Poland Alone: Britain, SOE and the Collapse of the Polish Resistance, 1944
192
Poland Alone: Britain, SOE and the Collapse of the Polish Resistance, 1944
192Overview
Poland was the 'tripwire' that brought Britain into the Second World War, but it was largely the fear of the new Nazi-Soviet Pact rather than the cementing of an old relationship that created the formal alliance. But neither Britain, nor Poland's older ally, France, had the material means to prevent Poland being overrun in 1939. The broadcast, 'Poland is no longer alone' had a distinctly hollow ring. During the next four years the Polish Government in exile and armed forces made a significant contribution to the allied war effort; in return the Polish Home Army received a paltry 600 tons of supplies. Poland Alone focuses on the bloody Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the Polish Resistance attempted to gain control of their city from the German Army. They expected help from the Allies but received none, and they were left helpless as the Russians moved in. The War ended with over five million Poles dead, three million of whom died in the concentration camps.
Jonathan Walker examines whether Britain could have done more to save the Polish people in their crisis year of 1944, dealing with many different aspects such as the actions of the RAF and SOE, the role of Polish Couriers, the failure of British Intelligence and the culpability of the British Press.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752469430 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 765,884 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
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Poland Alone: Britain, SOE and the Collapse of the Polish Resistance, 1944
By Jonathan Walker
The History Press
Copyright © 2011 Jonathan WalkerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6943-0
CHAPTER 1
The Rape of Poland
It was a bizarre plan, even by the standards of Reinhardt Heydrich, head of the SS Security Service (SD). As a pretext for Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, some twenty bogus border incursions by Polish troops were arranged. Under the hardly discreet codename 'Operation Himmler', a number of condemned criminals were to be dressed in Polish Army uniforms, killed by lethal injection and their bodies shot and arranged as if they had fallen in attacks on German territory. In one particular action, Heydrich employed Alfred Naujocks, an SD henchman with some experience in 'incident creation' to organise a feigned assault on the Gleiwitz radio station, just inside the German border. Naujocks was in position at the station before dawn on 1 September 1939 and duly received his consignment – a half-dead Polish Silesian, Franciszek Honiok. An impervious Naujocks later testified:
I received this man and had him laid down at the entrance to the station. He was alive, but he was completely unconscious. I tried to open his eyes. I could not recognize by his eyes that he was alive, only by his breathing. I did not see the shot wounds, but a lot of blood was smeared across his face. He was in civilian clothes. We seized the radio station as ordered, broadcast a speech of 3 to 4 minutes over an emergency transmitter, fired some pistol shots, and left.
As German radio bellowed out accusations of 'outrageous' Polish incursions, the unfortunate Honiok was finished off and left as 'evidence' of a Polish assault – probably the first casualty of the Second World War. Blitzkrieg was swiftly unleashed against Poland. Nearly 1,600 first-line aircraft attacked bridges, installations and airfields in support of German armoured units. Air supremacy was achieved within twenty-four hours. Despite the courage of the Polish pilots, their outdated fighters were no match for the cannons of the Messerschmitt 109E, while the JU87 Stuka was used to terrifying effect. With its ability to dive at an angle between 65° and 90°, delivering one 500lb and four 100lb bombs within a 50-yard radius, it was a fearsome machine. Its screaming 'Jericho' sirens on its undercarriage legs further demoralised victims.
On the first morning of Hitler's invasion plan, Fall Weiss (Case White) the speed of the advance was extraordinary and even Warsaw was bombed. Unlike defences in Western Europe, Poland had a porous border with Germany and was bereft of integrated fortifications, allowing swift access for panzer units across level terrain. Under the control of Army Group North, General von Kluge's Fourth Army swept across the Polish Pomeranian corridor at the same time as General von Kückler's Third Army burst out of East Prussia, drove south and blocked off Warsaw from the east. Polish resistance was fierce but hopelessly out-manoeuvred. There were many stories of great bravery on the part of the Poles with units such as the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade charging German infantry with sabres drawn. However, while German commanders conceded that the Polish Cavalry were 'superb', the appearance of German armoured cars caused devastating casualties amongst the Polish Lancer squadrons.
