The Katyn Massacre: Conspiracies and cover-ups

Not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.

Part III

A tacit deal with the devil

In September 1944, at the time of the Warsaw Uprising, George Orwell unleashed a withering blast against British Stalinists and their fellow-travelers:

Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not 'Is this policy right or wrong?' but 'This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?' And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power.

First of all, a message to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals generally: Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don't imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist for the Soviet regime, or any other other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

FDR died before the end of the war. Any evaluation of his actions over Katyn must allow that wartime expediency played a large role in his decision-making.

Nonetheless, the choices he made had far-reaching consequences. Key parts of his administration behaved as propagandists for Stalin’s regime. As Orwell warned it would not be easy to put those habits aside or to face up to the moral cost.

We know that people do not change their minds easily. They will fight the evidence in front of their eyes. Most prefer to cling to illusions rather than admit error. When all else fails, people prefer to ignore the matter and pretend that it never happened.

This problem becomes even more acute when an issue becomes grist for political campaigns. Honesty may be the best policy but it can also be a quick way to lose an election.

Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had no interest in losing elections.

Thus, while the US and Stalin came to be adversaries in the post-war years, the leaders of each country shared certain common objectives. For instance, none of them wanted the whole truth about Poland to come out.

Nor would they want the full story of Soviet penetration of the US government to become public.

• The NKVD and GRU obviously wanted to avoid a thorough reckoning. They might be able to salvage some of their intelligence and influence assets if the matter remained a shameful secret for the US government.
• Naïve liberals who could not distinguish between fellow liberals and Stalinist feared a witch-hunt. While they trusted communists, they feared the vast majority of the public. Therefore, they preferred to suppress information that might “inflame” public opinion.
• Clear-eyed functionaries understood that their reputations and claims to power would be damaged if it were revealed that they had permitted Stalin’s agents to roam freely through their departments or that they had helped cover-up Moscow’s crimes.

As Stephen Koch noted the Wise Men, the New Dealers, and the Brain Trusters faced a serious risk if the truth came out:

Any very public housecleaning of the Washington penetrations would have handed the populist right an all-too-powerful blunt instrument for attacking Yalta, containment, and their own position in power.

OK. It is finally time to talk about the narratives of McCarthyism and the importance of Katyn in them

The Katyn Massacre: Conspiracies and cover-ups

Part II

Once FDR and Stalin agreed to keep each other’s secrets, the US government labored to cover-up Soviet atrocities.

OWI: Above and beyond

Most of the government preferred to deal with Katyn by ignoring it and hoping the issue would fade away. On 22 April 1943 (nine days after the graves were revealed to the world) a State Department memo recommended that

on the basis of the various conflicting contentions [concerning Katyn] of all parties concerned, it would appear to be advisable to refrain from taking any definite stand in regard to this question.

Other bureaucrats chose to be more energetic and proactive.

The Office of War Information (OWI) was a key player in deep-sixing the truth. OWI loudly denied that the Soviets were responsible. This government bureau smeared those who raised questions as dupes and worse. In OWI’s eyes to doubt Stalin was to be pro-Nazi. The head of OWI Elmer Davies (remember that name) led the charge. On 3 May 1943, he took to the airwaves to defend Stalin’s honor and followed the Stalinist line that the Germans were responsible.

This is not benign neglect of an inconvenient truth. This is lying to the American public. But Davies and his people went even farther to help FDR and Stalin. The OWI actively worked to silence and censor media outlets that raised questions about Stalin’s role in Katyn.

We now know that Soviet intelligence had placed many assets in OWI. Some of its employees left the US after the war and went to work in Warsaw for the puppet government installed by the Red Army. There they wrote propaganda for Stalin. (Hence, their location changed but not their job duties.)

A sorry tale, more than a little sordid. Sadly, all wars, no matter how noble their aims, have their squalid incidents hidden away in dark corners. Governments lie to the public, especially in wartime. In this case, however, the cover-up forced the government to lie to itself with tragic consequences. Moreover, the lying and cover-ups did not end when the war was finally over.

Willful blindness and self-imposed ignorance

The Katyn cover-up did not simply conceal information from the public (voters). Steps were taken to ensure that the truth was hidden from most of the decision-makers in government. Note, for example, that MG Bissell apparently took no steps to ensure that Van Vliet’s information was shared with those policy-makers who were dealing with Stalin.

Reports came into the War and State Departments that implicated the Soviets. They were buried rather than disseminated. In some cases they were not even archived and ignored they were destroyed so they could never see the light of day.

This destruction was a willful and premeditated rejection of the lessons learned in the intelligence war against Germany and Japan.

At times it did not matter if a report was true or important: if it was perceived as “anti-soviet” it was rejected. People who sent along too many “anti-soviet” reports faced severe consequences to their career and reputation.

FDR actually exiled former Pennsylvania governor George Earle to Samoa after he voiced strong opinions on Stalin’s guilt. Earle was serving as a naval officer and had investigated the massacre while on a diplomatic mission in the Balkans. FDR rejected his assessment and took extreme steps to make sure his view did not become public.

FDR told Earle that he was absolutely certain that the Nazis were guilty. This is not surprising. His closest aide, Harry Hopkins, was completely in the pro-Stalin camp. When the massacre came to light Hopkins followed Moscow's lead in denouncing the Polish government for raising questions and demanding answers. He was happy to impute invidious motives to the ally fighting along side us in the "crusade in Europe".

Indeed, when the Poles exiled in London publicly denounced the Soviets for the massacre, Hopkins responded that they were troublemakers, interested only in preventing their large estates from falling into Russian hands.
David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch

U.S. policy-makers operated under the illusion that Stalin could be reasoned with -- that he could be a partner to secure the peace and safeguard a free and prosperous Europe. This illusion persisted, in part, because the bureaucracy squelched contrary opinions. Moreover, the arguments of the skeptics were weakened because they and their audiences were denied important information.

Famed diplomat George Kennan is a case in point. He doubted that Stalin could allow any degree of freedom in Poland after the war. As he saw it, the Russians had surely committed atrocities when they occupied Poland in partnership with Hitler. These crimes had to be covered up. The only way for Stalin to ensure that the cover-up would succeed was to install a regime completely servile to Moscow.

Kennan tried to make this case to his colleagues and bosses in State. As he admits his argument was weak because “I had no proof.” Without proof, his astute analysis was no match for officially sanctioned illusions.

He had no proof because key figures in the executive branch worked diligently to bury the evidence of Stalin’s crimes.

So it went for anyone who tried to put US-Soviet relations on a realistic footing. Their voice was muted and their position was weakened because elements inside the government worked overtime to bolster Stalin’s image, hide his perfidy, and punish his critics.

Kennan:

Western opinion was never fully aware, during the war years, of the full monstrosity of what had been done by the soviet police authorities during the Nonaggression Pact period.

The Katyn Massacre: Conspiracies and cover-ups

For a half-century after the mass murder of the Polish officers, the US government sought to cover-up and downplay this Stalinist atrocity.

The cover-up had far-reaching repercussions. It had a direct effect on the 1944 presidential election. It influenced our policies on the post-war settlement in Eastern Europe. To this day, it distorts our understanding of the history of WWII and post-war anti-communism.

Part I

Dangerous knowledge

Even before the Germans revealed the mass graves at Katyn, the US government had good reason to believe that something horrific had happened to the Polish officers. The Polish government in exile knew that thousands of POWs were unaccounted for. When pressed on this issue, Stalin was first evasive and then offered excuses that were unpersuasive and even laughable. (Gee, maybe they deserted and went to Manchuria.)

In 1942, Army intelligence (G-2) received reports from an agent in France that the Soviets had murdered Polish prisoners on an industrial scale.

Soon after the graves were discovered the Germans took several allied prisoners to the site in the hopes that they would confirm that the Soviets were responsible for the murders. The POWs refused to cooperate with their captors and balked at helping Goebbels’s propaganda efforts. However, the American prisonersCapt. Donald Stewart and Lt. Col. John Van Vliet were able to send coded messages to Army G-2 expressing their belief that the Soviets were guilty.

[The government hid the fact that they possessed this early evidence of Stalin’s culpability for over a half-century.]

After he was liberated from his POW camp, Lt. Col. Van Vliet made a report directly to Major General Clayton Bissell, head of Army G-2, in May 1945. In this report, he confirmed his assessment of Soviet guilt and expanded on his reasons for believing this. MG Bissell classified the report TOP SECRET and emphasized to Lt. Col. Van Vliet that he was to discuss the matter with no one.

This report was not circulated within the government. The single copy mysteriously went missing soon after it was written.

In 1951, congress created a committee to investigate Katyn. Stewart and Van Vliet were again sworn to secrecy about the coded messages they sent as POWs. Van Vliet was ordered to write a new report to replace the missing one he wrote in 1945. The Defense department eventually provided this report to the committee after a prolonged period of obfuscation and stonewalling.

The Katyn Committee heard testimony from MG Bissell. While he could not (or would not) explain how the 1945 report was lost, he was happy to explain why he failed to give the report wide circulation within the government:

Poland couldn't participate in the war with Japan. The Russians could participate in it. Those were the factors.

Based on realpolitik it is impossible to fault Bissell’s strategic calculus. With the war still raging in the Pacific, maintaining good relations with Stalin made strategic sense.

Guilty knowledge and a conspiracy of silence

Bissell was not alone in his assessment. Throughout the war, US military planners feared that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler. This, in turn, would allow Hitler to concentrate on the western allies and cost the lives of untold thousands of soldiers from the US, Britain, and the other nations fighting with them.

