Wojtek the Bear [paperback] (20 page)

In the end, the Poles did not win back independence by their own efforts. The Polish state reappeared because of a political earthquake which transformed Eurasia and the Middle East: the
collapse within a year or so of the three partition empires and the Ottoman Empire to the south. The Tsardom fell in 1917; the German and Austrian empires 18 months later. Piłsudski entered
Warsaw in triumph, proclaiming the restoration of independence on 11 November 1918.

There followed several years of vicious local wars as the new Polish Republic fought to establish its frontiers in the east and west. Poland took most of the Upper Silesian industrial basin and
the Pozna
ń
region from Germany, the city and district of Vilnius (Wilno) from the new Lithuanian state, and western Ukraine with the city of Lwów from Ukrainian nationalists. At the
time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had allowed both Poland and Finland to take independence from Russia. But in 1920, as Polish
forces reached Kiev and tried to create
a Ukrainian puppet state under Polish control, the patience of the Bolsheviks ran out. The Soviet armies surged westwards, and after defeating the Poles in central Ukraine, rode on across Poland
until the ‘Red Cavalry’ was almost on the outskirts of Warsaw.

There they were halted. Piłsudski’s troops launched a counter-offensive which cut round behind the Soviet attackers and severed their communications. The Red Army fell apart, and was
driven back almost to its starting-point. At the 1921 Treaty of Riga, a new eastern frontier was drawn for Poland, leaving large areas with Ukrainian or Belorussian majorities under Polish
control.

The Polish–Soviet War of 1920, coming only two years after the restoration of independence, set the scene for much of what was to happen in the following decades. Although the Battle of
Warsaw (the so-called ‘Miracle on the Vistula’) was a providential victory for Poland, the long-term consequences of the conflict were dire.

Firstly, it powerfully and permanently strengthened the ancient prejudices of both sides. The Russians were confirmed in their view that the Poles were predators and agents of Western capitalism
who had exploited Russia’s weakness to seize borderlands which had always owed allegiance to Moscow. The Poles, certain that the invaders had intended to turn Poland into a Bolshevik province
ruled from the Kremlin, saw the war as yet one more attempt by their traditional foe to crush Polish independence. The Bolshevik Revolution, they concluded, had merely wrapped up Russian imperial
instincts in the red flag.

Secondly, grievances over the frontiers drawn at Riga
were to bring disaster on the next Polish generation – the generation of soldiers who adopted Wojtek. Their
homes and their families lay mostly in these borderlands. But the eastern frontiers were a compromise which satisfied neither side. Piłsudski had dreamed of a vast confederation, rather like
the old Commonwealth, which would include Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania. In the event, he got a mainly Polish state with large and often discontented ethnic minorities: only 69 per cent
of its population was Polish, while Ukrainians and other minorities outnumbered ethnic Poles in the rural parts of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Between the wars, Warsaw government policy
towards the minorities was often brutal, and Ukrainian nationalist organisations fought back with bombs and political assassinations.

Józef Piłsudski was the dominant figure in independent Poland until his death in 1935. Always impatient with parliamentary democracy, he retired after a few years but in 1926
returned to lead a military coup which installed an authoritarian regime. After his death, power passed into the hands of army officers with extreme right-wing opinions (the so-called
‘Sanacja’). Political opposition was suppressed, left-wingers found themselves in detention camps and in the late 1930s the regime allowed itself to be pushed into racial discrimination
against Jews. In foreign policy, the Sanacja pursued Piłsudski’s principle of balance between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, favouring neither dictatorship against the
other but building up Poland’s independent military strength to deter German or Russian invasion.

This was an illusion. The third fateful consequence of the Polish–Soviet war was an unreal overestimate of Poland’s
military potential, coupled with an
equally unreal faith in the infallible judgement of the army’s commanders. The 1920 victory over the Red Army had been brilliant, but military technology soon moved on. The Polish army was
large in numbers – it could mobilise a million men – and high in morale. But its equipment with tanks, anti-tank artillery and aircraft fell far behind the pace of rearmament in the
USSR and above all in Nazi Germany. The efficiency of the Polish navy and the code-breaking skills of Polish military intelligence could not compensate for the weaknesses of the army in the
field.

