The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

by Clare Mulley

  On Tuesday 1 August, a light rain fell across Warsaw as women ‘bustled along the pavements’ carrying bundles of pistols and ammunition, while boys and girls ‘shouldered rucksacks full of medical supplies and food’ on their way to rallying points across the city.16 At five in the afternoon the Home Army attacked, forcing the occupying Wehrmacht troops out of large sections of the capital. Their aim was to hold their ground for four or five days until Soviet reinforcements were negotiated. After nearly five years of occupation, much of Warsaw was suddenly a free city. The Polish flag was hung from buildings and the national anthem and other patriotic songs were broadcast through the streets. The sense of euphoria carried across Europe to Christine in France, who used the news to press home her arguments with the Polish troops forced into service with the Wehrmacht in the Alps, and later with the Polish prisoners-of-war held at Gap. Before she left France six weeks later, however, reports were coming in of huge Polish military and civilian losses.

  The Polish Home Army had around 45,000 soldiers in the Warsaw district, mostly armed with pistols and grenades. But there were few heavy weapons. They faced a well-trained German formation of around 25,000 men, armed to the teeth and supported by artillery, Panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe. ‘The action of the Poles is a blessing’, Himmler reported to Hitler. ‘We shall finish them off … Warsaw will be liquidated.’17 Hitler responded by ordering ‘every inhabitant to be killed … no prisoners to be taken … every single house to be blown up and burned’.18 On 5 August, German troops attacked the city’s western suburbs, sending units from house to house to shoot the inhabitants regardless of age or gender, in an attempt to crush the Poles’ will to fight. Estimates of those killed within a few short days range from 20,000 to 60,000 people, among them shopkeepers, office workers, the elderly, and mothers with their children.

  After a direct appeal to Churchill from the Polish president, on the night of 4/5 August fourteen RAF bombers flew from Italy to Warsaw. ‘As the epic battle raged on, we did everything in our power to assist’, Gubbins later wrote, but, although a limited amount of equipment and ammunition was dropped successfully to the insurgents, the high casualty rate forced the air commander-in-chief, John Slessor, to cancel further flights.19 His ban was rescinded after huge pressure from the Polish aircrews under his command. The pilots who had fought so bravely and effectively for the Allies in the Battle of Britain refused to be forbidden to fly to the aid of their own nation and people. ‘Cannot accept RAF losses of 50% as being unacceptable, there are times when 100% is necessary’, General Tatar, the Polish deputy commander for home affairs, based in London, supported his men. ‘We do not ask for British crews, but Polish ones.’20 Polish, British and South African aircrews went back into action, but losses mounted, and although the few successful drops brought hope to the insurgents they were far too few to affect the eventual outcome. Two weeks later any further flights were banned.

  Churchill now appealed to Stalin for aid, or at least for the use of Soviet air space and airfields where RAF planes could land and refuel. Stalin refused, responding that ‘the information given to you by the Poles is greatly exaggerated and unreliable…’21 Having reached the banks of the River Vistula, only a few hundred yards from the action, the Red Army now abruptly came to a halt and stood idle for six weeks while Stalin denounced the revolt as the work of ‘criminals’ that was ‘doomed to fail’.22 The Soviets blamed military difficulties for their sudden lack of progress, but the real reasons behind what Gubbins called their ‘callous and calculated refusal’ to advance were political.23 Stalin had no intention of relieving Warsaw while the Germans were doing such a good job of weakening Polish resistance. In late July he had appointed what the Soviets called the ‘Lublin Polish Committee of National Liberation’, as a rival authority to the Polish government-in-exile. This new Communist-backed ‘government’ took its seat in Soviet-liberated Lublin on the first day of the Warsaw Rising, leaving little doubt as to Stalin’s intentions for post-war Poland.

  Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had in fact already mapped out Poland’s future at the Tehran conference of November 1943, at which Polish leaders were not present. Unknown to Christine in Algiers as she trained to drop into France, or to Poles fighting beside the British for what they believed to be a common cause, the conference did not recognize Poland’s territorial claims to its pre-war borders, and only Churchill committed himself to Polish independence. Roosevelt was angling for Soviet support in the Far East, and was almost literally already in bed with Stalin, having turned down an offer of hospitality at the British Legation in favour of an invitation from the Russians. At the end of the conference Stalin got out a map and the ‘Big Three’ carved up Poland along the ‘Curzon’ line, which was soon being described in The Times as ‘the old Polish frontier’.24 ‘I have intense sympathy for the Poles…’, Churchill told Parliament, ‘but I also have sympathy with the Russian standpoint’.25 A few idealists, such as Sir Owen O’Malley, who argued that the real choice was between ‘selling the corpse of Poland to Russia’ or ‘putting the points of principle to Stalin in the clearest possible way and warning him that our position might have to be explained publicly with equal clearness’, presented only the politest of threats.26 Tehran had shown Stalin that he had nothing to fear from either Britain or the USA.

  By the second week of August it was clear that, far from being a decisive action, the Warsaw Rising had descended into a relentless battle of attrition. Street barricades were built from rubble and broken furniture, pavements were torn up and trenches dug. Families of all social classes were caught in the fighting, lugging suitcases, blankets and food between the soldiers and the ruined buildings, and begging the fighters not to pull back. The resistance units were hugely resourceful, brilliantly improvising defences and weaponry, and supported by an efficient auxiliary service largely run by women and children. But medical supplies quickly ran out and dysentery was rife, food was scarce and horses, cats and dogs were soon being eaten. Day after day, despite their almost unbreakable spirit, Christine’s compatriots were being slaughtered in scores on the hastily constructed barricades, and in the streets and ruins of their city. The Germans advanced steadily, demolishing buildings and mowing down the insurgents in the streets and courtyards by machine gun until there were tens of thousands of corpses across the city. The ‘worst of all’, wrote John Ward, the only British officer on the ground in Warsaw, ‘is the smell of rotting bodies, which pervades over the whole of the city centre’.27

  Soon the insurgents took to navigating the city through its claustrophobic network of pitch-black sewers, the only safe route between the increasingly isolated pockets of Home Army personnel. At one point 1,500 fighting men, 2,000 walking wounded and 500 civilians including nurses and stretcher cases were navigating the filthy tunnels, slipping on the curved brick floors, wading through waste up to their shoulders – many drowning – while the enemy threw grenades down manholes and booby-trapped or blocked the exits. Sometimes the soldiers emerged from hours underground only to be rounded up at gunpoint as the German line advanced.

  ‘We do not ask for equipment’, the Home Army now desperately radioed London, keenly feeling the apparent injustice of failing to receive significant Allied support in their hour of need. ‘We demand its immediate dispatch.’28 Britain had warned the Poles that significant support could come only from the Soviets, and one Polish major now resigned in protest at the Polish administration in London continuing to give the Home Army too much reason to hope for material aid. His fears were borne out when Stalin’s promised support arrived in mid-August, with the drop of hundreds of leaflets encouraging the population to cease resistance and describing the Rising as the work of an irresponsible clique who would be punished for provoking civilian deaths.

  When the Russians continued to refuse the Allies air clearance, Polish aircrews insisted on resuming flights from Bari, in the heel of Italy, 960 miles as the crow flies and much of that directly over Germany. Fighter
protection for the bombers was out of the question and, flying both to the limit of their planes’ capacity and low over Warsaw’s rooftops in the teeth of intense anti-aircraft fire, they sustained huge losses for minimal impact. ‘You could see Warsaw from miles away, burning’, one pilot recorded, while another remembered that those who returned arrived in planes ‘holed like sieves’ and branded the missions a ‘suicidal waste of airmen’.29 As their commander continued to demand ‘the utmost will-power and self-sacrifice’, one Polish crew managed to make a further successful drop of supplies. The general rang to award the pilot the Virtuti Militari, but the whole crew had been burnt in the wreckage of their plane, which fell on roofs of Warsaw’s Old Town.30 ‘The Poles just really committed suicide in an effort to … send supplies to Warsaw’, one FANY wrote in distress.31 Two squadrons of British Liberators followed, but when they arrived Warsaw was in flames. Only in mid-September did Stalin relent on air clearance and permit one group of American bombers to land. He even allowed Soviet supply drops, knowing it was too late. ‘The relatively small amount of real help given is humiliating’, Douglas Dodds-Parker wrote, voicing the thoughts of many in SOE.32

