THE BAD WAR:

In Warsaw, a 'Good War' Wasn't (Anne Applebaum, June 2, 2004, Washington Post)

[T]he story of the Warsaw uprising really is the story of the destruction of Poland's "greatest generation." The uprising began when the leaders of Warsaw's underground army launched a rebellion against the Nazis who had brutally occupied their city for nearly five years. Hearing the Soviet Red Army guns to the East, knowing of D-Day and the American entry into the European war, they assumed the fighting would last just a few days, until the Allies joined and the city was freed. "We believed so much in the West," one of the survivors wistfully told CNN.

But their assumption was incorrect. Stalin not only refused to send Red Army troops to help what he described as a "band of criminals," he also refused to allow British and American planes to refuel in the Soviet Union, making airlifts impossible. Neither the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, nor the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, thought it important enough to pressure the Soviet dictator. With the exception of one airlift, the planes never came.

The Poles were left to fight alone. In the battle, which lasted 63 days, more than 200,000 people died, among them most of the country's intellectual and leadership. The scale of the catastrophe, the psychological, physical and economic damage, is almost unimaginable. [...]

When the Red army did finally "liberate" Warsaw the following winter, there was almost nothing left. Soviet secret police officers rounded up and arrested the remaining underground leaders, on the grounds that anyone brave enough to fight Germans would probably fight against the Soviet Union too. Again, Roosevelt and Churchill did not object: They had already consigned Poland to the Soviet "sphere of influence" during their conference with Stalin at Yalta, and had washed their hands of the country's fate.

For those tempted by the post-Vietnam nostalgia for the "good war" -- a nostalgia which seems to increase as things go badly in Iraq -- it's an unsettling story. But there are many such stories. No less terrible are the tales of the Allied troops who forced White Russians and Cossacks into trucks and returned them to the Soviet Union -- at Stalin's request -- where most were killed. Or the accounts of the mass arrests that accompanied the Soviet "liberation" of Central Europe, while we in the West officially looked away. One of the reasons the survivors in CNN's film speak such beautiful English is that they were all exiles, forced to live abroad after the war.

In fact, for millions of people, World War II had no happy ending. It had no ending at all. The liberation of one half of the European continent coincided with a new occupation for the other half.

Indeed, it's remarkable that the Poles still like us so much given our craven behavior towards them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 2, 2004 2:02 PM