11

Sikorski’s Diplomacy, 1941–1943

The subject of the diplomatic relations between the members of the Grand Alliance – Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union – and between their leaders – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – is a vast and complex one. The relations of these three countries and their leaders with the Polish Government and its leaders – Sikorski and Mikołajczyk – are barely less complex and daunting. On one level the story appears to be simple: Poland was betrayed by her allies. At the end of July 1941, the prospects for Polish diplomacy appeared to be bright: with the Germans now in occupation of all of Poland, Sikorski had nonetheless signed an agreement with Maisky which had restored full diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union. The Soviet recognition of the Polish Government in London negated the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and created a partnership that made clear there would be an ‘independent’ Poland after the fighting ended. By the end of 1943, however, it appeared that Polish interests had been sacrificed by Churchill and Roosevelt at the Teheran conference in their efforts to accommodate or appease Stalin. This interpretation views Poland as the helpless victim of Grand Alliance diplomacy, but it is not the whole story.

It is important to look first at the character of the man at the forefront of Polish diplomacy – Sikorski himself. His contemporaries and later biographers have all agreed that he was an extremely able man but also very arrogant. The United States ambassador to the Polish Government, Drexel Biddle, wrote an interesting analysis of Sikorski’s character prior to his second visit to Washington:

While he is a thoroughly honest, sincere and courageous character, he has gained, during the past few months, an inordinate ambition, a thirst for publicity. He pictures himself on the one hand as the leader of post-war Poland, on the other hand, now that France has disappeared as a dominant influence on the continent, the leader of continental Europe.¹

Sikorski had a vision of the shape of post-war Poland and post-war eastern Europe but faced formidable, if not insuperable, obstacles in achieving his aims. His tendency towards arrogance appears time and time again as he refused to face the facts before him and believed, often without adequate evidence, that the western allies supported his aims.

So what was Sikorski’s vision for the future? He carefully analysed Poland’s rapid defeat in 1939, looking at both the military reasons (which do not concern us here) and the diplomatic reasons. Sikorski had been a vociferous opponent of the Sanacja regime and, in particular, he despised the illusions held by its foreign minister, Józef Beck, that Poland was a ‘great’ power. For Sikorski the events leading up to the outbreak of the war with Germany, as well as the disastrous military campaign, illustrated the country’s fundamental weaknesses. Poland was geographically in a poor position, with the German territory of East Prussia and part of Pomerania providing the ideal launching pad for the German conquest. Poland was far too economically weak to be a great power. Her access to the sea had been limited to a corridor through German territory, which could be and was cut off in a rapid attack. She lacked the industrial resources to ever become a great power, since the post-war plebiscites in Silesia had deprived her of most of the wealth of coal in that region. Furthermore, Poland had antagonised her neighbours, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania, and had therefore become diplomatically isolated.

Sikorski’s solution was radical. A member of the Foreign Office, Rex Leeper, wrote in November 1939 that Sikorski appeared to have come to the conclusion that ‘the reconstruction of Poland within her pre-war frontiers is very problematic. If it proves impossible to recover from Russia what has been lost, he aims at finding compensation elsewhere which would at the same time increase Poland’s security.’² In particular, Sikorski believed that Poland’s strategic and economic weakness would be eliminated if she occupied East Prussia, German Pomerania and Silesia. To the east she needed to retain the economic resources of East Galicia, especially the oil wells at Drohobycz, and had a strong argument for so doing since the Soviet Union had never controlled that region prior to September 1939. The remainder of the eastern provinces consisted primarily of agricultural land which Poland could afford to bargain away if necessary. No single country in eastern Europe would ever be in a strong enough position to resist the might of Germany and the Soviet Union alone, and so Sikorski formulated a novel solution: confederation. Initially he planned for the confederation of Poland and Czechoslovakia, which could later be expanded to include Lithuania, Hungary and Rumania.

The obstacles lying in the path of achieving these plans were challenging. In the first place, Sikorski’s own position within his government was weak and the opposition to him both inside and outside the government had to be taken into consideration. His government had been shaken by the resignation of three ministers – August Zaleski, the foreign minister, Marian Zeyda, the minister for justice, and General Sosnkowski, the minister for military affairs – over the Sikorski–Maisky agreement. The last loss was important not only because Sosnkowski commanded the loyalty of the Polish Army in training in Scotland, many of whose officers still felt that their responsibility belonged not to Sikorski but to the Sanacja regime, but also because after his resignation Sosnkowski was then dismissed by Sikorski from his role as minister responsible for the ZWZ, the Polish underground army, the precursor to the AK. The government delegate reported that Polish public opinion supported the Sikorski–Maisky agreement but that there was criticism over the dismissal of Sosnkowski: criticism to which Sikorski reacted angrily.³ Sikorski also had to face opposition from General Anders, the commander of the Polish Army now forming in the Soviet Union, and to conduct his diplomacy with regards to Poland’s eastern frontier in the full knowledge that the men in this army came from the very provinces whose future was disputed by Poland and the Soviet Union.

Sikorski was not, of course, at liberty to pursue his vision independently, because Poland was a member of the alliance, and, indeed, a very junior member. What becomes apparent in 1941–3 is the extent to which the military fortunes of the Soviet Union determined the policies of the members of the Grand Alliance. When the Soviet Union was reeling under the weight of the German attack, Britain and the United States sought to woo Stalin. Mindful of the impact of the peace treaty of 1917 between revolutionary Russia and Germany which had led to a temporary German breakthrough on the Western Front, Churchill and Roosevelt sought to assure Stalin that they understood his demands for future security, among which was the recognition of the 1941 frontiers which gave him eastern Poland. Then, later, when the Soviet Union was stronger and advancing westwards, Churchill and Roosevelt were aware that the military performance of their armies did not match that of the Red Army, and that they were now in no position to resist Stalin’s demands.

The frontier issue had nearly ended the Sikorski–Maisky talks in July 1941 before an agreement had been reached, which was unsatisfactory in that the Soviet Union was only prepared to go so far as to state that it ‘recognises the Soviet-German Treaties of 1939 as to territorial changes in Poland as having lost their validity’.⁴ Sikorski only signed it because Eden convinced him that Britain would not recognise territorial changes made in time of war. In December 1941, Sikorski visited Stalin in Moscow to discuss the outstanding matters arising from the formation of the Polish Army in the Soviet Union and the application of the amnesty freeing the Polish citizens who had been deported from eastern Poland in 1940–41. The question of the frontier arose at the dinner held at the Kremlin on 4 December. According to the official Polish record, Stalin appeared unwilling to discuss the issue of the frontier and it was Sikorski who made the running. Towards the end the following exchange took place:

STALIN: We should settle our common frontiers between ourselves, and before the Peace Conference, as soon as the Polish Army enters into action. We should stop talking on this subject. Don’t worry, we will not harm you.

SIKORSKI: The 1939 frontier must not be questioned. You will allow me, Mr President, to return to this problem.

STALIN: Please, you will be welcome.⁵

Those were the final formal words between the two men and the remainder of the evening passed with inconsequential conversation.

