11
Fall of Warsaw
In the last week of August Master Sergeant Estill H. Rapier and Corporal Leroy G. Pipkin flew from Ukraine to the Soviet capital. They were housed in Moscow’s main hotel, the Metropole, and invited to a US embassy reception for Soviet officers decorated with American awards. They were truly impressed by what they saw in Moscow.
At the Metropole the airmen were shocked to see Japanese diplomats in the restaurant—the Soviet Union was not at war with Japan. “I stared right at the bastards but they deliberately avoided my eyes,” recalled Rapier. “I kept it up until they raised their newspapers in front of their faces.” At the embassy reception hosted by Averell Harriman on August 22, 1944, Rapier and Pipkin rubbed shoulders with Soviet dignitaries and senior commanders. “All of a sudden I found myself getting a big handshake from Molotov, the commissar for foreign affairs,” remembered Pipkin, “and then from Marshal Rokossovsky [the commander of the First Belarusian Front, advancing at that time in central Poland ], who had been called to Moscow to be decorated. And from Ambassador Harriman, the British ambassador, the Chinese ambassador, the Soviet commissar of public health and lots of other Soviet and diplomatic big shots.” Pipkin was especially impressed by Molotov and his frank replies to “blunt” questions addressed to him by the Americans.1
The American airmen did not come to Moscow to receive an award or prepare for a special mission. They were part of a tour group organized by the US Air Force commanders at the Ukrainian bases. As relations with the Soviets grew ever tenser, and daytrips to Poltava and other towns in the vicinity of the bases had become more problematic, American officers came up with the idea of taking officers, GIs, and nurses from Poltava to Moscow on a fairly regular basis. Along with Rapier, Pipkin, and their fellow airmen, one such group included nurses who had struck up an acquaintance with Kathy Harriman in June 1944. She repaid the hospitality offered her a few weeks earlier by inviting the group to the embassy reception and arranging a tour of Moscow. “We stayed around for a while and then Kathleen told us the dinner to follow the reception would get pretty dull, so we took off for town to see the Moscow night life,” recalled Pipkin.
The GIs and nurses left Moscow full of admiration for the Soviet Union, a sentiment they would share with fellow soldiers and nurses at the Poltava-area bases. They had no idea how tense Soviet-American relations had become during their brief visit to Moscow or of the problems faced by their hosts in dealing with the Kremlin over the Ukrainian bases. “Life here at Spaso [House] functions at an ever increasing tempo,” wrote Kathy Harriman to Mary on August 30. Their father had “almost nightly excursions to the Kremlin, the last one at two a.m.…” The previous night the ambassador had approached Molotov with an appeal to save at least one of the three American bases in Ukraine. The Soviet foreign commissar made a noncommittal reply. He wanted all the Americans out.2
A new crisis in Soviet-American relations began in early August 1944, when an uprising broke out in German-occupied Warsaw. It involved tens of thousands of Polish patriots led by officers of the clandestine Polish Home Army.
The uprising began soon after Soviet troops under Rokossovsky approached the suburbs on the right bank of the Vistula, across the river from the city center and its main quarters. The Germans sent an armored division into battle and managed to stop the Soviet advance. The Red Army, which had been on the attack for weeks, with its supply lines severely overextended, was unable to cross the Vistula and occupy the main part of the city. The offensive that had brought the Soviets from the Dnieper in Belarus to the Vistula at Warsaw had run out of steam. For the lightly armed Polish insurgents, that was a disastrous turn of events. They were never able to establish full control over the city and lacked the heavy weaponry required for battle against the German tanks. After the euphoria of the first days of the uprising, its progress stalled, and it soon became clear to everyone in London, Washington, and Moscow that the insurgents would be slaughtered unless they received immediate help.3
Of the three Allied powers, the Soviets were best positioned to render such assistance with artillery fire and supplies. But Stalin refused. The reasons, as the Western powers suspected, were political rather than military. The insurgents reported to the Polish government-in-exile in London, whose members were mostly representatives of prewar democratic political parties. Stalin, who considered the London Poles anti-Soviet, created his own Polish government, controlled by his secret police and by the Polish communists in Moscow, in preparation for a takeover of Poland. The Soviet media announced the creation of Stalin’s Polish government on July 22, 1944, soon after the Red Army had moved into Polish ethnic territory. But the new Polish government was allowed to assume some semblance of power under Soviet military control only after it signed an agreement recognizing the Soviet territorial acquisitions of 1939—the transfer from Poland to the Soviet Union of western Ukraine and Belarus. That was a concession that the Polish government in London and its supporters in Warsaw were not prepared to make.
