by Lynne Olson
Nowak’s first emotion was shock, followed by “a rage I could hardly contain.” He understood that the British could do nothing to stop the Soviets from overrunning Poland, but Churchill’s statement was “a public offer to agree in advance to Russian annexation of almost half of our country even before they [completely] occupied it.”
The prime minister’s declaration was the culmination of two years of behind-the-scenes maneuvering over the issue. Ever since early 1942, Stalin had urged Churchill to agree to his claims for eastern Poland. At first Churchill had rejected the idea, but under the strain of repeated British military defeats and the fear that Stalin might seek a separate peace with Hitler if his demands were not met, he finally gave in.
To Churchill, it was clear that the Russian leader’s acquisition of Polish territory would involve “the forcible transfer of large populations against their will into the Communist sphere.” By agreeing to this, he acknowledged in 1942, Britain would turn its back on fundamental principles of freedom that were the supposed bedrock of the Allied cause.
In private, he agonized over the decision. He was genuinely concerned about Poland’s fate but would take no action on its behalf. The reality was, as it always had been, that Britain’s political and military interests were inextricably tied to the future of western Europe, along with Greece and the Balkans. It had no such interests in eastern European countries, such as Poland.
Above all, the British were not prepared to risk their alliance with the Soviet Union for the sake of the Poles. Both Churchill and Roosevelt were willing to give Stalin whatever he wanted to ensure that the Soviets continued to bear the brunt of the fight against Germany on the eastern front.*1 The two Western leaders “found it convenient, perhaps essential, to allow Stalin’s citizens to bear the scale of human sacrifice which was necessary to destroy the Nazi armies, but which their own nations’ sensibilities rendered them unwilling to accept,” the historian Max Hastings noted.
In fact, Churchill and Roosevelt had already secretly conceded Poland’s eastern territories to Stalin at the Big Three Conference at Tehran in November 1943, three months before Churchill’s public announcement of the fact. Early in their partnership, FDR had made it clear to the prime minister that he would do nothing, beyond defeating Germany, to help Poland. For the president, there were no U.S.-Polish treaties to honor and agonize over, no debt to Polish pilots or troops for helping his country survive.
It mattered little to Roosevelt that many of the Poles’ contributions—such as the breaking of Enigma and the intelligence collected by Polish spies throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world—were of great importance to a future Allied victory. Nor did it matter to him—and certainly not to Stalin—that Polish sabotage had played a vital role in relieving pressure on Soviet forces at a time when such help was most desperately needed. Germany’s main supply and communications lines to Russia went through Poland, and the Poles, by blowing up hundreds of bridges and destroying or derailing more than seven thousand trains over the course of the war, had been responsible for massive delays and disruptions of German rail transports. In response, Germany operated trains through Poland only under increasingly heavy guard or diverted them away from Poland altogether, which caused even more delays.
In March 1943, Roosevelt told British foreign secretary Anthony Eden that it was up to the Americans, Soviets, and British to decide Poland’s borders; he, for one, had no intention of “go[ing] to the peace conference and bargain[ing] with Poland or the other small states.” Poland was to be organized “in a way that will maintain the peace of the world.” At Tehran, Roosevelt told Stalin he was in complete agreement with him on moving Poland’s frontiers to the west.
It was at Tehran, Churchill remarked, that he first realized what a small country Britain itself was and how little say it would have in world affairs from then on. “Here I sat, with the great Russian bear on one side of me with paws outstretched, and, on the other side, the great American buffalo,” he told an acquaintance. “Between the two sat the poor little English donkey.” Making the same point later to de Gaulle, Churchill remarked, “I am the leader of an unbeaten nation. Yet every morning when I wake, my first thought is how I can please President Roosevelt and my second is how I can conciliate Marshal Stalin.”
