LONDON, WASHINGTON, NORMANDY, PARIS, WARSAW JUNE—SEPTEMBER 1944
‘A source of joy to us all’
STALIN
AT 4 A. M. ON 6 JUNE, Eisenhower said, ‘OK. Let’s go’ to launch the great military operation across the Channel, involving 5,000 ships and 600,000 men. Having delayed the landing by twenty-four hours because of the weather, the Supreme Commander scribbled a note to himself about what to say were D-Day to fail. ‘If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone,’ concluded the general, who was smoking heavily and suffered from headaches, high blood pressure, insomnia and eye trouble.1
The night before Overlord was finally launched, Churchill dined alone with his wife. They went to his Map Room. ‘Do you realise,’ he said to her, ‘that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand men may have been killed?’ As for Brooke, he feared it might be ‘the most ghastly disaster of the war’.
Marshall, who was in England, rang the White House at 3 a. m. Washington time. Eleanor woke the President. He put on an old grey sweater, sat up in bed and stayed on the telephone for the next six hours.
‘How I wish I could be with you to see our war machine in operation,’ he cabled Churchill, to whom he sent a present of two electric typewriters to mark the occasion. That night, he broadcast to the nation in the form of a prayer beseeching God for victory and ‘a peace that will let all men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil’. It
Was just two years since he had promised Molotov a second front.
Stalin hailed ‘a source of joy to us all and of hope for further success’. He inscribed photographs of himself in uniform for the Western leaders, telling them the offensive he had pledged at Teheran would start in mid-June on the Byelorussian Front into Poland. To which Churchill responded with a series of messages noting that the ‘Teheran design’ was being implemented with coordinated attacks from west and east, and adding that Washington and London would despatch a convoy of thirty ships with supplies to Russia in mid-August. ‘I hope you will observe that we have never asked you a single question because of our full confidence in you, your nation and your armies,’ he wrote in a tart reference to Stalin’s questioning of his commitment to Overlord.
By the end of 6 June, 155,000 Allied troops had landed. Among them was the President’s one-time isolationist cousin Theodore Roosevelt Jr, who had joined the army and fought with distinction in Italy. He was the oldest man on the beaches, supporting himself with a cane.2
Four days later, Montgomery reported that it was safe for Churchill to cross to France for an inspection visit, accompanied by Marshall, Brooke and King. The peppery British general greeted the party as it scrambled from a landing craft in brilliant weather. During lunch in a tent outside Montgomery’s headquarters, three miles behind the front, Churchill asked if the Allied line was continuous. No, Montgomery replied. So what was to stop a German armoured column breaking up their meal? Churchill enquired. Later in the day, when the visitors went further forward, two German soldiers in hiding chose to give themselves up rather than shooting at them.3
The advance through the hedgerows of Normandy was more difficult than expected, but Stalin hailed the ‘brilliant success’ of taking Caen and Cherbourg, where Theodore Roosevelt Junior became Military Governor before dying in his sleep from a heart attack at the age of fifty-seven. For their part, the Western Allies welcomed the ‘glorious victory’ of the Soviet army at Minsk and in the Baltics. But Hitler hit back by launching the first flying bombs on London, leading to a British discussion of whether to unleash poison gas attacks on German cities— the Chiefs of Staff turned down the idea. Churchill now considered it time to broach a matter he knew was likely to raise hackles in Washington.
He wanted an agreement with Stalin to safeguard British interests in the eastern Mediterranean, and to stop the Communists taking over in Greece. Eden went to see the ambassador in London with a proposal that ‘the Soviet Union should take the lead in Roumania [sic] and the British should do the same in Greece’.4
The proposal was very much in line with Stalin’s thinking. He wanted a free hand in Romania, on Russia’s south-western frontier, and had little interest in Greece. He recognised the British-backed Greek government-in-exile in Cairo, and appears to have actively discouraged the Greek Communists from vying for power.
Stalin asked Churchill to solicit Roosevelt’s views. Writing to the President at the end of May, the British leader presented his initiative as the way to deal with ‘disquieting signs of a possible divergence between ourselves and the Russians in regard to the Balkan countries and in particular towards Greece’. Disingenuously, he added that there was no intention of carving the region into zones of influence. The Big Three powers would retain their rights and responsibilities towards the countries involved.
At the State Department, Hull said the Allies should stick to declarations of broad principles. Roosevelt told Churchill that, far from calming differences, the proposal would mean ‘the division of the Balkan region into spheres of influence’. Instead, there should be ‘consultative machinery to dispel misunderstandings and restrain the tendency toward the development of exclusive spheres’.