For Stalin, lending assistance to the London-backed uprising in Warsaw meant creating a rival to his own hand-picked Polish government and jeopardizing the Soviet territorial acquisitions of the war years. The Polish insurgents, their political leaders in London, and the Western allies led by Roosevelt and Churchill were up against a calculating and ruthless practitioner of realpolitik who would stop at nothing to achieve his goal. The pro-Western insurgents being slaughtered by the Germans in Warsaw would make his takeover of Poland all the easier. As events would show, that was actually his preferred scenario.4
On August 3, as the first news about the successes of the uprising began to come out of Warsaw, Stalin met in the Kremlin with Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the head of the London government-in-exile. On the agenda was the political future of Poland, and Mikołajczyk, who had given the go-ahead for the uprising before flying to Moscow, hoped that the start of the insurgency would strengthen his hand in negotiations with Stalin. It did not. Stalin dismissed the Polish Home Army as an ineffective fighting force. “What kind of army is it—without artillery, tanks, air force?” he asked Mikołajczyk. He then continued: “I hear that the Polish government instructed these units to chase the Germans out of Warsaw. I do not understand how they can do it.” Mikołajczyk did not disagree: the rebels needed help, and he asked Stalin to provide it. The Soviet leader graciously agreed to look into the matter. They would try to parachute a liaison officer into the city, he told Mikołajczyk.5
The Polish Home Army could not hold out long against a technically and numerically superior enemy. The Germans threw armored divisions, SS detachments, and police battalions recruited among anticommunist Russians and Ukrainians into the battle. The leaders of the revolt appealed to London for help. On August 4, Churchill cabled Stalin about the help being offered by the British and asked for further assistance. “At the urgent request of the Polish underground army we are dropping subject to the weather about sixty tons of equipment and ammunition into the south-western quarter of Warsaw where it is said a Polish revolt against the Germans is in fierce struggle,” wrote Churchill. “They also say that they appeal for Russian aid which seems very near. They are being attacked by one and a half German divisions. This may be of help to your operations.” Stalin responded the next day, questioning the reliability of Churchill’s information and the insurgents’ claim that they had captured Warsaw. Making no definite response to Churchill’s cry for help, Stalin played for time, which was on his side. Every passing day without significant assistance reduced the insurgents’ chances of survival.6
In Washington, President Roosevelt watched the developing situation in and around Warsaw with growing concern. He came up with an apparent solution: the Allies would not ask the Soviets to risk their pilots’ lives in facing German flak to drop supplies on Warsaw. The Americans would do so themselves, using the Poltava-area bases as a launching pad for the operation. Roosevelt’s military advisers signed off on the plan, which Harriman proposed to Molotov on August 14. He also encouraged the Soviet foreign commissar to consider a similar operation by the Soviet air force. Molotov could easily decline the latter request, citing the danger of the operation, but it was more difficult to turn down the American proposal to use the bases. He therefore temporized and instructed his first deputy, Andrei Vyshinsky, the former government prosecutor at the infamous Moscow show trials of the late 1930s, to rebuff Harriman on both counts, which Vyshinsky did in writing.7
Harriman requested a meeting with Vyshinsky and was joined by the British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. He came up with an additional argument to convince the Soviets to allow the use of the Ukrainian air bases. If the British were already trying their best to help the Poles by making air drops, and the Soviets had done their best by trying to put a liaison officer into the city, why were the Americans not allowed to participate as well? In response, Vyshinsky repeated the statement made in his earlier letter to Harriman: the Soviets did not want to be seen as participating in an adventurous act. “Mr. Harriman pointed out,” reads the American protocol of the meeting, “that he was not seeking the participation of the Soviet government but merely permission to drop arms. Mr. Vyshinsky interjected—and to land on Soviet bases. That would constitute participation.” Vyshinsky was under orders to yield nothing, and indeed he did not.8
The meeting produced no results, disappointing the American military commanders. Soon afterward General John Deane informed General Walsh in Poltava and General Spaatz in London that the planned mission to Warsaw would have to be postponed. The cable read: “The Soviet Foreign Office informed Harriman that the Soviet government does not, repeat, does not, concur in using Frantic Six to drop supplies to Poles in Warsaw.” Harriman kept pushing. On August 16 he wrote to Vyshinsky that the mission had been postponed until August 17, but if the Soviet government reconsidered its position, the aircraft could still be used to drop the supplies. Vyshinsky stuck to his guns, restating his earlier position: “the Soviet government does not wish to associate itself either directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw.”9
The presence of American air bases on Soviet soil, which the Soviets had had to tolerate in the previous weeks, now became intolerable. The Soviets could offer no valid excuse for preventing the Americans from helping the Polish insurgents. Stalin apparently decided that the bases had to be closed down. On August 17 Molotov used his meeting with Harriman and Clark Kerr to deliver an unexpected blow to the Americans: the Soviets not only objected to the use of the Ukrainian bases to resupply the Poles but wanted the Americans out altogether. “After a long discussion on the supplying of arms to Polish resistance groups in Warsaw,” read the American protocol of the meeting, “Mr. Molotov suddenly stated, in the British Ambassador’s presence, that he wished to warn Mr. Harriman that the Red Air Force was proposing to revise the question of the ‘Frantic’ bases. The summer season during which the fields were to have been available to the United States Air Force had ended and it was improbable that many flights would be made in the winter. The airfields were now needed by the Soviet Air Force.”