But the ‘Second Republic’ could also show some astonishing achievements. In the century and a quarter of partition, the three segments of Poland had grown apart; legal systems,
education, military training, even railway gauges now had to be unified. After 1918, ambitious central planning rapidly gave Poland the outlines of an effective infrastructure and reorganised its
industrial base. The new port of Gdynia was planted at the end of the ‘Polish Corridor’, Poland’s narrow foothold on the Baltic Sea, a city complete with docks and shipyards which
sprang up in a few years on the site of a fishing village. But in spite of these successes, Poland remained a strikingly backward and underdeveloped country when compared to its western neighbours.
Three out of four Poles lived in the countryside, almost all of them poor peasants. Illiteracy was widespread, and rural overpopulation was recognised as the cause of shocking poverty; a plague for
which the Second Republic was given no time to find a cure.

In spite of the ‘non-alignment’ policy, many Poles realised in the 1930s that a German attack was almost inevitable sooner or later. They also saw that non-alignment,
by irritating both of Poland’s dangerous neighbours and conciliating neither of them, threatened to bring about the ultimate national nightmare: an agreement between Russia and
Germany to join forces and destroy Poland.

This had already happened several times in history. It was the story of the eighteenth century partitions, while at the 1812 Convention of Tauroggen, Prussian generals had agreed with the
Russians to form an alliance and turn their weapons against Napoleon and his Polish supporters. Now, on the eve of war in August 1939, this lethal pattern was repeated. Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union staggered the world by suddenly overcoming their ideological enmity and signing the infamous Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Poles did not then know that a secret protocol to the pact had
arranged for a Fourth Partition between Russia and Germany and the abolition of Polish independence. But all their instincts about this new alliance told them to expect the worst.

Piłsudski had made a non-aggression agreement with the Soviet Union in 1932, and a similar pact with Nazi Germany in 1934. Neither Stalin nor Hitler had the slightest intention of
respecting these pieces of paper. As tensions increased, the government in Warsaw made itself believe that if Germany attacked Poland, France would come to the rescue with effective military
support. It was true that a French military mission led by General Weygand (and including a spindly young officer named Charles de Gaulle) had come to Warsaw and given significant help and advice
during the Polish–Soviet war of 1920. But French forces, though large in numbers and well equipped with tanks, were in no condition to defend their own country in the late 1930s, let alone to
fight their way across Europe to rescue a distant ally.

As Hitler crushed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and early
1939, it was obvious that his next target would be Poland. Germany had never accepted the loss of territories to Poland
after the First World War. Now Hitler concentrated his threats on the Baltic port of Danzig (Gda
ń
sk), which the 1919 Versailles Treaty had redefined as an independent ‘free city’,
and on the ‘Polish Corridor’ (another Versailles invention) which separated the main Reich territory from the German territory of East Prussia.

Hitler’s carefully planned onslaught began in the early hours of 1 September 1939, as the German battleship
Schleswig-Holstein
opened fire on the Polish forts at Danzig. At the same
time, the Luftwaffe bombed Polish cities and the German army drove across the frontier at a dozen points.

The Second World War had begun. In some ways, the Polish forces were prepared for it. Months earlier, Polish intelligence – which had broken the German Enigma military code – had
passed its secrets and an Enigma machine to the British, a gift which was to prove infinitely valuable to the Allied cause. And two days before war broke out, the Polish destroyer flotilla slipped
out of Gdynia and made its way to Scotland to join the Royal Navy – another long-planned move.

But there was no way that the Poles could hold the overwhelming weight of the German attack. Against 2,600 German tanks they had only 150, and only 400 modern aircraft to send up against the
Luftwaffe’s 2,000 bombers and fighters. And they were facing a new kind of war: the ‘blitzkrieg’ use of fast-moving armoured divisions which punched through defensive lines and
circled round to outflank the enemy, while dive-bombers destroyed transport and communications and drove thousands of fleeing civilians out to block the roads.

