The World at War (76 page)

AMBASSADOR HARRIMAN

The Warsaw incident was a very great shock to all of us, part of it was a misunderstanding, the fact the Red Army got to the river and couldn't get across, and the Germans moved into two divisions. The Poles rose up without any agreement on the part of the Russians but it was utterly cruel that Stalin wouldn't even try to get supplies in, he refused to let our aeroplanes fly over and drop supplies for several weeks. And finally he did agree. I really had tough talks with the Russian government over Poland, of willingness to help the Poles. It played a role in all of our minds as to the heartlessness of the Russians. Stalin was very suspicious of the underground in Poland, which owed its allegiance to the Polish government in London. On several occasions later on he showed that he thought the partisans were working against the Red Army and against the people he wanted to see and control after the war was over.

CHARLES BOHLEN

US diplomat and Soviet expert, Yalta participant

The British had a record for what is known as
spheres of influences and it's a very different thing for you to have spheres of influence, which are a tradition in your history. But overall it reflects the fact that you are a country without real minorities. We have a country that is full of minorities, we had Poles, Czechs, eastern Europeans represented in the United States and therefore it was not easy for us; we always opposed the idea of the spheres of influence. We finally had to come to accept that the Soviet Writ runs through all of the satellite areas up to the western edges of the Russian advance. We weren't a little premature in fixing these zones until we saw how the armies were to come out, and there's some evidence to

German infantry riding on Panzer III tanks in the Desert War, 1942.

A Desert Air Force Hurricane strafing a German tank in Tunisia, 1943.

German soldier house-clearing with a flamethrower during the summer offensive of 1942.

Where it was stopped: the gigantic statue of Mother Russia looms over the Stalingrad memorial to the Battle of Stalingrad, 1942–43.

The Arvo Lancaster was the mainstay of Bomber Command's night-bombing offensive, 1943–44.

A disastrous failure in the Battle of Britain, the Messerschmitt 110 found a new function as the preferred aircraft of the German night-fighter aces.

Self-defending formations of camouflaged B-17s could not survive over Germany. When they returned they were provocatively stripped to bare metal with garish squadron markings, to draw the Luftwaffe up into the guns of the long range P-51 Mustang, here escorting a B-17 at a post-war airshow.

Note the camouflaged wing panel from an aircraft cannibalised for spare parts used to patch the flak-damaged port wing of this B-17, photographed near Snettisham in early 1944.

Liberating Europe, the Allies still had to fight for every inch. A largely Canadian landing at Dieppe in August 1942 was a disaster.

The massive German fortifications in Normandy, 1944.

Grey wolves setting out to sea.