Harriman pushed back. He told Molotov that the fields had been made available to the US Air Force for the duration of the war, not for the summer, and that the plan was to move the bases westward, not to shut them down altogether. He proposed further discussion and offered to demonstrate to the Soviet foreign commissar how successful the shuttle operations had been. Molotov interjected that not much action was taking place at the fields, to which Harriman responded that flights had been suspended for a while after the German attack of late June, hinting at the Soviet failure to protect the bases. He also pointed out that the Soviets were delaying their decisions on opening air bases in the Far East.
The conversation ended with Molotov slightly softening his position. He suggested that his comments about the bases were of a preliminary nature, and that the question of their continuing use by the Americans could be raised later. The future of the Poltava-area bases, as well as prospective American air bases in the Far East, was suddenly in question. The Soviets were punishing the Americans for taking the British side in the dispute over the Warsaw Uprising. They were also determined to get rid of the American presence on the bases, which made their policy of suffocating the uprising by denying help indefensible. It was one thing to say that the Soviets were trying to help but had decided that it was too dangerous and ultimately useless, and another to prevent their allies from rendering assistance.10
Harriman, agitated and ever more frustrated by the reaction he was getting from the Soviet leaders, appealed to Roosevelt. Apparently under the influence of Harriman’s messages, Roosevelt decided to add his signature to a letter that Churchill had proposed they send to Stalin about the uprising. It was a desperate cry for help. “We are thinking of world opinion if anti-Nazis in Warsaw are in effect abandoned,” read the cable. “We believe that all three of us should do the utmost to save as many of the patriots there as possible. We hope that you will drop immediate supplies and munitions to the patriot Poles of Warsaw, or will you agree to help our planes in doing it very quickly? We hope you will approve. The time element is of extreme importance.”
Stalin once again responded in negative. Roosevelt was disappointed, but did not think he could do much to change the Soviet leader’s mind. “The supply by us of Warsaw Poles is, I am informed, impossible, unless we are permitted to land and take off from the Soviet airfields,” he wrote to Churchill, who pushed for further action. “Their use for relief of Warsaw is at present prohibited by the Russian authorities,” Roosevelt continued. “I do not see what further steps we can take at the present time that promise results.”11
Roosevelt decided to retreat. He would need Stalin’s good will in the future, especially with regard to the war in the Pacific, and did not want to burn his bridges on account of the Polish uprising. Whatever Roosevelt’s caution may have done to secure his long-term objectives in dealing with Stalin, it did little to ensure continuing American use of the Poltava-area bases. On August 25, the day Churchill wrote to Roosevelt proposing another joint message to Stalin, Molotov delivered on his earlier threat and demanded the closure of the American bases in Ukraine. He informed Harriman and Deane that the Soviets needed the bases for their own missions, while the coming winter would make the continuation of shuttle bombing all but impossible.
Harriman was extremely upset. In a cable that he sent Secretary of State Cordell Hull but did not dare to send to the White House, he argued that the Soviet refusal to allow the Americans to help the Poles was the result of “ruthless political considerations in order that the underground may get no credit for the liberation of Warsaw and that its leaders be killed by the Germans or give an excuse for their arrest when the Red Army enters Warsaw.” Harriman was right. Stalin’s refusal to help the Poles was based on “ruthless political considerations,” and he did not relent until September 1944, by which time the uprising had been almost crushed by the Germans.12
On September 2 the Polish Home Army abandoned the Old Town, the symbolic center of power in the capital. The Germans intensified their attacks on areas near the Vistula still controlled by the insurgents. In desperation, the Polish commanders opened surrender negotiations with the commander of the SS units fighting against them in Warsaw. Surprisingly, they achieved their main objectives: the Germans promised to treat them not as rebels but as combatants and give them the status of prisoners of war as defined by the Geneva Convention. News of the impending surrender reached Moscow as the First Belarusian Front, led by Rokossovsky, resumed its advance on the city. Based in Praga, a district of Warsaw on the right bank of the Vistula, Rokossovsky’s units were now resupplied and ready to strike. Under his command were the officers and soldiers of the First Polish Army, formed by the Stalin regime out of Polish military detachments that swore allegiance to the Stalin-controlled Lublin government. They were eager to cross the Vistula, capture the Old Town, and raise the flag of the pro-Stalin government in the Polish capital.
