Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (79 page)

In due course, the Freston team were thrown unceremoniously into a lice-ridden cell in the jail at Chenstohova, only recently liberated from the Gestapo. A powerful bulb shone day and night in the centre of the ceiling. There were no toilet facilities. Meals consisted of rye-bread and of watery gruel served in a filthy bucket. At the first ‘feeding’, Hudson kicked the bucket over. Guards peered through a slot in the door, offering remarks such as: ‘Allies, how are you?’

Hudson and his colleagues were saved after three weeks through the efforts of the British Embassy in Moscow. SOE had sounded the alarm when the Freston radio fell silent. On 11 February, a Dakota was sent to pick them up. After four flights and an overnight railway journey from Kiev, they reached Moscow on the 17th. Embassy staff told them that the Yalta Conference had taken place during their imprisonment. The one and only British Military Mission to Poland had been unable to make a single report before the ‘Polish Question’ had been settled.

The Freston group waited a further three weeks for Soviet exit visas. The members of the mission flew out from Moscow on 16 March, reaching London after five days, via Baku, Teheran, Cairo, and Gibraltar. ‘George’, the mission’s Home Army guide, stayed on as a guest in the British Embassy until September, when he left as the personal companion of the Ambassador.

One last detail deserves mention. Before leaving Moscow, the Freston team were talked to by ‘the senior British officer’ in the Embassy. He impressed on them that they were ‘not to tell the real story to anybody, and were to maintain that they had been liberated by the Red Army from a prisoner-of-war camp in Eastern Germany.’
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The ‘real story’ did not emerge for several years. When it did, Maj. Mur spoke his mind. The mission ‘was in every respect a complete failure.’
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The Freston Mission was SOE’s last dealing with Poland. It provided some sobering reflections. Gen. Gubbins was appalled at Britain’s failure to help its Polish allies. ‘Of course, they’ll simply be dropped overboard,’
he commented about this time to Sue Ryder, ‘We expect to squeeze as much as we can out of them, and then we’ll drop them.’
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At the time of the Warsaw Rising, Western leaders had been advised that the war in Europe could be concluded by Christmas. By October, however, this advice was seen to be evidently misplaced. There were two reasons. The British and Americans were making lamentably slow progress in the West; and the Soviets, instead of driving for Berlin, had preferred to invade the Balkans.

Nonetheless, Allied determination to destroy the German Reich did not waver. As the autumn of 1944 progressed, the stranglehold was tightened. The German frontiers had been breached. The British and Americans were into the Rhineland. The Soviets were in East Prussia. The day of reckoning was in sight.

In the last months of 1944, therefore, the action was everywhere except in the Vistula sector. For the time being, the Wehrmacht held on to the ruins of Warsaw. The Soviet Army made no move. This meant that the Lublin Committee had to rest content with its control over the provinces immediately to the east of the Vistula. The NKVD was given time to process the population of the same rear areas.

Though few outsiders were aware, the NKVD was already pushing ahead with its programme of population exchanges. Byelorussians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians from the west of the River Bug/Curzon Line were being expelled to the USSR. Poles from the east of the Curzon Line were being concentrated in collecting centres and were waiting for transport to the new Poland. The Lublin Committee had provided a legal framework for these operations by signing agreements in the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR, and the Lithuanian SSR in September. (From the standpoint of international law, it had no right to do so.)
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In December 1944, Gen. de Gaulle paid an official visit to Stalin in Moscow. Knowing his interest in Poland – the two men had both fought in the war in 1920 – Stalin tried to persuade the Gen. to recognize the Lublin Committee in return for his own recognition. De Gaulle declined.

In that same period, the Soviet
Stavka
started to draw up its masterplan for the decisive blow against Berlin. Stalin’s choice was for a campaign launched in the central sector of the Eastern Front and led by Marshal Zhukov. The central sector offered the most direct route to the heart of the Reich; it was made more attractive by the trans-Vistula bridgeheads,
which had resisted all attempts to dislodge them; and it had been freed from the political complications of the Warsaw Rising. Zhukov was preferred to Rokossovsky, who, much to his own annoyance, was directed in November to an assignment of secondary importance on the Baltic coast. A massive superiority of 10:1 in men and material was gradually built up on the bridgeheads. The launch date was set for 12 January 1945. If all went well, the ruins of Warsaw would be occupied within the first few hours.

The implications of the planned offensive were threefold. Firstly, the Soviet Army would control the whole of Poland in the space of two to three weeks, giving it a springboard for the terminal assault on Berlin. Secondly, the next meeting of the Big Three scheduled for Yalta in the Crimea would take place at a juncture when the Soviets were in a stronger position than that of the Western Allies. Thirdly, nowhere in Poland could hope to provide an easy hiding-place from the all-avenging power of the NKVD.

In the first months of 1945 – that is, in the last months of the War in Europe – events moved much as the Soviet planners would have wished. Zhukov’s January offensive carried all before it. The German defences were overwhelmed. Scores of armoured columns surged across the Polish plain, crossing Poland’s pre-war western frontier in late January and reaching the Oder in early February. Zhukov’s armies were due to conquer Berlin single-handed, without Western help. The snowbound ruins of Warsaw fell to the Soviets on 17 January with hardly a shot being fired. At Yalta, Churchill was the weakest of the ‘Big Three’, and Roosevelt was dying and allegedly depressed. They called on Stalin almost as petitioners. They desperately needed his cooperation for the showdown against Japan; and they had very little more to offer to guarantee victory over Germany. So they acquiesced in his takeover of Eastern Europe with barely a whimper. Whilst not withdrawing recognition of the Polish Government in London, and continuing to benefit from the services and sacrifices of the Polish forces in the West, they raised no objections either to the installation of the so-called Provisional Government in Warsaw or to the depredations of the NKVD in their First Ally’s homeland.