  It was while ‘Warsaw was’, as Francis succinctly phrased it, ‘blowing up’, that Christine had arrived in London.33 Her immediate instinct was literally to fly to the aid of her friends, family and country. Noreen Riols watched her storm into the SOE offices and demand to be parachuted back into Poland. ‘She presented her request as a fait-accompli’, Riols said, asking not whether but when it would happen.34 The British hummed and hawed, not committing themselves either way. Riols assumed that they had no intention of sending Christine back, but in fact there was a possibility – not to drop her on to the burning roofs of Warsaw, but for her to join a long-anticipated uniformed military mission to Poland.

  In February 1944 Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the Polish prime minister-in-exile, had written personally to Churchill, asking for a team of observers to be sent to the Home Army. This was not a new idea; Andrzej for one had discussed it with a key Polish courier when he had been in London at the end of 1943. The plan was to provide Britain and the USA with an independent source of intelligence on the situation inside Poland, while monitoring the shifting balance of power within the country and relations between the Home Army, the Wehrmacht and, later, the Red Army. As the months passed, the Polish émigré community in Britain maintained that the advancing Russians were arresting and liquidating Polish resistance soldiers as they came out to welcome them. Even John Ward, hiding in a safe house, described the first Russian forces as ‘very drunk … they appeared to beat Polish men without provocation and some were shot’. Within a few days ‘they had raped every female in the district over fourteen years of age’.35 But the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, refused to consider any mission to observe ‘political conditions’ without Soviet approval, which was not forthcoming. Undeterred, Gubbins and SOE pursued the idea, getting ready for immediate action once clearance arrived. At the beginning of September, Churchill scribbled a note: ‘This is a good idea, why not?’36 A few weeks later Harold Perkins, Christine’s old friend ‘Perks’, who was now the head of SOE’s Central Europe section, received a pencil note saying simply, ‘mission granted’.37

  The plan was to drop three teams into Poland under the codenames Freston, Fernham and Flamstead. Freston was purely an observation mission, but the other teams were also briefed for the armed liberation of Polish prisoner-of-war and forced-labour camps. As Soviet troops advanced, huge numbers of prisoners were being marched west by the Germans, killed in reprisals or shot so that they could not testify. Christine was to serve as the courier liaison officer between the three missions, dropping with either the first or second team. Her role was to advise the officers on the political conditions and personalities in their areas, and to explain – ‘without prejudice to her own position’ – British policy regarding Poland. ‘It is realized that this is a very difficult task’, her briefing paper informed her. ‘However, it is hoped that the Poles may be brought to an understanding of the expediency of the suggested solution.’38 Christine was in effect being asked in part to serve as an apologist for the British policy of asking the Poles to welcome the Soviet advance. ‘The Poles in Poland may be ill-informed…’, an addendum struggled to qualify the position; the missions were to bring an understanding of ‘the conditions ruling in world-wide politics today…’39 As Christine was to report back by wireless, she was then given her own ciphers and, in keeping with the overall theme of the operation, she was allotted the code-name ‘Folkestone’.40

  The Warsaw Rising ended only when all hope was lost, on 3 October 1944, after sixty-three days of intensive street fighting. As well as German losses, more than 18,000 resistants and 180,000 civilians had been killed.41 In the last hours before capitulation tens of thousands of people fled into the countryside, many re-forming to fight on. Others were forced to surrender, held prisoner or dispatched to Germany as forced labour. General Bór-Komorowski was arrested and imprisoned in Colditz. Violating the terms of the surrender, German demolition squads then systematically dynamited those buildings still standing in the city. Over the course of the next four weeks they murdered another 33,000 Jews in camps across Poland.

