Free Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw by Norman Davies

uphill charges undertaken with enormous loss by two divisions of Anders’s men. A British officer, later an Oxford professor, who watched them, said that he had never seen such a display of fearless courage. The victory opened the road to Rome, which was captured three weeks later. For the soldiers who had carried their red-and-white pennants to the summit of Cassino, it was celebrated as a stage on the much longer road to their own capital.
    For the first six months of 1944, the Red Army was advancing across a wide stretch of politically disputed territory. It crossed the pre-war Polish–Soviet frontier on 4 January. But it did not reach the ‘Peace Boundary’ on the River Bug until July. Throughout that time, it was engaged in a vast and crucial military operation, namely the destruction of the German Army Group Centre. So politics, in Europe’s most war-devastated zone, did not yet come to the fore. But the Red Army’s highly trained political officers were fully aware of the stakes. So, too, were the First Ally’s exiled Government and its local Underground representatives. The local population was not consulted. The Western powers were not specially interested. Very few of their most expert specialists would have been sufficiently well briefed to know that this was exactly the part of Europe which was home to the two divisions that were preparing to storm Monte Cassino.
    Nomenclature is revealing. In Soviet usage, the lands in question were known as Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. In the First Ally’s usage, they were known as the Kresy , or ‘Borders’. To most British and Americans, if they could be located at all, they were known, anachronistically and quite inaccurately, as Western Russia.
    Once the Red Army was approaching the Borders, the First Ally’s Government in London felt obliged to react and to issue instructions to its people on the spot. It decided on a strategy under the name of Operation Tempest. The Red Army was to be welcomed. The Underground Resistance movement was to come out of hiding whenever the German–Soviet front approached, and the retreating Germans were to be attacked. Wherever possible, local officials were to take control as the Germans leftand to make friendly provision for the safe passage of the Soviet forces. Nothing could have angered the Soviets more.
    The D-Day Landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944 finally opened up the Second Front which the Western Allies had repeatedly postponed. Operation Overlord was the largest amphibious operation in world history. But it took almost two months for it to be firmly established. The British did not capture Caen, one of the initial D-Day objectives, until 18 July. The Americans did not break out into open country until the end of the month. The German defenders of Normandy were not forced to retreat en masse until the Battle of the Falaise Pocket (19–21 August). The signal contribution of the First Ally to these operations lay with the 1st (Polish) Armoured Division, which landed in Normandy in the second wave and which took up station to the south of Caen as the forward element of the First Canadian Army. At Falaise, they were 1,244km (773 miles) from Berlin.
    The main consequences of the Normandy landings were twofold. The liberation of Paris and of northern France was at hand. And the Western armies could move into position as the second arm of the colossal pincer, which, in conjunction with the Soviets in the east, would gradually crush the Nazi Reich to death.
    In the first half of 1944, the relative weight of Great Britain within the Grand Alliance declined, whilst that of the USA and the USSR increased. The American and the Soviet stars were manifestly in the ascendant. The First Ally’s position was affected accordingly.
    At the official level, American attitudes to the exiled Government had always been correct, and often cordial. Polish officials were warmly and frequently received in Washington. Yet, as time