Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw by Norman Davies Read Free Book Online Page B

their chief patron. Having established themselves on Soviet territory in the 1930s, they had been caught up in Stalin’s purges. Virtually the entire party actif , c. 5,000 men and women, many of them Jewish, were shot on Stalin’s orders. At the outbreak of war, no coherent Polish Communist movement existed.
    In the spring of 1940, when Hitler unleashed a second round of Blitzkrieg, the Western powers suffered a catastrophe similar to that experienced by their First Ally the previous September. Denmark and Luxembourg surrendered in less than twenty-four hours. Holland capitulated after five days; Belgium, despite British and French assistance, after eighteen days. Norway held out for two months. In the French Campaign, which lasted for six weeks from 10 May to 22 June, the combined French and British armies performed much less effectively against the Wehrmacht than the First Ally’s forces had performed against the joint attack by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. 141 German divisions comprehensively overwhelmed the 114 French and British divisions deployed against them, a ratio of less than 3:2, compared to the ratio of 3:1 which the Wehrmacht had enjoyed in September 1939, not counting Soviet involvement. At the end of the fighting, 225,000 British and 115,000 French and Belgian troops were evacuated from Dunkirk, having lost all their arms and equipment. Over 2 million were taken prisoner.
    During the debacle of 1940, the First Ally sent its forces into battle alongside the British and French. An infantry brigade went to Narvik in northern Norway, where three of the First Ally’s warships also served. The First Ally contributed four infantry divisions, an armoured cavalry brigade, and an air force of four squadrons to the French Campaign. An independent Carpathian Brigade was formed under French command in Syria. The soldiers did not see action until the end of the second week inJune, when Paris was already invested. But the airmen destroyed fifty German planes for the loss of eleven pilots. On 19 June, the C.-in-C. announced that he would fight on, despite the fall of France, and ordered his men to head for Great Britain. Some 80,000 attempted to make the crossing, mainly from Brest and Bordeaux. France, under Marshal Pétain, made its peace with Germany. But the First Ally, in the steps of Churchill, refused to do so.
    On 3 July 1940, at the naval port of Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria, the Royal Navy executed one of the most ruthless acts of war to that date. Having called on the French fleet either to scuttle or to surrender, British battleships opened fire at their stationary targets, sinking several vessels and killing 1,300 sailors. No one who saw that demonstration of how the British could treat their former friends could doubt the seriousness of their intent.
    The First Ally’s predicament at this juncture was extremely precarious. The home country was being devoured by the Nazi and Soviet Occupations. The army was posted to Scotland, whose east coast it was detailed to guard against a possible German invasion. The exiled Government was relocated to London, which was awaiting bombardment by the Luftwaffe at any moment.
    It was during the darkest days in the summer of 1940 that the close relationship between Churchill’s new Coalition Cabinet and the First Ally was forged. Both the individual personalities and the corporate temper of the two sides were well matched. Churchill and Sikorski formed a two-man mutual admiration society. Both had active military service and distinguished political careers behind them – Sikorski had served in the Polish Legions of the Austrian army in the First World War, had played a decisive role as a field commander during the defeat of the Red Army at Warsaw in 1920, and had been Premier of his country in 1922–23. But both men had lingered in the political doldrums in the 1930s; both were unsullied by the failed policies of their respective Governments in the runup to war; and both