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Poland Alone: Britain, SOE and the Collapse of the Polish Resistance 1944
Poland was the "tripwire" that brought Britain into World War II, but it was largely the fear of the new Nazi-Soviet Pact rather than the cementing of an old relationship that created the formal alliance. But neither Britain, nor Poland’s older ally, France, had the material means to prevent Poland being overrun in 1939. The broadcast, "Poland is no longer alone" had a distinctly hollow ring. During the next four years the Polish Government in exile and armed forces made a significant contribution to the allied war effort; in return the Polish Home Army received a paltry 600 tons of supplies. Poland Alone focuses on the bloody Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the Polish Resistance attempted to gain control of their city from the German Army. They expected help from the Allies but received none, and they were left helpless as the Russians moved in. The War ended with over five million Poles dead, three million of whom died in the concentration camps. Jonathan Walker examines whether Britain could have done more to save the Polish people in their crisis year of 1944, dealing with many different aspects such as the actions of the RAF and SOE, the role of Polish Couriers, the failure of British Intelligence. and the culpability of the British press.
- GenresHistoryWorld War II
336 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 14, 2016
This is a captivating account of the betrayal of Poland. I read this book in part because I wanted to better understand Christina Granville's experience in the SOE. In the account of her life as a resistance fighter, I was puzzled by the Allies standing by while Warsaw burned. This book makes it clear that letting Poland go down the tubes was the intention of the Allies all along.
"Poland Alone" is a must-read for anyone interested in WWII. Jonathan Walker gives a reasoned, in-depth view of the failure of the Allies to effectively come to Poland's aid, and covers the complex issues that partly explain their shortcomings.
The naivety of Churchill and FDR in terms of Stalin is hard to witness, but then I'm reminded that Hitler and Stalin fooled much of the world for awhile. It makes you wonder what masks and spin we are being fooled by now, how clear-sighted our leaders are, and what hidden agendas may be in play.
WWII may be considered the war that was fought for all the right reasons, but the sacrifice of Poland was not right by any account. The reader can see the cold war beginning before the ink is dry on the Yalta Agreement.
"Poland Alone" is a must-read for anyone interested in WWII. Jonathan Walker gives a reasoned, in-depth view of the failure of the Allies to effectively come to Poland's aid, and covers the complex issues that partly explain their shortcomings.
The naivety of Churchill and FDR in terms of Stalin is hard to witness, but then I'm reminded that Hitler and Stalin fooled much of the world for awhile. It makes you wonder what masks and spin we are being fooled by now, how clear-sighted our leaders are, and what hidden agendas may be in play.
WWII may be considered the war that was fought for all the right reasons, but the sacrifice of Poland was not right by any account. The reader can see the cold war beginning before the ink is dry on the Yalta Agreement.
February 6, 2022
A great overview of the Polish underground forces during the war and their cooperation with the London based government in exile and the British intelligence forces monitoring their fight. The Polish underground Home Army managed to retrieve a fallen V-2 missile. The vital parts were sent to London for analysis. This was the first undamaged missile Brits got their hands on.
The author brings forward a little known fact about the Warsaw uprising in 1944, when Russians reached its eastern suburbs. On 27th of July the Governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fisher ordered 100,000 able-bodied Poles to report the following day to dig defences around the city. There was no response so on 30th of July Himmler himself issued a new order for 200,000 to report. The underground knew that this order would deprive them of its manpower. However, they also knew that the Germans would exact terrible retribution on a population who failed to respond. They knew that they had to act quickly. At the final conference on 31 July they decided to raise the following day.
He also describes an attitude of the British officials about the mass murder of Poles in Jews by the Germans. When the information on the mass killings were sent to London, the chief of the Joint Intelligence Committee, William Cavendish-Bentinck, expressed his opinion that this information was not trustworthy. According to him, "the Poles, and to a far greater extend the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up".
The author brings forward a little known fact about the Warsaw uprising in 1944, when Russians reached its eastern suburbs. On 27th of July the Governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fisher ordered 100,000 able-bodied Poles to report the following day to dig defences around the city. There was no response so on 30th of July Himmler himself issued a new order for 200,000 to report. The underground knew that this order would deprive them of its manpower. However, they also knew that the Germans would exact terrible retribution on a population who failed to respond. They knew that they had to act quickly. At the final conference on 31 July they decided to raise the following day.