The Prime Minister replied immediately that he was ‘much concerned’ by this. Consultations would paralyse action and be out-run by events. The Red Army was about to invade Romania where the Americans and British had no troops. So Stalin would be able to do as he wished. On the other hand, Britain had put itself in a position from which it could supervise the evolution of Greece, whose king and government were under its protection. ‘Why is all this effective direction to be broken up into a committee of mediocre officials?’ Churchill asked. ‘Why can you and I not keep this in our own hands?’
He proposed a three-month trial of the Romania-Greece arrangement, after which it would be reviewed by the Allies. Roosevelt agreed, though he insisted that ‘we must be careful to make it clear that we are not establishing any postwar spheres of influence’.
Churchill cabled Stalin proposing the trial which would be ‘only a working arrangement to avoid as much as possible the awful business of triangular telegrams which paralyses action.’ In reply, the dictator noted that Washington ‘has certain doubts about the matter’, but the deal was done. The division of Europe was taking shape, nearly a year before the Yalta Conference. Four years later, George Orwell wrote to his publisher that he got the idea of the global blocs in 1984 from the Teheran summit and what followed.5
* * * *
Having been excluded from Torch eighteen months earlier, de Gaulle was told about the landing in his country only two days before D-Day. He reacted calmly enough to begin with. Then Eisenhower said that, on Washington’s instruction, a proclamation would be dropped on France as troops landed, naming him as the new authority and making no mention of the Free French, the Resistance or de Gaulle.6
That sent the Frenchman into a rage. He vetoed the use of 200 Free French agents to guide Allied troops. When he was not given first place among leaders of governments-in-exile, he refused to broadcast to the French people. It was the turn of Churchill and Marshall to explode.
Trying to smooth over the row in the hours before the landing, the Free French ambassador Pierre Vienot asked to see Eden. The Foreign Secretary was at Churchill’s bedside; some accounts say the Prime Minister had drunk more than usual and had retired early—for him. At 1 a. m., Vienot went to Downing Street to plead that there had been a misunderstanding. From under the covers, Churchill harangued him about de Gaulle’s ‘treachery in battle’. Vienot responded that he would not be talked to in that way, and walked out. At 3 a. m., an hour before Eisenhower’s order to launch Overlord, Churchill telephoned an aide and ordered that the Free French chief should be flown to Algiers ‘in chains if necessary’. The aide ignored the instruction. When Vienot reported to him, de Gaulle evidently considered he had gone far enough, agreeing both to broadcast and to allow the liaison agents to work with Allied troops. A week later, three days short of the fourth anniversary of his flight to London from his collapsing country, he returned home to be received in triumph in the old Norman town of Bayeux.
Even so, when he visited Washington from the 6th to the 8th of July, the Frenchman was received as a military leader, not a head of government. Roosevelt greeted him by saying in French, ‘St content de vous voir’; but the visit was ‘devoid of trust on both sides’, as the Free
French representative in New York, Raoul Aglion, put it. The two men spoke at, rather than to, each other. Roosevelt refused to accord France the great power status the general saw as hers by right. Nor could de Gaulle accept the Four Policeman order propagated by the President which excluded France. He told Aglion America was ‘already trying to rule the world’ and that ‘Britain will always accede to its wishes’.
The presence at the White House talks of Leahy, who had been the US ambassador to the Petain regime, was a reminder to de Gaulle of how Roosevelt had worked with his enemies. Things were not improved when, as tea was being served, his host turned to Leahy to say: ‘For you, Admiral, Vichy [water] would be more appropriate.’ After the visit, Eleanor forbade their grandson from playing with a large model submarine de Gaulle had presented as a gift on the grounds that it came from a head of state. Roosevelt chipped in to say it was only from ‘the President of some French committee or other’.
However, the American leader relaxed his hostility to the extent of agreeing that the French Committee in London could be granted ‘temporary de facto authority for the civil administration of France’, on two conditions—that Eisenhower should have complete power to do what he felt necessary for military operations and that the French should be allowed a free choice as to their future government. Eisenhower took a less circumspect line. He saw de Gaulle’s value in rallying popular support, and preventing disturbances that might hamper military efforts. When Allied troops entered Paris on 24-25 August, Eisenhower let French forces be the first into the capital—on the 26th de Gaulle led a triumphant procession down the Champs-Elysees. After Stalin said he was ready to acknowledge de Gaulle as ruler of his country, and under pressure from Marshall and Eisenhower, Roosevelt caved in, though he took his time approving a draft recognising the new regime in Paris. Cadogan blamed the foot-dragging on the ‘spiteful old great-aunt’ Leahy. Churchill took up an invitation to visit Paris, and had an emotional stay, speaking at length in his idiosyncratic French, and taking delight in the gold bath in his suite, installed for Hermann Goring.17
In talks with the British, de Gaulle made plain that he envisaged his country becoming an equal partner in the post-war world. Together, he said, the two nations would be able to stop anything happening they did not accept. The US and the USSR would be too taken up by their rivalry to counter them. Other smaller countries would be supportive.