An American documentary film-maker was caught up in the rush to escape the German attack:
The Nazi planes covered the entire interior network of the Polish railways, completely destroyed train after train, killing and wounding 50 of 300 people on our train alone, including our engineer. As soon as the Nazis found there was no anti-aircraft protection on our train they gave up bombing, power-dived sometimes within 20 feet of the top of our train; what luck we had, jumping out of the windows, reaching the woods before they reached our car: for others were caught, and we filmed them between attacks, wounded, bleeding, dying or dead in their seats. The planes followed the survivors, strafing their hiding places in the woods, killing them in the open fields nearby. In one station, a crazy woman standing calm in her straitjacket seemed the only intelligent human being in a flock of frantic, frightened human sheep.
Meanwhile, Colonel-General von Rundstedt's Army Group South made similar rapid progress, though its Eighth Army met stiff resistance after reaching Lodzz and faced a week-long counter-offensive from Polish troops advancing across the Bzura River. The German Tenth Army raced from Lower Silesia towards Sandomierz, while von List's Fourteenth Army moved out of Moravia and Slovakia to take Kraków and the south-east of Poland. Senior Army commanders, unhindered by Hitler, had carried out much of this meticulous planning. As Generaloberst Franz Halder, Deputy Chief of the General Staff for Operations observed, 'Hitler did not interfere in Army preparations, except that he planned down to the smallest detail the attack against the Bridge at Dirschau'. It was ironic that this was one Polish operation where the Germans were thwarted, for the Poles pre-empted the German attack on this important bridge over the Vistula by blowing it up. Nevertheless, those who worked closely with him conceded that Hitler did have a grasp of small unit tactics:
With his personal experience of the last war in the ranks, he had gained a very good knowledge of the lower level of warfare – the properties of the different weapons; the effect of ground and weather; the mentality and morale of the troops – he was very good at gauging this.
The German invasion of 1939 ended nearly twenty years of relative freedom and independence for Poland. Such freedom had been a novel experiment as Poland's recent history was largely one of foreign domination, sandwiched between the Teutonic powers of Saxony and Prussia in the west, and Russia in the east. During the Great War, much of modern Poland's territory was occupied by Germany, who from 1915 pushed the Eastern Front boundary beyond Warsaw. In the hope that the Poles would support the German war effort, the Kaiser imposed a surprisingly benign tenure, allowing some religious tolerance and even reinstating the Polish language in education and government administration. As the German monarchy collapsed, so Polish nationalists came to the fore, including Józef Pilsudski, while the Versailles Peace Conference re-established the country as an independent republic, albeit with ill-defined boundaries, especially to the east. Following a plebiscite, the important industrial and mining region of Upper Silesia in the west was granted to Poland in 1921, but her independence was far from guaranteed. To the east, Lenin still hoped to export the Bolshevik revolution to the centre of Europe and in 1920 war broke out. Polish and Ukrainian troops achieved early successes. However, an effective Red Army counter-offensive brought Poland to the international negotiating table, where a proposal for a settled eastern boundary known as the 'Curzon Line' was discussed. This line, named after the British Foreign Secretary, was to be an armistice line but was soon ignored by the Bolsheviks who continued their march on Warsaw. The situation for the Poles appeared hopeless with only the River Vistula, on which the capital lay, remaining as a natural defence. But in an extraordinary reversal Józef Pilsudski's Polish army routed the Bolsheviks in the Battle of Warsaw, which became a legend known as 'The Miracle on the Vistula'.
Pilsudski remained the strongman of Poland throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. A coup in 1926 consolidated his power and ushered in the Sanacja (sanitation) regime, which was to continue in office until 1939. This regime was certainly no democracy, but neither was it the fascist dictatorship described by some sources. However, it remained dedicated to a continuous search for security and this inter-war period saw a succession of treaties and pacts between Poland and her neighbours or allies. A Polish-French Alliance was signed on 19 February 1921, only to be tempered later by the terms of the 1925 Treaty of Locarno, which saw Britain and France guarantee that the German borders would remain static. Significantly, no international guarantees were given for Germany's border with Poland, and feeling vulnerable, the Polish Government signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on 25 July 1932, followed by a similar pact with Germany in January 1934.
