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’s determination to impose Soviet hegemony upon every state liberated by his armies. The Russian leader perceived this as natural justice. He also cherished a bizarre expectation that such a polity would be welcomed by the proletarians of eastern Europe. The absence of such sentiment fuelled his animosity towards the Poles. American attention was fixed upon the military defeat of the Nazis. Washington displayed a remarkable indifference to the political future of the eastern battlefields until it was too late. Roosevelt’s most recent biographer seeks to acquit his hero of the charge of naivety towards the Soviet Union in 1945, pleading the inevitability of Soviet domination. This argument seems unconvincing. Too many of those closest to Roosevelt at this period have testified to their dismay about his behaviour towards Stalin, and about the president’s conviction that he could do business with the Soviets if the British imperialists were circumvented. Yet it is unmistakably true that the Russians already stood on Polish soil, beyond any conceivable reach of Anglo-American forces. Even if the Red Army had hastened forward to relieve Warsaw in August or September, the fate of the insurgents would have been no different. Those who resisted Soviet mastery, as many later attempted to do, would merely have been killed by Russian bullets rather than German ones.

Polish behaviour was characterized from beginning to end by a heroic spirit of self-immolation. Even when the Poles recognized that the Soviets were disinclined to aid them, they rejected Stalin’s demands. The Soviet leader indicated to the Polish prime minister, leader of the London Poles who visited Moscow early in August, that before he could expect anything from the Russians his government must resign; the Soviet seizure of eastern Poland must be recognized; and the London Poles must publicly accept Moscow’s preposterous claim that the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn was the work of the Nazis, not the Soviets. When Bor Komorowski in Warsaw heard of all this, he signalled proudly on 26 August: “Poland has not been fighting the Germans for five years, bearing the greatest losses, just to capitulate to Russia. Our fight against the Germans has shown that . . . we love freedom more than life.” Here, indeed, reality matched rhetoric in the most dreadful fashion.

There was a tragic romance about the mood in Warsaw, even as the city was battered into ruin. The Poles, determined to celebrate the resurrection of their national culture amid catastrophe, staged recitals, concerts, plays in the public buildings within their perimeter. A profusion of pamphlets, newspapers and political treatises was written and published. There was a plan to stage an opera, until the leading players were killed in action. An engaged couple, a lieutenant and a girl courier, asked to be married in the city’s cathedral. One of the two witnesses could not walk, having been wounded by shrapnel. He was carried into the cathedral sacristy for the wedding on the back of his fellow witness. The twenty-three-year-old bride and groom were buried alive by a Stuka strike a few days later.

The Red Army observed the last thrashings of the Rising with detached contempt. “The British and Americans are supplying the Germans, not the insurgents,” reported an officer of 1st Belorussian Front after watching an Allied parachute drop on 30 September. A Soviet agent codenamed Oleg who was sent to make contact with the Rising’s leaders in the last days reported afterwards to Moscow: “The interview was not particularly friendly. I could sense their suspicion and hostility towards me, as a representative of the Red Army.” The Russians had little enough compassion to spare for their own people. Why should they waste it on Poles?

The last shot of the Warsaw battle was fired on 2 October 1944, sixty-seven days after it began. Throughout September, while the Resisters in Warsaw were negotiating with the Germans through the Red Cross for a ceasefire, they rejected capitulation and insisted upon terms, notably the recognition