Boxed in by his larger and more powerful allies, Churchill tried to do the impossible: bargain with Stalin and reconcile the differences between the Soviets and the Poles. In exchange for eastern Poland, he urged the Russian leader to pledge his support for a free if truncated Poland and an independent Polish government. “As long as I live,” Churchill told Polish prime minister Władysław Sikorski, “I shall not depart from the principles, which I have always respected, of individual freedom and the right of large and small states to independence.” Although Churchill managed to convince himself that Stalin would abide by such a quid pro quo, the Poles knew better. The events of April 1943, in their view, provided definitive proof of that.
On April 13, German radio had made a stunning announcement: the discovery of the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish officers packed in mass graves in western Russia’s Katyn Forest, an area still occupied by the Germans at that point in the war. According to the Nazis, who provided a wealth of evidence, the murderers had been Russian. News of the massacre struck Poles like a hammer blow. For twenty months, the Polish government had been searching for those officers and 10,000 others, all of whom had vanished after the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. The Poles had repeatedly pressed the Soviets for information about the missing men; again and again, Stalin and his men had denied any knowledge of their whereabouts.
On April 15, Sikorski formally asked the International Red Cross to conduct an independent investigation. Dismayed by Sikorski’s action, Churchill, who had little doubt as to the Soviet guilt, nonetheless pressured the Poles not to make an issue of the atrocity and to withdraw the request. Conciliation, Churchill said, was “the only line of safety for the Poles and indeed for us.”
Sikorski, who had been criticized by some in his government for making too many concessions to the Soviets, refused Churchill’s demand. “Force is on Russia’s side, justice on ours,” he declared. “I do not advise the British people to cast their lot with brute force and to stampede justice before the eyes of all nations.” On April 26, 1943, the Soviets, using the appeal to the Red Cross as a pretext for taking a step they had been planning for months, formally severed diplomatic relations with Poland. When the British government attempted to repair the break, Stalin replied that it could be mended only by dismantling the current Polish government in exile.
General Władysław Sikorski
For the Poles, the Katyn revelations were followed three months later by another shattering blow: the death of Sikorski in a plane crash off Gibraltar. The RAF aircraft carrying the Polish leader and his party dived into the sea less than a minute after taking off from an airstrip on the British-controlled redoubt in Spain. Immediately after the crash, a young Polish officer who witnessed it sobbed as he repeated again and again, “This is the end of Poland.” There was a certain prescience to his words.
Over the previous three years, Sikorski, who served as both prime minister and commander in chief of the Polish armed forces, had emerged as one of the most influential and highly respected leaders of occupied Europe. “He was unmistakably the ‘doyen’ of the exiled governments,” noted the British historian William Mackenzie. “His status was not so very far below that” of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. William Strang, a top official in the British Foreign Office, had told Count Edward Raczyński, Poland’s ambassador in London, that he and his colleagues “regarded Sikorski as a very great man—in fact, the greatest of all the European statesmen whom war has driven into exile.”
In his diary, Raczyński noted that Sikorski’s death had had “a tremendous impact on Allied, neutral and enemy circles. It has shown us that he had a more assured international position than his Polish compatriots were
wont to realize.” Echoing that view, Harold Nicolson wrote that the general “was the only man who could control the fierce resentment of the Poles against Russia, and force them to bury their internecine strife. He is one of those rare people whom one can describe as irreplaceable.”
Many Poles in London, including Raczyński, suspected sabotage, although an investigation by the British government concluded that the crash had been an accident. Some proponents of the sabotage theory believed that the Soviets had engineered the crash, noting that the Soviet spy Kim Philby was then MI6 chief for the Iberian Peninsula.*2 Whatever the truth, there was no question that Stalin viewed Sikorski as a major obstacle to his getting what he wanted. Before Katyn, the general had pushed hard for cooperation between the Poles and Soviets, but, as Raczyński noted, “the Soviets didn’t want to negotiate and compromise. They wanted to deal with a Polish leader who would give them justification for taking over Poland and imposing their own regime.”
