In midsummer 1944, Allied forces were fast approaching two occupied capitals: Paris and Warsaw. For the one, the summer would end in the joy of liberation; for the other, it would end in a firestorm of death and destruction.
In late July, the people of Poland would have given anything to see the U.S. and British armies, now closing in on Paris, “standing at Warsaw’s gates,” a Polish resistance fighter observed. Instead, their centuries-old enemies, the Russians, were nearing the city.
Several weeks earlier, the Red Army, advancing along a thousand-mile front, had swept German troops out of eastern Poland, now claimed by Stalin. The Soviet troops had then pushed westward into territory that no one, not even Stalin, could contend was anything but Polish. Yet on July 22, the Kremlin announced the formation of the Committee of National Liberation—a small group of Polish communists handpicked by Stalin—and proclaimed it the legitimate interim civil government in Polish territories that the Soviets had captured from the Germans. The committee would set up shop in Lublin, the first major city in Poland to be freed from German control. It was possible, Stalin said, that in time it might become the nucleus of a new Polish government.
For members of the Polish Home Army, this was calamitous news. As they saw it, they had two options: do nothing and let Stalin take over all of Poland through his puppet government, or rise up against the Nazis and try to establish control themselves.
Since 1939, the Polish underground’s primary goal had been to launch a national uprising when the moment was right. And in late July 1944, the Home Army’s leaders believed that the time had finally arrived. The swift Soviet advance across Poland had made a nationwide uprising impossible, but there was still hope that the Home Army could at least drive the Germans out of Warsaw and take control of the capital before the Russians got there. Some 35,000 officers and troops of the Home Army were based in Warsaw, all eager to fight for Poland in this critical hour. “National dignity and pride required that the capital should be liberated by the Poles themselves,” said a top underground official. “What kind of an army would it be, what sort of government, that, being in the capital, failed to take part in the battle for the liberation of the city?”
The Home Army’s plans were based, however, on the assumption that Allied airlifts would bring in reinforcements. Living, as one underground official later put it, “in a world of illusion,” the Home Army’s leaders believed that Britain and the United States would rush arms and men to support the uprising once it broke out. Furthermore, they were convinced that their Western allies would pressure the Soviets to do the same.
In the last week of July, the situation grew increasingly urgent. Red Army patrols were spotted a few miles from Warsaw, and panicked German troops began to stream out of the city. On July 26, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, the commander of the Home Army, radioed the Polish government in exile in London that “we are ready to fight for Warsaw at any moment. I will report the date and hour of the beginning of the fight.” He asked that Polish fighter and bomber squadrons and the Polish 1st Parachute Brigade, which had been created and trained in Britain for precisely this moment, be sent to Warsaw as soon as possible. He also requested Allied bombing attacks on German airfields near the capital and the immediate dispatch of arms, ammunition, and other equipment.
Up to that point, neither the British chiefs of staff nor SOE had definitively informed the Home Army that it would not receive Allied aid in the event of an uprising. Only now did the British military make it clear that the hopes of the Polish resistance hadn’t the slightest chance of being fulfilled. Focused as they were on postinvasion operations in Normandy, British commanders told the Polish government in exile that the Home Army’s requests were “completely impossible.” The Polish bomber squadrons in the RAF were currently engaged in raids over Germany, while Polish fighters were providing support for Allied troops in Normandy, as well as making strafing and bombing runs against enemy ground targets and escorting bombers and ship convoys. The Polish parachute brigade, meanwhile, had been put under the command of General Bernard Law Montgomery for deployment in western Europe.
Knowing all this, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, who had replaced the late General Władysław Sikorski as commander in chief of the Polish armed forces, vehemently opposed the idea of an uprising, believing that without strong Allied assistance, it “could only lead to useless bloodshed.” Early in July, Sosnkowski ordered the Home Army to cancel its plans. But during the last week of July, he left England to visit Polish troops in Italy; while he was gone, the rest of the Polish Cabinet sent a message authorizing Bór-Komorowski to “proclaim the insurrection at the moment which you will decide as most opportune.”