‘Eventually, England and France will create peace together,’ he concluded. Churchill demurred—he saw the Anglo-American alliance as the major force in the post-war world. As soon as the Prime Minister had left, de Gaulle arranged a trip to Moscow.
* * * *
As the Allied armies advanced, Churchill visited Italy, meeting the generals and the Pope, bathing at Capri and getting sunburned. He met the Italian Communist leader Palmiero Togliatti who had been told by Stalin to support the government. He also spent a day with Tito, who looked uncomfortable in a splendid blue-and-gold uniform.8
Much as he relished the trip, this was a frustrating time for the Prime Minister which brought out the fraying of his relationship with Roosevelt. From Italy, he wrote to his wife, reflecting his frustration at the role his country was playing in the alliance. Two-thirds of British forces are being misemployed for American convenience, he charged. He told Roosevelt he deplored the way in which the Italian campaign was being ‘bled white’ by the transfer of US troops for the Anvil landing in South of France. ‘Let us resolve not to wreck one great campaign for the sake of winning the other,’ he added. He sought to enlist Hopkins, with no success — the aide, who had returned to Washington to work two or three hours a day, noted to Dill that ‘the Prime Minister sounds a little jittery’. Roosevelt replied that Eisenhower wanted Anvil by the end of August, so it should be launched as soon as possible.9
‘We are deeply grieved by your message,’ Churchill wrote back in one of the more strongly worded messages he had begun to send to Washington. Not enough resources were available to make Anvil a success, he warned. He recalled a remark by Eisenhower after Teheran about the importance of ‘continuing the maximum possible operations in an established theatre’, and added a message from Stalin calling the Italian offensive ‘worthy of the greatest attention and praise’. ‘If you still press upon us the directive of your Chiefs of Staff to withdraw so many of your forces from the Italian campaign and leave all our hopes there dashed to the ground, His Majesty’s Government, on the advice of their [sic] Chiefs of Staff, must enter a solemn protest,’ he concluded. ‘It is with the greatest sorrow that I write to you in this sense.’10
Roosevelt responded in friendly language, but gave no ground. He insisted on Anvil going ahead as soon as possible, and hoped that the reduced forces in Italy would be able to achieve ‘great things’. He rejected any idea of a thrust into the Balkans through the mountain gap by the city of Ljubljana in Slovenia which Churchill reasoned could lead the
Allies to Vienna. ‘I honestly believe that God will be with us as he has in Overlord and in Italy and in North Africa,’ Roosevelt concluded. ‘I always think of my early geometry: “A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.”’
There was nothing Churchill could do. For the sake of Allied solidarity, he had to pledge to ‘make a success of anything that is undertaken’. When the landing in the South of France, renamed Dragoon, was launched on 15 August and proved successful, he cabled the White House that he wished it ‘success from my heart’. But, to Moran, he called it ‘sheer folly’. ‘Good God, can’t you see that the Russians are spreading across Europe like a tide?...They have invaded Poland, and there is nothing to stop them marching into Turkey and Greece.’
To try to restore harmony, he sought a fresh meeting with Roosevelt. ‘I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement,’ he wrote. ‘That we must meet soon is certain.’ It would be better if Stalin joined in. If not, the two of them must confer. Hopkins warned Roosevelt that a bilateral summit might be construed as having ‘left Russia out in the cold’. Roosevelt wrote to Stalin proposing a tripartite meeting in the north of Scotland. But the dictator said he could not leave his command —‘my colleagues consider it absolutely impossible’.