On this slender basis Sikorski presented a lengthy and upbeat report to his council of ministers on 12 January 1942. He reassured his ministers that he had remained firm on the question of a revision of Poland’s eastern frontier, and gave the misleading impression that Stalin would give the Poles assistance ‘in our disputes with the Ukrainians in the matter of the Polish city of Lwów’.⁶ Yet in private Sikorski appeared to have doubts that the pre-war eastern frontier could be regained. His intelligence chief, Leon Mitkiewicz, revealed in his diary that Sikorski:

has accustomed himself to the thought that we will have to cede something to Russia in the east. For example, about Wilno and about the whole Wilno region, the General spoke in a manner which indicated that it would be necessary to cede this area to the Lithuanians [in exchange] for [their] joining a Central European Federation together with the Poles. About Lwów, too, the General said – rather it was possible to surmise and feel – that he is thinking of defending Eastern Galicia with Lwów and the oil basin, at the possible cost of concessions in the rest of our East.⁷

Sikorski was only too well aware that only days after Stalin had seemed to agree to postpone discussion of the frontier, he then had challenged Poland’s pre-war territorial integrity during Eden’s visit to Moscow. As Eden recalled: ‘The conversation, which up to that moment had been smooth in character, suddenly changed and Stalin began to show his claws. He opened by asking for our immediate recognition of Russia’s 1941 frontiers as the Soviet frontiers in the peace treaty.’⁸ When Eden refused to discuss the issue, citing the Atlantic Charter and the need to consult with the United States, Stalin’s angry response was: ‘I thought the Atlantic Charter was directed against those people who were trying to establish world domination. It now looks as if the Atlantic Charter was directed against the USSR.’⁹

On 14 August 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt had issued the eight-point Atlantic Charter from on board the ill-fated British ship Prince of Wales.* Article 1 stated of the signatories that ‘their countries seek no aggrandisement, territorial or other’. This article appeared to provide security for Poland’s eastern frontier, and was used as such for Eden’s refusal to entertain Stalin’s demands for the Baltic States and for eastern Poland. But, on the other hand, it threatened to thwart Sikorski’s plan to gain territory from Germany, particularly East Prussia and Western Pomerania. Article 2, ‘they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned’, also threatened Polish interests. Stalin could point to the (blatantly rigged) elections and plebiscite during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland as evidence that the population of these provinces had voted for incorporation into the Soviet Union. Biddle wrote to the secretary of state on 12 September 1941, explaining the Polish memorandum submitted to the United States Government on the Atlantic Charter, that the ‘mass deportations which had taken place in certain sections of Poland, rendered the principle of self-determination set forth in point 2 of the Declaration, difficult, to say the least’.¹⁰ Notwithstanding its reservations about the Charter, Poland became a signatory on 24 September 1941.

Sikorski was acutely aware of the relationship between Soviet military fortunes and their diplomatic demands. When he visited Moscow in December 1941, Soviet military fortunes were at a nadir, with German forces on the brink of taking Moscow. In hindsight it is apparent that this situation presented Sikorski with the best opportunity he would ever have to settle the frontier question directly with Stalin. During the winter the Soviet counteroffensive relieved the pressure on Moscow and they were able to transport supplies into the besieged city of Leningrad. The British ambassador to the Soviet Union, Sir Stafford Cripps, warned Sikorski at the end of January 1942: ‘Russia has acquired a much stronger position. In the matter of State frontiers she has established certain principles which she considered as being beyond discussion.’¹¹ Sikorski was alert to the threats posed to Polish interests, warning his ministers on 4 February: ‘The successes enjoyed by the Soviet army, have electrified public opinion here in Great Britain, and along with British defeats in both the Near and Far East, are doubtless causing a certain state of mind that is disadvantageous for Poland.’ He believed that there was a great danger that Britain would take any action it could to keep the Soviet Union in the war, even to the extent of allowing the Soviet Union a free hand in communising Europe.¹² He had already despatched his trusted foreign minister, Raczyński, to the United States to alert the government there of Soviet demands and the British reaction to them. Intelligence reports from Poland reaching London in early 1942 indicated that the Germans were preparing for a massive offensive into the southern region of the Soviet Union in the spring, which the Soviets would temporarily be unable to withstand. The solution, as Sikorski outlined to Eden, was the immediate launch of a Second Front: ‘A single armoured division employed on the European continent in 1942 at the moment of the fiercest battles on the eastern front, will represent a greater force if compared to the adversary, than five such divisions employed against the Germans in 1943.’ This gamble was necessary ‘in order to establish a United Nations, rather than chiefly a Russian peace’. By showing that the western allies were prepared to make sacrifices, they would be in a stronger diplomatic position with regard to the Soviets. In the meantime, no promises regarding post-war frontiers should be made.¹³

The British reaction to the danger of Soviet reverses in the spring of 1942 was rather different: it wanted to conclude a treaty with the Soviet Union which would bind the two countries closely together both during and after the war. The question was: what would Britain offer the Soviet Union? The first step in this accommodation, if not actual appeasement, of the Soviet Union was taken by Churchill in his telegram to Roosevelt on 7 March 1942:

The increasing gravity of the war has led me to feel that the principles of the Atlantic Charter ought not to be construed so as to deny Russia the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her … I hope therefore that you will be able to give us a free hand to sign the treaty which Stalin desires as soon as possible. Everything portends an immense renewal of the German invasion of Russia in the spring and there is very little we can do to help the only country that is heavily engaged with the German armies.¹⁴

The phrase ‘the frontiers she occupied’ subtly sacrificed the whole of the Polish territories occupied by the Soviets after their invasion in September 1939. This also reflected Churchill’s own personal opinion, for on 26 April 1942, he wrote to Sikorski: ‘The current war is a continuation of the first. Russia demands only the return of that territory with which she entered the war in 1914.’¹⁵ This, of course, was not true, both because East Galicia had never been a portion of the Russian partition, and because in 1914 cities like Łódź had been part of the Russian Empire, but Stalin was not claiming these. The reaction of the American undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles, to Churchill’s telegram was shared by Roosevelt: ‘The attitude of the British government is not only indefensible from every moral standpoint, but likewise extraordinarily stupid.’¹⁶ When Sikorski was in the United States in March and April 1942, during his meetings with Roosevelt and Welles he emphasised his belief that although the Soviet Union had only demanded the recognition of Soviet incorporation of the three Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), this should be viewed as just Stalin’s opening play. If the British agreed, then the principles of the Atlantic Charter would have already been breached, leaving Stalin free to demand, first, eastern Poland, and then hegemony over the whole of eastern Europe. His opinions fell on receptive ears, particularly since Sikorski outlined his preferred solution: a confederation of eastern European states, beginning with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Sikorski also drew Roosevelt’s attention to the strength of the anti-German underground in Poland and its determination to reject German suggestions for Polish participation in an anti-Soviet campaign. He informed both Roosevelt and the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Maxim Litvinov, that Poland had ‘a friendly attitude towards the Soviet Union, conditioned, however, by its respecting our rights and our territory’.¹⁷

Back in Britain the Polish Government mounted a sustained campaign on Eden, virtually begging him not to conclude a treaty with the Soviet Union that included any decisions on post-war frontiers. Sikorski even threatened to release the ‘Red Book’, the list of Soviet crimes committed during the occupation of Poland in 1939–41.¹⁸ Churchill himself was becoming considerably less keen on an Anglo-Soviet treaty, telling his colleagues: ‘We must remember that this is a bad thing. We oughtn’t to do it, and I shan’t be sorry if we don’t.’¹⁹ He wanted some sort of treaty with the Soviet Union but not one that covered post-war frontiers. But it was American opposition that led to the removal of these clauses. The American ambassador to Britain, John Winant, warned Churchill and Eden ‘that should a British-Russian treaty be concluded, admitting Soviet territorial demands, the President would be forced to make a public statement disassociating the United States very definitely from any part in such an agreement’.²⁰ The Anglo-Soviet Treaty, signed on 26 May 1942, did not confirm the Soviet Union’s 1941 frontier with Poland and promised that the two powers ‘will act in accordance with the two principles of not seeking territorial aggrandizement for themselves and of non-interference in the internal affairs of other peoples’.²¹ Eden later gave Sikorski all the credit for the final treaty: ‘It is 100% to your merit that this treaty has its present shape and not a different one. The United States have also supported your point of view, and therefore 50% of the merit is theirs.’²² Sikorski wrote to Roosevelt to thank him for his assistance with the treaty.²³

This marked the high point of Sikorski’s diplomacy and it was all downhill from then on. Negotiations between the exiled Poles and exiled Czechs had begun in London in November 1940, and a Mixed Commission was set up to discuss the prospects for a confederation of the two countries. The future of Teschen, the disputed area of Silesia which the Czechs had seized in 1920 only to lose it to the Poles in 1938, was a stumbling block and one which Beneš, the Czech leader, particularly resented. The real challenges were to establish the purpose of the confederation and then to convince the members of the Grand Alliance that such a confederation would be a positive step. Sikorski was adamant that it should be a bulwark against any future expansionist plans by either Germany or the Soviet Union. In contrast, the Czechs, and in particular Beneš, were strongly in favour of allying the confederation to the Soviet Union in some form. As Raczyński wrote: ‘unfortunately, the Czechs, having only the Germans as their enemies and chronically seeking support from Russia, support the Russian claims to our south-eastern territories, counting on assuring for themselves Carpathian Ruthenia in this matter’.²⁴