It suddenly became in Stalin’s interest to prevent or delay the surrender of the insurgents in Warsaw and make them fight as long as possible, in order to distract the German troops along the Soviet front line. The Soviets began flying their own supply missions to Warsaw. This, along with the dramatically increased artillery barrage of German positions in the city and the Soviet advance in Praga, made the leaders of the Polish uprising increase their demands on the Germans, requiring surrender to regular German troops and not the hated SS units. This demand led to a break in negotiations, and the Poles continued to fight. The slaughter of Polish patriots would continue for the rest of the month, while the Soviets remained on the Praga side of the Vistula. Stalin and his aides nevertheless did their best to convince the Western Allies that they were doing everything in their power to save the insurgents.13
On September 9, the day the Soviets began to resupply the insurgents from the air, they also withdrew their objections to the use of the Poltava-area bases for resupply purposes by the US Air Force. Soviet permission to use the Poltava bases for Warsaw airdrops was granted to the British in an offhand manner, and they passed the news on to the Americans. Around the same time the Soviets also approved the long-delayed shuttle-bombing mission designated as Frantic VI. It had no relation to Warsaw.
The Frantic VI task force, put together by the Eighth Air Force in Britain that bombed German industrial targets near the cities of Chemnitz and Breslau (present-day Wrocław), consisted of seventy-seven Flying Fortresses and sixty-four Mustangs. They landed at the Ukrainian bases after completing their mission on September 11 and spent the next day at the bases, waiting for Soviet approval of targets to be bombed on the way back to Europe. Oblivious to the high level of tension between the Allies, the American airmen enjoyed the day and were impressed by the attitude of ordinary Red Army soldiers and locals toward them. Captain Edward Martin, who came to Poltava with the Frantic VI task force, found the Soviets “as friendly as any people I’ve seen.”14
On September 13, after finally receiving approval from the Soviets, the Frantic VI planes flew to Italy, bombing targets in Hungary. The mission was considered moderately successful—only one Mustang was shot down by the Germans on the way to Ukraine, and there were no losses on the flight to Italy. As for the results of the bombing, the outcome was estimated as “fair to poor.” It was only much later, after the end of the war, that Frantic VI was characterized as the most successful raid ever undertaken by the shuttle bombers. It turned out that the machine-building factory near Chemnitz bombed by the Flying Fortresses on their way to Ukraine produced all the engines for the German Tiger and Panther tanks. Its destruction set back German production of tank engines for half a year—an eternity in a war quickly nearing its end.15
News of Stalin’s change of heart regarding Warsaw caught the American Air Force commanders by surprise. Major General Anderson, as deputy commander of operations of the US Air Force in Europe, raised his concerns about the Warsaw airdrops to Roosevelt’s special adviser Harry Hopkins, whom he visited on September 7 at the White House. Anderson suggested that a cost-benefit analysis did not favor such operations. He pointed out the difficulties of dropping supplies with precision in a battle zone and the risks that crews would incur by flying at low altitudes. Anderson was also concerned by the political cost of pushing for the airdrops—the possibility that the bases might be denied to the Americans altogether. But that was two days before the Soviets finally granted permission for the drops, removing the political factor. The logistical problem and the risk to airplanes and crews from enemy fire still had to be dealt with. The American pilots would soon learn that the odds of conducting of a successful mission in the skies over Warsaw and staying alive were not in their favor.16
General Eisenhower gave permission to start the airdrops on September 11. On the following day, he informed Army Chief of Staff George Marshall of a mission planned for September 13, and Marshall cabled General Deane in Moscow, ordering him to clear and coordinate the mission with the Soviet commanders as soon as possible. Time was of the essence, and the first sentence of the cable stressed that: “Conditions [of the] Polish patriots in Warsaw so critical that urgent action is required.” The last sentence carried the same emphasis: “delivery of supplies must be accomplished at earliest possible date.”17
Deane made haste to carry out the new mission. On the night of September 12 he, Averell Harriman, and Archibald Clark Kerr were in Molotov’s office in the Foreign Commissariat asking that the mission be allowed to go ahead the next day. Molotov called the deputy chief of the Red Army General Staff, General Aleksei Antonov, who told him that they had already approved the airdrop—a surprising demonstration of efficiency compared to previous missions, which had been postponed for days and even weeks. However, bad weather got in the way, forcing USSTAF to move the date of the operation first to September 14, then to the fifteenth, and eventually to the eighteenth, the first day when the skies were finally clear over most of northern Europe.18