With the death of Pilsudski in May 1935, the Sanacja regime lost its unifying force at the very time when the country was subject to increased nationalist agitation, for included in a population of 32 million were some important minorities including Ukrainians (4 million), Jews (2.2 million), Byelorussians (1.5 million) and Germans (1 million). The Depression of the late 1920s and poor harvests had badly affected the population of Poland, of whom 64% lived off the land, and some communities became susceptible to envy of the Jews, who, by their industry, achieved representation in higher education, and dominated professions such as law and medicine. Some elements in Polish society felt excluded from further advancement and looked for scapegoats amongst such minorities. As a result of economic inequalities, there were some anti-Semitic riots, but their nature was sporadic, largely un-orchestrated and lacked the state sponsorship clearly evident in Germany.
On 29 September 1938, the Munich conference began. Perhaps 'conference' was a misnomer, for yet again, Hitler dictated the European agenda, pushing the feeble British and French delegations into accepting the German annexation of the Sudetenland. Almost all of the Czechoslovak defensive positions lay within this region and the country, now totally exposed, anxiously awaited dismemberment. The Polish Government and especially the sharp and resourceful Polish Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, closely monitored events in their neighbouring state. In a move to pick over the Czech carcass, Poland gave the Czech government an ultimatum to remove its troops from the northwest corner of the Duchy of Teschen. On 1 October 1938, Polish troops seized this portion of Czech territory, much to the delight of the Germans who were happy to spread the blame for the ceding of parts of Czechoslovakia. Although Germany was deprived of this three-hundred-square-mile parcel of land containing important rail junctions, its seizure by Poland was opportunist and short-lived; it was also an action which appalled traditional friends of Poland, such as Winston Churchill, who accused the Poles of jumping 'on the back of Czechoslovakia in that moment of agony which helped to rend her in pieces.'
Although Beck knew he had guarantees from Britain and France, he was enough of a pragmatist to realise that these agreements needed underwriting. He therefore looked to a wider plan for an east European block of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the remains of Czechoslovakia, that might just be a bulwark against Germany and the Soviet Union. However, these plans soon foundered and in the winter of 1938–9 Germany bought off Hungary by giving her a sizable chunk of southern Slovakia. The remainder of Slovakia was encouraged by Germany to declare independence on 14 March 1939 and the following day, the President of Czechoslovakia, Emil Hácha, was invited to meet Hitler. Standing before the dictator, Hácha was berated and humiliated and, once he had been revived from physical collapse, was 'encouraged' to sign away Moravia and Bohemia. These two regions had formed the residue of the Czech part of the country and their new status as a German 'protectorate' and base for German troops would prove important as a springboard for the forthcoming attack on Poland.
The 1939 Anglo-Polish Treaty did not contain any guarantee for the integrity of Poland's pre-war boundaries, though on 31 March the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain surprised the House of Commons with a verbal assurance that if Poland were attacked, Britain and France 'would lend the Polish Government all the support in their power'. Three days later, after a series of customary rages, Hitler instructed the German High Command (OKW) to issue plans for the invasion of Poland. The simultaneity of these acts has prompted some sources to blame Chamberlain's assurances for pushing Hitler to accelerate his plans for an attack on Poland, but it would seem that Hitler needed little encouragement. And it was hard to see how Britain could not have given Poland a guarantee, for as Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office observed:
There was no hope of averting a war by not guaranteeing Poland. The more or less instinctive reaction of the Government, approved by the Foreign Office, was not therefore unpremeditated panic as suggested by some: it was a calculated defiance, and it was probably right.