Of course, Poland was one of those nations fighting with the Allies in the West. The United States may have had no choice but to placate Stalin. They did have the option to be honest with the ally whose soldiers were fighting beside them. Allied leaders made the morally dubious decision to lie to a faithful partner. Eisenhower did not inform the Poles fighting under him in France that his great crusade would not bring freedom to their families in Poland. Churchill never told the Poles that they were fighting for the glory of the British Empire instead of the independence of their homeland. Instead he assured Gen. Anders "we will not abandon you and Poland will be happy."

Realpolitik was not the only factor at work. On the American side an even more repugnant calculus came into play FDR’s political prospects. At the Tehran Conference in late 1943, Roosevelt acceded to many of Stalin’s demands. But, he explained to the despot, the details of the negotiations must remain secret for a time: 1944 was an election year and he did not want to alienate millions of Polish-Americans whose votes he needed.

Stalin played along. During the campaign FDR told the Polish premier that "A strong and independent Poland will emerge" after the fighting ended. Stalin's silence allowed this lie to pass unchallenged.

The same need for secrecy obviously held true for Katyn. If the truth came out, it would do more than complicate US diplomacy: it would hinder Roosevelt's campaign for a fourth term.

So it was that FDR and Stalin became tacit co-conspirators. They shared an interest in hiding the truth about Poland.

Katyn and the historians

Anthony Daniels:

There is a curious phenomenon in Western intellectual life, namely that of being right at the wrong time. To be right at the wrong time is far, far worse than having been wrong for decades on end. In the estimation of many intellectuals, to be right at the wrong time is the worst possible social faux pas; like telling an off-colour joke at the throning of a bishop. In short, it is in unforgivable bad taste.

There was never a good time, for example, to be anti-communist. Those who early warned of the dangers of bolshevism were regarded as lacking in compassion for the suffering of the masses under tsarism, as well as lacking the necessary imagination to “build” a better world. Then came the phase of denial of the crimes of communism, when to base one’s anti-communism on such phenomena as organised famine and the murder of millions was regarded as the malicious acceptance of ideologically-inspired lies and calumnies. When finally the catastrophic failure of communism could no longer be disguised, and all the supposed lies were acknowledged to have been true, to be anti-communist became tasteless in a different way: it was harping on pointlessly about what everyone had always known to be the case. The only good anti-communist was a mute anti-communist.

The handling of the Katyn massacre by Western historians fits Daniel’s description to a “T”:

The treatment of the Katyn massacre illustrates the determined myopia of revisionists in the decades prior to the collapse of the USSR and the opening of its archives.
Haynes and Klehr, In Denial

As Haynes and Klehr go on to record, the left-wing’s campaign to protect Stalin was fought on several levels and went through several phases. Initially, they tried to promote Stalin’s lie that the Nazis were responsible. Part and parcel of this strategy was a willingness to label those who promoted the truth as Nazi-dupes and proto-fascsts.

As evidence mounted that Katyn was a Stalinist crime Uncle Joe’s Western apologists threw up their hands and pronounced the whole thing a complicated mystery. They adopted an even-handed approachmaybe Nazis, maybe Soviets, who knows?

Of course, those scholars and pundits had no desire to unravel the mystery themselves. Ignorance is bliss when the truth maybe politically damaging.

Without a doubt the primary tactic of Stalin’s left-wing apologists was to simply bury the massacre and ignore it in their writing, e.g. Eric Hobsbawm:

In his book The Age Of Extreme, published in 1994, he quite deliberately underplayed the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939-40, saying it was merely an attempt to push the Russian border a little further away from Leningrad. He also omits any mention of the massacre of 20,000 Polish soldiers by Russian Secret Police at Katyn.

In the same book, he dismisses the appallingly violent suppression by the Nazis of the Polish resistance in the 1944 Warsaw uprising - when a complacent Soviet army ignored desperate pleas to come to the Poles’ aid - as 'the penalty of a premature uprising'.

Finally, when the evidence is undeniable and they are forced to confront it, they still have ways of minimizing it. Long-hidden information that clears up the mystery can be dismissed as “old news” and minimized as of only “antiquarian interest”. Those scholars who research these questions are painted as “obsessives” and apologists for unsavory causes.

Thus the experts can avoid reckoning with their mistakes, inconvenient questions can be buried, and the essential and all-important narratives can be saved.

All of this happened with the Katyn massacre. It continues to this day. The Left is willing to accept the truth about the crime as long as the damage falls only on Russia and “Stalin’s heir” Putin. But in no way is it acceptable examine Stalin’s apologists in America and the West.

What must be ignored at all costs is what the massacre and its aftermath tells us about the Narratives of “McCarthyism” and the “Red Scare”.

A meaty subject, maybe one deserving its own post.

Katyn

On 5 May 1940 Stalin's Politburo ordered the NKVD to liquidate the Polish officers held as POWs after the conquest of Poland. What we now know call the Katyn Massacre claimed the lives of 22,000 men.

There is a Katyn memorial in St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery in Niles, IL. It was conceived and created by Wojciech Seweryn. His was an amazing life.

You can hear about it in this informative interview with his daughter.