The mission to Warsaw, code-named Frantic VII, involved 110 Flying Fortresses and 73 Mustangs of the Eighth Air Force. They took off from airfields in Britain on the morning of September 18 and headed in the direction of Warsaw. Morale was high, as the pilots knew that this time they were going on a humanitarian mission instead of a bombing run. Yet humanitarian mission or not, it was fraught with greater danger than a typical bombing raid. The German air-defense coordinators had figured out in advance where the task force was headed, and their fighters and anti-aircraft gunners were at the ready. As the planes had to descend to an altitude of 18,000 feet or lower to make precision drops of supplies, they became easy targets for German flak. The planes appeared over Warsaw and began dropping canisters of weapons and supplies around noon.19
Later that afternoon, when the Frantic VII Flying Fortresses began to land on the airfields of Poltava and Myrhorod, American and Soviet mechanics could not believe their eyes. One Flying Fortress and two Mustangs had been lost in battle, as well as nineteen Fortresses heavily damaged, one of them beyond repair. An additional thirty bombers reported minor damage, as did some Mustangs. By Frantic standards, these were heavy losses.
The results of the mission were no less disappointing. Out of close to 1,300 containers of weapons, ammunition, food, and medical supplies dropped by the task force, only a quarter got into the hands of the insurgents—the rest landed on German-held territory or sank in the Vistula. The airdrop lifted the spirits of the Polish fighters and prolonged their struggle but did little to change the situation on the ground. Moreover, the insurgents reported that after the American raid of September 18, the Soviets had scaled down their own airdrop operations. The cost-benefit ratio was hardly in favor of continuing airdrops, whether the pilots and planes were American or Soviet.
On September 21, Deane wrote to the Red Army General Staff, asking for information on the results of the Soviet airdrops. The original request had come from Hap Arnold, who was trying to determine (as Deane noted) “whether or not additional American assistance is required in this respect.” Arnold clearly had his doubts. So did General Anderson, who wrote to his superiors in Washington that the Poles had recovered only one-tenth of the supplies dropped by the Americans. Anderson called the airdrop operations impractical and thought that they “should be discouraged in the highest U.S. circles.”20
The British, however, insisted that the operations continue, and Roosevelt went along. On September 30 General Spaatz informed Eastern Command that Washington had approved Frantic VIII, with a mission to Warsaw. He wanted General Walsh and his subordinates to secure the requisite Soviet permission. The Soviets advised against airdrops, suggesting that the supplies would fall into German hands, but approved the mission for October 1. Bad weather delayed it until October 2. Early that day, Anderson received word that the Soviets had withdrawn their approval. The logic was as realistic as it was grim: whatever remained of the Polish resistance in Warsaw was on its last legs.21
The Warsaw Uprising was drowned in the blood of its participants, who fought for 63 long days with little outside help. More than 15,000 fighters died in battle, with approximately 5,000 wounded. The remaining 15,000 combatants were captured or surrendered at the end of the uprising on October 5. Losses among the civilian population were far greater—in excess of 150,000; approximately 700,000 were expelled from the city, which was leveled by the Germans in a symbolic act of punishment inflicted on the entire Polish nation. When the Red Army and its Polish units finally entered Warsaw on January 17, 1945, there was little left of the Polish capital, which had to be rebuilt almost from scratch in the decades to come. But Stalin could now claim Warsaw for himself. 22
For Averell Harriman, Stalin’s refusal to allow the use of the Poltava-area air bases to help the Polish insurgents early in the uprising constituted a turning point in his relations with the Soviets. It was the last straw for the US ambassador, just as it was for many American officers at the bases, convincing them that they could not do business with their Soviet hosts. Stalin’s sudden change of heart or, more properly, of political calculation, only worsened the situation. In their last-minute effort to save the Poles, the Americans suffered their greatest combat losses since the start of shuttle bombing. The mission that had begun with high hopes ended in profound disappointment. With the Frantic VIII mission to Warsaw canceled and no new ones in the offing, the Americans in Ukraine prepared for the inevitable—evacuation.