The Martyrdom of Warsaw
The Secret Army. By T. Bor-Komorowski. (Gollancz. 21s.)
ON August 1st, 1944, the Warsaw detachments of the Home Army (a nation-wide underground organisation of which General Bor was commander-in-chief) went into action against the German garrison in the capital. On October 3rd, General Bor and what was left of his command surrendered on terms. Between those two dates there had taken place what was possibly the most savage fighting in the history of warfare ; and there are grounds for suspecting that a curious and horrible act of treachery had been per- petrated by the Russian Government.
The Russians did not like General Bor, who was, of course, an officer serving the Polish Government in London, and whom they repeatedly denounced as a war criminal both before and during the fighting in Warsaw ; and their own ,main forces, though they drove the Germans out of the large district known as Praga and stood for some time upon the Vistula, were either unable or unwilling to press home their advantage. To the Poles, fighting against odds in the blazing ruins, the broad outline of Russian policy seemed susceptible of only one explanation ; the Russians, even while their broadcasts urged " Help is coming. Victory is near. Keep fighting ! ", intended that the Germans should liquidate the insurrection.
This was what, in fact, happened. To say that the Russians deliberately willed it may be over-simplifying the matter. The Red Army had difficulties of its own and may genuinely have miscalculated its capacity to relieve the defenders of Warsaw. But when you get down to the details of what passed for Russian co-operation in the actual operations (which General Bor does in a very dispassionate manner) it is impossible to credit the Russians with clean hands. Moscow's refusal to al:ow Allied supply-dropping aircraft to refuel at Soviet bases effectively severed what might have been the Warsaw garrison's life-line, and involved R.A.F. squadrons attempting to do the job from Italy in prohibitive casualties. When Russian anti-aircraft batteries in Praga could keep the sky clear above Warsaw the Russians did drop urgently needed supplies of food, ammunition and some arms ; but they dropped them " free," the ammunition was the wrong sort, and the effect on weapons of being thrown to the ground from a height of several hundred feet was what might have been expected.
Home Army units attempting to carry out their orders to co-operate with the Red Army were disarmed, and their officers (at best) imprisoned. As the plight of Warsaw— assailed by tanks, artillery and aircraft, her defenders and her population alike weakened by hunger and threatened by disease—grew steadily more desperate, General Bor tried every possible expedient to establish liaison with the Russian command on their own terms ; but his messages, whether routed via London to the Kremlin or sent direct across the Vistula, went unanswered. He might have been addressing enemies, not allies.
And so the grim, heroic struggle ended, after a display of stubborn valour which it is impossible to read without feeling pride in the spirit of man ; and Warsaw fell for the second time in five years. General Bor begins his sober, careful narrative in 1939, and describes the slow but irrepressible growth of the whole underground movement in Poland. It never flinched before the atrocious measures taken (in vain) by the Germans to repress it ; and it is sad to note how, once the ulterior motives of the Russians became a factor in Poland's struggle for freedom, the pur- poses of brave patriots became dependent for success on a force whose aA they had to invoke but which they knew they could not trust.
As a chronicler of this strange, violent and tragic interlude in his country's history, General Bor has the great virtue of being a trained soldier, and seeing what was after all a military prob:em from a soldier's point of view. His style is terse and matter-of-fact, his character gives an impression of simple integrity, and the agonies and achievements of which he writes compel our interest the more surely for being described and assessed so objectively. He has written a book which I think almost everyone would be the better for reading. PETER FI.EMING.
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