Therefore, the prospects for the confederation were not good. Indeed, Roosevelt warned Sikorski in March 1942 that the Soviets were unlikely to favour it, especially since Sikorski wanted to expand it to include Lithuania, which the Soviets intended for themselves, and ultimately he wanted a southern confederation to include all the countries in the Balkans. Churchill had been in favour of the confederation to begin with but when, during the negotiations for the Anglo-Soviet Treaty, he learned of Soviet opposition he changed his mind. While Molotov was in London negotiating the treaty, he had an important conversation with Beneš, who assured him that ‘if your relations with Poland are not friendly there would be no confederation’; Sikorski also met Molotov, but the confederation issue was not raised. Sikorski wrote to Beneš urging him that the matter of Teschen could be settled amicably and that a confederation was really the only guarantor of the future independence of both countries, but in vain. The last meeting of the Mixed Commission was held on 23 July 1942, although talks between the two exiled governments continued for the rest of the year. The Czechs moved even further towards the Soviet camp, and the American embassy in Moscow reported: ‘evidence was accumulating to the effect that the Czechoslovak Legation is spending a good deal of its time serving the interests of the Soviet Government’. After the break in relations between Poland and the Soviet Union, Beneš offered to act as an intermediary between them. The Polish Government had no trust in him. It felt that he lacked ‘objectivity’ and that, indeed, ‘in the course of the last year the Czechoslovak Government appears to have become a fervent advocate of USSR aims and, in connection with this attitude, has shown a marked tendency to withdraw from the engagements which it had previously undertaken with regard to Poland’. Beneš achieved his own goal when he signed the Soviet-Czech treaty in Moscow on 12 December 1943.²⁵

The question of the future frontiers of Poland continued to dominate Sikorski’s diplomacy. Stalin had offered Sikorski a new Polish western frontier on the Oder but Sikorski told Hugh Dalton, the former minister of economic warfare and a friend of the Poles, that he dismissed this idea as a ‘provocation’.²⁶ Certainly, Sikorski envisaged a realignment of the German-Polish frontier with Polish gains in East Prussia, Danzig and Pomerania, because this would give Poland a shorter and therefore a more defendable frontier with Germany. It is also likely that Sikorski also wanted to see the whole of Upper Silesia in Polish hands: part of this rich industrial area had been lost to Poland in the disputed post-war plebiscite. A thesis has been advanced that Sikorski actually had wanted to advance the frontier all the way to the Oder and Neisse, roughly where the border now lies, but the evidence for this is fragmentary.²⁷ Indeed, when Stalin had made the offer of a new frontier on the Oder, Sikorski had demurred on the grounds that Lower Silesia contained a predominantly German population. The Polish council of ministers warned Sikorski to be cautious on the subject of gains from Germany: ‘The advancement of such boundless territorial demands discredits the Poles in the eyes of Anglo-Saxon opinion as a people of unrestrained greed; which does irreparable harm to our real territorial aspirations’, which were more limited.²⁸ The real danger in opening any discussion of the western frontier was that the Big Three might use the prospect of substantial territorial gains from Germany as a bargaining chip to win over Polish support for a revision of the eastern frontier in line with Stalin’s demands.

At the end of 1942 it appeared that the tide of the war was beginning to turn in the Allies’ favour: Stalingrad was encircled by the Soviets and the western allies had almost cleared North Africa. Sikorski set out for Washington in December 1942 to present his case on the future shape of Poland to Roosevelt, telling the commander of the Polish underground army, Rowecki, that he was seeking recognition of ‘our rights in the East with a simultaneous support for our claims in the West’.²⁹ In addition, Sikorski was also trying to gain an increase in supplies for the underground army in Poland so that it could make its contribution to the defeat of Germany at the opportune moment, and he and his aide Colonel Andrzej Marecki held a series of meetings with senior American generals about this. In a memorandum Sikorski prepared for Sumner Welles, after his first round of conversations with Roosevelt and Welles, he set out the Polish defence of the 1920 eastern frontier. He made the point that the northern and central provinces were primarily agricultural and of no great value, but in contrast East Galicia was of great value to Poland:

The southern part which contains our only oil-fields is of great importance to Poland, whereas the high cost of production and the comparatively low output [400,000–500,000 tons per annum] would make it insignificant to our neighbour, nor would it bear comparison with his vast capacities or economic facilities of production. In this part of Poland there is also ozocerite, natural gas, potassium chloride, timber and water-power.

He countered the Soviet argument that the river Bug was a strategic barrier by stressing that the Pripet marshes, on the existing frontier, formed a much stronger defensive shield. Sikorski also pointed out that Lwów had never belonged to Russia, and Wilno only when Poland was partitioned.³⁰

Sikorski returned to London convinced that his visit had been a great success. He informed his council of ministers that their fears that the Grand Alliance was entertaining the idea of ‘depriving Poland of a part of the eastern territories in exchange for acquisitions in the west’ had been misguided.³¹ He said that Roosevelt supported Polish claims for East Prussia but was concerned about the claims for part of Silesia. A jubilant Sikorski, throwing off all earlier constraint, then reported to the Foreign Office that Roosevelt was in favour of Polish expansion at the expense of Germany and that he would support Poland’s claims in the east. Furthermore, he stated that Roosevelt had suggested that Stalin would be content to absorb part of Finland, Estonia and Latvia but not Lithuania, and Bessarabia but not Bukovina. The Foreign Office was bewildered and asked Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in the United States, for clarification. The response was: ‘General Sikorski had in fact done all the talking’, and that it was he who had hoped that Stalin would be satisfied with more limited gains. Welles had also made the American position on the western frontier clear: no binding statement on the western frontier would be issued and the United States would not guarantee the integrity of any frontier.³²

Sikorski viewed his visit to Washington as both a personal success and important because he believed that it had demonstrated that the United States was prepared to stand up to Soviet demands detrimental to Polish interests with more determination than Britain. His optimism was entirely unjustified. Shortly after Sikorski’s return to London, Welles had asked the Polish ambassador, Jan Ciechanowski, to clarify the Polish position on the eastern frontier: ‘Am I to understand that the Polish Government is determined not to sacrifice even an inch of its Eastern Territory’, and Ciechanowski was forced to reply in the affirmative.³³ Eden complained that Sikorski was now taking a harder line than before: whereas earlier there seemed a chance that Sikorski might agree to give up the eastern provinces, although certainly not Lwów, now he had returned to demanding the Riga Line and, to make matters worse, was also demanding the Oder Line in the west.³⁴

Sikorski appears to have been in danger of falling into the trap of being punctilious about the restoration of Poland’s eastern frontier while at the same time being acquisitive in the west. He was unwilling or unable to recognise that Poland was in an extremely weak position diplomatically. The evacuation of the Polish Army from the Soviet Union during 1942 had reinforced the British forces in the Middle East, but the British had neither been approached for, nor had offered, any commitments to the Polish cause in return for this reinforcement. The evacuations were a diplomatic disaster, for, at the dinner at the Kremlin on 4 December 1941, Stalin had explicitly stated that the correct time to discuss the frontiers would be when the Polish Army had begun fighting the Germans. With the evacuation of the Anders army, Stalin lost patience with the Poles, and refused to allow recruitment to the Polish Army to continue because, as he told the new Polish ambassador, Tadeusz Romer, they would only go to Iran.³⁵ The evidence of Stalin’s absolute determination to secure eastern Poland for the Soviet Union is overwhelming: communiqués on German atrocities in the Soviet Union included references to the cities of Lwów and Wilno, and the Soviet definition of eligibility for recruitment to the Polish Army had sought to exclude Polish citizens of Belorussian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Jewish ethnicity. Polish complaints were ignored. In January 1943, Stalin raised the stakes by withdrawing Polish citizenship from the Poles left in the Soviet Union, who were now to be considered simply as Soviet citizens.

