Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (2003)

I did not finish this. I found the decision to not use Polish names or even the name of the country--The First Ally, to be incredibly irritating and demeaning. I cannot believe a historian actually thought that was a good idea. ( )

What everybody knows about WWII Poland is that the war started there, that there was a revolt in Warsaw, and that the Red Army swept through on its way to Berlin. In this book, Norman Davies explains that there was a lot more going on than that; in particular, that there were two “Warsaw Risings”, the ghetto rising of 1943 (which is usually thought of, in the West at least, as “the” rising) and the Home Army rising of 1944. The book is concerned with the second.


Davies starts with background: the first third of the book discusses the pre-rising situation from the points of view of the Western Allies, the Germans, the Russians, and the Poles themselves. The middle third is the dramatic, tragic story of the Rising itself, and the final third is the even more tragic aftermath, where many Home Army soldiers who had been treated as legitimate POWs by their enemies, the Nazis, were executed or imprisoned by their “friends”, the Soviets.


The background section presents the dilemma of Poland, sandwiched between Germany and the Soviet Union. There’s a map of the Polish state at its greatest extent (in the 16th century), extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea (as an aside, unlike a lot of other histories I’ve been reading, this book has excellent maps), a discussion of the various subsequent trials and tribulations, the victory over the Bolsheviks in 1920, subsequent events, including the German/Soviet partition. Davies acknowledges that Poland was a de facto military dictatorship in 1939 (Soviet apologists have gotten a lot mileage out of that, during and since); however, he doesn’t volunteer that Poland flirted with Hitler, including occupying its own little chunk (400 square miles) of Czechoslovakia in 1938.


Davies does not gloss over the considerable anti-Semitism that existed in Poland during the prewar and war years. He’s not particularly apologetic about it, citing Polish claims that Jews enthusiastically welcomed Soviet troops in eastern Poland in 1939, and the astonishing statement that the Stern faction of the Irgun contacted German officials in Turkey and proposed an alliance against England. At the same time Davies acknowledges that, during the rising, some units of the Home Army rounded up and shot Jews who had managed to hide out from the SS in occupied Warsaw for four years. Other units welcomed Jews into their ranks; the Home Army staged a “forlorn hope” frontal assault on the Warsaw transit camp; it was unexpectedly successful and the storming units were amazed to find a formation of Jewish ex-soldiers, emaciated and dirty but lined up in orderly ranks on the camp’s parade ground. An ex-sergeant stepped one pace forward, saluted, and said “Reporting for duty” to his rescuers.


The accounts of the Rising are full of sometimes grim, sometimes touching stories like this. The big questions are: (1) Was the rising coordinated in advance with the Western Allies and Stalin, and (2) Could the Red Army, in sight across the Vistula, have done more to help the rising? Davies answers “Yes” to the first, although his evidence isn’t as good as it possibly could be, and “Yes” to the second, although he acknowledges that Rokossovsky was having more difficulty with German resistance than normally supposed.



Thus most of the supplies air-dropped during the rising came from RAF units based thousands of miles away in southern Italy rather than Soviets across the river. Davies cites the well-known claim that Stalin deliberately allowed the Rising to fail so Poland would be free of potential resistance groups when the Red Army moved in; this makes perfect sense, although evidence for it is surprisingly sparse. In any event, the Home Army held out for two months with what they had and eventually surrendered with military honors.


The aftermath, of course, is ugly. I grew up in the Cold War and was taught that Poland was one of those Communist countries that hated the US. Davies makes no bones about blaming Britain (and, to a lesser extent, the US) for what happened. The British Foreign Office and newspapers were heavily penetrated by Communists and sympathizers, and Poland was dismissed as “ungrateful” and “unreasonable” for expecting the West to intervene against Stalin. Roosevelt comes off as a hopelessly naive dilettante, and Churchill as a Machiavellian pragmatist. In light of all this, it’s pretty amazing that the Poles trust us enough to be the fourth largest contributor of troops to Iraq. It’s also telling that it’s perfectly acceptable - in fact, moderately amusing - to be an ex-Communist in the US or England but utterly damning to be an ex-Nazi; and that almost everybody knows who Himmler and Eichmann were but very few can identify Dzerzhinsky or Beria.


I do have some negatives: Davies is convinced that English speakers won’t be able to deal with Polish names. Thus all the participants are identified by either an Anglicized first name and an initial (“Adam S.”, “Thomas A.”) or by an English translation of the nom de guerre used during the war (General “Boor”, Captain “Butterfly”). Admittedly, it might be hard to keep track of (for example) Zbigniew cibor-Rylski, but it somehow seems to dishonor these people by reducing them to abbreviations. Similarly, Poland is consistently referred to as “The First Ally”, rather than as “Poland”; once or twice would be a good reminder but always is an affectation. Next, Davies is fond of reverse name-dropping: omitting the names of well-known people when describing their actions. Thus you have to check the endnotes to find out that, “an artillery officer in Rokossovsky’s army” who writes a poem about the Red Army is Alexsandr Solzhinetsyn, and an Englishman critical of Communism is Robert Conquest. Although all references are included in the endnotes, there’s no bibliography; since the book has 35 appendices already, it shouldn’t have been that difficult to add another with general reference works and specific books on the Rising. Finally, the index is not very good. However, these don’t detract much from the overall value. It makes me appreciate the first lines of the Polish national anthem: Poland has not yet perished, While we are still alive... ( )

Fini. Very thorough ( )

Well written and researched. A very depressing piece of history. ( )