In a message to Churchill at the beginning of June, Roosevelt had noted that ‘over here new political situations crop up every day but, so far, by constant attention, I am keeping my head above water.’ That month, Congress passed a key plank in completing the reforming agenda of the New Deal, the G. I. Bill of Rights, which made subsidised university education available to veterans—by the late 1940s, half the male college students in the United States were on the programme. It had been Roosevelt’s idea, proof that, amid his machinations, his spirit was firmly on the side of progress which could serve the country’s needs and interests. But he failed to get through a measure to allow all servicemen to vote; Southern Democrats saw that it would open the floodgates to the end of Jim Crow restrictions on black enfranchisement, and Republicans knew that most of those at war would vote for Roosevelt.11
On 20 July, plotters tried to kill Hitler with a bomb and General Kuniaki Koiso, a harsh military man known as the ‘Tiger of Korea’, was appointed Prime Minister of Japan. That same day, Roosevelt was nominated by the Democratic Convention to run for a fourth term. Senator Harry Truman of Missouri became the vice-presidential candidate. Given the state of Roosevelt’s health, it was one of the most important nominations ever made for the number two post but it was the result of party feuding and alliances rather than a consideration of who might succeed to the White House.
During the convention, Roosevelt set off by train on a lengthy journey to meet military chiefs running the war in the Far East, notably Douglas MacArthur. Unusually, he left Marshall behind, which was not to the liking of the Chief of Staff who sent his own emissary to see the Pacific commander. On the journey, the President collapsed on the floor of his railway carriage with angina.
MacArthur had intimated that he could be available to be drafted as the Republican candidate. When a Nebraska congressman wrote to him denouncing the ‘monarchy’ of left-wingers and New Dealers in Washington, the general replied that this was ‘sobering and calculated to arouse the thoughtful consideration of every true patriot’. Roosevelt knew he had nothing to fear from MacArthur as a politician, and the general’s ambitions soon fizzled out. On top of which, MacArthur wanted presidential backing to fulfill his pledge to return to the Philippines rather than following the strategy advocated by Admirals King and Chester Nimitz, the navy Commander in the Pacific, who wished to aim straight for Japan after US forces had sunk three Japanese aircraft carriers and destroyed 400 of their planes in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
Roosevelt sided with MacArthur.
Getting back to the East Coast, the President made a radio address from the deck of a destroyer floating in a flooded dry dock. With ten thousand workers assembled to hear him, he put on his heavy leg braces, which he had worn less and less frequently. Because he had lost weight, they did not fit. The deck was curved. A crisp wind blew. Roosevelt had to grasp the lectern. For the nation he had led for eleven years, it was the first intimation of the decline in his health. His voice was mushy and muffled; his delivery uncertain and rambling. His speechwriter Sam Rosenman listened with ‘a sinking sensation’. Roosevelt was suffering what Dr Bruenn would call a ‘substernal oppression with radiation to both shoulders’. It could have been muscle spasms or angina. An examination reported ‘no unusual abnormalities’—a phrase which, given his record, meant little.
Roosevelt’s election opponent was the sharp, energetic, forty-two-year-old crime-busting prosecutor and New York Governor, Thomas Dewey. A short, dapper man with a pencil moustache, he was described woundingly by a Roosevelt relative as looking like the groom on a wedding cake. It was going to be a rough campaign, in which the incumbent would have to keep the state of his health hidden from voters —and from himself—as he put himself forward as the champion of the American fighting man and the leader who could fashion a new world. Roosevelt, who had not personally disliked his previous opponents, developed a deep distaste for Dewey, privately calling him a ‘son of a bitch’ and saying publicly that he would not pronounce his name ‘because I think I am a Christian’. The Republicans accused him of molly-coddling domestic Communists, and of having diverted a destroyer to pick up his dog, Fala, which had supposedly been left behind on an island during the West Coast trip. Roosevelt roused the country to laughter with a speech in which he said that, while he was used to malicious falsehoods about himself, he had ‘a right to resent, to object to libellous statements about my dog’.
As the electoral battle moved into gear, representatives of the Big Four powers met in a Washington mansion, Dumbarton Oaks, to plan the postwar global organisation that was to keep the peace. For fear of irritating Tokyo, the Soviets refused to sit down with the Chinese, who had to wait their turn till the US and British completed their work with the Russians.12
Exhibiting all his diplomatic skills, Cadogan headed the British team. Gromyko led the Soviet side, displaying the toughness that was to mark his long career. Though Cordell Hull was involved from time to time, Welles’s successor as Under Secretary of State, the former Lend-Lease administrator Edward Stettinius, ran American operations, drawing heavily on planning carried out since 1939 by a Russian-born official,
Leo Pasvolsky, a man with an unusually large, egg-shaped head known as ‘the brain that walks like a man’.