Remembering Katyn

Seweryn was born one day before the Nazis invaded Poland. He never knew his father who was one of the POWs murdered by the NKVD.

After making his way to the US, he conceived and designed the memorial and then worked for decades to raise the money and create the monument. One year after the memorial was finished, Seweryn was invited to join Poland's president Lech Kaczy?ski at the ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre. He died with all on board when the president's plane crashed.

The historiography of the massacre tells us a great deal about the state of the historical profession and also sheds an important new light on the "McCarthy Era" and the so-called Red Scare.

But that is for another post.

Old spy cases never die

"There's no statute of limitations on counterespionage, none at all."
William Hood, Cry Spy

The British government as released a trove of files that bear on some old spy cases.

The Unbelievable Story of How the CIA Helped Foil a Russian Spy Ring in London
Newly released documents reveal a real-life plot that seems ripped from a Cold War novel.

It’s an interesting story that provides a look inside intelligence operations during the Cold War.

The Portland spy case was another black eye for the British Security services.

Embarrassingly for MI5, the agency discovered that Houghton had previously been on its radar and it had made serious errors about him. In 1956, MI5 had been asked for security concerns about Houghton working at the UDE and was even sent a report from Houghton’s wife warning that he was revealing classified information. At the time, MI5’s vetting section had erroneously concluded, without serious investigation, that Mrs. Houghton was claiming this out of spite because their marriage was breaking up a striking failure for MI5.

In truth, the Soviets displayed something resembling contempt for British counter-intelligence at this time.

After their arrest, the Krogers’ fingerprints were sent to the FBI, who established their real identity as Morris and Lona Cohen, known to be two of the Kremlin’s most important underground assets in the Cold War. The Cohens were American-born KGB illegals in the United States, who had operated with an array of key underground Soviet agents, including the celebrated illegal William Fisher, who lived under an alias, “Rudolf Abel.” They had also acted as KGB couriers, passing top-secret intelligence on U.S. atomic research from agents including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. After the Rosenbergs’ arrest, followed by their trial and execution for espionage in the U.S. in 1952, the KGB spirited the Cohens out of the United States, slipping through the FBI’s hands. Now-available Soviet intelligence material shows the KGB gave them New Zealand passports. In 1954 the Cohens arrived in Britain to begin their new life, and espionage career, as the Krogers.

The KGB obtained the fake passports from Paddy Costelloa New Zealand diplomat who was a graduate of Cambridge University where he ran in the same communist circles as Phlby, Burgess, et. al.

FBI agent Robert Lamphere noted the Zelig-like propinquity of the Cohen/Krogers:

A Philby-network man issued passports for the Cohens, who were involved with Colonel Abel, Gordon Lonsdale, and possibly with the Rosenbergs.

Sending the Cohens to Britain seems highly risky on two counts.

1. They were directly associated with at least three* spy networks known to the US/UK security services: The Cambridge Ring, the Rosenbergs, and Rudolph Abel. If the FBI or MI5 followed the right thread from any of these cases they might track down the Cohens. That in turn, could jeopardized high-value operations currently underway in Britain.

Gordon Lonsdale/Konon Molody was a decidedly high-value asset. According to the Soviet archives, he was the first Soviet “illegal” to operate in Great Britain since the 1930s.

* Lona Cohen worked with a fourth network that stole atomic secrets in New Mexico. However, the FBI did not learn of this network for decades.

2. If captured, the Cohens had many secrets to bargain with should they put self-preservation ahead of ideological loyalty.

Yet the KGB sent them to London to work near the center of a major, on-going, and productive operation. This suggests that the Soviets were confident that MI5 was too inept to be a danger to the Cohens and other traitors ( the polite Narrative) or that the KGB/GRU had sources within MI5 who could protect the spies. (The Chapman Pincher theory).

The Soviets usually took great pains to protect their agents and to ensure operational security. For instance, when Ursula Kuczynski Hamburger Beurton (SONJA) was sent to Moscow for training, she was ordered to leave her son behind. Her superiors feared that the boy would learn Russian words which might someday betray SONIA’s cover story that she was merely a Jewish refugee from Germany.

When Walter Krivitsky defected and was interrogated by MI5, the Soviets ceased all contacted with their Cambridge spies until they were sure that those agents were not compromised by the revelations. The same thing happened when Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945.

The Soviet intelligence agencies were usually patient and careful. So it seems significant that they were willing to put the Cohens to work in London so quickly.

And they were not wrong. MI5 did not break the case (despite their subsequent claims to Parliament and the press). The Portland spies were discovered thanks to the defection of a Polish intelligence officer, Michael Goleniewski to CIA.

To add insult to injury, MI5 even accepted “Gordon Lonsdale” as a true identity until an FBI investigation revealed that the Canadian Gordon Lonsdale was actually the Russian Konon Molody.

