Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (25 page)

On 27 July, Governor Fischer gave his order of the day:

It was a risky move. If the men showed up, the Underground would be robbed of its manpower at a stroke; if they didn’t, he would have a legal pretext for mass punishment. On the other hand, as happened to the Tsarist governor in 1863, he might provoke the very revolt he was trying to avoid. In the event, the order was universally ignored. In the interests of caution, no reprisals were made. The Gestapo acted more decisively. They killed the long-term political prisoners they had been holding on ice in the Paviak and who had lost their potential usefulness.

At the end of the week, the military situation seemed to stabilize. The Wehrmacht’s Ninth Army was containing the southern bridgeheads. The Soviets achieved no further breakthrough. Most importantly, the defensive lines to the east of Praga were hardening. German spirits rose when strong reinforcements arrived. On the 29th, men of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division marched through the city streets in full battle array. Their tanks rumbled across the Vistula bridges, which Wehrmacht sappers were wiring for possible demolition. Tension remained high. But several of the evacuated military units returned. The defenders were given time to dig in and to brace themselves for the expected assault.

German anxieties were increased by public manifestations of Communist-led preparations. On 29 July, Soviet aircraft dropped leaflets carrying an appeal from the Soviet-controlled Committee of National Liberation calling the people to arms. In the afternoon, posters were plastered on various walls in the city announcing that the representatives of the exiled Polish Government in London had fled, and that the commander of the Communist People’s Army was assuming command of all Underground units. It was more than reasonable to conclude that an imminent Soviet assault on Warsaw from outside was to be joined by a Communist-led assault within. The log of the German Ninth Army contained the following entry: ‘29 July 1944. Polish insurgents [were] expected to begin armed action in Warsaw district about 2300 hours . . . But nothing happened.’
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The 29th and 30th of July were the Saturday and Sunday of a sunny, summer weekend. Uncertain whether this was a lull before the storm, or a good chance to relax before the Bolshevik Occupation, those Varsovians who could relax, made the most of it. The churches were packed; the parks were thronged; the bathing-places on the riverside were crowded. The sound of distant artillery caused excitement, but was not sufficiently close to clear the streets. There were one or two gunfights of unknown provenance and the usual array of police cordons. No bombs were falling.

Tuesday 1 August began like any other working day during the Occupation. Heavy German patrols roamed the suburbs in trucks. Armed police were more noticeable than usual on street corners. But most people were able to go about their everyday business. The weather was fine and warm. The midday news from Radio Berlin announced that ‘the Russians are planning to create a Polish statelet under their control’. Then the daily communiqué of the German News Agency issued at 1.29 p.m. stated: ‘
Warschau ist kalm.
’
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As far as the German authorities could tell, the city presented an appearance of normality.

T
HE
R
ED
A
RMY MARCHED
westwards out of Russia on four separate occasions – in 1918, in 1920, in 1939, and in 1944. It did not do so simply for the greater aggrandizement of its masters but in pursuance of basic Bolshevik principles. For the Bolsheviks were internationalist revolutionaries who firmly believed that their regime could not survive in isolation. In 1918 and again in 1920, the Red Army was sent to the west by Lenin, who had hoped to exploit the revolutionary ferment in Germany. In September 1939, it was ordered to march by Stalin who was reaping the gains arranged in the recent Nazi–Soviet Pact. In 1944, in the final phase of the German–Soviet War, it was following up the colossal victories at Stalingrad and Kursk. On each occasion, the final destination was intended to be Berlin. But the early plans repeatedly went awry. In late 1918, the Red Army barely reached Lithuania before the Russian Civil War intervened. In 1920, it was held on the River Vistula and comprehensively beaten in a brilliant counterattack by Warsaw’s defenders. In 1939, it established the ‘Peace Boundary’ on the River Bug, from which it was driven back less than two years later by Operation Barbarossa. In 1944, therefore, at the fourth attempt, the Soviets intended to solve their ‘western problem’ once and for all. And they were very conscious of previous mistakes.