He also describes an attitude of the British officials about the mass murder of Poles in Jews by the Germans. When the information on the mass killings were sent to London, the chief of the Joint Intelligence Committee, William Cavendish-Bentinck, expressed his opinion that this information was not trustworthy. According to him, "the Poles, and to a far greater extend the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up".
August 22, 2010
One of that books on history of Poland every foreigner should read. Author showed Poland standing practically alone in fight against Germany and Soviet Russia. I don't underestimate British help in taking in Polish soldiers and giving them a place to stay. But comparing efforts - Poles were fighting on every possible frontline in WW2 - Allies could do more.
April 17, 2024
THE TRAGIC STORY OF THE POLISH RESISTANCE
Stories of the French Resistance crowd library shelves. They’re among the most popular books about World War II. But many give a misleading picture of reality. Only about 500,000 French men and women worked for the Resistance during the five years of the war, a little over one percent of the country’s population. And most enlisted only in the final months of the war, as Allied victory came to seem more likely. By contrast with resistance movements in other occupied countries, especially Poland and Yugoslavia, the French effort was paltry. In Poland, the Underground State was complex, highly organized, and numerous from the outset. It featured its own administration, judiciary system, and educational facilities as well as an army organized along traditional military lines. In Poland Alone, historian Jonathan Walker tells the story of the extraordinary Polish Resistance movement from the perspective of the British, its sole ally.
A STRATEGIC ROLE IN THE ALLIED VICTORY?
The Polish Home Army (the Armia Krajowa (AK) was a force of between 300,000 and 500,000 fighters organized along traditional military lines. It was affiliated with the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. There were several other fighting forces, including the Peasants’ Battalions (which merged with the AK by 1944) and the Communist Armia Ludowa (which fought on its own). All told, there were an estimated 650,000 combatants active in the resistance to the Nazis. Opposing them was a total of more than one million Nazis troops in 1944 who otherwise might have helped tip the balance for Germany either in France or in Belarus, when the last massive Soviet offensive began shortly after the Normandy Invasion. From that perspective, the Polish Resistance played a strategic role in helping ensure Allied victory in the war.
The Home Army assisted the Allies in gathering intelligence, too. Poland’s most important contributions were the German Enigma machine it supplied to the British and the detailed information about the Nazi V-2 program that led to the bombing of the rocket facility at Peenemünde. But also “48% of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in between 1939 and 1945 came from Polish sources,” according to many scholars. “The total number of those reports is estimated at 80,000, and 85% of them were deemed high or better quality.”
THE APOCALYPTIC IMPACT OF THE WAR ON POLAND
Just as the heroics of the French Resistance distract American readers from the much more intense and longer-lasting resistance in Eastern Europe, the broader impact of the war in the West obscures its apocalyptic effects in the East. For example, of the six million who perished in the Holocaust, some 2.7 million were Polish. At war’s end, Warsaw was rubble. Its pre-war population of 1.3 million was 300,000 in 1945. And the country’s population as a whole shrank by more than two million despite a flood of refugees fleeing the Soviet Union at war’s end.
A BRITISH PERSPECTIVE ON THE POLISH RESISTANCE
Poland Alone is not a straightforward account of the extensive anti-Nazi movement in the country. It is, rather, an account of how sympathetic forces within Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) struggled with its detractors in the Air Ministry and the Foreign Office to support the Home Army. Author Jonathan Walker devotes great detail—excruciating detail, if the truth be told—to the internecine political battles in London over the use of scarce wartime resources to support the Polish, especially the aircraft of Britain’s Bomber Command.
Walker repeatedly notes bitter complaints from the Poles about the lack of support from British airdrops to its forces on the ground. The complaints eventually rose all the way to Winston Churchill himself. But by the closing months of the war, the Prime Minister was far from supportive. After all, he had secretly flown to Moscow to carve up Eastern Europe with Joseph Stalin, dramatically shifting Poland’s post-war borders. And the resulting agreement doomed Poland to Communist rule for more than forty years.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
British author Jonathan Walker is a member of the British Commission for Military History and Honorary Research Fellow in War Studies at the University of Birmingham. He became a full-time author after a successful business career. Walker has since written at least eight books of military history and contributed to several more. He was born in the UK in 1953.
