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be sent to penal battalions. “One had to be very vigilant at Front HQ,” said Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD. “There were so many kind of nationalists, and Whites who were urging men to desert, and assuring them of good treatment from the Germans.” He added gravely: “We would never convict innocent people. We looked into every case.” It was acute awareness of the significance of the Soviet tide for the people of eastern Europe, above all the Poles, that caused Churchill to send to a friend a greeting for this “New, disgusting year.” How perverse it seemed that, amid Stalin’s smashing victories, Jock Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, should observe: “The prospect of the end of the war and the problems it will bring with it are depressing the PM.” Churchill said to Colville: “Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be bolshevised; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.”

Roosevelt raised the Polish issue half-heartedly at the Yalta conference of the leaders of the Grand Alliance in February 1945, reminding Stalin that the United States possessed seven million inhabitants of Polish stock. As an elected national leader, the president had to consider their concerns. Stalin dismissed this assertion with a shrug: of those seven million Poles, only 7,000 voted, he said. A British junior minister, H. G. Strauss, resigned from Churchill’s government over Yalta, observing that he found it “impossible to approve of the treatment of the Polish people by the Crimean conference.” When New Zealand’s prime minister remonstrated about the abandonment of the Poles to Stalin, Churchill answered: “Great Britain and the British Commonwealth are very much weaker militarily than Soviet Russia, and have no means, short of another general war, of enforcing their point of view. Nor can we ignore the position of the United States. We cannot go further in helping Poland than the United States is willing or can be persuaded to go. We have therefore to do the best we can.” Poland’s doom was sealed—to be passed with the acquiescence of the democracies from the bloody hands of one tyrant into those of another.

When Hitler heard that Warsaw had fallen, he ordered the arrest and interrogation by the SS of three senior staff officers at OKH who were deemed to have connived in this act of weakness. As a gesture of solidarity, Guderian insisted on sharing his subordinates’ ordeal. In the midst of one of the climactic battles of the Third Reich, its senior commanders were obliged to devote hours to this black farce. Guderian was then grudgingly permitted to return to his duties. OKH’s chief of operations was dispatched to a concentration camp. Another of the three staff officers was shot.

“Germany’s leadership faces its greatest challenge of the war,” acknowledged a Berlin radio broadcast on 22 January. “Retreats and disengagements are no longer possible, because our armies are now disputing territory of vital importance to German war industry . . . The utmost effort is required from every man and woman. The German people will respond willingly to the call, because they know that our leader has never failed to restore the situation, however grave the difficulties.” On the same day, Bradley’s aide Colonel Hansen wrote in his diary: “It is incredible to view the advance of the Russian front and realise how the East has suddenly become the cynosure of American and allied attention.” After many months when commanders in the west had scarcely considered events in the east, now as they pored over their maps and perceived the Soviet line of battle drawing so close to Berlin, the movements of the Red Army began to cast a long shadow over the operations of the Anglo-Americans.

For the Western allies, the frustrations of communicating with the Russians about practical military problems, such as bomb lines, remained as great as ever. To the end, Stalin rejected all demands for liaison officers to be attached to Soviet field headquarters, just as Russian officers were attached