Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [248]
The most disastrous resistance epic of all was, of course, the Warsaw rising, which began in August 1944. There, Churchill’s 1940 vision of an oppressed people breaking forth in revolt against their occupiers was dramatically fulfilled, though the SOE did not directly encourage the Polish initiative. But, in the absence of support from Allied regular forces, the Polish Home Army was comprehensively defeated. The British made much of their attempts, thwarted by Russian intransigence, to parachute arms to the Warsaw Poles. Gubbins was even rash enough910 to urge the Chiefs of Staff to accede to the urging of the Home Army’s leaders that a Polish parachute brigade then in Britain should be dropped to aid the rebels. Even beyond the practical difficulties, it reflected lamentably on Gubbins’s professional judgement that he endorsed such a romantic and futile notion. Parachute-dropped aid from Britain might have assuaged the frustration of Churchill and his people, but could not conceivably have altered the tragic outcome in Warsaw. Large-scale popular uprisings were doomed, unless conducted in concert with the advances of armies, which rendered them strategically irrelevant. The incitement of violent opposition in occupied countries made sense between 1940 and 1942, when every ruthless expedient had to be tried to avert Allied defeat. But it became irresponsible in 1944–45, when Allied victory was assured.
Among the occupied nations, postwar gratitude to Britain for the promotion of resistance was often equivocal. De Gaulle, with characteristic gracelessness, expelled SOE personnel from France as soon as he had power to do so. Georgios Papandreou, the Greek exile prime minister, told Harold Macmillan shortly before his country’s liberation that the British should not disguise from themselves the fact that their prestige in the Balkans had fallen, while that of the Russians had risen, despite Allied victories in France and Italy: “Moreover, in our desire to attack the Germans911 we had roused and armed most dangerous Communist forces in Greece itself.” Churchill’s wartime enthusiasm for resistance groups was soured in 1944 and thereafter by the triumphs of several Communist and nationalist movements in their own countries. They seized power, or in some cases merely attempted to do so, throwing themselves into domestic struggles with greater determination than they had displayed against the Germans.
Towards the end of the war, Jock Colville describes how the controller of BBC European Services, the former diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick, “gave a damning account912 of the inefficacy of both SOE and PWE [Political Warfare Executive], both of which have been loud in self-advertisement.” Kirkpatrick observed that their failures confirmed his own beliefs in the importance of parliamentary scrutiny. Secret mandates rendered the SOE and PWE immune from the sceptical oversight their activities would otherwise have received. This is a criticism applicable to most secret intelligence organisations in war or peace, but Kirkpatrick knew enough of the SOE to render his view significant. “Special ops” recruited some remarkable men and women, and could claim useful sabotage achievements. But its essential purpose was misconceived. “The occupied nations believed with passion,”913 in the words of Sir William Deakin, “and fought to construct their secret armies in the interior and exterior Resistance which would play a leading part in the last stage of liberation of their countries. But this was an obsessive dream.”
The historian Thomas Arnold declared in 1842: “If war, carried out914 by regular armies under the strictest discipline, is yet a great evil, an irregular partisan warfare is an evil ten times as intolerable … letting loose a multitude of armed