Each of these events directly affected the fortunes of the survivors of the Home Army, the Secret State, and the Warsaw Rising. Zhukov’s January offensive, for example, provoked the formal dissolution of the Home Army. Watching from his hideout in western Poland, Gen. Bear Cub realized that the game was up. The AK had justified its existence for
five years as part of the Allied fight against Germany. But if the leading Allies no longer supported them, and if the Germans were to be driven out by the Soviets, there was little sense in fighting on. What is more, if the AK were still to be on a war footing when the NKVD took hold, there was going to be a pointless bloodbath. So, on 19 January, only a fortnight after meeting the Freston mission, Bear Cub issued his final order:

Soldiers of the Home Armed Forces!

The rapid progress of the Soviet offensive may lead to the occupation by the Soviet Army within a short space of time. This is not the victory of the just cause for which we have fought since 1939 . . . We do not want to fight the Soviets, but we will never accept life in anything than a free, independent Polish state espousing the creed of social justice . . .

Soldiers of the Home Army! I give you my last order. Carry on working and acting with the aim of regaining full independence of the country. In this, each of you must be his own commander . . . I hereby release you from your oath of allegiance and declare the Home Army to be dissolved.

On behalf of the service, I thank you for your sacrifice to date. I deeply believe that our Holy Cause will prevail and that we shall meet in a truly free and democratic Poland.

Long live a free, ‘Independent and prosperous Poland.’

Place of Stay 19 January 1945

Bear Cub Maj.Gen. 26

Thereafter, the insurgents belonged to no recognized collective. They were on their own.

One of the more exotic figures who was serving in the Kieltse district at the time of the Home Army’s disbandment was Sat-Okh, or ‘Long-Feather’, a.k.a. Stanislaw S. (1922–2003), pseudonym ‘Cossak’ (Kozak). Half Pole, half Native American, he was the son of Tall Eagle, a Shawnee chieftain from the Yukon Territory, and of a Polish woman who had fled from Tsarist exile in Siberia and had crossed the Bering Straits with a party of Polish refugees. A Canadian citizen, he had been trapped in Poland by the outbreak of war, whilst visiting his mother’s relatives. His adventures read like a film scenario. They included service as an Underground scout, capture and arrest, imprisonment and torture in the Gestapo jail at Radom, escape from a transport to Auschwitz, multiple wounds, and further service in the AK ‘Spruce’ Group (Jodło). Like many of his comrades,
Sat-Okh would end his wartime service in the claws of the Communist security police.
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The Soviet Occupation of Warsaw’s ruins took place as soon as the Germans withdrew and a pontoon bridge could be thrown across the Vistula. Headed by NKVD units, soldiers of the Polish People’s Army (LWP) entered the empty snowbound streets to be greeted by small groups of survivors who had somehow kept alive in the cellars. One of the early tasks was to put up propaganda posters denouncing the ‘coughed-up dwarfs of Reaction’ to be seen by all subsequent returnees. Here was an unmistakable signal that all former insurgents belonged to a condemned species.

Sure enough, Gen. Serov was there on the spot very promptly, writing to Beria about the extent of the destruction in Warsaw and making provisions for the return of the inhabitants. Notwithstanding the desolation, he was taking no chances.

To mark the Soviet Army’s entry into Warsaw, Moscow Radio broadcast the Manifesto of the Provisional Government together with a version of the city’s recent history:

Attentive listeners may have noticed that ‘the Polish Army’ was now identified exclusively with the formations under Soviet command, that the blame had spread from Boor’s leadership to the Home Army as a whole, and that the Home Army was linked to the NSZ. No substantiation whatsoever was offered for the charges of murder and collaboration.

The Polish clauses of the Yalta Agreement were largely dictated by Soviet demands. Poland’s eastern frontier was fixed on the Soviet interpretation of the Curzon Line, with no concessions to Polish claims whatsoever. The Provisional Government set up by the Soviets was to stay in being and to form the basis of a post-war Government of National Unity. Elections were to be held, and a limited number of ministers from London admitted, but on terms dictated by the Soviets’ clients. This meant, in effect, that the democratic Polish Government would never return, and that all its former adherents would be suspect. Within weeks, Churchill was telling Roosevelt that he feared they had put their names to ‘a fraudulent manifesto’.

Many weeks passed in Warsaw whilst the gruesome task proceeded of reburying and, where possible, identifying corpses. But a symbolic end to the task was marked on 25 March by a solemn state funeral that was awarded to the leaders of the People’s Army killed in the Old Town. Broadcast on radio and attended by ‘representatives of the Allied nations’, it was the occasion for political speeches, notably by ‘Citizen Bierut’ and by C.-in-C. Rola-Z.:

BIERUT: Citizens! We are looking now on four simple coffins, but we know that around us are thousands of graves . . . This heap of rubble is hiding the uncounted graves of those who fell at their posts in the fight for Warsaw. We are standing by the graves of those who led the fights when it appeared that the fighting could not be avoided. This fight, and the tragedy which resulted from it, was not necessary for Poland . . . The Warsaw Rising was instigated by the folly and lust for power of those to whom the fate of the nation was of no importance . . . The greatest crime the world has ever seen . . . was instigated by reactionary politicians under conditions which condemned it to failure in advance . . .