Bolshevik ideology, otherwise known as Marxism-Leninism or more popularly as ‘Communism’, played an important part in Soviet calculations, especially in the early years. Unfortunately, it did not provide any simple guidelines. Indeed, it presented the Bolsheviks with one of their most acute dilemmas. On the one hand, Marx had predicted revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, like Germany or Britain; and he was firmly convinced that peasant societies and backward economies such as Russia or China were the last place on earth for a genuine proletarian revolution. Lenin, on the other hand, had invented a set of political techniques with which a ruthless band of determined activists could seize power despite unfavourable social and economic conditions. What is more, he actually succeeded in taking control of the largest state in the world, and in setting up a totalitarian dictatorship in clear contradiction of previous Marxist precepts.
Somehow the circle had to be squared. So as an adept in ideological gymnastics, he reconciled the irreconcilable by arguing that the early extension of Bolshevik power to Germany and to Western Europe in general was essential. In Bolshevik parlance, the link to be built between revolutionary Russia and Germany was known as ‘the Red Bridge’.

In 1920, at a period of his career when Lenin was accusing his critics in the Bolshevik Party of ‘infantile Leftism’, he himself was suffering from infantile delusions on the grand scale. He really seems to have believed that crossing the 1,500km (900 miles) between Russia and Germany would be a relatively simple operation and that the advance of the Red Army across the ‘Red Bridge’ would be welcomed by all the peoples of the region. He ignored expert advice and learned the hard way.
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None of the Bolsheviks best acquainted with the problem was fully convinced by Lenin’s arguments, though they were obliged to follow the party line. Leon Trotsky, the Commissar for War, knew that the fledgeling Red Army was ill prepared to face well-trained European adversaries. He recoiled from the prospect of attacking Central Europe by force, preferring instead to spread revolution into Asia. He invented the ingenious formula ‘The road to London and Berlin leads through Calcutta’. Karol Radek, Lenin’s special adviser on Polish affairs, told him straight that a nation consisting largely of Roman Catholic peasants was not going to fall easily for Bolshevik slogans. And Joseph Stalin, who was a Georgian and the Commissar for the Nationalities, needed no telling that most of the non-Russian peoples regarded the Bolsheviks as mere ‘Red Tsars’. He was sceptical about the project throughout. As the political controller of the South-Western Front in 1920, when he signally failed to share Lenin’s enthusiasm, he landed himself in serious political trouble. But in essence he was proved right. Not surprisingly, when he became supreme Soviet dictator and twice sent the Red Army back over the same ground, he had no intention of relying on popular goodwill. In 1939, he relied on his partnership with the Third Reich. In 1944, he relied on nothing else but the brute strength of his victorious forces.

The Soviet advance of 1920 was one of those episodes which have almost escaped from the history books. From the Soviet point of view, it was a shameful defeat which the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers were eager to forget and which later Communist censors would try to erase from the record. It shattered the dreams of the Congress of Comintern, which assembled in Moscow at the height of the advance; and it was not the subject of an impartial historical monograph for over fifty years. Yet it
was keenly remembered by those who participated. It formed the culminating campaign of the two-year war between Soviet Russia and the Polish Republic, and it culminated with Marshal Tukhachevsky’s chilling order of the day of 1 July: ‘Onwards! Over the corpse of White Poland shines the road to worldwide conflagration!’ Unfortunately for Tukhachevsky, the Poles proved to be anything but a corpse. After giving him a sound drubbing, they drove the Red Army back in confusion. The plan for World Revolution was postponed indefinitely.