Sosnkowski was not the only Cassandra to warn the Home Army of looming disaster. Jan Nowak, the young Home Army courier who had spent several months in London in 1944 and had flown back to Poland in time for the uprising, told Bór-Komorowski and his lieutenants to expect no help from the Allies. Based on Nowak’s report at a July 29 meeting of Home Army leaders, a number of participants urged Bór-Komorowski to delay the uprising. Others felt differently. “We have no choice,” one leader declared. “I ask you to imagine a man who has been gathering speed for five years in order to leap over a wall. He runs faster and faster, and then, one step before the obstacle, the command is given to stop! By then he is running so fast that he cannot stop: if he does not jump, he will hit the wall. Thus it is with us. In a day or two, Warsaw will be at the front.”
His comment underscored the vast chasm of understanding between London and Warsaw. In Whitehall offices, coolness and rationality reigned. In Warsaw, there was only desperate passion. For five years, its people had suffered hunger, terror, and death. Now the chance for rebellion had come, and they would not be stayed by British logic. Throughout the city, men, women, and children began retrieving revolvers, rifles, grenades, and other arms from the places where they had been hidden since 1939. The weapons were cleaned and surreptitiously distributed to members of the Home Army.
At precisely 5 P.M. on August 1, thousands of windows and doors were flung open all over Warsaw, and the uprising began. From balconies, rooftops, and windows, underground soldiers cut down passing German troops with a cascade of rifle and small-arms fire. Other Poles lobbed grenades at Nazi headquarters and hurled Molotov cocktails at ammunition dumps and troop transports. In dozens of neighborhoods, ordinary citizens—housewives, workers, university professors, shopkeepers—dragged tables, chests, desks, and sofas into the street to build barricades against German tanks and troops. Long-hidden Polish flags were unfurled and draped from apartment windows.
By nightfall, virtually every visible trace of the German occupation had vanished. Warsaw residents had torn down German street and shop signs, posters, inscriptions, and flags. Portraits of Hitler and other prominent Nazis were affixed to the barricades so that Germans would have to fire at images of their own leaders.
During the first three days of the insurrection, the Home Army fighters, only some 2,500 of whom were well armed, gained control of most of Warsaw. In that critical first stage of the fight, however, they failed to take several key military targets, including German airfields and the bridges over the Vistula River. The insurgents were already overextended and in desperate need of assistance. But no aid of any kind came from the Western Allies or from the Red Army, several units of which were encamped on the outskirts of the capital.
The Nazis, meanwhile, were bringing up reinforcements and preparing to counterattack. The Hermann Göring Division, an elite unit of Luftwaffe troops, was being rushed from Italy, and two more SS divisions were also on their way. Their aim, according to the Reich’s top leaders, was to teach the upstart Poles a final lesson. “Every inhabitant of Warsaw must be killed, and there shall be no taking of prisoners,” Heinrich Himmler declared. Once his forces had carried out that task, they were to flatten whatever was left of Warsaw. “From the historical point of view, this insurrection is a blessing,” the SS chief crowed to Hitler. “Warsaw will be eradicated….That nation which for seven hundred years has stood in our way…shall no longer be a problem for our children or even for ourselves.”
As Himmler’s SS and police units surged into Warsaw, Home Army radio operators sent desperate appeals to London, requesting weapons and ammunition. With the hours ticking by, the resistance felt more and more ignored and cut off from the world—a sense of isolation that was only heightened by reports of new Allied advances on the Normandy front and the liberation of a growing number of French cities and towns.
Nonetheless, their appeals finally began to have some effect. In early August, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden pressed the British chiefs of staff to come to the Home Army’s assistance with “maximum effort.” The reluctant RAF dispatched several supply flights from Italy, but its losses were heavy, causing future missions to be canceled. Air Chief Marshal Sir Douglas Evill, vice chief of the air staff, said that effective aerial support “could only be provided by Russian tactical aircraft, operating at short range.” And those, of course, were nowhere to be seen.
In Warsaw, meanwhile, the SS and police units dispatched by Himmler went from house to house on a wild rampage of looting, rape, and murder. In one neighborhood after another, residents were herded into courtyards and streets to be executed by machine-gun fire. By the end of the day on August 5, more than 10,000 civilians had been slaughtered in one Warsaw neighborhood alone. Over the next several days, the orgy of killing swept throughout the city.