Stories of the French Resistance crowd library shelves. They’re among the most popular books about World War II. But many give a misleading picture of reality. Only about 500,000 French men and women worked for the Resistance during the five years of the war, a little over one percent of the country’s population. And most enlisted only in the final months of the war, as Allied victory came to seem more likely. By contrast with resistance movements in other occupied countries, especially Poland and Yugoslavia, the French effort was paltry. In Poland, the Underground State was complex, highly organized, and numerous from the outset. It featured its own administration, judiciary system, and educational facilities as well as an army organized along traditional military lines. In Poland Alone, historian Jonathan Walker tells the story of the extraordinary Polish Resistance movement from the perspective of the British, its sole ally.
A STRATEGIC ROLE IN THE ALLIED VICTORY?
The Polish Home Army (the Armia Krajowa (AK) was a force of between 300,000 and 500,000 fighters organized along traditional military lines. It was affiliated with the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. There were several other fighting forces, including the Peasants’ Battalions (which merged with the AK by 1944) and the Communist Armia Ludowa (which fought on its own). All told, there were an estimated 650,000 combatants active in the resistance to the Nazis. Opposing them was a total of more than one million Nazis troops in 1944 who otherwise might have helped tip the balance for Germany either in France or in Belarus, when the last massive Soviet offensive began shortly after the Normandy Invasion. From that perspective, the Polish Resistance played a strategic role in helping ensure Allied victory in the war.
The Home Army assisted the Allies in gathering intelligence, too. Poland’s most important contributions were the German Enigma machine it supplied to the British and the detailed information about the Nazi V-2 program that led to the bombing of the rocket facility at Peenemünde. But also “48% of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in between 1939 and 1945 came from Polish sources,” according to many scholars. “The total number of those reports is estimated at 80,000, and 85% of them were deemed high or better quality.”
THE APOCALYPTIC IMPACT OF THE WAR ON POLAND
Just as the heroics of the French Resistance distract American readers from the much more intense and longer-lasting resistance in Eastern Europe, the broader impact of the war in the West obscures its apocalyptic effects in the East. For example, of the six million who perished in the Holocaust, some 2.7 million were Polish. At war’s end, Warsaw was rubble. Its pre-war population of 1.3 million was 300,000 in 1945. And the country’s population as a whole shrank by more than two million despite a flood of refugees fleeing the Soviet Union at war’s end.
A BRITISH PERSPECTIVE ON THE POLISH RESISTANCE
Poland Alone is not a straightforward account of the extensive anti-Nazi movement in the country. It is, rather, an account of how sympathetic forces within Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) struggled with its detractors in the Air Ministry and the Foreign Office to support the Home Army. Author Jonathan Walker devotes great detail—excruciating detail, if the truth be told—to the internecine political battles in London over the use of scarce wartime resources to support the Polish, especially the aircraft of Britain’s Bomber Command.
Walker repeatedly notes bitter complaints from the Poles about the lack of support from British airdrops to its forces on the ground. The complaints eventually rose all the way to Winston Churchill himself. But by the closing months of the war, the Prime Minister was far from supportive. After all, he had secretly flown to Moscow to carve up Eastern Europe with Joseph Stalin, dramatically shifting Poland’s post-war borders. And the resulting agreement doomed Poland to Communist rule for more than forty years.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
British author Jonathan Walker is a member of the British Commission for Military History and Honorary Research Fellow in War Studies at the University of Birmingham. He became a full-time author after a successful business career. Walker has since written at least eight books of military history and contributed to several more. He was born in the UK in 1953.
January 1, 2016
An enlightening and honest look at WW2 from the Polish perspective. Quite a different story to that I was taught at school.
There are a lot of names and dates, but this is still a relatively engaging read.
There are photographs which augment its presentation very well.
Same as other books in this genre, very selective presentation of facts and key situations, which leads ultimately to an incomplete and erroneous perspective on culpability.
There are a lot of names and dates, but this is still a relatively engaging read.
There are photographs which augment its presentation very well.
Same as other books in this genre, very selective presentation of facts and key situations, which leads ultimately to an incomplete and erroneous perspective on culpability.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews