Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (review)

Norman Davies, the most prominent British historian of Poland, has written a blockbuster of a book about the longest, most destructive, and most heroic episode of urban warfare in German-occupied Europe. The battle waged by the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK) against the Germans in Warsaw from 1 August to 2 October 1944 was the culmination of five years of armed resistance against the German occupation. At the same time, the Polish fighters were striving for an independent Poland—and not a Communist state dominated by the USSR, whose Red Army was advancing through Poland with a subservient "Polish Committee of National Liberation" in tow.

The dual nature of the rising was difficult for contemporary Western observers and later Western historians to understand. In the West, the Warsaw uprising was often overshadowed by the equally heroic, though much smaller Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April–May 1943. Only now, with the publication of Norman Davies's study, does the English-speaking reader have access to a comprehensive account of the fighting in Warsaw in the summer of 1944, which forms the core of the book. Earlier, readers could turn to Janusz Zawodny's excellent though brief account, Nothing but Honour: The Story of the Warsaw Uprising, 1944 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), and to Joanna K. M. Hanson's fine book, The Civilian Population and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Also available were accounts by Neil D. Orpen, Airlift to Warsaw: The Rising of 1944 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), which focuses on the abortive Western resupply efforts; and George Bruce, The Warsaw Uprising, 1 August–2 October 1944 (London: Hart-Davis, 1972). Jan M. Ciechanowski's study, The Warsaw Rising of 1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), deals not with the fighting itself but with the Home Army commanders, their strategic plans, and above all their decision—approved by the Polish government-in-exile in London—to rise up in the capital, which originally had been excluded from the plans for a general uprising against the retreating Germans. Ciechanowski condemns both the AK leaders and the Polish government in London for having decided to fight without securing a guarantee of Soviet support. He blames them for the destruction of the city and the enormous loss of life, estimated at 150,000–200,000 people.

Davies, by contrast, convincingly argues that the Home Army commanders made their decision at a time when the German Army Group Center was collapsing; when news had come in of the attempt to assassinate Hitler (an attempt that, while unsuccessful, suggested that the Führer was losing support among his army leaders); and when Marshal Konstantin Rokossovskii's tanks were sighted on the outskirts of "Praga," the part of Warsaw located on the eastern bank of the Vistula (pp. 620–621). Indeed, Rokossovskii had orders to take Praga by 8 August, and the Polish-language radio on the Soviet side called on the people of Warsaw to help the Red Army by rising up against the Germans.

However, after a German counterattack unexpectedly rebuffed Rokossovskii's vanguard, the Soviet plans changed. The Soviet leader Josif Stalin determined that the Warsaw uprising was being led by the political enemies of his Polish Committee. Also, Polish Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who was in Moscow from 30 July to 9 August 1944, could not accept either the Polish-Soviet frontier demanded by Stalin (which would have forced Poland to give up one-third of its territory with no guarantee of receiving territorial compensation at Germany's expense) or the minority role Stalin envisaged for Mikołajczyk's Peasant Party (the largest party in Poland) in a new Polish government. Mikołajczyk's rejection of these demands, especially the frontier—which was unacceptable not only to his government and the AK commanders but also to the overwhelming majority of Poles at the time—induced Stalin to withhold Soviet military support for the Warsaw uprising. In late...