Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (69 page)

Others were less fortunate. André heard from Berling that the communications group sent by Monter had landed and that they were being investigated by the counterintelligence department. After eight days’ agonizing delay, ‘Poppy’ and his radio were sent to the First Army’s Communications Department, and for the rest of the month was in daily contact with Monter, but to no great effect. He then made his way to his mother’s house, where he was arrested by the NKVD. By early October, he was on his way to the Gulag.
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Most of his companions were drafted into the Berling Army, before they too fell foul of the NKVD. Capt. Kalugin was shot.
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Since the Soviets felt no confidence in the insurgents sent to meet them, they determined to send a mission of their own to find out about the insurgents. On the night of 21/22 September, Capt. Ivan Andreievitch Kolos was dropped into the City Centre by parachute. He was accompanied by a radio operator. Unfortunately, his orders were to make for the HQ of the People’s Army (AL) and not for Gen. Boor. Still worse, his
operator had injured himself when he hit a balcony on the way down, and his radio set may also have been damaged. Nonetheless, with some delay, the two Russians reached their destination and set to work. Their orders were to locate the main German positions in Warsaw, to discover the whereabouts of British intelligence, and to establish the intentions of the Rising’s leadership. Despite the obvious urgency, they had no authority to negotiate.

To put it mildly, Kolos was poorly prepared. When he reached AL headquarters, he was surprised to find that the People’s Army had practically no soldiers. He explained this to himself by concluding that the main body of the People’s Army must have been cut off elsewhere in the city. (There was, in fact, no main body.) When introduced to the commander of the combined AL, KB, and PAL
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forces, Col. S., he imagined that he was talking to Gen. S., the Commanderin-Chief, who was in London. When introduced to a Capt. ‘Coracle’, who spoke fluent Russian and who presented himself as Gen. Boor’s adjutant, he was not to know that the only two Home Army officers to use the pseudonym Coracle were long since dead.

The messages sent back by Kolos to his superiors betray his disorientation:

If von dem Bach had ever been given five whole divisions, he would have been totally amazed.

If British intelligence had ever possessed a centre in insurgent Warsaw, MI6 would have been very interested to learn more.

During an interview filmed fifty years later, Kolos described his preparation for the mission. The NKVD had given him papers with a Polish-sounding name – Kolosovski – and had told him that if he fell into the hands of the Home Army he would be shot. Far from preparing him to assist an Allied force in distress, they had given him the unmistakable
impression that he was entering enemy territory. No wonder he was totally at sea. He was taken to see the Home Army command on two occasions, on the 21st and on the 22nd; and he later reported meeting Boor. He would also complain about the ‘English intelligence agents’ whom he perceived to be milling around in Boor’s entourage. His only substantive question was to ask the Rising’s leaders how, in their view, the Soviet Army could best capture Warsaw. Monter and Bear Cub responded with the outline of a pincer movement to north and south, which, completely unknown to them, was uncannily similar to the plan which Rokossovsky and Zhukov had submitted to Stalin on 8 August. Since at the time, Berling’s limited operations were already disintegrating, the question was more than a trifle surreal. [
AMAZON
, p. 390]

The net result of all this was diplomatic disarray. When the British and American Ambassadors visited Stalin yet again on 23 September, pleading once more for help for the Rising, all purposes were crossed. Stalin, presumably, had not yet received any coherent information from Warsaw via Kolos and the NKVD. If he had, he would have been highly embarrassed. He had been belittling the insurgents for nearly two months, saying that they were incapable of serious resistance, and now his own man on the spot was reporting that they had been holding their own against five German divisions. He would also have learned, if he did not already know, that the Communist forces in Warsaw were not very impressive and were not in charge. So when the ambassadors enquired whether Gen. Boor’s messages to Marshal Rokossovsky had been passed on, he began to bluster. ‘No one can find this General Boor’, he replied unhelpfully. ‘We don’t know where he is. He must have departed from Warsaw.’ This was a new variant of an old syndrome: ‘General! What general?’ One is tempted to talk of wilful ignorance or bad faith or both. But behind it stood an appalling failure of political and military intelligence.