Roosevelt consented to modifications of the power of the Four Policemen by giving authority to a council in which seven other countries would sit on a non-permanent basis. He also agreed that France could take a permanent seat on the council in due course. Moscow and Washington both wanted the big powers to have a veto in matters involving their own interests. Cadogan pointed out that this would make the organisation seem like a dictatorship. When Roosevelt cabled Stalin on the matter, the reply was that unanimity of the three main allies had been implied at Teheran. Gromyko insisted Moscow’s position was ‘final and unalterable’. Then the Kremlin threw in a demand for all sixteen constituent USSR republics to sit in the General Assembly.
Hull asked Harriman if he thought Stalin had decided to reverse the policy of cooperation Washington believed it had obtained. The ambassador did not think so, but counselled that it could be difficult to grasp the Soviet concept of what had been agreed. Molotov had indicated to him that, if the West did not raise objections to a Soviet plan, he and Stalin saw this as compliance. ‘Then, too, words have a different connotation to the Soviets than they have to us,’ the envoy added. To enable the Western Allies to go to a swift session with the Chinese, it was decided that the crucial issue of the veto would be left until the Big Three met again.
* * * *
The Red Army had launched its summer offensive on 22 June, the third anniversary of the start of Operation Barbarossa. In keeping with the patriotic feeling Stalin was seeking to evoke, it was named after a heroic Tsarist general, Bagration, who had fought Napoleon across Europe and perished after repulsing French charges at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. A total of 1.7 million troops were involved, with 6,000 planes, 2,715 tanks, 24,000 artillery pieces and 70,000 lorries. In the first week, more than 150,000 Germans were killed or captured. By the beginning of August, Soviet forces held a line stretching from Riga on the Baltic through Lithuania and East Prussia to the outskirts of Warsaw and then south to the Hungarian border.
Just before Bagration began, Roosevelt had several meetings with the Prime Minister of the London Poles, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, who had taken the post after the death of Sikorski in a plane accident in Gibraltar. The President said Poland must be free and independent. He opposed dividing the country along the Curzon Line in the east. He would mediate an agreement to give Silesia, East Prussia and other important areas to Warsaw. The Poles should understand that the United States and Britain had no intention of fighting Russia, but he was certain Stalin was not an imperialist. The Soviet leader did not want to annihilate Poland, and knew how important it was to the Western Allies. ‘I will see to it that Poland will not be hurt in this war, and will emerge strongly independent,’ he promised. ‘Here is the perfect idealist,’ Mikolajczyk thought. ‘But his faith in Stalin is tragically misplaced.’13
In a message to the Kremlin, the President stressed that there was no attempt on his part ‘to inject myself into the merits of the differences which exist between the Polish Government and the Soviet Government’.
Mikolajczyk, he added, struck him as ‘a very sincere and reasonable man whose sole desire is to do what is best for his country’ and who wanted to foster cooperation between the Polish underground and the advancing Red Army. Roosevelt ended by suggesting a visit to Moscow by the Polish leader while taking care to state that he was not trying to press his views in any way.
In reply, Stalin wrote that a ‘reconstruction’ of the government-inexile was vital for all Polish groups to work together. So was recognition of the Curzon Line by which Warsaw would cede large swathes of territory to Russia. To Churchill, the Soviet leader wrote that, as the Red Army moved into Poland, the Kremlin had ‘seen fit to get in touch with the Polish Committee of National Liberation’. This was play-acting. The Committee had been organised under Soviet auspices at the end of 1943, and was at Stalin’s beck and call. It was already setting up shop in the city of Lublin which had been taken by the Red Army. ‘We have not found in Poland other forces capable of establishing a Polish administration,’ Stalin told Churchill. ‘The so-called underground organisations, led by the Polish Government in London, have turned out to be ephemeral and lacking in influence.’ He was, however, ready to meet Mikolajczyk, even if he thought it better for him to see the National Committee first. ‘This seems to me the best ever received from U. J.,’ Churchill commented to Roosevelt while insisting on the ‘utmost importance’ of not deserting the London Poles. Eden told the Commons that London continued to recognise Mikolajczyk and his colleagues, though he wished to say no more ‘since we are here concerned with relations between two of our Allies’. The Foreign Secretary believed Washington would do nothing for the Poles. Roosevelt might make ‘vague and generous promises’, but it would be a delusion to put faith in them, Eden forecast privately. The government-in-exile in London agreed. It accused Moscow of intending ‘to impose on the Polish people an illegal administration which has nothing in common with the will of the nation’. It called on Britain to make a demarche to Stalin. Knowing that the West was not going to intervene militarily in the east, the Home Army of the London Poles was preparing to rise against the Nazis as the Red Army moved in on Warsaw.