It is likely that this withdrawal of Polish citizenship was Stalin’s angry reaction to Sikorski’s visit to Washington. Indeed, the American ambassador to the Polish Government, Drexel Biddle, reported to the State Department that Stalin’s action should be seen as a warning to Sikorski that he should go to Moscow to discuss Poland’s eastern frontier directly with Stalin. In the same despatch Biddle noted that Sikorski had told him that he had received ‘secret information today that the Russians are hinting that Stalin may be prepared for his part to make concessions’. Sikorski was willing to go to Moscow but, because ‘Stalin is riding the wave of military successes’, wanted Britain and the United States to prepare the ground for him first.³⁶ Both Britain and the United States appealed to the Soviets to reverse their ruling on Polish citizenship and to allow the evacuation from the Soviet Union of the families of Polish soldiers who were already in the Middle East, but to no avail. Their lack of success forced the American ambassador in Moscow, Admiral William Standley, to conclude: ‘it was precisely because of the fact that Sikorski took his problems to Washington before discussing them with Stalin that Soviet-Polish relations have deteriorated to their present state’.³⁷

Sikorski made no plans to go to Moscow for talks with Stalin, as it was politically impossible for him to contemplate making concessions to him at this time. His government was greatly alarmed by reports coming in from the Middle East about the attitude of the officers in the Anders army, ‘who, in their hatred towards Russia overstep the mark, and are even considering reaching a compromise with the Germans’.³⁸ It was, however, equally dangerous for the Polish Government to depend on Britain and the United States to defend its interests. For example, on 10 March 1943 a leading article in The Times, written by E. H. Carr, suggested that eastern Europe should be under Soviet hegemony.³⁹ The Poles were outraged and, although Eden made it clear that this did not reflect government policy, the Soviets were convinced that The Times was a government organ and that opinions stated in it were official government policy.⁴⁰ Also in March, Eden visited Washington and had interesting talks with Roosevelt, who told Eden that, in his opinion, after the war no country other than Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union should have armaments more powerful than rifles. This proposal was so absurd that it could be safely ignored. Another statement did, however, have far more serious implications for Poland: Roosevelt did not ‘intend to bargain with the Poles or other small countries at the peace conference’, and ‘in any event Britain, the United States and Russia should decide at the appropriate time what was a just solution, and Poland would have to accept’.⁴¹

On the surface it seemed that there was still a great deal of sympathy for the Poles in government circles. At the end of March, the permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office, Cadogan, ably summed up the situation:

The indications are that the Russians are trying to force the Poles to agree to accept the Curzon Line frontier under the threat of working against General Sikorski’s Government and of making the position of the Poles in Russia impossible. General Sikorski cannot accept such a frontier settlement now and neither we nor the United States Government could advise him to do so. The Russian attitude is, therefore, playing into the hands of German propaganda by stirring up disunity among the United Nations, and by encouraging anti-Soviet feelings in the U.S.A. and among the smaller European nations. It is also undermining the morale of the Polish Fighting Forces here and in the Middle East, which is a matter of very direct interest to us.⁴²

Cadogan’s mention of German propaganda was prescient given the news the Germans were about to broadcast to the world, which would for ever damage both Polish-Soviet and Polish-British relations.

On 12 April 1943, the German news agency Transocean made public the German discovery of the graves of the Polish officers murdered at Katyń by the NKVD in April and May 1940. The next day the news was broadcast on German radio and repeated by radio stations worldwide.

A giant pit was found, 28 metres long and 16 metres wide, filled with 12 layers of bodies of Polish officers, numbering about 3000. They were clad in full military uniform, and while many of them had their hands tied, all of them had wounds in the back of their necks caused by pistol shots. The identification of the bodies will not cause great difficulties because of the mummifying property of the soil and because the Bolsheviks had left on the bodies the identity documents of the victims.⁴³

The Poles had been pressing the Soviets to account for the missing Polish officers ever since the formation of the Anders army had begun, and were appalled now to learn of their fate. Two days later TASS issued a denial and insisted that the Germans themselves had killed the Polish officers in 1941 when they first overran the area. The Poles had no doubt that the Soviets were responsible: for nearly two years they had repeatedly asked the Soviet authorities for details of the whereabouts of these officers without receiving satisfactory responses. General Kukiel, the Polish minister responsible for POW matters, issued a statement, agreed to by Sikorski and other ministers, requesting that the IRC investigate the matter. There were precedents for this appeal: when the Germans murdered some British officers, and when the news of murders of British and American soldiers by the Japanese was made public, the British Government had appealed to the IRC for assistance. An important difference now, of course, was that those murders had been committed by the enemy and not by an ally, the Soviet Union.

The former Polish ambassador to the Soviet Union, Stanisław Kot, now minister of information, drafted a communiqué to be issued by the Polish Government, in which all the steps taken by the Poles to discover the fate of the officers were listed with all the evidence pointing to the Soviets as the guilty party.⁴⁴ Later, when the full implications of this communiqué had become evident, the Polish Government tried to explain to Biddle what had happened:

I am informed by Sikorski’s closest associates that after Kot had written the communiqué he succeeded in influencing Sikorski over the telephone, at moment when latter was tired and ill, to permit him to release it; that when on second thought, Sikorski had wanted to withdraw it, it was already in the hands of the press.⁴⁵

On 24 April, Sikorski had a meeting with Eden at the Foreign Office during which Eden subjected him to an intense interrogation concerning the evidence against the Soviets. Finally, Eden was reluctantly forced to accept Sikorski’s conclusion but made a passionate appeal: ‘Great Britain was in a desperate position. Her two allies were involved in a serious and public dispute, weakening the common front and splitting up the United Nations.’ He urged Sikorski to withdraw the invitation to the IRC and to ‘make a declaration stating that the Katyń affair was an invention of German propaganda’. Sikorski’s response was that he could not do the latter but would withdraw the request for the IRC and control the Polish press if the British and Americans appealed to Stalin to release more Poles from the Soviet Union.⁴⁶

It was too late: on the night of 24–25 April, Molotov summoned the Polish ambassador in Moscow, Romer, and read out a note which began: ‘The Soviet Government consider the recent behaviour of the Polish Government with regard to the USSR as entirely abnormal and violating all regulations and standards of relations between two Allied States.’ It then accused the Polish Government of being in collusion with the Germans before concluding: ‘On the strength of the above, the Soviet Government has decided to suspend relations with the Polish Government.’⁴⁷ Romer refused to accept the note, which was then delivered to his hotel. On 28 April, the Polish Government issued a statement affirming that their policy was ‘a friendly understanding between Poland and the Soviet Union on the basis of the integrity and full sovereignty of the Polish Republic’.⁴⁸ The Soviet use of ‘prervat’ meaning ‘suspend’ rather than ‘porvat’ meaning ‘break off’ meant that many, Sikorski and Romer, among them, hoped that the break would be only temporary.⁴⁹ Yet the Polish mention of ‘integrity’ suggested that they would not relent on the question of the 1941 frontier, so the Soviets were not prepared to alter their stance, and, on 5 May, Romer left the Soviet Union. Goebbels wrote in his diary: ‘One can speak of a complete triumph of German propaganda. Throughout this whole war we have seldom been able to register such a success.’⁵⁰

It might be argued that the Polish Government should have approached the matter differently. Quite obviously it could not have condoned the murder of its officer corps as silence would have implied. Still less could it have declared, as Eden suggested, that the Germans were the guilty party. Sikorski’s pro-Soviet policy had already proved controversial, and if he had shown any weakness at this point, it would almost certainly have led to mutinies within the Polish Army, whose friends and relatives had been murdered, and to his sacking by the Polish president Raczkiewicz, who had never liked Sikorski’s policy towards the Soviet Union. Nor would Sikorski have been supported by the Poles within Poland. The Underground Government and resistance had approved of the plan for a thorough investigation of the Katyń graves by the IRC, and when the official request was withdrawn, the commander of the underground army, Rowecki, notified Sikorski of the country’s disappointment and anger and asked him to clarify his position. Rowecki then continued to keep the government informed of how the Germans and the communists were making use of Katyń in their propaganda.⁵¹

One criticism can be made of Sikorski’s leadership at this difficult time. The rising in the Warsaw ghetto and the Germans’ brutal suppression of it coincided with the revelations of Katyń. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Germans, who had known about the discovery of the graves since the winter of 1942–3, deliberately delayed releasing the news until the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto was in progress, in the hope that world opinion would be diverted away from their crimes and focus instead on Soviet crimes.⁵² If so, then Sikorski fell into the trap laid by the Germans: he could have easily countered the Soviet accusations of Polish collusion with the Germans by highlighting ongoing German crimes on Polish soil against the Jewish population, but missed the opportunity.