Whether he was involved in Sikorski’s death or not, Stalin certainly profited from it. After Sikorski died, the Polish government in exile splintered into warring camps, with no strong leader to unite the various factions or exert the kind of influence that the general had had with the British government and the other Allies.
Churchill, meanwhile, refused to bow to the increasingly obvious reality that Stalin meant to control all of Poland, not just the eastern territories. Two weeks before his February 22 announcement, the prime minister told his War Cabinet that, “with the Russians advancing into Poland, it was in our interest that Poland should be strong and well supported. Were she weak and overrun by advancing Soviet armies, the result might hold great dangers in the future for the English-speaking peoples.” He ordered the RAF to triple the number of aircraft flying arms and supplies to Poland—to a grand total of twelve per month.
His order made no sense except to offer hope—false, as it turned out—to the Poles. Twelve bombers could hardly deliver the enormous quantity of weapons and ammunition needed by the Polish Home Army to ward off its enemy, whether that enemy was Germany or, at some point, the Soviet Union. As Jan Nowak came to understand during his stay in London, Poland had no place in British and U.S. strategic planning. The Western Allies would never send any of their forces to liberate Poland, as they were now preparing to do for France and the Low Countries.
Haunted by guilt, Churchill could not bear to acknowledge any of that. Neither could General Colin Gubbins and the other higher-ups at SOE, who had encouraged the Polish Home Army from the beginning in its plan to mount a full-scale national uprising against the Germans in conjunction with the Allied offensive in western Europe. According to the Poles’ blueprint, the uprising would require Polish bomber and fighter squadrons, now flying with the RAF, to ferry to their homeland thousands of Polish paratroopers, also based in Britain.
Gubbins had known since 1941 that the plan was an impossibility, but his own close attachment to the Poles and, more important, the Allies’ reliance on Polish sabotage and intelligence had kept him from telling them the truth. Gubbins’s biographer puts it plainly: “Neither SOE nor the Polish GHQ [in London] had it in them to tell the Home Army that, owing to the impossibility of providing adequate air support, their plans were plain rubbish.”
Making the situation worse, Gubbins ordered Peter Wilkinson, a staffer in SOE’s Polish section, to engage, as Wilkinson later observed, in “make-believe joint planning with the Polish general staff, working out the logistic requirements of a full-scale airborne invasion of Poland which both they and I knew could not possibly take place. For my part it was a thankless task and I felt deeply frustrated and depressed by the futility of the whole exercise.”
Even the British chiefs of staff, whose resistance to aiding a Polish uprising had been unwavering, were much less adamant in their public pronouncements on the issue than they were in private. Unwilling to antagonize the Poles and jeopardize the flow of valuable military intelligence they were providing, the chiefs talked vaguely of “the desirability of preparing the Secret Army in Poland for action coordinated with the military operations of the Allies.” The Poles, the chiefs added, “should be supplied with the largest possible quantity of equipment,” subject only to “the availability of suitable aircraft.” There was a catch-22, of course: no suitable aircraft were ever available in the numbers needed.
In late 1943, a War Office staffer declared that “the time is fast approaching when we must tell the Poles firmly and without ambiguity what the fate of their main plan for the support of the Secret Army is to be. As I understand it…the Combined Chiefs have already turned down the plan as it stands. If this is so, then the quicker the Poles are told, the better.” But no such warning was given, and Home Army leaders in Poland, unaware of the machinations in London, continued to believe that their Western allies would come to their aid.
In London, meanwhile, Czech president Edvard Beneš paid close attention to the events in Poland. Stalin’s aggressive behavior and the Western Allies’ acquiescence reinforced the Czech leader’s determination to cut a deal with the Soviets as quickly as possible in regard to the postwar fate of his own country.
Having already concluded that he could not rely on Britain or the United States for support, Beneš traveled twice to Moscow in 1943 to negotiate with Stalin and Czech communist leaders who had taken refuge in the Soviet capital for the war’s duration. The communists were, in effect, a Moscow-based shadow cabinet to the London-based government in exile.