Related:

First rule of counterintelligence: never say never

"Veni, Vidi, Deus Vicit"

Story

Pictures:

Music

The miracle on the Vistula

97 years ago

People this brave deserve to be remembered

First posted 1 August 2008


On 1 August 1944 the Polish Home Army launched a uprising in Warsaw against the German occupiers. They had few weapons but possessed an abundance of courage. The time was right: the Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw and Allied armies were advancing against the Germans in France. Wehrmacht officers had nearly killed Hitler on 20 July. It seemed that end of the Nazi state was at hand,

Moscow radio had even broadcast a call to arms to the Poles on 29 July.

In the first days, the uprising had success. The Home Army gained control of central Warsaw. Then they were betrayed by their allies and their allies ally.

The Red Army took no steps to aid the Poles. They even refused to allow British and American planes to use Soviet airfields in airlift and bombing operations. Churchill and Roosevelt had no military options and only a few diplomatic ones. Churchill wanted to put pressure on Stalin but FDR refused. The Warsaw Uprising was a potential embarrassment to a man running for his fourth term. He had already acquiesced to Stalin’s plans for Poland but dared not admit it for fear of losing the votes of Polish-Americans and other Catholics. The Uprising threatened to make Poland an issue in his last campaign.

Many in the West believed the Uprising was hopeless and tragic from the very beginning. The Home Army disagreed. They sent this message to London on 24 August:

Hello.. here is the heart of Poland! Hear Warsaw speaking!
Throw the dirges out of your broadcasts;
Our spirit is strong it will support even you!
We don’t need your applause!
We demand ammunition!!!

They did not get their ammunition but still the Poles fought on. They held out for 63 days-- fighting house to house and hand to hand against tanks and professional soldiers while under continuous bombardment from artillery and the Luftwaffe. Over 200,000 Poles died. It was the equivalent of a 9/11 a day for over two months.

Just before the end, Warsaw radio broadcast a searing message:

This is the stark truth. We were treated worse than Hitler’s satellites, worse than Italy, Rumania, Finland. May God Who is just, pass judgment on the terrible injustice suffered by the Polish nation, and may He punish accordingly all those who are guilty.

Your heroes are the soldiers whose only weapons against tanks, planes, and guns were their revolvers and bottles filled with petrol. Your heroes are the women who tended the wounded and carried messages under fire, who cooked in bombed and ruined cellars to feed children and adults, and who soothed and comforted the dying. Your heroes are the children who went on quietly playing among the smoldering ruins. These are the people of Warsaw.

Immortal is the nation that can muster such universal heroism. For those who have died have conquered, and those who live on will fight on, will conquer and again bear witness that Poland lives when the Poles live.

It is a sad fact that the only party to behave honorably toward the Home Army was the Wehrmacht. After 63 days the Poles were still fighting though they had no hope of success. They agreed to surrender to the regular army on the condition that they be treated as POWs. Those terms were granted and, amazingly, the Germans upheld their end of the bargain.

Siege of Vienna

First posted 12 September 2003


In the summer of 1683 the Ottoman Turks advanced up the Danube, occupied Hungary, and, in July, laid siege to Vienna. They had 200,00 men and over 300 cannon. The defenders of the city numbered less than 22,000 only 6,000 of whom were regular soldiers; the remainder were civilians pressed into service at the start of the siege.

The relief of the city was complicated by European politics. Louis XIV of France hoped to gain German territory on the Rhine while the Hapsburgs were occupied in the east. To that end, he worked to create am anti-Hapsburg alliance with Hungary and Poland which would deny Austria aid against the Turks. (Incidentally, the Ottoman artillery were commanded by a Frenchman, a former Capuchin no less).

By September, conditions were desperate inside the city- low supplies, disease, and weakening defenses. The Hapsburgs had raised a relief army of only 21,000. But, fortunately, Poland had spurned Louis's maneuvers and sent an army of 24,000 under their King John Sobieski.

On September 12, the two relief armies and the forces inside the city attacked the besiegers. The critical moment came in mid-afternoon when Sobieski sent his cavalry into the heart of the Ottoman camp. The battle became a rout. The next day the Polish king wrote his wife: "the Vizer took such hurried flight that he had time to escape with only one horse."

He also noted the Turks "left behind a mass of innocent Austrian people, particularly women; but they butchered as many as they could." Separate from that slaughter, the Ottomans had sent 67,000 Austrians east as slaves and 14,000 girls to the harems of Constantinople.

Sobieski's troops captured the Ottoman battle flag ("The green standard of the Prophet") in the fighting. This he sent to the Pope with the message "Veni, Vidi, Deus Vicit" ("I came, I saw, God conquered").

The lifting of the siege is usually marked as the turning point for the Ottoman empire. For centuries they had advanced against Europe, conquering the Byzantium empire, capturing lands in the Balkans and islands in the Mediterranean. After 1683 they began 250 years of retreat. (Funny how many of these critical turning points find the Poles fighting on the right side).

Poland: First to Fight

Originally posted 1 September 2010

The popular image of Poland in WWII is of a small nation that became the first victim of the Nazi blitzkrieg and the proximate cause of the war when Great Britain and France rallied to its side.