Having pushed the Home Army from Warsaw’s outer districts, the Germans targeted the insurgents’ center-city stronghold. The uprising was slowly dying. Its lightly armed troops were defending themselves against Nazi forces possessing armored cars, tanks, long-range artillery, dive-bombers, and other heavy weapons. By the middle of August, the Germans were shelling and bombing the city twenty-four hours a day. No part of Warsaw was out of artillery range, and much of the downtown area was on fire. Bricks were falling like rain, blazing timbers flew through the air, dust and smoke blanketed everything. Sidewalks and streets were littered with bodies, and many more corpses were buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Still the Poles fought on. The combat was most savage in Warsaw’s Stare Miasto (Old Town), just north of the city center, with its narrow, winding cobblestone streets and tall, beautifully restored medieval houses. There, in extremely close quarters, Poles took on Nazis in hand-to-hand combat so intense that it reminded some Germans of the last days of the Battle of Stalingrad.
From the cellars of bombed-out buildings, Home Army radio operators continued to tap out urgent pleas for Western aid. At one point Bór-Komorowski sent a personal message to both Churchill and Roosevelt: “Confident of the part we have played in the war effort of the Anglo-Americans, we have the full right to address to you, Mr. President and Mr. Prime Minister, this ardent appeal for immediate help to be sent to wounded Warsaw.”
Moved by the insurgents’ passionate resistance and stunned by the Germans’ barbarity, Churchill insisted that the RAF resume its supply missions. Over the next week, almost a hundred planes were dispatched to the Warsaw area. The flak was murderous, and the aircrew casualties were huge. It was almost impossible to make accurate drops over the rapidly shrinking areas of the city still held by the Home Army. Nonetheless, many Polish pilots clamored to fly there. The pilots of 303 Squadron, who had so bedazzled Britain with their heroics in the Battle of Britain, went so far as to send a blunt telegram to Queen Elizabeth, the wife of George VI and mother of Elizabeth II: “WHEN IN 1940, THE FATE OF GREAT BRITAIN WAS IN THE BALANCE, BELIEVE US, YOUR MAJESTY, WE POLISH AIRMEN NEVER THOUGHT OF ECONOMIZING OUR BLOOD OR OUR LIVES….AT THAT TIME, OVER BURNING LONDON, THERE WAS NO DEARTH OF POLISH OR BRITISH AIRMEN. ARE THEY TO BE LACKING NOW OVER BURNING WARSAW? IS THE CITY TO PERISH ON THE EVE OF VICTORY, AFTER YEARNING FOR LIBERATION FOR FIVE YEARS?” The queen never answered the telegram; in fact, she probably never received it. In any case, 303 Squadron was not sent to Warsaw.
On August 2, the day after the uprising began, Churchill had gone before Parliament to proclaim the rebellion “a hopeful moment for Poland.” He went on, “The Russian armies now stand before the gates of Warsaw. They bring the liberation of Poland in their hands. They offer freedom, sovereignty and independence to the Poles. They ask that there should be a Poland friendly to Russia.” But the Red Army never advanced as far as Warsaw’s gates. Indeed, it halted its headlong advance less than a dozen miles from the heart of the Polish capital. There it waited—and did nothing.
Churchill, with Roosevelt’s backing, asked Stalin to allow Allied bombers carrying supplies to Warsaw to land at Soviet airfields to refuel and rest. It was the very least the Soviets could do, Churchill thought, but the response was negative. The uprising was a foolhardy affair, the Kremlin said, and “the Soviet Government could not lend its hand to it.” Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, reported to Roosevelt that the Soviets wanted the Warsaw uprising crushed and would brook no attempt by the Western Allies to support it. George Kennan, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, declared that what Stalin was really telling the United States and Britain was this: “We intend to have Poland lock, stock and barrel….You are going to have no part in determining the affairs of Poland from here on out, and it is time you realized this.”
Churchill was fast coming to the same conclusion. Indeed, according to his doctor, the prime minister was consumed during the uprising with fears of Soviet aggression. But he was also personally caught up in the epic David-and-Goliath struggle taking place in Warsaw. The Poles’ passionate resistance had won his esteem, and the searing eyewitness accounts of German atrocities against Polish civilians left him enraged. More than fifty years later, Churchill’s grandson, also named Winston Churchill, remarked, “My grandfather was beside himself in desperation to secure help for the Poles.”
