by Lynne Olson
Knowing all this, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, who had replaced the late General Władysław Sikorski as commander in chief of the Polish armed forces, vehemently opposed the idea of an uprising, believing that without strong Allied assistance, it “could only lead to useless bloodshed.” Early in July, Sosnkowski ordered the Home Army to cancel its plans. But during the last week of July, he left England to visit Polish troops in Italy; while he was gone, the rest of the Polish Cabinet sent a message authorizing Bór-Komorowski to “proclaim the insurrection at the moment which you will decide as most opportune.”
Sosnkowski was not the only Cassandra to warn the Home Army of looming disaster. Jan Nowak, the young Home Army courier who had spent several months in London in 1944 and had flown back to Poland in time for the uprising, told Bór-Komorowski and his lieutenants to expect no help from the Allies. Based on Nowak’s report at a July 29 meeting of Home Army leaders, a number of participants urged Bór-Komorowski to delay the uprising. Others felt differently. “We have no choice,” one leader declared. “I ask you to imagine a man who has been gathering speed for five years in order to leap over a wall. He runs faster and faster, and then, one step before the obstacle, the command is given to stop! By then he is running so fast that he cannot stop: if he does not jump, he will hit the wall. Thus it is with us. In a day or two, Warsaw will be at the front.”
His comment underscored the vast chasm of understanding between London and Warsaw. In Whitehall offices, coolness and rationality reigned. In Warsaw, there was only desperate passion. For five years, its people had suffered hunger, terror, and death. Now the chance for rebellion had come, and they would not be stayed by British logic. Throughout the city, men, women, and children began retrieving revolvers, rifles, grenades, and other arms from the places where they had been hidden since 1939. The weapons were cleaned and surreptitiously distributed to members of the Home Army.
At precisely 5 P.M. on August 1, thousands of windows and doors were flung open all over Warsaw, and the uprising began. From balconies, rooftops, and windows, underground soldiers cut down passing German troops with a cascade of rifle and small-arms fire. Other Poles lobbed grenades at Nazi headquarters and hurled Molotov cocktails at ammunition dumps and troop transports. In dozens of neighborhoods, ordinary citizens—housewives, workers, university professors, shopkeepers—dragged tables, chests, desks, and sofas into the street to build barricades against German tanks and troops. Long-hidden Polish flags were unfurled and draped from apartment windows.
By nightfall, virtually every visible trace of the German occupation had vanished. Warsaw residents had torn down German street and shop signs, posters, inscriptions, and flags. Portraits of Hitler and other prominent Nazis were affixed to the barricades so that Germans would have to fire at images of their own leaders.
During the first three days of the insurrection, the Home Army fighters, only some 2,500 of whom were well armed, gained control of most of Warsaw. In that critical first stage of the fight, however, they failed to take several key military targets, including German airfields and the bridges over the Vistula River. The insurgents were already overextended and in desperate need of assistance. But no aid of any kind came from the Western Allies or from the Red Army, several units of which were encamped on the outskirts of the capital.
The Nazis, meanwhile, were bringing up reinforcements and preparing to counterattack. The Hermann Göring Division, an elite unit of Luftwaffe troops, was being rushed from Italy, and two more SS divisions were also on their way. Their aim, according to the Reich’s top leaders, was to teach the upstart Poles a final lesson. “Every inhabitant of Warsaw must be killed, and there shall be no taking of prisoners,” Heinrich Himmler declared. Once his forces had carried out that task, they were to flatten whatever was left of Warsaw. “From the historical point of view, this insurrection is a blessing,” the SS chief crowed to Hitler. “Warsaw will be eradicated….That nation which for seven hundred years has stood in our way…shall no longer be a problem for our children or even for ourselves.”
As Himmler’s SS and police units surged into Warsaw, Home Army radio operators sent desperate appeals to London, requesting weapons and ammunition. With the hours ticking by, the resistance felt more and more ignored and cut off from the world—a sense of isolation that was only heightened by reports of new Allied advances on the Normandy front and the liberation of a growing number of French cities and towns.
Nonetheless, their appeals finally began to have some effect. In early August, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden pressed the British chiefs of staff to come to the Home Army’s assistance with “maximum effort.” The reluctant RAF dispatched several supply flights from Italy, but its losses were heavy, causing future missions to be canceled. Air Chief Marshal Sir Douglas Evill, vice chief of the air staff, said that effective aerial support “could only be provided by Russian tactical aircraft, operating at short range.” And those, of course, were nowhere to be seen.
In Warsaw, meanwhile, the SS and police units dispatched by Himmler went from house to house on a wild rampage of looting, rape, and murder. In one neighborhood after another, residents were herded into courtyards and streets to be executed by machine-gun fire. By the end of the day on August 5, more than 10,000 civilians had been slaughtered in one Warsaw neighborhood alone. Over the next several days, the orgy of killing swept throughout the city.
Having pushed the Home Army from Warsaw’s outer districts, the Germans targeted the insurgents’ center-city stronghold. The uprising was slowly dying. Its lightly armed troops were defending themselves against Nazi forces possessing armored cars, tanks, long-range artillery, dive-bombers, and other heavy weapons. By the middle of August, the Germans were shelling and bombing the city twenty-four hours a day. No part of Warsaw was out of artillery range, and much of the downtown area was on fire. Bricks were falling like rain, blazing timbers flew through the air, dust and smoke blanketed everything. Sidewalks and streets were littered with bodies, and many more corpses were buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Still the Poles fought on. The combat was most savage in Warsaw’s Stare Miasto (Old Town), just north of the city center, with its narrow, winding cobblestone streets and tall, beautifully restored medieval houses. There, in extremely close quarters, Poles took on Nazis in hand-to-hand combat so intense that it reminded some Germans of the last days of the Battle of Stalingrad.
From the cellars of bombed-out buildings, Home Army radio operators continued to tap out urgent pleas for Western aid. At one point Bór-Komorowski sent a personal message to both Churchill and Roosevelt: “Confident of the part we have played in the war effort of the Anglo-Americans, we have the full right to address to you, Mr. President and Mr. Prime Minister, this ardent appeal for immediate help to be sent to wounded Warsaw.”
Moved by the insurgents’ passionate resistance and stunned by the Germans’ barbarity, Churchill insisted that the RAF resume its supply missions. Over the next week, almost a hundred planes were dispatched to the Warsaw area. The flak was murderous, and the aircrew casualties were huge. It was almost impossible to make accurate drops over the rapidly shrinking areas of the city still held by the Home Army. Nonetheless, many Polish pilots clamored to fly there. The pilots of 303 Squadron, who had so bedazzled Britain with their heroics in the Battle of Britain, went so far as to send a blunt telegram to Queen Elizabeth, the wife of George VI and mother of Elizabeth II: “WHEN IN 1940, THE FATE OF GREAT BRITAIN WAS IN THE BALANCE, BELIEVE US, YOUR MAJESTY, WE POLISH AIRMEN NEVER THOUGHT OF ECONOMIZING OUR BLOOD OR OUR LIVES….AT THAT TIME, OVER BURNING LONDON, THERE WAS NO DEARTH OF POLISH OR BRITISH AIRMEN. ARE THEY TO BE LACKING NOW OVER BURNING WARSAW? IS THE CITY TO PERISH ON THE EVE OF VICTORY, AFTER YEARNING FOR LIBERATION FOR FIVE YEARS?” The queen never answered the telegram; in fact, she probably never received it. In any case, 303 Squadron was not sent to Warsaw.
On August 2, the day after the uprising began, Churchill had gone before Parliament
to proclaim the rebellion “a hopeful moment for Poland.” He went on, “The Russian armies now stand before the gates of Warsaw. They bring the liberation of Poland in their hands. They offer freedom, sovereignty and independence to the Poles. They ask that there should be a Poland friendly to Russia.” But the Red Army never advanced as far as Warsaw’s gates. Indeed, it halted its headlong advance less than a dozen miles from the heart of the Polish capital. There it waited—and did nothing.
Churchill, with Roosevelt’s backing, asked Stalin to allow Allied bombers carrying supplies to Warsaw to land at Soviet airfields to refuel and rest. It was the very least the Soviets could do, Churchill thought, but the response was negative. The uprising was a foolhardy affair, the Kremlin said, and “the Soviet Government could not lend its hand to it.” Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, reported to Roosevelt that the Soviets wanted the Warsaw uprising crushed and would brook no attempt by the Western Allies to support it. George Kennan, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, declared that what Stalin was really telling the United States and Britain was this: “We intend to have Poland lock, stock and barrel….You are going to have no part in determining the affairs of Poland from here on out, and it is time you realized this.”
Churchill was fast coming to the same conclusion. Indeed, according to his doctor, the prime minister was consumed during the uprising with fears of Soviet aggression. But he was also personally caught up in the epic David-and-Goliath struggle taking place in Warsaw. The Poles’ passionate resistance had won his esteem, and the searing eyewitness accounts of German atrocities against Polish civilians left him enraged. More than fifty years later, Churchill’s grandson, also named Winston Churchill, remarked, “My grandfather was beside himself in desperation to secure help for the Poles.”
But Roosevelt did not share that sense of urgency. He refused to do anything more to aid the Poles after Stalin denied Allied aircraft access to Soviet airfields. When the prime minister sent the president a wrenching eyewitness account of Nazi mass killings in Warsaw, FDR coolly replied, “Thank you for the information in regard to the appalling situation of the Poles in Warsaw and the inhumane behavior of the Nazis….I do not see that we can take any additional steps at the present time that promise results.”
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THROUGHOUT THE EARLY DAYS of August, residents of Paris huddled around their forbidden radio sets to listen to BBC reports of Warsaw’s agony. Many were haunted by the same thought: Would a similar calamity befall them and their beautiful city, still intact after four years of German occupation?
After a long, bloody summer of slogging across Normandy’s hedgerow country, Allied troops in the north had finally broken through in late July and were now slicing their way into the heart of France. Yet even though U.S. forces were closing in on Paris, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had no plans for its immediate liberation. In fact, he planned to bypass the city, which he considered of little strategic importance, and roll on with all possible speed toward Germany.
As General Charles de Gaulle, then ensconced in Algiers, saw it, Eisenhower’s decision spelled disaster for both Paris and himself. Not only was the capital in danger; so was de Gaulle’s hope of controlling all of liberated France. His main rivals, the French communists, dominated the resistance movement in many parts of the country, including Paris. He had already received word that they were preparing an insurrection there. It was vital, in de Gaulle’s view, that the Western Allies reach Paris before the situation spiraled out of control.
Determined to get his way, he set out to outmaneuver Eisenhower, just as he earlier had outmaneuvered Roosevelt, who had wanted no role at all for him in the postwar governance of France. Before the D-Day invasion, the president had decided that U.S. military forces would administer France until elections could be held. To that end, dozens of army officers were currently enrolled in a two-month crash course in public administration and the French language at the University of Virginia.
By contrast, Eisenhower and most British officials believed that de Gaulle and his French Committee of National Liberation should act as the provisional government of France. Churchill, although still upset with de Gaulle over his behavior prior to D-Day, reluctantly agreed to allow him to return to France for a brief visit the week after the invasion. The prime minister was responding to heavy pressure from the British press and public, as well as to strong lobbying by Eisenhower. In effect, the Allied commander, who had been given considerable latitude by Roosevelt in governing liberated areas, was making an end run around Washington.
In his memo authorizing de Gaulle’s visit to Bayeux, on the Normandy coast, Churchill wrote, “I suggest that he should drive slowly through the town, shake hands with a few people and then return, leaving any subsequent statement to be made here.” As usual, de Gaulle had other ideas. At that point, most of the French knew him only as a spectral voice, to which they had listened over the BBC throughout the war years. “He was a ghost to those millions, an ideal,” according to one observer. “Now he had to give himself flesh and blood [and] become a political reality.”