History records a different story. Poland fought Hitler’s Reich longer than any other nation. Her contributions to the Allied victory were significant and should be reclaimed from the memory hole.

First, about the defeat in September 1939:

The Polish Army-- almost completely unmechanized, almost without air support, almost surrounded by the Germans from the outset and, shortly, completely surrounded when the Red Army joined the aggression-- fought more effectively than it has been given credit for. It sustained resistance from September 1 until October 5, five weeks, which compares highly favorably with the six and a half weeks during which France, Britain, Belgium, and Holland kept up the fight in the west the following year
(John Keegan, The Battle for History)

Despite the defeats of 1939, the Polish nation never stopped fighting. Not only did the Home Army resist the Nazis inside of occupied Poland, but Polish forces fought on every major front of the European war.

The existence of a legitimate government in exile and of a strong army abroad--Poland, even in 1944, had the fourth largest number of men fighting German after the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom-- lent a powerful heart to the Poles, who produced few collaborators and no puppet chief, a unique distinction in the record of European response to German aggression.

Polish airmen filled whole squadrons in the Battle of Britain at a time when Britain barely had enough fighter pilots to hold off the Luftwaffe. (The Kosciuszko Squadron shot down more German planes than any other fighter squadron during the battle). Ground units fought heroically in key battles in Italy and France.

Perhaps the greatest contribution Poland made to the final victory was in the realm of intelligence. They played a vital role in breaking the Enigma cipher system used by the German high command and shared their discoveries with the French and British.

The Poles eventually designed a whole array of mechanical aids -- some of which they passes to the British, some of which the British replicated independently, besides inventing others themselves-- but their original attack, which allowed them to understand the logic of Enigma, eas a workd of pure mathematical reasoning. As it was done without any modern computing machinery, but simply by pencil and paper, it must be regarded as one of the most remarkable mathematical exercises known to history.
(John Keegan, Intelligence in War)

In the first desperate years of the war, Engima/ULTRA intelligence enabled Britain to hold off the Luftwaffe and then the U-boat menace.

The Nazis never discovered the ULTRA secret in five years of war. That is an amazing testament to the Poles and the French still on the Continent who knew the secret but never divulged it, not even under Gestopo torture.


The Polish Underground was the number one source of HUMINT in occupied Europe for the British. They provided vast amounts on information on the German V-1 and V-2 secret weapons, the movements of U-boats, and the German military preparations in advance of D-Day.

Witold Pilecki is a name every student should know. He carried out what the Times of London called “perhaps the bravest act of espionage of the Second World War”: he volunteered to go inside of Auschwitz. His reports documented the Nazi’s extermination campaign against the Jews.

People this brave deserve to be remembered

First posted 1 August 2008


On 1 August 1944 the Polish Home Army launched a uprising in Warsaw against the German occupiers. They had few weapons but possessed an abundance of courage. The time was right: the Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw and Allied armies were advancing against the Germans in France. Wehrmacht officers had nearly killed Hitler on 20 July. It seemed that end of the Nazi state was at hand,

Moscow radio had even broadcast a call to arms to the Poles on 29 July.

In the first days, the uprising had success. The Home Army gained control of central Warsaw. Then they were betrayed by their allies and their allies ally.

The Red Army took no steps to aid the Poles. They even refused to allow British and American planes to use Soviet airfields in airlift and bombing operations. Churchill and Roosevelt had no military options and only a few diplomatic ones. Churchill wanted to put pressure on Stalin but FDR refused. The Warsaw Uprising was a potential embarrassment to a man running for his fourth term. He had already acquiesced to Stalin’s plans for Poland but dared not admit it for fear of losing the votes of Polish-Americans and other Catholics. The Uprising threatened to make Poland an issue in his last campaign.

Many in the West believed the Uprising was hopeless and tragic from the very beginning. The Home Army disagreed. They sent this message to London on 24 August:

Hello.. here is the heart of Poland! Hear Warsaw speaking!
Throw the dirges out of your broadcasts;
Our spirit is strong it will support even you!
We don’t need your applause!
We demand ammunition!!!

They did not get their ammunition but still the Poles fought on. They held out for 63 days-- fighting house to house and hand to hand against tanks and professional soldiers while under continuous bombardment from artillery and the Luftwaffe. Over 200,000 Poles died. It was the equivalent of a 9/11 a day for over two months.

Just before the end, Warsaw radio broadcast a searing message:

This is the stark truth. We were treated worse than Hitler’s satellites, worse than Italy, Rumania, Finland. May God Who is just, pass judgment on the terrible injustice suffered by the Polish nation, and may He punish accordingly all those who are guilty.

Your heroes are the soldiers whose only weapons against tanks, planes, and guns were their revolvers and bottles filled with petrol. Your heroes are the women who tended the wounded and carried messages under fire, who cooked in bombed and ruined cellars to feed children and adults, and who soothed and comforted the dying. Your heroes are the children who went on quietly playing among the smoldering ruins. These are the people of Warsaw.

