Armageddon - Max Hastings [79]
It might also be noticed that in Italy the Allied Commander-in-Chief General Sir Harold Alexander encouraged partisans to rise on the widest pos-sible scale in the summer of 1944, when it was believed that liberation of the whole country was imminent. With the coming of winter, and the Allies bogged down in the mountains, the partisans suffered terribly from German counter-measures. In November, Alexander felt obliged to reverse his earlier policy and urge the partisans to abandon open military activity until spring. In some areas upon which German repression fell most heavily, there was deep and lasting bitterness about Allied incitement to premature action, followed by failure to relieve the partisans before the Germans fell upon them. Alexander could plead military necessity for his actions—and inaction. So did Stalin. All the Allies behaved with considerable cynicism in encouraging armed resistance in occupied Europe while possessing no means of preventing inevitable German retribution. The consequences for Warsaw were, however, vastly more terrible than anything which took place in the west.
Stalin, of course, went beyond mere passivity towards the uprising. He informed the Western allies, in response to their appeals for aid to the Poles, that he would not lift a finger to preserve these “criminals” from the consequences of their folly. He refused to provide refuelling facilities in Russian territory for British aircraft attempting arms drops to the insurgents. Late in the Rising, he allowed just one force of American aircraft to land at Poltava after dropping supplies, most of which fell into German hands. “We don’t want British and American planes mucking about here at the moment,” Rokossovsky told Alexander Werth. The RAF lost an aircraft for every ton of supplies dropped to the Poles on the perilous 780-mile trip from Italy. Forty-one Allied planes were destroyed out of 306 dispatched to aid the Warsaw resisters, while the nearest Russians were a mere fifteen miles away.
As we shall see later, when the Red Army occupied Poland its forces launched a ruthless second front against the survivors of Army Krajowa. This struggle continued long after Hitler fell, almost unnoticed by the world, with substantial casualties on both sides. Poland’s destiny, to become a Soviet vassal state, was decided before the first shot of the Rising was fired. One of the German propaganda leaflets launched into the Allied lines in north-west Europe was directed at the Polish Armoured Division: “WHY DIE FOR STALIN?” it demanded; “. . . your soldiers are not dying for democracy or the preservation of the democratic form of government—they are dying for the establishment of Communism and a form of the Stalinist tyranny . . . so that Poland shall be a Soviet state.” From a Polish viewpoint, all this was perfectly true. “Within a very short space of time,” a modern Russian historian writes, “the Poles were translated from Russia’s enemies to its allies, and then once more into its enemies.”
It is unlikely that the full facts about Stalin’s actions in the autumn of 1944 will ever be known. Even the most distinguished Western historian of Poland, Norman Davies, writing in 2003 with access to considerable Soviet documentation, concludes that many aspects of Russian behaviour remain conjectural. There were real tensions between Moscow and its lackeys, the communist Lublin Poles, who seem to have shared the assumption of Bor Komorowski’s men that the Red Army would move swiftly to liberate Warsaw. Soviet policy wavered through August and September.