But Roosevelt did not share that sense of urgency. He refused to do anything more to aid the Poles after Stalin denied Allied aircraft access to Soviet airfields. When the prime minister sent the president a wrenching eyewitness account of Nazi mass killings in Warsaw, FDR coolly replied, “Thank you for the information in regard to the appalling situation of the Poles in Warsaw and the inhumane behavior of the Nazis….I do not see that we can take any additional steps at the present time that promise results.”
THROUGHOUT THE EARLY DAYS of August, residents of Paris huddled around their forbidden radio sets to listen to BBC reports of Warsaw’s agony. Many were haunted by the same thought: Would a similar calamity befall them and their beautiful city, still intact after four years of German occupation?
After a long, bloody summer of slogging across Normandy’s hedgerow country, Allied troops in the north had finally broken through in late July and were now slicing their way into the heart of France. Yet even though U.S. forces were closing in on Paris, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had no plans for its immediate liberation. In fact, he planned to bypass the city, which he considered of little strategic importance, and roll on with all possible speed toward Germany.
As General Charles de Gaulle, then ensconced in Algiers, saw it, Eisenhower’s decision spelled disaster for both Paris and himself. Not only was the capital in danger; so was de Gaulle’s hope of controlling all of liberated France. His main rivals, the French communists, dominated the resistance movement in many parts of the country, including Paris. He had already received word that they were preparing an insurrection there. It was vital, in de Gaulle’s view, that the Western Allies reach Paris before the situation spiraled out of control.
Determined to get his way, he set out to outmaneuver Eisenhower, just as he earlier had outmaneuvered Roosevelt, who had wanted no role at all for him in the postwar governance of France. Before the D-Day invasion, the president had decided that U.S. military forces would administer France until elections could be held. To that end, dozens of army officers were currently enrolled in a two-month crash course in public administration and the French language at the University of Virginia.
By contrast, Eisenhower and most British officials believed that de Gaulle and his French Committee of National Liberation should act as the provisional government of France. Churchill, although still upset with de Gaulle over his behavior prior to D-Day, reluctantly agreed to allow him to return to France for a brief visit the week after the invasion. The prime minister was responding to heavy pressure from the British press and public, as well as to strong lobbying by Eisenhower. In effect, the Allied commander, who had been given considerable latitude by Roosevelt in governing liberated areas, was making an end run around Washington.
In his memo authorizing de Gaulle’s visit to Bayeux, on the Normandy coast, Churchill wrote, “I suggest that he should drive slowly through the town, shake hands with a few people and then return, leaving any subsequent statement to be made here.” As usual, de Gaulle had other ideas. At that point, most of the French knew him only as a spectral voice, to which they had listened over the BBC throughout the war years. “He was a ghost to those millions, an ideal,” according to one observer. “Now he had to give himself flesh and blood [and] become a political reality.”
When de Gaulle arrived in Bayeux on June 14, he was mobbed by huge crowds of cheering, sobbing townspeople wherever he went. After walking Bayeux’s streets for hours, then addressing its population in the town square, he traveled to the nearby town of Isigny, where he did the same. When he returned to England that night, he left behind in Normandy one of his top aides, whom he had assigned to act as governor of the region. With Eisenhower’s tacit support, de Gaulle was undermining Roosevelt’s attempts to impose an Allied military administration on France. Whether Washington liked it or not, the French general was now in charge of the liberated areas of his country.
De Gaulle’s biggest challenge, however, was to gain control of Paris—France’s political, social, and economic epicenter—as soon as it was freed. Like Warsaw before the uprising there, Paris was a tinderbox, its residents eager to settle the score with the Germans and erase the humiliation of their country’s capitulation. “On the barricades,” one resistance leader proclaimed, “we must wipe out the shame of 1940.” Such feelings were stoked by the French communists, who controlled the unions and underground press in Paris, as well as two of its three major resistance organizations.
General de Gaulle triumphantly returns to France eight days after D-Day.
In mid-August, a series of communist-inspired strikes was launched in the capital; railway men, police officers, and postal and telegraph workers, among others, walked off the job, paralyzing the city. The communists called for an armed insurrection on August 18. At 7 A.M. that day, small bands of resistance fighters throughout Paris opened fire on German patrols. Other groups burst into public buildings, ousting the occupants and taking over. In a matter of hours, French flags were fluttering from windows and rooftops as far as the eye could see.
As in Warsaw, barricades sprang up all over the capital. At the Place du Palais-Royal, the actors of the Comédie Française, the national theater group of France, built their own huge obstruction, using sofas, bureaus, and other items of furniture from their theater’s scenery storeroom. In the Paris police headquarters, now occupied by the resistance, the nuclear physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie and his assistants from the Collège de France made Molotov cocktails out of a variety of materials, including sulfuric acid and potassium chlorate, that they had brought from their laboratory.
Although the uprising caught the Germans by surprise, it didn’t take long for them to respond. Troops and tanks charged into the center of the city and the surrounding neighborhoods, wounding and killing hundreds. Among those battling the German forces were thousands of Gaullist resistance fighters. They had been ordered by de Gaulle not to engage in overt rebellion, but once the uprising began, they felt they had no choice but to join.
Faced with a fait accompli, de Gaulle traveled from Algiers to Eisenhower’s headquarters in France to press him to launch an immediate Allied attack on Paris. If the supreme commander refused, de Gaulle said, he would withdraw the French 2nd Armored Division from Allied command and dispatch it to Paris on his own authority. Veterans of the fighting in North Africa, the 16,000 men in the division, under the command of General Philippe Leclerc, had arrived in Normandy just two weeks before to take part in the march on Paris.
But neither de Gaulle’s appeals nor his threats made any headway with Eisenhower. To him, the capture of Paris—and the time and matériel, particularly gasoline, it would entail—would put at risk his overriding goal of reaching the Rhine River and crossing into Germany before the Wehrmacht could reorganize.
Yet Eisenhower changed his mind the very next day, thanks to the pleading of a young resistance leader named Roger Gallois, who came from Paris to present him and General Omar Bradley, the commander of U.S. ground forces in France, with alarming news. The resistance fighters in the capital were barely hanging on, Gallois said. If the Allies did not come to their aid immediately, hundreds of thousands of Parisians would lose their lives. Furthermore, the German commander in Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, was under orders from Hitler to destroy the city before surrendering it to the Allies. Although Choltitz didn’t like the order, he thought he had no choice but to carry it out. He sent word through Gallois that only the Allies’ speedy arrival could stop him.
Both Eisenhower and Bradley were swayed by Gallois’s report. On August 22, Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) ordered the French 2nd Armored Division, supported by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, to race toward Paris. Three days later, on the morning of August 25, Leclerc’s troops reclaimed the delirious capital of their country. Throngs of Parisians embraced and kissed the soldiers as they marched and rode by. Glasses of champagne and cognac were handed to them. People climbed up onto the moving tanks, threw flowers and food, waved handkerchiefs and flags. High above the crowds, the great church bells of Paris—in Notre Dame, Sacré-Coeur, Sainte-Chapelle—rocked the city with their joyous peals. Not even gunfire from German snipers and sporadic duels between Allied and German tanks could dampen the celebration.
Parisians celebrate the liberation of their city by Allied troops.
De Gaulle’s triumphant entry into Paris later that afternoon foiled the communists’ scheme to establish a government in the capital before he arrived. The following afternoon, in a carefully planned scenario, de Gaulle introduced himself to the people of Paris. After relighting the eternal flame at France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the general, followed by hundreds of his men, marched down the Champs-Élysées to Notre Dame. From sidewalks, rooftops, windows, and balconies, hundreds of thousands of Parisians lustily cheered him.
That evening, the CBS war correspondent Larry LeSueur tried to capture for his American listeners the jubilant mood of the city. “Tonight,” he said, “all Paris is dancing in the streets.”
DURING THE LAST DAYS of August, while the people of Paris were still toasting their liberators with champagne, thousands of Polish resistance fighters and civilians slipped down manholes and disappeared into Warsaw’s stinking, night-black sewers. The sewers had become the Poles’ only means of escape from the shelled and bombed-out ruin that Stare Miasto had become. Against all odds, elements of the Home Army had held out for almost a month there. Now cut off from ammunition, food, and water, they were on the verge of annihilation, and Bór-Komorowski gave the order to evacuate. Even so, fighting continued in other parts of the city. In Berlin, Himmler remarked to his lieutenants, “For five weeks, we have been fighting the battle for Warsaw. This is the most bitter struggle of all we have had since the start of the war.”
An RAF bomber pilot who flew over Warsaw during the uprising later remarked that if Dante could have seen the burning city, he would have had a realistic picture of his Inferno. Yet few people in the West had any idea of Warsaw’s anguish. Except for some short news accounts and a few editorials, the drama, heroism, and tragedy of the uprising went largely unnoticed in Britain and the United States. The liberation of Paris and the Allied advance toward Germany were dominating newspaper and magazine headlines and radio broadcasts.
There was, however, one major exception. In a piece called “A Tale of Two Cities,” The Economist, an influential British political and international affairs journal, provided a grim, “heartbreaking” comparison between Warsaw’s struggle for survival and the relatively easy liberation of Paris. Almost exactly five years earlier, The Economist pointed out, just three nations—France, Britain, and Poland—had gone to war against Germany. Since that time, the British, with help from their allies, prominently including the Poles, had managed to hold on to their freedom, and the French, with even more Allied help, were recovering theirs. But now the Poles were trying to drive out the Germans, and in this “vastly bloodier and more desperate battle,” they have been “almost unsupported by their Allies, materially or even morally.”
Warsaw’s Stare Miasto (Old Town) in ruins after the 1944 uprising.
The Russians’ refusal to provide military support or to allow their allies the use of their air bases was “intolerable,” The Economist added. “The rising in Warsaw is a glorious contribution to the Allied cause, and it cannot be refused. Talks are now going on about aid to Warsaw….In honor and expediency alike, they should have only one result, and that speedily. But, incredibly, the present prospect is said to be precisely the opposite. To our joy in victory, it seems that the Allies may have to add the ultimate shame of desertion.”
The agitated Churchill was making a belated effort to forestall that outcome. He already had given in to Stalin on the question of eastern Poland; now the issue of a free and independent Poland was obviously in jeopardy. If Warsaw were ruined and the Home Army wiped out, Stalin would have a much easier time installing a regime of his own creation. The Kremlin, Churchill concluded, “did not mean to let the spirit of Poland rise again in Warsaw.”
In a War Cabinet meeting, he discussed with its members the possibility of sending bombers to help Warsaw and having them land on Soviet airfields without permission. But in the end, the British government decided against taking unilateral action. It was, Churchill wrote after the war, another in the “terrible and even humbling submissions [that] must at times be made to the general aim.”
Making one final push to aid the Poles, Churchill renewed his appeal to FDR to support a plan to send large-scale relief to Warsaw and also, if need be, to “gate-crash” Soviet airfields. The president, who was facing reelection in two months and wanted no hint of dissension within the alliance to harm his chances, remained unwilling to confront Stalin. Responding to Churchill’s plea, Roosevelt said he had been informed by intelligence sources that the Germans were now in full control of Warsaw: “The problem of relief for the Poles…has therefore unfortunately been solved by delay and by German action, and there now appears to be nothing we can do to assist them.” (FDR was wrong: the uprising would continue for another month.)
Six weeks after the insurrection began, Stalin, knowing that the Home Army was doomed, withdrew his objections to the use of Soviet bases by U.S. bombers. On September 18, more than a hundred B-17s dropped containers containing submachine and machine guns, pistols, grenades, medical equipment, and food rations. The supply mission was far too late; most of the containers drifted into parts of the city already reclaimed by the Nazis. “Had the containers been dropped in the first days, when two-thirds of the city was in our hands, they might have decided the outcome of the battle,” Bór-Komorowski later remarked. Stalin, having scored propaganda points for his onetime gesture of supposed magnanimity, rejected requests from the British and U.S. military for repeat missions.
When the commanders of the Home Army launched their uprising on August 1, they believed they would have to hold out for only four or five days before help came, which was, as it happened, the exact scenario that unfolded in Paris. In Warsaw, however, the Home Army and the city’s other residents held out—with no reinforcements at all—for sixty-three days. As SS troops pushed the Poles into smaller and smaller areas of the city, hope still flickered that outside aid would arrive in time to save what was left of them and Warsaw. But help did not come, and in early October, even hope died.
Food, water, and ammunition were gone. Disease was rampant. In the few districts still held by the Home Army, dozens of people were crammed into every basement and cellar, many on the verge of death. Faced with the prospect of total annihilation of the city’s population, the Home Army leadership decided it had no choice but to capitulate. At 8 P.M. on October 2, Bór-Komorowski signed a surrender agreement at German headquarters.The following day, the Polish underground radio station sent a farewell message to London. The announcer’s voice cracked with emotion as he said, “We have been free for two months. Today, once more we must go into captivity.”
A staggering 200,000-plus people—about a quarter of the Warsaw residents who had survived the war to that point—had been killed in the uprising. All those left were ordered by the Germans to evacuate their ruined city. On the morning of October 5, the survivors emerged from their cellars and shelters, most of them soon to begin an existence in German POW, concentration, and labor camps. Leading the procession out of Warsaw were Bór-Komorowski and his Home Army troops. A phalanx of SS men awaited them several hundred yards away. As the Poles moved forward, Bór-Komorowski began singing the Polish national anthem. With tears in their eyes, his men and the civilians behind them joined in the hymn. Their voices swelling in intensity, they sang “Poland Has Not Yet Perished as Long as We Live” as they marched toward the waiting Germans.
Hitler did not massacre the survivors of Warsaw as he earlier had vowed to do, but he made life as hellish for them as possible. Many thousands died in German captivity before the war was over. Auschwitz was the destination for more than six thousand of the city’s residents, mostly women and girls, a number of whom were Jews who had been hidden by Polish Christians in Warsaw and whose real identities remained secret. They were not sent to the gas chambers, but many succumbed from cold, starvation, disease, and physical abuse before the Soviets entered the camp in the spring of 1945.
More than twelve thousand other women from Warsaw ended up in the unspeakable squalor of the vastly overcrowded Ravensbrück camp, where, like at Auschwitz, there was virtually no food and the sanitary conditions were appalling. Hundreds of the women were pregnant, the result of rape by German soldiers during the uprising. When the babies were born, they were deliberately starved to death. Many of their mothers died as well.
Hitler, meanwhile, followed through on his pledge to destroy Warsaw. Nazi sappers divided the city into districts, each given a date for destruction. House by house, block by block, district by district, the remnants of the Polish capital were systematically and methodically burned and dynamited. All that was left when Russian troops finally “liberated” the city in January 1945 were ruins and the unburied dead.
PARIS, BY CONTRAST, was remarkably untouched when de Gaulle took control of it in late August. There was little mourning there—the uprising had claimed fewer than two thousand lives—and the city, its beauty unmarred by bombs, was once again open for both business and pleasure. The Allies took over hundreds of hotels for their own use, and within days a frenzied round of partying began. Most Parisians—and the French in general—had very little to eat, but there was a thriving black market in food, liquor, and wine for those who could afford the exorbitant prices. The city’s best restaurants, which had served members of the Wehrmacht and Gestapo just a few days earlier, were now welcoming hordes of Allied officers and journalists.
De Gaulle, however, was not among them. His sole focus at the time was to consolidate his authority over Paris and the rest of the country and to mobilize its resources for the liberation of all of France and the final Allied assault on Germany. Within days, he had effectively disbanded the French resistance, bringing its units under the control of the regular French army and ordering SOE officers who had worked with resistance fighters to return to England.
The general spent much of the fall of 1944 touring France’s main provincial centers and meeting their residents. In Besançon, a bustling city in the east of the country, Eric Sevareid stood in the middle of a huge crowd “jammed elbow to elbow” for two hours in a cold September rain, everyone patiently awaiting de Gaulle. Having lived in France for several years before the war, Sevareid was intimately familiar with the sourly cynical attitude of most of the French toward politics and politicians. But as he gazed at the faces around him, he observed “an intentness, an almost fanatical look of reverence such as I had never dreamed to see in this country.”
Sevareid compared the assured, poised de Gaulle he saw that day with the rigid, unsmiling neophyte leader he had observed leading a meager parade of Free French troops in London on Bastille Day 1940. In those four years, Sevareid remarked, de Gaulle “had learned how to gesture, how to speak confidentially and colloquially to the people. He asked the people of Besançon to sing the Marseillaise with him, and then he walked slowly down the narrow streets, waving and touching the outstretched hands of hundreds. So it went, in every city and town he visited, the voice and myth becoming Gallic reality. I remembered how, in those other days, no Frenchman had seemed great to the French. Others had—Roosevelt, Churchill—but never one of their own. Now there was a great Frenchman too, and they accepted him as such.”
So had much of the rest of the world. By early fall 1944, most of the Allied nations, including those in occupied Europe, had recognized de Gaulle and his committee as the provisional government of France. Roosevelt resisted for as long as he could, but, finding himself isolated on the issue, he finally gave in. On October 23, the United States recognized the general’s committee. FDR made the announcement without first informing Churchill, who, despite growing misgivings, had loyally continued to follow Roosevelt’s lead on matters involving de Gaulle. Caught flat-footed, the British government scrambled to issue its own announcement of recognition.
Three weeks later, Churchill made his first visit to liberated France. Given the extremely turbulent relationship between the prime minister and de Gaulle, both French and British officials feared the worst. “We all tremble for the result,” said a British Foreign Office staffer. He and the others needn’t have worried. As insufferable as de Gaulle had been in adversity, he was, as one historian wrote, “magnanimous in victory.” On November 11—a bright, cold Armistice Day—the people of Paris and their leader gave Winston Churchill a welcome so warm and joyous that “it had to be seen to be believed,” marveled Duff Cooper, the new British ambassador to France. “It was greater than anything I have ever known.”
More than half a million Frenchmen lined the flag-bedecked Champs-Élysées and nearby streets as de Gaulle, Churchill, and the top officials of their governments strode down the wide thoroughfare to a dais half a mile away. Some in the massive crowd “were cheering; some were laughing; some were sobbing; all were delirious,” remembered General Pug Ismay, who was among the officials in the procession. “All we heard was ‘Vive Churchill!’ ‘Vive de Gaulle!’‘Vive l’Angleterre!’ ‘Vive la France!” From the dais, the prime minister and general stood at attention as French and British troops paraded past. On de Gaulle’s orders, a French band played a popular military march, “Le Père la Victoire” (“Father Victory”). “For you,” de Gaulle said to the beaming Churchill. In his memoirs, de Gaulle noted, “It was only his due.”
Caught up in the emotion of the day, both leaders put behind them, at least temporarily, their bitter antagonisms. For Churchill, it was a magical moment. From the day his beloved France had fallen in 1940, he had insisted to all naysayers, including Roosevelt and many in the prime minister’s own government, that it would, like a phoenix, rise from the ashes one day. That day was now here, and he paid tribute to the Frenchman who had shared his belief and done so much to make it a reality. In a speech to French resistance leaders, Churchill described de Gaulle as the “incontestable leader” of France. “From time to time,” the prime minister conceded, “I have had lively arguments with him about matters relating to this difficult war, but I am absolutely sure that you ought to rally round your leader and do your utmost to make France united and indivisible.”
De Gaulle returned the favor, acknowledging the vast debt he and France owed to Churchill and the British. At a lunch honoring Churchill, he noted, “We would not have seen today if our old and gallant ally, England…had not deployed the extraordinary determination to win and the magnificent courage which saved the freedom of the world….I do know that France…will not have forgotten in a thousand years what was accomplished in this war through the blood, sweat, and tears of the noble people whom the Right Honorable Winston Churchill is leading to the heights of one of the greatest glories in this world. We raise our glasses in honor of Winston Churchill…and England, our ally, in the past, the present, and the future.”
Though clearly heartfelt at the moment, that concept of partnership and unity would be badly strained in the difficult months to come. And as the British and French officials toasted each other, a more immediate shadow darkened their celebration: Allied victory, which had seemed so tantalizingly close at the time of Paris’s liberation, had slipped, for the moment, out of reach.