Immortal is the nation that can muster such universal heroism. For those who have died have conquered, and those who live on will fight on, will conquer and again bear witness that Poland lives when the Poles live.

It is a sad fact that the only party to behave honorably toward the Home Army was the Wehrmacht. After 63 days the Poles were still fighting though they had no hope of success. They agreed to surrender to the regular army on the condition that they be treated as POWs. Those terms were granted and, amazingly, the Germans upheld their end of the bargain.

A brave woman has her story told

Siege of Vienna

First posted 12 September 2003


In the summer of 1683 the Ottoman Turks advanced up the Danube, occupied Hungary, and, in July, laid siege to Vienna. They had 200,00 men and over 300 cannon. The defenders of the city numbered less than 22,000 only 6,000 of whom were regular soldiers; the remainder were civilians pressed into service at the start of the siege.

The relief of the city was complicated by European politics. Louis XIV of France hoped to gain German territory on the Rhine while the Hapsburgs were occupied in the east. To that end, he worked to create am anti-Hapsburg alliance with Hungary and Poland which would deny Austria aid against the Turks. (Incidentally, the Ottoman artillery were commanded by a Frenchman, a former Capuchin no less).

By September, conditions were desperate inside the city- low supplies, disease, and weakening defenses. The Hapsburgs had raised a relief army of only 21,000. But, fortunately, Poland had spurned Louis's maneuvers and sent an army of 24,000 under their King John Sobieski.

On September 12, the two relief armies and the forces inside the city attacked the besiegers. The critical moment came in mid-afternoon when Sobieski sent his cavalry into the heart of the Ottoman camp. The battle became a rout. The next day the Polish king wrote his wife: "the Vizer took such hurried flight that he had time to escape with only one horse."

He also noted the Turks "left behind a mass of innocent Austrian people, particularly women; but they butchered as many as they could." Separate from that slaughter, the Ottomans had sent 67,000 Austrians east as slaves and 14,000 girls to the harems of Constantinople.

Sobieski's troops captured the Ottoman battle flag ("The green standard of the Prophet") in the fighting. This he sent to the Pope with the message "Veni vidi, Deus Vicit" ("I came, I saw, God conquered").

The lifting of the siege is usually marked as the turning point for the Ottoman empire. For centuries they had advanced against Europe, conquering the Byzantium empire, capturing lands in the Balkans and islands in the Mediterranean. After 1683 they began 250 years of retreat. (Funny how many of these critical turning points find the Poles fighting on the right side).

Today is the 332d anniversary of the lifting of the siege.

Solidarity

Originally posted 31 August 2003



On this day in 1980 the Polish communist government agreed to the demands of the striking workers in the Gdansk shipyard. Workers would have the right to organize freely and independently

The strike marked the beginning of the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are, rightly, given the greatest share of credit for winning the Cold War. But Lech Walesa and John Paul II played indispensable roles.

In the 70s many experts believed that continuing the Cold War was pointless-- the Communists weren't so bad, not every society valued Western style freedom, cowed populations accepted what they could not change. Solidarity and the Poles put the lie to such talk.

In the long twilight struggle against Stalinism, the workers of Poland were the first light of sunrise.

Poland: First to Fight

Originally posted 1 September 2010

The popular image of Poland in WWII is of a small nation that became the first victim of the Nazi blitzkrieg and the proximate cause of the war when Great Britain and France rallied to its side.

History records a different story. Poland fought Hitler’s Reich longer than any other nation. Her contributions to the Allied victory were significant and should be reclaimed from the memory hole.

First, about the defeat in September 1939:

The Polish Army-- almost completely unmechanized, almost without air support, almost surrounded by the Germans from the outset and, shortly, completely surrounded when the Red Army joined the aggression-- fought more effectively than it has been given credit for. It sustained resistance from September 1 until October 5, five weeks, which compares highly favorably with the six and a half weeks during which France, Britain, Belgium, and Holland kept up the fight in the west the following year
(John Keegan, The Battle for History)

Despite the defeats of 1939, the Polish nation never stopped fighting. Not only did the Home Army resist the Nazis inside of occupied Poland, but Polish forces fought on every major front of the European war.

The existence of a legitimate government in exile and of a strong army abroad--Poland, even in 1944, had the fourth largest number of men fighting German after the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom-- lent a powerful heart to the Poles, who produced few collaborators and no puppet chief, a unique distinction in the record of European response to German aggression.

Polish airmen filled whole squadrons in the Battle of Britain at a time when Britain barely had enough fighter pilots to hold off the Luftwaffe. (The Kosciuszko Squadron shot down more German planes than any other fighter squadron during the battle). Ground units fought heroically in key battles in Italy and France.

Perhaps the greatest contribution Poland made to the final victory was in the realm of intelligence. They played a vital role in breaking the Enigma cipher system used by the German high command and shared their discoveries with the French and British.

