July 25, 2004
THE UNEXPUNGABLE STAIN:
'Rising '44': Betraying Warsaw: RISING '44: The Battle for Warsaw By Norman Davies (CARLO D'ESTE, NY Times Book Review)
AUGUST 2004 will mark the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising, when 40,000 members of the Polish underground Home Army spilled into the streets to liberate the city from its Nazi occupiers. The revolt was inspired in part by the belief that the Red Army would come to the aid of the rebels. Russian units had advanced to the eastern bank of the Vistula River and were within supporting distance of the Warsaw fighters, but once Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, commander of the First Belarussian Front, declined to intervene, the Germans were freed not only to suppress the uprising but also to carry out appalling reprisals. Stalin would later dismiss the rebellion as the act of ''a gang of criminals.''Norman Davies, a fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, is the foremost historian of modern Poland. Of his previous books, ''God's Playground: A History of Poland'' is widely regarded as a landmark account. This new work, ''Rising '44,'' draws on a wealth of original material. Yet Davies says he is frustrated at how disappointingly little is available from either Russian or British archives. While Russian unwillingness to release documents (except selectively) is well known, there is no accounting for why 95 percent of the records of the British intelligence services during World War II have remained closed, with little prospect of their being opened in the future. The British penchant for secrecy 60 years after these events hardly seems justified, particularly since a vast majority of the participants are no longer alive.
In any case, ''Rising '44'' is much more than the story of the Warsaw uprising. It is one of the most savage indictments of Allied malfeasance yet leveled by a historian. Unsparing in his depictions of the slaughter of the Polish fighters and the destruction of their capital, Davies challenges the popular assumption that World War II was entirely the triumph of good over evil.
The secrecy is, obviously, a function of the fact that the Allies behaved evilly as regards Poland. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 25, 2004 10:25 AM
Sheesh. The Allies did what they thought they could. Maybe they were wrong. But there was no way they could help Poland in 1944. It was logistically impossible.
Like it or not, England and America were stuck with an evil ally in WW2. That they didn't redeem the world is not an "UNEXPUNGABLE STAIN".
Get over it. We won't redeem the world in this war.
Posted by: Brandon at July 25, 2004 1:08 PMYeah. It's not like the Western Allies sat on their hands and told the Germans, "Go ahead."
Another example of the stupidity of Poles. That they expected the Russians to do them favors beggars belief.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 26, 2004 12:13 AMThe secrecy is also necessary to maintain the
fiction that we were on a higher moral plane
than the Germans.
J.H.:
That's foolish. What we did was awful, but orders of magnitude less evil than the Holocaust.
Posted by: oj at July 26, 2004 11:00 AMThe Poles asked for it and they got it.
God must have hated them to put them between the Germans and the Russians, but for a people between the Germans and the Russians to go around picking fights with other people was insane.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 27, 2004 3:24 AMThe rapist always claims the bitch wanted it.
Posted by: oj at July 27, 2004 8:20 AMIf we'd just left the Poles to the Germans for a few months longer, this wouldn't be an issue, would it?
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 28, 2004 11:15 PMGermany didn't have a few more months.
Posted by: oj at July 28, 2004 11:20 PM