Stark military facts governed the response of the British and American governments to the Katyń revelations and the break in diplomatic relations between the Polish Government and the Soviet Union. The Soviets had inflicted a massive defeat on the Germans when General Friedrich von Paulus was forced to surrender the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, and the Germans were in retreat on the Eastern Front. In contrast the western allies were concentrating their resources on the strategic bombing campaign in Germany and in winning the battle of the Atlantic, for until the latter was won, an invasion of the continent could not be started. Therefore, the choice was clear: the war could be won without the Poles, should they withdraw from the alliance, but not without the Soviets. Churchill informed Stalin that he was opposed to an investigation by the IRC, and Roosevelt went further in his telegram to Stalin: ‘It is my view that Sikorski has not acted in any way with Hitler gang, but rather that he made a stupid mistake in taking the matter up with the International Red Cross.’ While Roosevelt may have deleted ‘stupid’ from the final telegram, this is obviously what he thought of the response of the Polish Government.⁵³

The British certainly agreed with the Poles that the Soviets were guilty. The British ambassador in Moscow, Archibald Clark Kerr, wrote: ‘In a horrible way it seems to fit in with the Poles’ story of the disappearance of 8300 officers. The anger and unconvincing terms of Soviet denials suggests a sense of guilt.’⁵⁴ Cadogan wrote in the privacy of his diary: ‘How can the Poles ever live amicably alongside Russians, and how can we discuss with Russians execution of German “war criminals”, when we have condoned this.’⁵⁵ On 24 May 1943, the British ambassador to the Polish Government, Owen O’Malley, presented a lengthy and very thorough analysis of the entire Katyń affair to the Foreign Office. He made the case for Soviet guilt but concluded that it was strongly inadvisable for the British Government to allow this belief to become public even if this meant that the government would have to put moral scruples to one side:

In handling the publicity side of the Katyń affair we have been constrained by the urgent need for cordial relations with the Soviet Government to appear to appraise the evidence with more hesitation and lenience than we should do in forming a common-sense judgment on events occurring in normal times or in the ordinary course of our private lives; we have been obliged to appear to distort the normal and healthy operation of our intellectual and moral judgments; we have been obliged to give undue prominence to the tactlessness or impulsiveness of Poles, to restrain the Poles from putting their case clearly before the public, to discourage any attempt by the public and the press to probe the ugly story to the bottom. In general we have been obliged to deflect attention from possibilities which in the ordinary affairs of life would cry to high heaven for elucidation, and to withhold the full measure of solicitude which, in other circumstances, would be shown to acquaintances situated as a large number of Poles now are. We have in fact perforce used the good name of England like the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre; and, in view of the immense importance of an appearance of Allied unity and of the heroic resistance of Russia to Germany, few will think that any other course would have been wise or right.⁵⁶

Churchill forwarded O’Malley’s despatch to Roosevelt, describing it as ‘a grim, well-written story’. He also asked Roosevelt to return it to him, ‘when you have finished with it as we are not circulating it officially in any way’.⁵⁷ Roosevelt’s reaction is not known. Churchill’s own response was: ‘If they are dead nothing you can do will bring them back.’⁵⁸ While it was understandable that the British Government should have perceived the necessity of concealing the truth concerning Katyń during the war, the extent and length of the cover-up during and after the Cold War is inexcusable, and this subject will be returned to in Chapter 18.

Churchill promised Stalin that he would muzzle the Polish press, which was publishing strongly anti-Soviet opinions. It had long been a thorn in Sikorski’s side, being particularly critical of his policy towards the Soviet Union, and for the anti-Soviet journalists the news of Katyń justified their earlier scepticism. The British censored not only Polish broadcasts on the BBC to Poland and the Polish press in Britain, but also the Polish press in the Middle East. In contrast, the Soviet press continued to make anti-Polish statements virtually without criticism from British quarters. The British authorities in the Middle East, Reader Bullard in Teheran and Richard Casey in Cairo, noted the anger of the Polish troops at being unable to respond to the TASS statements circulating in the region.⁵⁹ In London the Soviet War News criticised the Polish Government and finally, after a particularly hostile article on 30 April, Churchill summoned Maisky and as Cadogan noted: ‘Then we kicked Maisky all round the room, and it went v. well.’⁶⁰

Sikorski, Churchill and Roosevelt all hoped that the breach in Soviet-Polish relations would be temporary, yet evidence quickly mounted up to suggest otherwise. Soon after the break the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Standley, informed the State Department that while the foreign correspondents in Moscow had at first been ordered by the Soviet censors to use ‘suspension of relations’, a few days after the announcement they were ordered to use ‘break’ or ‘rupture’. Furthermore, both Standley and Clark Kerr informed their governments that an article in Izvestiya by Wanda Wasilewska of the Union of Polish Patriots was sharply critical of the Polish Government. Indeed, Standley reported: ‘the consensus here is that the publication of the aforementioned article has now definitely closed the door to any rapprochement between the present Polish Government and Moscow’. Biddle drew the same conclusion after a conversation with Bogomolov, the Soviet ambassador to the exiled governments in London.⁶¹ In contrast, Sikorski was optimistic: during a meeting with Eden on 24 May, he let it be known that he was still pressing for the formation of new Polish divisions in the Soviet Union. This meeting occurred after the Soviet announcement of the creation of the Berling army had been made.

Stalin’s reaction to the break in relations suggested that he had been preparing for it for a long time, for he quickly threw his support behind the wider activities of the Union of Polish Patriots and despatched more Soviet partisans to Poland.⁶² He then upped the stakes by demanding a reorganisation of the Polish Government before he would even consider a restoration of relations. He wrote to Churchill:

Although you informed me that the Polish Government wanted to work loyally with the Soviet Government, I question its ability to keep its word. The Polish Government is surrounded by such a vast pro-Hitler following, and Sikorski is so helpless and browbeaten that there is no certainty at all of his being able to remain loyal in relations with the Soviet Union even granting that he wants to be loyal.⁶³

The Polish politicians in question were Raczkiewicz, Kot and Kukiel. Churchill and Roosevelt were desperate for relations to be restored but warned Stalin that they could not interfere in the internal composition of a foreign government. Nevertheless, both men urged Sikorski to make changes to the council of ministers, and it seems likely that he was planning to do so after his trip to the Middle East.⁶⁴

Sikorski was extremely aware that the news of the murder of their relatives and friends had greatly unsettled the Polish soldiers in the Middle East. On 25 May 1943, he left London for a long overdue visit to the Anders army. He toured the army camps from 1 to 17 June and then held talks with Anders in Cairo to discuss current political and military problems. According to Anders, the visit and the talks were a great success.⁶⁵ On 3 July, Sikorski flew from Cairo to Gibraltar. On the evening of 5 July, the plane carrying Sikorski and his daughter, his chief of staff, Klimecki, his British liaison officer, Victor Cazalet, and several other passengers, including a recently arrived courier from Warsaw, Colonel Jan Gralewski, crashed into the sea on takeoff from Gibraltar, killing all the passengers. The Czech pilot, Eduard Prchal, survived but was badly injured.⁶⁶ Sikorski’s body was found and was transported by ship to Plymouth, and his funeral was held at Westminster Cathedral on 15 July. The British CIGS, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, wrote in his diary:

The service was too theatrical and fussy to stir up my feelings till the very end. But when I saw the empty stand where the coffin had been with 6 ‘sierges’ burning round it, and on either flank representative ‘colours’ of regiments borne by officer parties it struck me as a sad picture of Poland’s plight: both its state and its army left without a leader when a change of the tide seems in sight. I was very fond of Sikorski personally and shall miss him badly.⁶⁷

Sikorski’s coffin was buried in Newark Cemetery, which already contained the graves of over 200 Polish pilots who had died fighting for the Allies.

The British convened a Court of Inquiry into the crash of Sikorski’s Liberator, under the chairmanship of Group Captain J. Elton, and 30 people were questioned. The Polish Government sent Major Stanisław Dudziński as its representative. The inquiry was unable to determine with any certainty why the plane had crashed and concluded:

It is apparent that the accident was due to jamming of elevator controls shortly after take off with the result that the aircraft became uncontrollable.

After the most careful examination of all available evidence, including that of the pilot, it has not been possible to determine how the jamming occurred but it has been established that there was no sabotage.⁶⁸

The Poles were unhappy about the readiness of the British to rule out sabotage but two separate commissions conducted by the Poles themselves in September and November 1943 were unable to find any evidence of sabotage and concluded that ‘the cause had to remain as due to unknown factors’.⁶⁹

The lack of a definite cause led many to believe that the plane must have been deliberately sabotaged and gave rise to a number of surprisingly long-lasting conspiracy theories blaming the British, the spy Kim Philby acting on Soviet orders, the Soviets or the Poles themselves. Perhaps the longest-running was that Churchill wanted Sikorski dead because he was a strong leader and Churchill preferred someone weak whom he could bully into agreeing to Soviet demands.⁷⁰ But Frank Roberts took Churchill the news of Sikorski’s death and later said that the prime minister ‘was deeply moved and wept over what he felt was a personal loss, that of a great Polish patriot and of a war leader for whom he had real friendship and admiration’.⁷¹ This is corroborated by Retinger’s account of Churchill’s reaction:

I was ushered into the big room at 10 Downing Street which had just been vacated by the Cabinet, and which was dense with smoke. I found the Prime Minister alone, wearing his light blue siren suit. As soon as he saw me he got up and started to cry. He told me that he had loved General Sikorski as a younger brother, and had watched his career not only with interest, but with affection. He was profoundly moved and shocked by the news of the crash, and deplored the fact that he would not be able to cooperate with General Sikorski when peace came. He went on to recall with emotion the many critical days they had spent together.⁷²

Suspicion also fell on to the British because on two previous occasions Sikorski’s life had been in danger when leaving their territory: a bomb was found on a plane carrying him from Canada to the United States in March 1942, and on an earlier occasion the plane taking him south from Scotland was found to have been sabotaged.

The presence on Gibraltar of Kim Philby, ostensibly working for SIS (Secret Intelligence Service), but later discovered to be working for Soviet intelligence, lent credence to the theory that the Soviets had somehow killed Sikorski. This claim centred on the movements of the crew of the plane carrying Maisky from London to Moscow, which was parked on the same airfield, and it was generally acknowledged that security on Gibraltar was lax. Yet why would the Soviets want Sikorski dead? He was the one Polish leader who was a strong enough character to engage in negotiations with them, and even if the Soviets did not want to negotiate with the Polish Government, they would hardly take the risk of throwing suspicion on themselves so soon after the Katyń revelations. The last theory concerns the Poles themselves. There were rumours before Sikorski even arrived in the Middle East that an attempt would be made on his life by Poles.⁷³ An extraordinary claim was made in 1947 by General Gustaw Paszkiewicz: he stated that he was approached by Anders to join a plot to assassinate Sikorski but refused. This theory has some plausibility since, as has already been explained earlier in this chapter, Sikorski was prepared to consider alterations to Poland’s pre-war frontier in the east and this would have made homeless a number of soldiers under Anders’s command. It is, however, unlikely that Anders himself was involved in any plot, and much likelier that Paszkiewicz, who had returned to Poland after the war, made this claim as part of the communist Polish Government’s campaign against Anders.⁷⁴ While Sikorski’s death was almost certainly an accident, and there were other such fatal accidental crashes during the war, if sabotage was involved, then the involvement of members of Anders staff cannot be entirely ruled out.

Sikorski’s death threw the Polish Government into turmoil. In Poland the underground forces were in a similar state of confusion following the arrest of their leader, Rowecki, by the Gestapo. For all his faults, Sikorski had been a strong and determined man who as Harold Nicolson observed, ‘was the only man who could control the fierce resentment of the Poles against Russia, and force them to bury their internecine strife. He is one of those rare people whom one can describe as irreplaceable.’⁷⁵ Sikorski had filled two posts, prime minister and commander-in-chief, and it appears that the decision was quickly taken to separate them. The Allies watched with anxiety as the Poles created their new government.

President Raczkiewicz immediately seized the initiative by suggesting that General Sosnkowski, who shared his staunchly anti-Soviet stance, should be appointed commander-in-chief. The only alternative seemed to be Anders. Raczyński kept the Foreign Office informed of Polish plans, and the Foreign Office in turn consulted Clark Kerr in order to discover whom the Soviets might favour. Clark Kerr responded that he knew nothing of Sosnkowski, but was sure that Anders was persona non grata with the Soviets. Sosnkowski was extremely popular within the army and had many supporters in Poland in the AK command, but he also had his detractors. Within Poland there was opposition to his appointment from the right-wing NSZ, who felt he was too involved in politics, and from the left wing, who remembered that Sosnkowski had resigned from the government over the Sikorski–Maisky agreement and doubted that his political views had changed. The British hoped that Sosnkowski’s appointment, made by Raczkiewicz before the appointment of a prime minister, ‘will be offset by the immediate formation of a “democratic” Government under a Prime Minister who will hold the ship of State to the course plotted by Sikorski’.⁷⁶

Retinger and Raczyński were deeply involved in the appointment of the new prime minister. Both favoured Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the leader of the largest political party, the Peasant Party, as someone who had been earmarked by Sikorski for the job. When Retinger saw Eden and Churchill separately on 5 July to suggest Mikołajczyk, Churchill could not remember him but when Retinger described him, replied: ‘The man who looks like a fat, slightly bald, old fox.’ Mikołajczyk indicated his willingness to accept the job but attached conditions; the most important was a restriction of the wide powers of the president, granted under the 1935 constitution, to appoint his successor and to make political appointments without consultation. Sikorski had forced Raczkiewicz to accept such changes during the formation of the original Polish Government-in-Exile in 1940, and Mikołajczyk wanted the same restrictions to apply now. He also wanted to restrict the powers of the commander-in-chief. He did not want Sosnkowski to be a member of his cabinet, in a position to interfere in political affairs, and also sought to restrict his authority over the underground army, giving some of the responsibilities to the minister of national defence. The two ministers, Kot and Kukiel, whom the Soviets wanted dismissed, both retained their posts. One significant change was that Raczyński was replaced as minister for foreign affairs by Tadeusz Romer, but continued as the Polish ambassador to Britain. The new government was announced on 17 July, after Sikorski’s funeral. The names of the new ministers were transmitted to the Polish Army in the Middle East and to Poland, and problems soon arose. The telegrams from Poland from the government delegate and from Bór-Komorowski, the new commander of the AK, indicated that the Poles in Poland were anxious about the new government, while Anders was damning: ‘This government is utterly bereft of our trust and our view of it is decidedly negative.’⁷⁷

There was another important diplomatic development in mid-1943. In June Stalin suddenly recalled Maisky, his ambassador in Britain, and Litvinov, his ambassador in the United States, to Moscow. Maisky was replaced by Fedor Gusev, who had been the Soviet ambassador in Canada. Cadogan had met Gusev before and noted: ‘If M. Gusev is the man I remember, I should say he was not a good choice. His English was sparse and peculiar.’ Clark Kerr described Gusev as ‘like a sea calf and apparently no more articulate’. Indeed, when Harold Nicolson met Gusev he recorded: ‘The Russian Ambassador cannot speak one word of any known language and is accompanied by an interpreter who grins horribly.’⁷⁸ Churchill and the Foreign Office were greatly concerned about the wider implications of Maisky’s removal, since it occurred when the Soviet front seemed stalled, prior to the battle of Kursk, whereas the Allies were about to invade Sicily: a move which might lead Stalin to believe that the Allies would then turn their attention to an invasion of the Balkans, a region he wanted to control himself. Sir Orme Sargent came up with another possible reason for the changes:

May he not have convinced himself that H.M.G. are not going seriously to discuss any political issues arising out of the present war situation; and that since M. Maisky has never been able to get down to any concrete discussions on these matters, he may as well abandon the idea of working through the Soviet Embassy in London.

If this is really the case it has alarming possibilities, for it means that the Soviet Government, when we eventually do decide on negotiating with them and invite their collaboration, will have by that time made up their minds to plough a lonely furrow. It makes it all the more necessary, to my mind, that we should without delay put our cards on the table and show that we are ready to discuss with them questions such as the Polono-Russian frontier, the future of Germany, the handling of the States of Central Europe, the Balkans, etc.

Clark Kerr felt that these fears were exaggerated.⁷⁹ Whatever Stalin’s motives were, it was now more apparent that there was an urgent need for the leaders of the Allies to have a face to face meeting to discuss the numerous challenges facing them.

With relations severed between Poland and the Soviet Union, Mikołajczyk’s government was entirely dependent on the goodwill of Britain and the United States to act as intermediaries. Mikołajczyk himself was inexperienced in international affairs, and Retinger noted that Churchill showed little sympathy and: ‘He acted like a kind of steam-roller, hating any obstacle in his path and trying by sheer force of personality to crush anything which stood in the way of his own wishes and views on Polish-Russian relations.’ Frank Roberts, who had many dealings with Mikołajczyk, believed that he ‘had a very practical approach to what could be done and what couldn’t’.⁸⁰ The question was: what did the Polish Government want, and to what extent were the British and American governments prepared to take on Stalin to achieve Polish wishes?

Mikołajczyk was never in a strong enough position in London to conduct foreign relations with the degree of independence demonstrated by Sikorski. Both Raczkiewicz and Sosnkowski were so strongly anti-Soviet that Mikołajczyk was in no position to make compromises on the issue of the future frontiers of Poland, nor did he have the permission of the main four political parties in Poland. On 15 August 1943, they issued a declaration setting out their aims in war and peace. Among the principles were:

a. The basic principle of the foreign policy should be the collaboration with the Allies, based on equality with a distinct emphasis on self-determination in affairs concerning Poland, her sovereign rights and the integrity of her territory.

b. A constant watchfulness concerning Soviet influence, which is becoming increasingly marked in the Allied countries and a ceaseless recalling to their consciousness of the latent danger in Russian-Communist totalitarian peace aims.

c. The securing to Poland of a Western and Northern frontier, which would guarantee to her a wide access to the sea, together with integrity of her Eastern frontier, as well as suitable indemnities.

d. The formation of a confederation of states of which the Polish-Czechoslovak union might be the nucleus.⁸¹

The overwhelming impression that is given by this document is that the political parties in Poland had no idea of the true impact of the break in relations between Poland and the Soviet Union. It was in broad agreement with the policy Sikorski had pursued but already, even before his death, this diplomacy had failed.

The Mikołajczyk government was determined to fight for the restoration of Poland’s pre-war eastern frontier after the war, but did not realise the extent to which the British and American governments no longer believed that this was possible, and, indeed, were now forming arguments as to why it might not be even desirable. At the Quebec conference in August 1943, Eden sounded out Roosevelt’s foreign policy adviser Henry Hopkins on American opinion, and, as he reported to Cadogan, Hopkins had told him that he ‘knew that the President’s mind about Russia’s frontiers was almost exactly the same as my own’.⁸² In other words, Roosevelt supported Britain’s approval of the Curzon Line. Eden was preparing for the Moscow conference of the three foreign ministers, himself, Molotov and Cordell Hull, which was designed to iron out any difficulties and sound out opinions before Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met together for the first time, at Teheran. Eden very much wanted to resolve beforehand the question of Poland’s eastern frontier at Moscow. Therefore, on 9 September 1943, he asked Mikołajczyk:

Supposing that as a result of the war you would get East Prussia, valuable territories in Silesia and in the East, territories up to the Curzon Line extended by the inclusion of Lwów – so far as Wilno is concerned the prospects are much worse – would you consider such a solution acceptable?

Mikołajczyk responded by saying that he could not discuss the question, and the Polish record noted: ‘Mr Eden evaded further discussion on that subject.’⁸³ Alerted now to the line Eden wanted to take at the Moscow conference, the Poles prepared their position. At another meeting with Eden, on 5 October, Mikołajczyk said that he welcomed the forthcoming conference but: ‘At the same time the Polish Government was against entering into any conversation relating to Polish-Soviet frontiers, and it considered the resumption of mutual diplomatic relations to be the most important and urgent issue.’⁸⁴ Eden was both surprised and disappointed by the response, and wrote to O’Malley on the next day that he would have to go to Moscow ‘as a mediator with a very weak hand’.⁸⁵

The question remains: should the Poles have given more leverage to Eden at this point? Certainly, had the Poles been willing to negotiate on their frontiers, the Moscow conference would have provided the best opportunity, as it, as opposed to the subsequent conference at Teheran, had a clear agenda and many important issues were resolved there. Indeed, the assistant under secretary at the Foreign Office who accompanied Eden to Moscow, Sir William Strang, described it as ‘perhaps the most fruitful of all the international ministerial conferences held during the war’.⁸⁶ It can be argued that if Eden and Hull had been able to demonstrate to Molotov that the Poles were prepared to go some distance towards meeting Soviet demands, then Molotov and Stalin might have been prepared to make the concession of granting Lwów to Poland. This, after all, could still have been represented as conforming to the Curzon Line, which divided into two as it entered East Galicia. It was also possibly the compromise that, had he still been alive and in power, Sikorski would have settled for. But the reasons against making such concessions at this point were, however, equally compelling. In the first place, Mikołajczyk did not have the political support necessary to give away a large portion of Polish territory. Second, he would have faced the opposition of the troops in the Middle East, something also of concern to the Allies. Whereas Mikołajczyk knew that the Poles would oppose concessions, Eden was uncertain about the extent of American support. From private conversations with Hopkins and State Department officials, Eden had been given the impression that the Americans accepted the Curzon Line and were in favour of Poland retaining Lwów, but he was also aware that in public the United States Government ‘have always taken a very firm line against the recognition of any territorial changes effected by force and in an election year they will pay great attention to the well-organised Polish vote’.⁸⁷ Consequently, Eden was in a weak position regardless of what the Poles said.

The Moscow conference enabled the British and Americans to learn more about the Soviet attitude towards Poland. The reports of the new American ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, who was present at the most important meetings, are revealing: he wrote to Roosevelt that ‘the problem of Poland is even tougher than we believed’. Although the frontiers were not discussed, Harriman gained the strong impression that the Soviets were adamant in their demand for the 1941 border. He noted of a conversation with Litvinov, in which Eden participated: ‘Litvinov started with a torrent of abuse against the Poles, the gist of it being that they would have to learn to live within their ethnographical boundaries as a small nation and give up the idea that they were a great power.’ Both Eden and Harriman noted that the main matter of concern to the Soviets was the composition of the current Polish government: ‘They regard the present Polish government in exile as hostile and therefore completely unacceptable to them.’ The person who caused most offence was Sosnkowski. Eden had hoped to demonstrate the friendliness of the Polish Government by informing Molotov that the AK was preparing to rise up against the Germans and that the British were arming them, but Molotov was clearly not interested. The AK was loyal to the government in London and Molotov was not convinced that it would not resist the Soviet armies when they advanced into Poland. All three foreign ministers confirmed their desire to see ‘the rise of an independent Poland’.⁸⁸ This would become a kind of mantra repeated so often by so many people as to become meaningless. When Mikołajczyk later asked him to define what was meant by ‘an independent Poland’, Eden had a ‘fit of pique’, and denied that the Soviets were planning to impose a communist-style government on Poland.⁸⁹

The Moscow conference achieved nothing beneficial for the Poles. At their request the frontier issue had not been discussed and instead the spectre of a Soviet-imposed government in Poland had arisen. The Poles felt that the communiqué issued at the end showed that the Allies had split Europe into spheres of influence, with Poland placed firmly within the Soviet sphere. Ciechanowski transmitted a memorandum from the Polish Government to the State Department outlining the Poles’ objections and their alarm that:

The USA is willing to admit the occupation of Polish territory exclusively by Soviet forces, without the participation, in some form at least of American, British and Polish forces … On the basis of past tragic experiences, as well as our intimate knowledge of Soviet methods, this would be equivalent to delivering Poland to the USSR for immediate and complete sovietisation.⁹⁰

The Poles were now deeply apprehensive about the forthcoming meeting between the Big Three at Teheran.