At the end of July 1944, Mikolajczyk made a circuitous flight to Moscow. The fourty-four-year-old leader of the main peasant party was among the more moderate figures of the London government, standing apart from the die-hard anti-Communists. Known for his stubbornness, the balding, thickset politician could expect to head the largest parliamentary group in a democratic regime. He was under several disadvantages, however. The Lublin group had already started operating on Polish territory, with Soviet backing. The NKVD was purging supporters of the London Poles in areas taken by the Red Army. Despite verbal assurances from the Americans and British, he had no way of knowing how far they were ready to go in standing up to Stalin — or how prepared the dictator would be to compromise. As the historian Norman Davies has noted, his position as leader of a peasant party would have meant that Stalin would have classed him with the kulak rural bourgeoisie he had liquidated in the Soviet Union.14
‘Why are you here?’ Molotov asked when the Polish leader called on him. The Soviets advised him to see the Lublin Committee, but Mikolajczyk insisted on meeting Stalin first. That entailed a three-day wait, during which a German threat to deport men from Warsaw sparked the Warsaw Rising on 1 August, starting a two-month battle which would ravage the city while, in the words of Norman Davies, ‘the largest army in the world pretended not to be there,’ despite having broadcast calls for the Poles to rise in revolt. The death toll of 30,000 resistance fighters and Germans was far outweighed by more than 200,000 civilians who perished.
The leaders of the Home Army counted on help from the Russians, but, with its supply lines highly extended and its troops exhausted, the Red Army was planning to rest and regroup before entering the city. The Poles felt they could not wait, however. They were anxious to make their mark in the capital before Soviet troops arrived, if only to establish their political claims against the Lublin group. Stalin paced his office, uncertain what to do. Could the army advance? he asked. His generals said a pause was essential. Stalin conferred with Beria and other aides. The decision was to accept the military advice. This may have been playacting to establish an alibi against accusations that he did not want to help the Poles; but the commander at the front, the part-Polish Rokossovsky, said the rising would have only made sense if his forces had been about to take the city, and that this point had not been reached. Faced with a German counter-offensive east of the Vistula, the Soviet leader ordered the Red Army to halt on 2 August—the order was later concealed.15
The following day, Mikolajczyk got to see the dictator. When he asked for help for the insurgents, Stalin initially agreed, but then said he would not allow any operations beyond Red Army lines, dismissing the underground for not having fought the Germans in the past but ‘skulking in the woods’. However, according to Mikolajczyk’s later account, he said the Soviets expected to enter Warsaw on 6 August; Molotov had told him they were ten miles from the city.
Mikolajczyk had two meetings with the Lublin group. First, they told him there was no fighting in Warsaw; then they attacked the Home Army for acting without consulting Moscow. Mikolajczyk should resign, they said, so that they could form a government. If he returned to his homeland, he would be arrested. Still, there was a slender hope—Stalin’s initial offer of help. Mikolajczyk must have communicated this to the British, because, on 5 August, the head of the military mission in Moscow asked the Soviet General Staff for information about ‘the decision’ to fly arms and ammunition into Warsaw. The letter was forwarded to Stalin.
On 9 August, Mikolajczyk saw Stalin again. The dictator was cordial, speaking warmly of Soviet-Polish relations. According to the account Mikolajczyk gave to Clark Kerr, the Soviet leader said he had no intention of ‘communising’ Poland, which should have ties with the West as well as an alliance with the USSR. As for the prime enemy, he added that Communism was ‘no more fit for Germany than a saddle for a cow’. He agreed to provide the rising with ‘the most rapid assistance possible’, though he wondered how realistic this was given the German counterattack. Thinking he had obtained a commitment, the Polish leader left as soon as he could for London.
Stalin wrote to Roosevelt that the meetings could be considered as the first stage in the relations between the Polish Committee and Mikolajczyk and his colleagues. He added that the London Poles had been offered four ministerial portfolios in a post-war government, including the post of Prime Minister. How accurate that was in the light of the harsh attitude taken by the Lublin Committee is open to question. But Churchill noted to Roosevelt that the mood of the message was ‘more agreeable than we have sometimes met’.
The previous day, the Red Army commander, Rokossovsky, had drawn up a plan to cross the Vistula River to take Warsaw and drive on towards Berlin. This was approved by his superior, Marshal Zhukov. The Lublin Committee issued a declaration proclaiming that ‘the moment has arrived for the liberation of our capital’. But Stalin hesitated. Reports from the field showed strong support for the London Poles. Their partisans were shooting members of the Lublin group. The leaders of the rising were unlikely to prove friends of Moscow while the German counter-attack showed that the Wehrmacht was not on the run.