This first modern Battle of Warsaw was closely observed by a British diplomat, who twice put his reflections to paper. On the first occasion, shortly after the battle, Lord D’Abernon summed up his impressions in truly Gibbonian style. ‘If Charles Martel had not checked the Saracen conquest at the Battle of Tours,’ he wrote, ‘the interpretation of the Koran would be taught at the schools of Oxford . . . [And] had Pilsudski . . . failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, the very existence of Western civilisation would have been imperilled’.
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A decade later, he was much less confident of the outcome:

It may be that Communist doctrine, repelled by force of arms in 1920, will later achieve the disruption it seeks. But should this come to pass, it will be due less to the military strength of the Soviet, less to propaganda however lavish or persistent, than to disunion among its adversaries and to the strange incapacity to deal with the economic crisis, which is today so grave a reproach to the intelligence of the Western world.
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Stalin came out of the crisis physically safe, but politically damaged. Shortly before the Battle of Warsaw, he was ordered by Moscow to move up from the south and support Tukhachevsky’s flank. If he had obeyed, he and his army group would have borne the brunt of the Polish counter-offensive and would almost certainly have been destroyed. As it was, since he disobeyed, he returned to Moscow to face Trotsky’s fury and a charge of indiscipline. He was lucky that a party tribunal issued nothing more than a reprimand. But he must certainly have come away with the impression that advancing on the Vistula was a dangerous business. Seventeen years later, when he purged the Red Army’s officer class, he made sure that Tukhachevsky was the leading victim. After a brief show trial, Tukhachevsky was condemned to death in the company of five other generals who had all commanded armies on the Warsaw Front under him.
The three men who signed their death warrants – Voroshilov, Yegorov, and Budyonny – had all served in 1920 on the South-Western Front with Stalin. Some people may think this is coincidence.

Equally, Stalin cannot have avoided the conviction that the Poles were not a nation to be trifled with. The Poles’ fierce attachment to their independence inevitably raised his suspicions. And they never left him. Gen. de Gaulle had also fought in Poland in 1920; and when he visited Stalin in Moscow a quarter of a century later, attended by his translator Gaston P., the Soviet dictator could not refrain from a slighting remark. ‘But I am a Frenchman,’ protested Gaston P. ‘Once a Pole, always a Pole,’ was the retort.
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Not surprisingly, therefore, the Soviet advance of 1939 was undertaken with the greatest possible caution. It began on 17 September, two weeks later than Stalin’s Nazi partners had anticipated; and it did not proceed until the Soviets had signed a truce with the Japanese in far-off Mongolia. As a result, it occurred at a juncture when the Wehrmacht had already completed most of the hard fighting and when Warsaw was already surrounded. As in 1920, the Red Army soldiers were told that their mission was one of social liberation. Their tanks rolled into towns and villages announcing to the bewildered inhabitants that they had come to save them from the fascists. This made the joint Nazi–Soviet victory parade in Brest-Litovsk a bit of an embarrassment and, in later years, yet another prime candidate for amnesia.

One thing, however, the Soviets refused to forget. The Nazi–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Demarcation, signed by Stalin’s representatives on 28 September 1939, established a new Soviet frontier running along the River Bug through the middle of conquered Poland. To the east of this ‘Peace Boundary’, they took possession of a large tract of territory, which they henceforth treated as irrevocably theirs. For the rest of his life, Stalin never wavered, regarding the ‘Peace Boundary’ as the permanent and legitimate frontier of the USSR. Indeed, the view was to last as long as the Soviet Union did.

The most cynical comments about the September Campaign of 1939 were uttered by Molotov, Stalin’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. In a speech intended to justify the Soviets’ contravention of their international treaties, Molotov declared shamelessly that ‘Poland has ceased to exist’. The crime may be judged still more heinous when the Nazi–Soviet assault was later shown to have been planned in advance. Molotov added insult to injury. Poland, he said, was ‘the Bastard of Versailles’.

The Soviet advance of 1944 was on a far grander scale than any of its predecessors. In the central sector alone, some 2.5 million troops were amassed – over three times as many as in 1920. More importantly, it came at the end of three years of indescribably brutal Nazi occupation. Many of the native peoples, who had no love either for Russia or for communism, nonetheless anticipated the Red Army’s approach with a mixture of foreboding and relief.