For the time being, a detailed analysis of Stalin’s thoughts about the Warsaw Rising remains beyond the historian’s reach. It is not possible to judge, for example, whether his decision to shun the insurgents in mid-August was absolute and final, or whether it was open to modification. One could argue that he was using the Rising as a bargaining chip and that in late September he was still waiting for movement on the key political issues – namely the frontier and the composition of the post-war Government – which he had expected to be settled long since. If so, one would be arguing from guesswork.
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All that can be said with certainty is that there had still been no movement on the key Polish–Soviet issues and that there was still no hint of the Kremlin changing its stance. The Polish Communists were ever more hostile. On 30 September, the Chairman of the Lublin Committee held a press conference in Moscow. ‘General Boor’, he said, ‘is a war criminal. If he fell into our hands, we would put him on trial.’
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A valuable source of information regarding Soviet attitudes lies in a group of intelligence reports sent from Praga to Moscow in late September. Three reports entitled ‘The Position in Warsaw’ were written on 15, 22, and 25 September. Their author, a member of the War Council of the First Byelorussian Front, was Lt.Gen. T. Telegin. Their recipient was the Chief of the Red Army’s Political Directorate, Col.Gen. Comrade A. S. Shcherbakov, who forwarded them to Stalin.
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The military sections of the reports describe the layout of the insurgent strongholds, the battles of the 1st (Polish) Army on the Cherniakov bridgehead, the evacuation of the bridgehead, and the sorties flown by the Soviet air force. As always, they are meticulous in their lists of types and numbers of weapons and units involved; and they do not conceal the fact that the Home Army provided the principal insurgent force fighting alongside Berling’s men.

The political sections of the report, in contrast, make no attempt to present an accurate or objective picture. Telegin’s informants are either members of the People’s Army or Home Army prisoners under
interrogation; and they are not given to saying anything about the Rising’s leadership that is vaguely complimentary. The only two political groupings mentioned are the ‘Londoners’ and the ‘supporters of Lublin’. In analysing insurgent opinions regarding the prospects of surrender, three groups are mentioned – an unnamed company of capitulationists; the Londoners, who wish to fight on; and the People’s Army, whose views are not defined. Gen. Boor is obviously up to no good. He burdens the People’s Army with the most dangerous assignments, and he gives no help to those that cross the river. A nineteen-year-old prisoner is quoted as saying that the Home Army was supposed to clear out the Germans from Warsaw and, after that, from Poland as a whole; but since these expectations were obviously false, ‘discontent’ and ‘desertion’ were rife. In a vicious comment about Radoslav, Telegin tells his superiors that the senior AK commander on the bridgehead first fired on the Polish Army then went over to the Germans. He also passes on what he takes to be the Home Army view, namely that the Soviet Army is feeble and ‘that England alone can liberate Poland’.
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As one would expect, Telegin was intensely interested in the mission of the American Flying Fortresses. He watched them closely, and calculated that of the 1,000 containers dropped, 21 reached the insurgents, 19 fell into the Soviet lines, and 960 were collected by the Germans. In one case, where the parachute and its load landed 40km (twenty-five miles) east of Warsaw, he made a precise inventory of the contents:

a mine thrower with 20 mines; 2 machine-guns with ammunition, 10 automatic rifles + 3 revolvers with ammunition, 4 grenades, a string of ‘Bickford’ fuses, and a large food package containing 100 cans of preserves and 6 boxes of biscuits, hard-tack and chocolate. (The weapons were damaged on landing)
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The really interesting thing though, was Telegin’s conclusion. He did not tell Moscow that the Americans were hopeless bunglers or that their mission had gone disastrously wrong. He told Moscow baldly that ‘the English and American airforce is not aiding the insurgents, it is supplying the Germans’.
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When evaluating bourgeois capitalists and imperialists, the Soviet reflex was to impugn their motives in the worst possible way and to draw themselves towards an assessment that bore no relation to reality.

Telegin’s third report carried an interesting quotation purportedly taken from the Home Army’s
Bulletin
nr. 43 of 18 September. An article in
the
Bulletin
had apparently been explaining to its readers what the Berling Army actually was: