Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (9 page)

The Allied camp evolved in several distinct stages. To begin with, in 1939, it consisted of just three states – France, the United Kingdom, and Poland. It did not include either Lithuania, whose port of Klaipeda (Memel) was seized by Germany on 23 March 1939, or Albania, which had been invaded and annexed by fascist Italy in April 1939, or indeed Finland, which was attacked by the Soviet Union in November. For Lithuania was coerced by Germany into the formal acceptance of its loss. The Italian annexation of Albania was recognized by France and Britain in a dubious diplomatic manoeuvre reminiscent of the recent Munich Agreement. And the Finno-Soviet conflict was brought to an uneasy close before any other states intervened. By Allied calculations, therefore, no significant breach of the peace occurred in Europe in 1939 other than the German assault on Poland in September. It was the Polish Crisis which brought the Allied coalition into being and gave it its first war aim. Poland had been allied to France since 1921, and to Britain by the Treaty of Mutual Assistance signed on 25 August 1939. Both France and Britain had publicly guaranteed Poland’s independence on 31 March. So when the Wehrmacht poured over the Polish frontier at dawn on 1 September, the Allies possessed a clear
casus belli
.

After the fall of Poland in 1939 and the fall of France in 1940, the Allied camp is often said to have been reduced to the grand total of one, namely
Britain. This is hardly correct even if one discounts the great support of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the involvement of India, and the growing band of exiled Governments, some of them with significant military contingents at their disposal. For the United States was not exactly neutral. Whilst officially pursuing a policy of non-belligerency, President Roosevelt embarked on a systematic programme of turning his country into ‘the great arsenal of democracy’. Energetic efforts were made to strengthen America’s military establishment, to expand industrial production, and to lay down a ‘two-ocean navy’. Huge supplies and subsidies were shipped to Britain under the principle of Lend-Lease. Both the Destroyers for Bases deal and the Atlantic Charter were in place well before the USA itself took to arms.

1941 saw the Allied coalition transformed by three capital events. On 22 June, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, thereby changing Stalin from Hitler’s friend to Hitler’s mortal foe. On 7 December, Japan bombed the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, thereby destroying American isolationism at one blow. Four days later, in a gesture of encouragement to its Japanese partner, Germany declared war on the USA. From then on, ‘the Grand Alliance’ was in place.

In the last phase of the war, as victory drew ever closer, any number of countries from Iraq to Liberia joined the Allied ranks. Former German allies such as Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Finland were forced to change sides. Former neutrals such as Turkey abandoned their neutrality. Finally, on 1 March 1945, Saudi Arabia boldly declared war on both Germany and Japan.

Britain’s role in this changing constellation was absolutely crucial, though not necessarily in the ways that many Britons imagined. Britain did not ‘win the war’. But it did fight on the winning side and it supplied the third largest group of military forces within the Allied camp. Above all, it supplied the main strand of continuity in the Allied cause. It was the only one of the Allied principals to wage war against Germany almost from the start and right to the end. It held the coalition together after France had fallen by the wayside and until the Soviets and the Americans joined in. Thereafter, it was the great offshore ‘aircraft carrier’ that gave the Americans their foothold in Europe and which provided the springboard for the D-Day landings. Most importantly, it provided the heart-warming
voice of defiance, which, from a position of near hopelessness, promised a triumphal outcome even in the darkest hours.

From the military point of view, Britain’s role was strictly limited. For the British war machine was strangely unbalanced. On the one hand, in the Royal Navy and the RAF, the United Kingdom possessed a world-class system of defence forces that could effectively prevent any enemy from invading its island base. On the other hand, despite the largest empire on the globe, it maintained land forces of such modest proportions that they were incapable of independent action in Continental warfare. In 1939, the trained reserves of the British army were smaller than Czechoslovakia’s. What is more, British finances hung on a thread. As the appeasers of the 1930s had correctly calculated, a stark choice loomed between saving the Empire or fighting a European war. If Britain were to involve itself in a major conflict, there was little chance of success without major financial assistance from the only source then available – the USA. In which case, willy-nilly, even a victorious Britain would end up as an American dependant.

As in 1914, HMG (His Majesty’s Government) in 1939 could not begin to contemplate war against Germany without a principal ally in the West and a principal ally in the East, plus, ideally, a rich backer. Further, HMG’s preferences were the same as they had been for thirty years – for France, for ‘Russia’, and for the USA. Britain was bound to France by the terms of the Treaty of Locarno (signed in 1925). She was not yet bound to the Soviet Union. Indeed, public opinion had spent more than a dozen years in revulsion against Bolshevik misdeeds. But in the 1930s, as the Nazi threat grew, the old Russophile sympathies revived. The British Left, oblivious to the criminal realities of Stalinism, was increasingly seduced by the charms of anti-fascism and increasingly advocated an Anglo-Soviet rapprochement. The British Right, oblivious to the hypocrisy of consorting with a revolutionary dictator, was driven by
Realpolitik
. Writing on 4 February 1936, Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the
Daily Express
and chief crusader of the British Empire, saw nothing wrong in advocating friendship with Moscow:

In international affairs, the new development seems to be the big part Russia is playing in the world. The Russians have become very respectable. They wear high hats at the funeral of George V, and they please the high Tory newspapers. The truth is that, if we are to
continue to take part in the European game, we need Russia. We are united by a fear of Germany.
³

The trouble with Britain’s preferred scenario was that none of the chosen pieces would fall into place. France, though far stronger than Britain in land forces, did not seem to possess the political will to take international initiatives. During the Munich Crisis of September 1938, the Czechoslovaks were allied to France, not Britain. But it was the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who was obliged to take the lead. Unknown to the outside world, the Soviet Union was engaged in a series of political purges and mass murders whose scale at the time was unimagined and whose paralysing effects, not least among the decimated military, rendered any major foreign involvement impossible. In 1939, the Soviet Census Office lasted just long enough (before the censors were themselves purged) to report in
Izvestia
that 17 million people had disappeared during the previous decade. The Red Army, at war in Mongolia and hard pressed by the Japanese, was only saved at the last minute by the brilliance of a young general called Zhukov, who had been rapidly promoted to replace his purged superiors. All thought of Soviet action in Europe was unrealistic until a truce could be arranged on the Mongolian front. This did not happen until after 15 September. As for the United States, though recovering from the Depression, she was still gripped by an extreme form of isolationism, which inspired Congress to block any overt intervention in Europe. In short, the Polish Crisis crept up on a continent in which the old Allied coalition could not be reconstructed. This is exactly the reason why Hitler could calculate quite correctly that, given Stalin’s help, he could destroy Poland at very low cost.

The last months of peace, therefore, were filled with a great deal of diplomatic manoeuvring and a great deal of bluff. Britain’s guarantee of Poland, issued on 31 March, was not supported by any credible threat of enforcement. It bound Britain to protect Poland’s ‘independence’ and to offer ‘all support in her power’. It led to some desultory staff talks between British, French, and Polish officers who agreed, somewhat disingenuously, that a German attack on Poland should be answered by a French attack on Germany. Gen. Gamelin promised to aid the Poles with ‘the bulk of our forces’. But no detailed plans were laid.
⁴

On 6 April 1939, the guarantee became reciprocal. During the Polish Foreign Minister’s visit to London, Poland undertook to defend Britain’s independence, if threatened, just as Britain had agreed to defend Poland’s.
⁵

The Anglo-Polish Treaty of Mutual Assistance of 25 August was even more of a stop-gap measure. It came about because Britain and France had failed to prevent Stalin from throwing in his lot with Hitler. It was signed in haste in response to the Nazi–Soviet Pact concluded only three days earlier. Everyone in Britain knew that it was not an ideal arrangement. Most people would not have hesitated to accept the Soviet Union as the eastern ally, or perhaps the Soviet Union plus Poland to balance the combination of France and Belgium in the West. But such things were simply not in the running. Once Ribbentrop and Molotov had signed their pact, the British Government had only one choice – to have Poland as the eastern ally or to have nothing. And, to put it bluntly, Poland was indisputably better than nothing. Apart from that, time was of the essence. The Wehrmacht was expected to strike at any moment. Indeed, as historians later learned, Hitler actually gave the order to march on 26 August only to countermand it and postpone it for a week.

From Poland’s point of view, of course, the Treaty could be regarded as something of a success. Warsaw had feared that Poland might be attacked in isolation, and that none of the powers would bother to defend her. Poland’s future could best be protected when a German–Polish conflict became a European one. To be allied to both France and Britain was not a bad prospect.

The Treaty of Mutual Assistance had talked about aggression by an unnamed ‘European Power’. A secret protocol clarified the term. It identified the power concerned as Germany and it provided that, if some power other than Germany should make a similarly aggressive move, then ‘the Contracting Parties will consult together on the measures to be taken in common.’
⁶

Nonetheless, the British establishment did not waver in its conviction that Nazi conduct had passed the bounds of tolerance. Hitler’s occupation of Prague in March was the event that brought all shades of opinion to a common conclusion. Even those like Beaverbrook, who continued to argue publicly for avoiding war, privately accepted that war was coming. ‘One or the other,’ he wrote to a friend in March, ‘the British Empire or the German Reich must be destroyed.’
⁷
The only questions were when and how. The
Daily Express
was still asserting in August that ‘there will be no war this year’,
⁸
and, when the Wehrmacht finally marched, the likes of Beaverbrook were still trying to stay aloof. ‘Poland’, he objected, ‘is no friend of ours.’
⁹
But by then, they were voices crying in the wilderness. The British Government, the British Parliament, and British public opinion
as a whole had decided that enough was enough. Even Chamberlain, the arch-appeaser, was determined to respect his commitments. Early on 3 September, he made the fateful broadcast. ‘This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consquently this country is at war with Germany.’
¹⁰

Britain’s dilemma with its eastern allies was well illustrated by the case of Czechoslovakia, which, after Austria, was the second of Germany’s neighbours to feel the heat of Hitler’s attentions. In the 1930s, Britain simply had no means of intervening in Central Europe. The RAF had very few warplanes with the practical capability to fly across Germany and to return without refuelling. The Royal Navy could not steam along ‘the coast of Bohemia’. The tiny British army could not contemplate marching across Germany. And to take any sort of action on the Continent without French support was unthinkable. Hence, during the Munich Crisis of September 1938, the British Government took the perfectly rational option of appeasing Nazi Germany rather than of confronting it. They did not play their hand very cleverly, and missed the chance of reaching a workable compromise. But they had already made the mistake of issuing an unenforceable guarantee to Austria and of seeing the guarantee humiliatingly sidelined by the
Anschluss
. So they were all too eager to save face and to reach a settlement. Czechoslovakia capitulated without a fight, signing an agreement that proved to be its death warrant. In less than six months, Hitler was in Prague, waving from the same window in Hrad
any Castle from which Presidents Masaryk and Beneš had been wont to wave. Slovakia broke away. Bohemia and Moravia were turned into a protectorate of the Reich. President Beneš and his Czecho-Slovak Committee took up residence in Paris, and then, after the fall of France, moved to London, where they stayed until the end of the war.