encouraged’.
²²

1943 opened with a second interAllied Conference, held in January at Casablanca under the codename of Symbol. Roosevelt and Churchill discussed grand strategy. Stalin, though invited, was unable to attend. Three capital decisions were taken. With virtually no discussion, the Grand Alliance adopted the policy of unconditional surrender. A colossal nonstop bombing offensive was to be mounted against Germany from the UK. And in place of a Second Front in France, the Western Allies were to transfer their forces from North Africa to Italy. Each decision had far-reaching implications.

The prospect of fighting on until Germany surrendered unconditionally appeared to suit the First Ally’s interest. It seemed to eliminate the possibility of separate settlements in Western and Eastern Europe, and it increased the likelihood that the Western powers would be able to prevent unilateral Soviet initiatives. It greatly strengthened the will of the First Ally’s exiled Government and its forces to continue their lonely struggle.

The Allied bombing offensive was controversial at the time and has caused much dissension among historians. But its destructive might is not in doubt. It culminated in the destruction of Dresden in February 1945. Once again, the contribution of the First Ally’s aircrews, as in the Battle of Britain, was impressive.

The prospect of a campaign in Italy gave a sense of purpose to the Anders Army in Palestine. Training began immediately to reform as the 2nd Polish Corps and to join the ‘Desert Rats’ of the Eighth Army, who now had the Eternal City in their sights. For a predominantly Catholic formation, this was no mean goal. On the other hand, by postponing the major landings of the Western powers in France, it gave Stalin more time to consider his priorities.

Later in 1943, Allied fortunes were transformed by the stupendous Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk. Stalingrad, where the Germans lost 250,000 men, ended in the surrender of von Paulus’s Sixth Army.
²³
It was the psychological turning point. Kursk, which is generally rated as the biggest armoured battle in history, destroyed the Germans’ ability to
mount another major offensive. Henceforth, the Red Army never lost the initiative, and moved steadily westwards on the long road to Berlin. The Soviet Union’s prestige rose astronomically. Criticism of Stalin looked churlish.

Political developments were dominated by the inescapable geographical fact that in marching from Russia to Germany, the Red Army would have to cross the country in between where the war had originally started. So the problem of the First Ally re-emerged. Stalin took several relevant steps. He had already permitted the recreation of a Polish Communist movement under a new name. He was signalling to the comrades of the Communist camp that his early policy of wiping the First Ally from the map had been reversed. He then did two things. Firstly, he set up a clutch of political and military bodies in Moscow which remained under Soviet control but which could form the basis of a surrogate post-war administration. Secondly, on 25 April 1943, he broke off diplomatic relations with the exiled Government. In retrospect, one can see that he was sounding out the limits of Western tolerance.

Berlin worked tirelessly to deepen this rift in the Allied camp. Among other things, it publicized the discovery of a mass grave, near Smolensk in Russia, containing the corpses of 4,500 of the First Ally’s missing officers, and it assembled an International Committee of Enquiry, which declared the ‘Katyn Forest Massacre’ a Soviet crime. The First Ally appealed to the International Red Cross, thereby providing the pretext for the break in diplomatic relations with Moscow that ensued. In Allied circles, the appeal was widely thought to be ‘anti-Soviet’. As historians later confirmed, the British and American Governments were well enough informed that on this occasion the Nazis had no need to lie. Yet they attributed the massacre to the Nazis all the same.
²⁴

The First Ally was further shaken on 4 July 1943, when its Premier and Commanderin-Chief was killed in an air crash off Gibraltar. The dead man had cooperated loyally with Stalin, was respected by Churchill, and was liked by Roosevelt. By universal consent, he was a very decent and flexible person to deal with. His removal worked only in the interest of those who wanted to disrupt the Alliance. Several candidates were suspected of murder.
²⁵

The most immediate effect of the Gibraltar catastrophe, however, lay in the necessary reconstitution of the exiled Government. Amidst considerable in-fighting, the post of Premier was separated from that of Commanderin-Chief. The Premiership fell to the leader of the exiled Peasant
Party, a member of the pre-war opposition, and sometime activist in the Poznan Rising against Germany, Stanislas M. The chief military post went to Gen. Casimir S., a man of a different political orientation, who had been a personal friend of the ‘Great Marshal’ and one of the masterminds of the victory in 1920. The new Premier was well viewed by his British allies. The new Commanderin-Chief, though a down-to-earth realist, was viewed less enthusiastically.
²⁶

In November 1943, the ‘Big Three’ met face to face for the first time. Stalin was in buoyant mood. Roosevelt and Churchill, having failed to mount a second front in Europe for the second year running, were eager to make concessions. Churchill took the initiative in proposing that the Nazi–Soviet Peace Boundary of 1939, now misleadingly renamed the ‘Curzon Line’, could stand as the basis for further discussions about the Soviet Union’s post-war western frontier. He agreed with Stalin that the First Ally should be compensated by an unspecified slice of German territory in the west. Roosevelt put a further gloss on proceedings during a subsequent, private encounter with Stalin. But they all discussed the matter in secret, in the absence of any representative from the First Ally, and they kept the details secret.

The Italian Campaign opened in July 1943 when Allied forces landed in Sicily. The first stage was rapidly achieved. But the task of forging a path up the mountainous spine of Italy reduced progress to a crawl. Mussolini’s fascist state collapsed. But the Germans conducted a brilliant fighting retreat. The 972km (604 miles) from Syracusa to Rome was to take 332 days. The largest single obstacle was encountered at the heavily fortified hill of Monte Cassino, which barred the road to Rome for the first five months of 1944.