So, instead of following the Rokossovsky-Zhukov plan, Stalin switched priority to an attack on Romania, an easier target. From Churchill’s message in May, he knew that he would have no trouble with the West. An advance to the Balkans would block any lingering British plans to intervene there. On 13 August, Tass news agency issued a statement denying any contact between the Home Army and the Soviet command. ‘Full responsibility for the events in Warsaw will fall exclusively on Polish emigre circles in London,’ it ended.
Five days later, Stalin told Churchill that, after his second meeting with Mikolajczyk, he had ordered intensive arms drops on Warsaw. But he had concluded that ‘the Warsaw Action represents a reckless and terrible adventure which is costing the population large sacrifices. This would not have been if the Soviet command had been informed before the beginning of the Warsaw action and if the Poles had maintained contact with it. In the situation which has arisen the Soviet command has come to the conclusion that it must disassociate itself from the Warsaw adventure as it cannot take either direct or indirect responsibility for the Warsaw action.’
Britain tried drops on Warsaw with planes flying from Italy, but a third of the aircraft were lost, and the RAF declined to fly more sorties. Any help would have to come from US bombers from England, flying on from Warsaw to land in Ukraine. Churchill sought to rouse Roosevelt to action with a message referring to ‘an episode of profound and far-reaching gravity. If, as is almost certain, the German triumph in Warsaw is followed by a wholesale massacre no measure can be put upon the full consequences that will arise.’ He proposed a joint approach to Moscow. The victory in Normandy far exceeded any single Russian battle, he went on, so ‘I’m inclined to think that they will have some respect for what we say so long as it is plain and simple. It is quite possible that Stalin would resent it but even if he did we are nations serving high causes and must give true counsels towards world peace.’
Stirred to action, the Americans pressed for landing rights for relief planes at airfields it was using in Ukraine for shuttle bombing of Germany. But Vyshinsky, the Deputy Foreign Minister, said this could not be agreed to because the rising was ‘a purely adventuristic affair to which the Soviet Government could not lend its hand’. When Harriman and Clark Kerr asked to meet Molotov, they were told he was unavailable. Seeing Vyshinsky again on 15 August, they pointed out that, even if the rising had been premature, the Poles were killing Germans and that Moscow’s obstructionism was bound to have a bad effect on Western opinion. But Stalin had made up the Kremlin’s mind.
Harriman sent a message to Roosevelt saying: ‘I am, for the first time since coming to Moscow, gravely concerned by the attitude of the Soviet Government. If [its] position... is correctly reflected by Vyshinsky, its refusal is based on ruthless political considerations—not on denial that resistance exists nor on operational difficulties.’ He urged Roosevelt to contact Stalin to seek reconsideration, pointing out the risk to ‘the belief of the American public in the chances of success of postwar cooperation and of world security organization’.
On 17 August, Harriman and Clark Kerr got to see Molotov. He was unyielding, pointing to Western newspaper criticism of the Soviet Union as the work of the London Poles. Nothing could be done to save the fighters in the streets of Warsaw from their own folly, Molotov said, American use of the airfields in Ukraine would have to stop as winter approached. Reporting to Roosevelt, Harriman depicted Molotov and his deputy as men ‘bloated with power [who] expect they can force acceptance of their decisions without question on us and all countries’.
Washington instructed Harriman to ease off for fear of jeopardising military cooperation with Moscow. A major general from the US air force in Europe warned Hopkins that London was trying to manipulate the Americans, and said only 5 per cent of supplies dropped on Warsaw would reach the underground. The State Department told Harriman,
‘there is a tendency on the part of the British to go considerably farther than the President is prepared to go.’ The ambassador, who was working till 6.30 a. m., did not give up. ‘In our long-term relations with the Russians,’ he cabled Roosevelt and Hull, ‘we should impress our views on them as firmly as possible and show our displeasure whenever they take action of which we strongly disapprove.’
Roosevelt bent to the extent of agreeing to a joint message with Churchill to Stalin which said: ‘We are thinking of world opinion if the anti-Nazis in Warsaw are in effect abandoned. We believe that all three of us should do the outmost to save as many of the patriots there as possible. We hope that you will drop immediate supplies and munitions to the patriot Poles in Warsaw, or will agree that our planes should do it very quickly. We hope you will approve. The time element is of extreme importance.’