  The Rising had not been entirely without military impact, which almost added to the tragedy. Many much-needed divisions of the Wehrmacht had been tied to the city, sustaining heavy losses while unable to fight either on the Western Front against the Allies or in the East against the Red Army. ‘What the Polish Home Army achieved with heroic bravery … represented an important contribution to the Allied victory,’ Gubbins wrote, ‘but especially to the Russian victory.’42 Christine was determined that this should not be the final epitaph for Poland’s war. There was still much to be fought for, and both the Poles and SOE were increasingly desperate to send in Freston and its sub-missions while there was still hope for an independent future for Poland.

  Christine was confirmed for the operation, and after some lobbying she managed to get John Roper selected as a member of Fernham, the second mission team.43 Her thoughts had also turned to Andrzej, now based in the Italian town of Bari, the centre of SOE activities directed towards Poland. On 19 October, Andrzej arrived in London and they had an emotional reunion. By the time he returned to Bari, two weeks later, he too was approved to drop with the Fernham team. Despite group briefings, his fellow team members never knew he had an artificial leg. The Freston team meanwhile, dressed in ‘splendid fur-collared coats’, was ready to drop, but it was repeatedly delayed by bad weather.44

  At last allowing herself to believe, for the first time in months, that she was going home, Christine once again gave Poland as her place of birth on the mission ‘vetting forms’.45 A week later Perkins sent a ‘Top Secret’ letter to General Tatar informing him of the mission and of Christine’s ‘special role’. ‘I believe you are already conversant with her activities’, Perkins wrote, knowing that Christine had long been persona non grata with the Poles. ‘I would only state that she is one of the most intelligent and courageous operators with whom it has been my pleasure to work … and understands [the British] character and temperament as well as she understands that of her own people.’46 Tatar ran the plan past the Polish administration and confirmed their support, hoping the missions would validate their demands for weapons, get the Home Army recognized as an official Allied Force, and provide independent witnesses to the atrocities taking place.

  Although MI5 had already given Christine clearance in 1940, she was ‘put through the cards’ again, and on 21 November 1944 she was granted an honorary commission in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and matching WAAF identity papers. SOE had described her as ‘one of the most distinguished of our female agents’ and ‘a woman of very considerable influence … [who] should not be treated as a junior officer’.47 As a result she was given the rank of Flight Officer, the equivalent of a Flight Lieutenant, although, irritatingly, no grant to pay for
the uniform.

  That same day Christine flew to Bari, buttoned up in her new uniform, and with John Roper at her side. She was delighted to see Andrzej’s Opel at the airport. Although Andrzej thought Christine looked terribly thin, ‘a bag of bones’ as he called her, she was also ‘glowing with success’ at having engineered their return to Poland.48 But Christine did not stay long. Her knowledge of her country and the Polish administration was needed back in London, and she returned a few days later leaving the men to check into the trullo, the conical stone house, traditional to Puglia, where they were to be lodged until the operation got final clearance. The worst winter in thirty years was just setting in.

  The SOE base at the little fishing port of Monopoli, halfway between Bari and Brindisi, had been set up in late 1943, mainly by experienced hands from Algiers and Cairo. As soon as the Brindisi airbase was secured, the ‘handsome and dashing’ colonel Henry Threlfall was sent out as commander, reporting to Perkins.49 For a while Andrzej had served as Threlfall’s liaison officer at a Polish training school, and the two men had formed a strong friendship. Throughout the Warsaw Rising, Threlfall had fought a desperate battle to get more support sent to the insurgents, constantly pressing the Polish point of view with the Air Force authorities. It was, he said, ‘exhausting and heart-breaking’ work that brought limited results.50 Eventually he was reprimanded for submitting ‘undesirable memoranda … which are essentially political in character’.51 Undeterred, he now turned to supporting plans for Freston and its sub-missions.