On 16 November, the Polish Government set out its position in a memorandum for Churchill and Roosevelt. It is worth quoting at length because it represents the standpoint of the Polish Government which would remain largely unchanged over the next year:

The unwillingness of the Polish Government to enter into discussions on frontier questions is based on the following considerations:

1) Poland, who entered the war in 1939 in defence of her territory, has never given up the fight and has not produced any Quisling, is fully entitled to expect that she will emerge from this war without reduction of her territory.

2) The Polish Eastern lands which are the object of Soviet claims extend to half of the territory of the Polish Republic. They contain important centres of Polish national life. They are closely knitted with Poland by ties of tradition, civilization and culture. The Polish population which has resided there for centuries forms a relative majority of the population of these lands. On the other hand the lower density of their population and their possibilities of economic development furnish Poland with a socially sound means of solving the problem of the over-population of her Western and Southern provinces.

3) The Polish Government could not see their way to enter a discussion on the subject of territorial concessions above all for the reason that such a discussion in the absence of effective guarantees of Poland’s independence and security on the part of Great Britain and the United States would be sure to lead further and further to ever new demands.

The attribution to Poland of Eastern Prussia, Danzig, Opole Silesia and the straightening and shortening of the Polish Western frontier are in any case dictated by the need to provide for the stability of future peace, the disarmament of Germany and the security of Poland and other countries of Central Europe. The transfer to Poland of these territories cannot therefore be treated fairly as an object of compensation for the cession to the USSR of Polish Eastern lands which for reasons adduced above do by no means represent to the USSR a value comparable to that which they have for Poland.

The Poles were also disappointed that no progress had been made towards the resumption of relations between Poland and the Soviet Union at the Moscow conference.⁹¹ This was now an urgent matter because the Soviet armies were approaching the pre-war Polish frontier and their attitude towards the Polish underground was unknown. Therefore, Mikołajczyk ‘appealed for guarantees and the safeguarding of the right of the Allied Polish Government to assure administration on Polish territory immediately after its liberation from German occupation’. The Poles received no response to their memorandum before Teheran, but were reassured by Eden that the talks there would primarily be on military strategy.⁹²

The most striking point about the Teheran conference at the end of November 1943, viewed widely as a turning-point in the war, is the sheer casualness with which the decisions were reached. The American interpreter later wrote:

No one was in charge of organising meetings, setting up schedules, or handling any of the numerous technical preparations for the conference. Moreover, Roosevelt had no position papers on questions that would be discussed. It was my first experience with Roosevelt’s informal method of operation. He preferred to act by improvisation rather than by plan.⁹³

Churchill had wanted to meet Roosevelt prior to Teheran in order to reconcile their approaches on military strategy, but Roosevelt took steps to avoid such a meeting. The conference at Cairo, immediately preceding Teheran, was devoted to meetings with Chiang Kai-shek, designed to encourage the Chinese leader to take a more active part in the war against the Japanese. Consequently, the two western leaders arrived in Iran with their differences unresolved. As Roosevelt had once told Churchill, he was convinced: ‘I can personally handle Stalin better than your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better and I hope he will continue to do so.’⁹⁴ Roosevelt treated the talks with Stalin with the same casualness as his fireside chats to the American people. His method of befriending Stalin was to mock Churchill openly in front of him, which naturally put Churchill on the defensive and forced him to attempt to curry favour with the Soviet leader.⁹⁵ The pawn to be sacrificed in this diplomatic game of chess was Poland.

The British position on Poland going into the conference was to accept the Curzon Line as Poland’s future eastern frontier, to obtain compensation for Poland in the west and north in the form of territory taken from Germany, and to attempt to gain the guarantees the Polish Government wanted on the future political freedom of their country. Roosevelt’s position was more complex: he believed that the frontier between Poland and the Soviet Union should lie east of the Curzon Line, with Lwów going to Poland. He also wanted the Poles to have the freedom to choose the government they wanted.⁹⁶ Given the aims of Churchill and Roosevelt prior to the conference, why then did they sacrifice Poland?

The answer lies in the discussions during the first plenary session on 28 November, which was devoted to military strategy. Stalin had been pressing the Allies to launch a Second Front since 1941. Now he became aware that, although both Churchill and Roosevelt were adamant that the Second Front would be launched in late spring or early summer 1944, there were significant differences of opinion between them as to the emphasis that should be placed on the invasion of France as opposed to continuing operations in Italy and launching a new front in the Balkans. Broadly speaking, Roosevelt wanted to concentrate on France, with a major invasion across the Channel into northern France and a subsidiary operation in southern France. While Churchill accepted the importance of the invasion of northern France, he was concerned about the consequences on operations elsewhere necessitated by diverting all available landing craft to the cross-Channel operation. He was also keen to explore the concept of an invasion of the Balkans to be carried out in collaboration with the Yugoslav partisans, a strategy the Poles were also extremely eager on seeing pursued because it would bring the forces of the western allies closer to Poland. But Roosevelt was not interested in what he saw as sideshows, and Stalin was opposed to allied operations in the Balkans because this was an area in which he saw the opportunity to dominate politically.

Therefore Stalin was in agreement with Roosevelt on the primacy of what would become Operation Overlord. As Cadogan noted in his diary: ‘President promises everything that Stalin wants in the way of an attack in the West, with the result that Winston, who has to be more honest, is becoming an object of suspicion to Stalin.’⁹⁷ Churchill needed to do something to restore his prestige in Stalin’s eyes. At dinner that evening Roosevelt was taken ill and retired early, leaving Churchill and Stalin to continue their talks. Totally unprompted, Churchill brought up the subject of Poland:

Churchill then remarked that it would be very valuable if here in Teheran the representatives of the three governments could work out some agreed understanding on the question of the Polish frontiers which could then be taken up with the Polish Government in London. He said that, as far as he was concerned, he would like to see Poland moved westward in the same manner as soldiers at drill execute the drill ‘left close’ and illustrated his point with three matches representing the Soviet Union, Poland and Germany.⁹⁸

Stalin did not indicate his opinion then but suggested postponing the discussion on Poland. Before Poland was discussed formally, Stalin learnt of Roosevelt’s opinion when they had a private talk on 1 December. Roosevelt told Stalin that he believed that Poland should be moved westwards ‘even to the River Oder’. Stalin now knew that, barring the exact definition of Poland’s frontiers on the map, he had got what he wanted. Furthermore, and arguably even more importantly, Roosevelt’s revelation of his position with the rider that he would not be able to make his position public for the next year because he could not risk alienating 6,000,000 American voters of Polish extraction before the 1944 presidential election was significant.⁹⁹ Stalin also now knew that Roosevelt would have to remain on the sidelines while Poland’s future was decided. As Field Marshal Sir Alanbrooke expressed it, Stalin now had ‘the president in his pocket’.¹⁰⁰

Poland was discussed at the plenary section on the afternoon of 1 December. It was at this point that Stalin put forward his demand for the port of Königsberg, then in East Prussia, with the remainder of East Prussia going to Poland, and Churchill was taken aback by this but made no objection. Nor did he appear concerned about the implications of extending the Polish frontier as far westwards as the Oder nor of the consequent transfers of populations these frontier changes required. The main question was the Curzon Line. The Soviets were offended by the British reference to a period of the war they would prefer to forget, when asked how the Molotov–Ribbentrop Line differed from the Curzon Line. (The answer was that the province of Białystok remained in Poland according to the Curzon Line.) Roosevelt remained silent during the discussion of the frontiers, and Stalin was free to interpret this as acquiescence. At the Moscow conference, the Soviets had made the claim that the Polish Government and its underground forces in Poland were agents of the Germans, and at Teheran Stalin repeated this claim. Churchill was so determined to settle the frontier matter that he ignored Stalin’s provocative statement.¹⁰¹

The Teheran conference was a complete victory for Stalin with regards to Poland. Churchill now faced the challenge of obtaining the agreement of the Poles in London, but they were never told formally of the decisions taken at Teheran, and remained ignorant that the fate of eastern Poland had been settled there. The Polish Government did, however, know that Stalin was convinced the Poles would be hostile to the arrival of the Soviet armies on their territory, and it was now up to the government to order the underground forces in Poland to come out into the open. The Soviet reaction to the appearance of these well-armed Poles would shape Poland’s ever more desperate diplomacy during the course of 1944.