Whatever the President’s personal feelings, domestic politics were in play. At Teheran, he had invoked the Polish vote as a reason for not committing himself. Now, in his re-election campaign, he could see the electoral danger if he was portrayed as having done nothing to help the Warsaw rising. On 23 August he sent Churchill a message that ‘we must continue to hope for agreement by the Soviet to our desire to assist the Poles in Warsaw’. What they got was a broadside from Stalin. ‘Sooner or later the truth about the handful of power-seeking criminals who launched the Warsaw adventure will out,’ he wrote. ‘Those elements, playing on the credulity of the inhabitants of Warsaw, exposed practically unarmed people to German guns, armour and aircraft. The result is a situation in which every day is used, not by the Poles for freeing Warsaw, but by the Hitlerites, who are cruelly exterminating the civil population.’
Churchill suggested replying with a proposal that the US planes would land in Ukraine without Moscow being officially told where they had been. ‘The massacre in Warsaw will undoubtedly be a very great annoyance to us when we all meet at the end of the war,’ his draft to Stalin added. ‘Unless you directly forbid it, therefore, we propose to send the planes.’ If there was no reply, he felt they ought to proceed and see what happened.
There were limits to how far Roosevelt was ready to go. ‘I do not consider it advantageous to the long-range general war prospect for me to join with you in the proposed message to U. J.,’ he replied. He was not going to let the Warsaw rising imperil his relations with Stalin. Hopkins put his faith in the Red Army. ‘The problem of Warsaw will be handled by the sure victories on Germany’s eastern front,’ he advised.
On 4 September, Churchill returned to the charge. He told Roosevelt that the War Cabinet was ‘deeply disturbed at the position in Warsaw and at the far-reaching effect on future relations with Russia of Stalin’s refusal of airfield facilities’. The defeat of the rising would destroy any hope of progress towards a political settlement, and fatally undermine Mikolajczyk.
The Prime Minister told his secretary he wanted to threaten ‘drastic action’ on supplies to the Soviet Union if Stalin did not help the rising. ‘Seeing how much is in jeopardy we beg that you will again consider the big stakes involved,’ he told Roosevelt in another message. In a cable to Clark Kerr, which was copied to the White House, the War Cabinet said it wanted the Kremlin to know how moved British opinion was by events in Warsaw.
‘Our people cannot understand why no material help has been sent from outside to the Poles in Warsaw,’ the cable went on. ‘The fact that such help could not be sent on account of your Government’s refusal to allow United States aircraft to land on aerodromes in Russian hands is now becoming publicly known. If on top of all this the Poles in Warsaw should now be overwhelmed by the Germans, as we are told they must be within two or three days, the shock to public opinion here will be incalculable...Your Government’s action in preventing this help being sent seems to us at variance with the spirit of Allied cooperation to which you and we attach so much importance both for the present and for the future.’
Roosevelt was not to be moved. His response to London said US intelligence reported the ‘fighting Poles’ leaving Warsaw, with the Germans in full control. In fact, the rising did not end for a month; but Roosevelt’s message concluded that ‘the problem of relief for the Poles in Warsaw has therefore unfortunately been solved by delay and by German action and there now appears to be nothing we can do to assist them. I have long been deeply distressed by our inability to give adequate assistance to the heroic defenders of Warsaw and I hope that we may together still be able to help Poland and be among the victors in this war with the Nazis.’
In mid-September, the Allies finally went into action. Soviet planes dropped food and bombed German positions. US bombers parachuted down supplies which did fall mainly in areas controlled by the Wehrmacht. Hull told Harriman: ‘From the political point of view, we feel that it is of the highest importance that there should be no hesitation on our part... in order to avoid the possibility of our being blamed in the event that the aid does not arrive in time.’
Though Stalin now claimed he had been misinformed about the reasons for the rising, the Red Army still did not advance as antiCommunist Polish forces in the city were reduced to a handful. The deadly inaction had done the Lublin Committee’s work for it. Reporting to Washington, Harriman concluded that Stalin did not want the Poles to take credit for the liberation of Warsaw, and wished the underground leaders to be killed by Nazis or stigmatised as enemies who could be arrested when the Russians entered. ‘Under these circumstances,’ he added, ‘it is difficult for me to see how a peaceful or acceptable solution can be found to the Polish problem.’
‘I have evidence that they have misinterpreted our generous attitude as a sign of weakness, and acceptance of their policies,’ the
Envoy reported to Roosevelt. ‘Time has come when we must make clear what we expect of them as the price of our goodwill. Unless we take issue with the present policy there is every indication the Soviet Union will become a world bully wherever their interests are involved.’ He advocated that Washington should be ready to stand up to the Kremlin on vital issues. In the last analysis, he thought, Stalin would back off. Churchill reflected that the world was ‘full of wolves and bears’.
World History