The Poles eventually designed a whole array of mechanical aids -- some of which they passes to the British, some of which the British replicated independently, besides inventing others themselves-- but their original attack, which allowed them to understand the logic of Enigma, eas a workd of pure mathematical reasoning. As it was done without any modern computing machinery, but simply by pencil and paper, it must be regarded as one of the most remarkable mathematical exercises known to history.
(John Keegan, Intelligence in War)

In the first desperate years of the war, Engima/ULTRA intelligence enabled Britain to hold off the Luftwaffe and then the U-boat menace.

The Nazis never discovered the ULTRA secret in five years of war. That is an amazing testament to the Poles and the French still on the Continent who knew the secret but never divulged it, not even under Gestopo torture.


The Polish Underground was the number one source of HUMINT in occupied Europe for the British. They provided vast amounts on information on the German V-1 and V-2 secret weapons, the movements of U-boats, and the German military preparations in advance of D-Day.

Witold Pilecki is a name every student should know. He carried out what the Times of London called “perhaps the bravest act of espionage of the Second World War”: he volunteered to go inside of Auschwitz. His reports documented the Nazi’s extermination campaign against the Jews.

The echo of the low dishonest decade

Why Was Hollywood at War with Poland?

The Left was very powerful among screenwriters in that period and many of the most unkind representations of Poles or Poland were the product of radical leftists, often members of the Communist Party. We must also remember that the Left had a particular grievance against Poland for several reasons. First, Poland was widely perceived on the Left as a reactionary country still preserving many of the characteristics of a bygone era. Secondly, the Poles had defeated Soviet Russia in the war of 1919-1921-a virtual sin to the pro-Soviet Left. Finally, Poland was the victim of a double assault in September 1939 by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Hence any mention of Poland immediately raised the issue of Communist collaboration with the Nazis and the brief era when Hitler and Stalin were allies. Hence for the Left, Poland was at least an obstacle and at most an object of hatred. There was no pro-Polish element in Hollywood to counter the Left’s powerful animus against Poland.

Reviews here and here

Old habits die hard

Pete Seeger hated Solidarity.

Pete Seeger Remembrance of an Historic Night. Not What You'd Expect Me to Say

He was a real lover of freedom and justice.

A hero turns 100

Poland’s unsung war-time hero turns 100

General Stefan Ba³uk, one of the last living members of the elite special-operations paratroopers of Poland's WWII Home Army celebrates his 100th birthday today.

Having fought in the September 1939 Campaign, he then joined the Polish armed forces in the West, serving with the 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade.

After training in Glasgow, Scotland, to be a parachute commando, he was dropped into Poland in April 1944 and worked for the Home Army’s department engaged in the production of false documents for Polish intelligence officers, made photo documentation of German military installations in Warsaw and took part in the Warsaw Uprising.

After the war he was imprisoned by the communists, and subsequently worked as a taxi driver for several years, before focusing on photography.

Siege of Vienna

First posted 12 September 2003


In the summer of 1683 the Ottoman Turks advanced up the Danube, occupied Hungary, and, in July, laid siege to Vienna. They had 200,00 men and over 300 cannon. The defenders of the city numbered less than 22,000 only 6,000 of whom were regular soldiers; the remainder were civilians pressed into service at the start of the siege.

The relief of the city was complicated by European politics. Louis XIV of France hoped to gain German territory on the Rhine while the Hapsburgs were occupied in the east. To that end, he worked to create am anti-Hapsburg alliance with Hungary and Poland which would deny Austria aid against the Turks. (Incidentally, the Ottoman artillery were commanded by a Frenchman, a former Capuchin no less).

By September, conditions were desperate inside the city- low supplies, disease, and weakening defenses. The Hapsburgs had raised a relief army of only 21,000. But, fortunately, Poland had spurned Louis's maneuvers and sent an army of 24,000 under their King John Sobieski.

On September 12, the two relief armies and the forces inside the city attacked the besiegers. The critical moment came in mid-afternoon when Sobieski sent his cavalry into the heart of the Ottoman camp. The battle became a rout. The next day the Polish king wrote his wife: "the Vizer took such hurried flight that he had time to escape with only one horse."

He also noted the Turks "left behind a mass of innocent Austrian people, particularly women; but they butchered as many as they could." Separate from that slaughter, the Ottomans had sent 67,000 Austrians east as slaves and 14,000 girls to the harems of Constantinople.

Sobieski's troops captured the Ottoman battle flag ("The green standard of the Prophet") in the fighting. This he sent to the Pope with the message "Veni vidi, Deus Vicit" ("I came, I saw, God conquered").

The lifting of the siege is usually marked as the turning point for the Ottoman empire. For centuries they had advanced against Europe, conquering the Byzantium empire, capturing lands in the Balkans and islands in the Mediterranean. After 1683 they began 250 years of retreat. (Funny how many of these critical turning points find the Poles fighting on the right side).

Today is the 330th anniversary of the lifting of the siege.