Beneš’s second trip there, in late December, resulted in the signing of a treaty with the Soviets that called for a strong communist presence in any postwar Czech government. If Beneš had not gone to the Soviet capital and agreed to the treaty, Jan Masaryk later told a friend, “the Czechs would have found themselves in the same situation as the Poles.”
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IN THE MONTHS LEADING up to D-Day, Britain’s relationship with the Free French seemed as fraught and tangled as its dealing with the Poles. But de Gaulle and his men clearly had an advantage over the Polish exiles. Though de Gaulle himself was still shunned by both FDR and Churchill, British policy makers were focusing more and more on the postwar world, in which good relations between Britain and France were considered vital.
In mid-1943, Roosevelt had lobbied hard for Churchill to withdraw all British support from de Gaulle, claiming that the French general “has been and is now injuring our war effort and…is a very dangerous threat to us.” As before, Churchill found himself in an exceedingly difficult position. If he did what Roosevelt wanted, he would face stiff resistance from the British people and many officials in his own government. While the United States, from the relative safety of the North American continent, could easily afford to write off France as a postwar player, Britain thought it essential that its closest European neighbor be as strong as possible after the war to help balance a possibly renascent Germany and increasingly powerful Soviet Union. On the other hand, while the war continued, Churchill needed the United States far more than he did France.
Swayed by Roosevelt’s anti–de Gaulle arguments, Churchill, describing the general as “this vain and even malignant man,” urged his Cabinet to consider “whether we should not now eliminate de Gaulle as a political force.” The Cabinet, strongly influenced by Anthony Eden, rejected the idea, declaring that “we would not only make him a national martyr but would find ourselves accused…of interfering improperly in French international affairs with a view to treating France as an Anglo-American protectorate.”
Preparations for the invasion of France, dependent as they were on intelligence from the French underground, might also be placed in jeopardy if the man regarded by the resistance as its leader were shunned by the Americans and British.
Eden and the Foreign Office worked to persuade Churchill to recognize the French Committee of National Liberation—the Algiers-based organization that de Gaulle coheaded with General Henri Giraud—as the main governing body of North Africa and o
ther liberated French colonies, as well as the sole voice of free France. The European governments in exile had all granted recognition to the committee, as had Canada, Australia, and South Africa; the Soviet Union was poised to do the same. Most members of Parliament and much of the British press had also advocated recognition. So had General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander of Allied forces in North Africa and the future supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe.
Although Roosevelt continued to resist the pressure, Churchill finally succumbed, telling the president he might have to break with him over the issue: “I am reaching the point where it may be necessary for me to take this step so far as Great Britain and the Anglo-French interests…are concerned.” With that, facing virtual unity among the other Allies, FDR agreed in late August 1943 to a severely limited U.S. recognition of the French committee. (On the same day, the British government issued its own, less restrained statement of recognition.)
At the same time, the president refused to halt his efforts to get rid of de Gaulle—to the general’s intense anger and resentment—and to boost the standing of Giraud, inviting him to the United States and receiving him with full honors at the White House. Roosevelt’s campaign had no effect. In November 1943, Giraud was forced out as the committee’s cochairman, and de Gaulle took full control.
As 1944 dawned, the prickly French general was clearly a figure to be reckoned with. In addition to commanding the French resistance, he was now regarded by millions of ordinary French men and women as their leader. His Free French forces now totaled more than 400,000, many of whom had fought in North Africa and Italy. Like the Poles, the French forces had distinguished themselves in the Italian campaign: in the spring of 1944, they would smash the southwestern flank of the Germans’ Gustav Line in central Italy and help open the door to Rome. In addition, seven new French divisions had begun training in Britain, preparing for the fight to reclaim France. De Gaulle also headed a greatly enlarged empire of French possessions that had deserted Vichy and come over to the general’s camp. They included French North Africa and the West African country of Senegal, with its vital naval base at Dakar—the prize that de Gaulle and Churchill had unsuccessfully sought three years before.