Given their weaknesses, the Poles put up noble resistance during the September Campaign. The tales of Polish lancers charging German tanks are mostly fantasy (though
there were a few such incidents), but the Germans suffered over 50,000 casualties – more than the British and French together inflicted on them in France the following year. The Germans had
not expected such a stubborn defence, and were dismayed when a counter-attack on the Bzura river temporarily threw them back and caused them heavy losses. But the Poles had a strategy problem as
well as an equipment problem.

In 1939, both France and Britain had promised to declare war on Germany if Poland were invaded, and they duly did so on 3 September. There had also been military talks that summer, which the
Poles had understood to mean that in the event of war France would attack Germany across the Rhine with full force. The Polish task was therefore to hold up the German armies for about two weeks to
allow the French offensive to succeed. But nothing of the kind happened. There was no French offensive, and no military, air or naval assistance was sent to Poland from either France or Britain.
This was the first of Poland’s many bitter disappointments with the Western Allies.

Warsaw was soon surrounded, although the government managed to escape to the south-east. The Polish armies were in retreat, but still fighting hard, when on 17 September the Red Army crossed the
frontier without warning and attacked them from behind.

Moscow announced that Poland had ceased to exist, and that its eastern provinces of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia were being taken over by the Soviet Union to protect their inhabitants.
Caught between two enemies, the
Polish forces fell apart and organised resistance ceased. Many thousands of prisoners of war were rounded up by the Red Army, and transported
eastwards to unknown destinations in the Soviet Union.

From this awful moment in late September 1939, three diverging paths led into the future for Poland’s soldiers. On one point, however, everyone was united. Poland, unlike
France or Belgium or several other nations conquered by Hitler, would not surrender. Józef Piłsudski had written that ‘to be defeated, but not to give in, is victory!’
Somehow, somewhere, the war to restore an independent Poland had to go on.

The first of the three paths led across Europe to France and Britain. The second path led back into occupied Poland itself, into the armed resistance movements which at once began to spring up.
The third path began in the prison camps and convict settlements of the Soviet Union, and traversed vast distances to cross Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt before reaching Italy. It was along this
third journey, the longest and most arduous of them all, that Polish soldiers found and adopted a bear cub they named Wojtek.

All these paths had branches, potholes and forks. All those who travelled on them hoped that they would finally converge in a liberated and democratic Poland. But most of them did not live to
see their grandchildren reach the end of those roads. Poland did not regain full independence and democracy until 1989.

The first path began at a bridge, which crossed a shallow frontier river called the Czeremosz. For a week or so after 17 September, the Soviet forces did not seal off the
borders in
Poland’s south-eastern corner, allowing the army commanders and the president to cross into Romania followed by tens of thousands of officers and soldiers.
Many others escaped over the southern mountains into Hungary. A third group headed north into Lithuania, then still precariously independent, and was interned after surrendering.

On 30 September, a new government-in-exile was set up by General Władysław Sikorski, who became both prime minister and commander-in-chief. Based in Paris, this government was in many
ways a coup against the old Sanacja regime carried out by Sikorski, a famous officer who had gone abroad in the 1930s in order to form a centre of opposition to the ageing Piłsudski and his
successors. Even before Sikorski took over, officers and men were escaping from Romanian internment and heading west to rejoin the war. One group of soldiers from Romania and Hungary managed to
find a ship to Syria, where they joined French forces as the ‘Carpathian Rifle Brigade’. But the bulk of the troops who had escaped the Nazi and Soviet armies were transported to
France. There they were joined by volunteers of Polish origin from all over western Europe to form a force which eventually numbered some 80,000 men.

Early in 1940, troops from Sikorski’s army in France went into action with British and French forces during the inconclusive Norway campaign. When the main German offensive burst into
France that May, the Poles fought skilfully, but they were driven back and separated by the rapid onrush of the Panzer divisions and by the collapse of French units on their flanks.