Neither Britain Nor Russia Could Have Saved the Warsaw Uprising

Eve-Ann Prentice, in the Guardian (Aug. 6, 2004):

[Eve-Ann Prentice reported from Poland in the 1980s; she is the author of One Woman's War.]

The commemoration of cataclysmic events of the second world war has become a sorry business. Not just because today's leaders seem to feel the need to apologise - or demand apologies - for unspeakable deeds perpetrated by long-dead compatriots. But also because accounts of the events are distorted by the tunnel vision of time and the demands of modern geopolitics.

In the past week Gerhard Schroder, the German leader, was in Poland acknowledging guilt for the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Poles during the Warsaw uprising 60 years ago this month, while Polish prime minister Marek Belka has been pressing for a British apology for failing to come to the Poles' aid.

The sweeping impression from the anniversary coverage of the uprising has been that both the western allies and Soviet forces sat on their hands while the Polish resistance was slaughtered by the Nazis. This is simply not true.

Throughout the cold war, western historians and their governments accused Stalin of preventing the Red Army from aiding the uprising. It is true Stalin had no interest in seeing anti-communist rebels take control of Warsaw and refused US and British aircraft the use of Soviet bases to drop supplies, as was the case elsewhere.

But even US historians say that documents released by Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union show that the Red Army initially made every reasonable effort to come to the Poles' assistance and later chose not to largely because this would have required a reorientation of military efforts and a slackening of the main offen sive against German forces.

There was little that the Soviet generals could have done, even if they had wanted to. The west bank of the Vistula in Warsaw is on high ground and gave the Nazis even more of an advantage over any attacker than their military superiority already provided.

The suggestion that the bulk of the Red Army was camped on the east bank of the Vistula is wrong. As William Mackenzie, official historian of Britain's Special Operations Executive, has written, the Polish general Bor-Komorowski was prompted to signal the beginning of the uprising by the appearance of "small Russian forces 10 miles from Warsaw on July 31" - one day before the rebellion began. "These troops were not a spearhead but the extreme left flank of a wide turning movement, dangerously exposed to counter-attack, and . . . there was no strategic justification for an immediate Russian attack on Warsaw".

It is also wrong to suggest that Britain and the western allies did nothing. "From August 1 to the final surrender on October 2 there was unending passionate discussion up to the highest levels," according to Mackenzie, about how to support the rebels. Allied aircrews launched attempts to airdrop supplies but the "rate of loss was far higher than could be borne continuously; there were other resistance movements dependent on the same resources".

Two squadrons of night-flying Liberators flew 54 sorties to Warsaw from Italy on the night of August 13-14, resulting in 23 successful airdrops, but at the cost of 11 aircraft lost and 11 damaged by flak.

Historian Martin Gilbert says that on August 4, 13 British bombers flew from Foggia in Italy to Poland. Five failed to return and only two reached as far as Warsaw, where they dropped 24 containers of ammunition. "Twelve containers fell into the hands of the insurgents; 12 fell into German-controlled parts of the city."...