When de Gaulle arrived in Bayeux on June 14, he was mobbed by huge crowds of cheering, sobbing townspeople wherever he went. After walking Bayeux’s streets for hours, then addressing its population in the town square, he traveled to the nearby town of Isigny, where he did the same. When he returned to England that night, he left behind in Normandy one of his top aides, whom he had assigned to act as governor of the region. With Eisenhower’s tacit support, de Gaulle was undermining Roosevelt’s attempts to impose an Allied military administration on France. Whether Washington liked it or not, the French general was now in charge of the liberated areas of his country.
De Gaulle’s biggest challenge, however, was to gain control of Paris—France’s political, social, and economic epicenter—as soon as it was freed. Like Warsaw before the uprising there, Paris was a tinderbox, its residents eager to settle the score with the Germans and erase the humiliation of their country’s capitulation. “On the barricades,” one resistance leader proclaimed, “we must wipe out the shame of 1940.” Such feelings were stoked by the French communists, who controlled the unions and underground press in Paris, as well as two of its three major resistance organizations.
General de Gaulle triumphantly returns to France eight days after D-Day.
In mid-August, a series of communist-inspired strikes was launched in the capital; railway men, police officers, and postal and telegraph workers, among others, walked off the job, paralyzing the city. The communists called for an armed insurrection on August 18. At 7 A.M. that day, small bands of resistance fighters throughout Paris opened fire on German patrols. Other groups burst into public buildings, ousting the occupants and taking over. In a matter of hours, French flags were fluttering from windows and rooftops as far as the eye could see.
As in Warsaw, barricades sprang up all over the capital. At the Place du Palais-Royal, the actors of the Comédie Française, the national theater group of France, built their own huge obstruction, using sofas, bureaus, and other items of furniture from their theater’s scenery storeroom. In the Paris police headquarters, now occupied by the resistance, the nuclear physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie and his assistants from the Collège de France made Molotov cocktails out of a variety of materials, including sulfuric acid and potassium chlorate, that they had brought from their laboratory.
Although the uprising caught the Germans by surprise, it didn’t take long for them to respond. Troops and tanks charged into the center of the city and the surrounding neighborhoods, wounding and killing hundreds. Among those battling the German forces were thousands of Gaullist resistance fighters. They had been ordered by de Gaulle not to engage in overt rebellion, but once the uprising began, they felt they had no choice but to join.
Faced with a fait accompli, de Gaulle traveled from Algiers to Eisenhower’s headquarters in France to press him to launch an immediate Allied attack on Paris. If th
e supreme commander refused, de Gaulle said, he would withdraw the French 2nd Armored Division from Allied command and dispatch it to Paris on his own authority. Veterans of the fighting in North Africa, the 16,000 men in the division, under the command of General Philippe Leclerc, had arrived in Normandy just two weeks before to take part in the march on Paris.
But neither de Gaulle’s appeals nor his threats made any headway with Eisenhower. To him, the capture of Paris—and the time and matériel, particularly gasoline, it would entail—would put at risk his overriding goal of reaching the Rhine River and crossing into Germany before the Wehrmacht could reorganize.
Yet Eisenhower changed his mind the very next day, thanks to the pleading of a young resistance leader named Roger Gallois, who came from Paris to present him and General Omar Bradley, the commander of U.S. ground forces in France, with alarming news. The resistance fighters in the capital were barely hanging on, Gallois said. If the Allies did not come to their aid immediately, hundreds of thousands of Parisians would lose their lives. Furthermore, the German commander in Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, was under orders from Hitler to destroy the city before surrendering it to the Allies. Although Choltitz didn’t like the order, he thought he had no choice but to carry it out. He sent word through Gallois that only the Allies’ speedy arrival could stop him.