The British Government's belated stand against Hitler was rewarded with more than just points for morality. Increased co-operation between Britain and Poland was to reap significant benefits for the former, in the shape of intelligence. The Polish Intelligence Service had for some time since the early 1930s been decoding German military signals traffic. They had even managed to construct a replica 'Enigma' machine, from which they deciphered pre-war German Wehrmacht messages. However, German modifications to the military machine in late 1938 could not be discovered in time to enable Polish GHQ to read enemy ciphers in the critical period during August and September 1939. Nevertheless, the Poles were prepared to share what Enigma knowledge they held with British and French Intelligence. On 26 July 1939, Intelligence officers from the three countries met in the village of Pyry, just south of Warsaw. AG Denniston, Head of the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) who attended the meeting, recalled that the Poles displayed 'a mass of telegrams they had read, concerning naval traffic between Berlin and the [German] fleet in Spanish waters'. This hard evidence of their progress was followed up in August by the delivery to London, of a replica machine. This did not mean that the western Allies could read German signals immediately, because the settings and keys were regularly altered, but with the invaluable assistance and knowledge of Polish cryptanalysts, the British were eventually able to break the Enigma code.
Meanwhile, to the east of Poland, Britain was lukewarm about talks with the Soviet Premier Josef Stalin and since the spring of 1939 had largely pushed away offers of a Soviet pact. In Moscow, distrust of the west was allowed to fester, with both Britain and France being seen as unreliable allies since their weak showing at Munich the previous year. It was a widely held belief that 'the [British] Government made allies with eloquence and great diplomatic skill, without being in a position to back up their words with suitable deeds.'
As Germany piled on the pressure during August, the atmosphere in Warsaw remained strangely calm. William L. Shirer, an American correspondent with CBS who was based in the Polish capital, noted in his diary:
Walking home to the hotel at dawn, the air was soft and fresh and the quiet, soothing. All in all, the Poles are calm and confident and Berlin's gibes and Goebbels' terrific campaign of lies and invented incidents leave them cold. But they are romantic – too confident. You ask them, as I've asked a score of officials in the Foreign Office and the army this past week, about Russia and they shrug their shoulders. Russia does not count for them. But it ought to.
Shirer was right. Both the Soviets and Germans saw Poland as a buffer state between their ideologies and a convenient Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact would neatly divide Eastern Europe into areas of influence and control. More importantly for Hitler, it would relieve the threat of a war on two fronts, whilst for Stalin, it would allay his fears that he might be attacked from the west at the same time as any Japanese assault on his eastern borders. After overtures from Hitler, on 24 August 1939 Vyacheslav Molotov, the new Commissar for Soviet Foreign Affairs, signed a pact with his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The pact would keep Stalin out of a major war for the moment, but at a stroke, it had determined Poland's fate.
Hitler now pushed the issue of the 'Polish Corridor'. This was a strip of land, some twenty-five miles wide, which was given to Poland through the Treaty of Versailles in order to allow her access to the sea. The practical effect was that it split off East Prussia from the rest of Germany, including the German-speaking seaport of Danzig, which had been declared a 'Free City' under the protection of the League of Nations. Hitler then put forward terms for his acquisition of Danzig and the Corridor, but while these terms were clearly unacceptable to the Poles, they found some favour in Britain. Chamberlain still hoped for peace and he was not alone. Hastings Ismay, Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence was prepared to allow the dictator one last chance, declaring to his colleague Robin Hankey:
Danzig is no longer a place but a principle and in my opinion, we should make no more concessions of any kind unless and until Hitler himself makes a real geste de rapprochement. If he did that, and I thought it could be trusted, I would go a very long way to meet him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poland Alone: Britain, SOE and the Collapse of the Polish Resistance, 1944 by Jonathan Walker. Copyright © 2011 Jonathan Walker. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
List of Maps,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Chapter One The Rape of Poland,
Chapter Two The Polish Home Army,
Chapter Three Operation 'Wildhorn',
Chapter Four Auschwitz,
Chapter Five SOE – a Lifeline?,
Chapter Six Soviet Onslaught,
Chapter Seven Warsaw Erupts (August 1944),
Chapter Eight Warsaw in Flames (September 1944),
Chapter Nine Chaos and Collapse,
Chapter Ten Epilogue,
Conclusion,
Appendix Equivalent Military Ranks,
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations,
Bibliography,
About the Author,
Copyright,