Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Both Eisenhower and Bradley were swayed by Gallois’s report. On August 22, Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) ordered the French 2nd Armored Division, supported by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, to race toward Paris. Three days later, on the morning of August 25, Leclerc’s troops reclaimed the delirious capital of their country. Throngs of Parisians embraced and kissed the soldiers as they marched and rode by. Glasses of champagne and cognac were handed to them. People climbed up onto the moving tanks, threw flowers and food, waved handkerchiefs and flags. High above the crowds, the great church bells of Paris—in Notre Dame, Sacré-Coeur, Sainte-Chapelle—rocked the city with their joyous peals. Not even gunfire from German snipers and sporadic duels between Allied and German tanks could dampen the celebration.

  Parisians celebrate the liberation of their city by Allied troops.

  De Gaulle’s triumphant entry into Paris later that afternoon foiled the communists’ scheme to establish a government in the capital before he arrived. The following afternoon, in a carefully planned scenario, de Gaulle introduced himself to the people of Paris. After relighting the eternal flame at France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the general, followed by hundreds of his men, marched down the Champs-Élysées to Notre Dame. From sidewalks, rooftops, windows, and balconies, hundreds of thousands of Parisians lustily cheered him.

  That evening, the CBS war correspondent Larry LeSueur tried to capture for his American listeners the jubilant mood of the city. “Tonight,” he said, “all Paris is dancing in the streets.”

  —

  DURING THE LAST DAYS of August, while the people of Paris were still toasting their liberators with champagne, thousands of Polish resistance fighters and civilians slipped down manholes and disappeared into Warsaw’s stinking, night-black sewers. The sewers had become the Poles’ only means of escape from the shelled and bombed-out ruin that Stare Miasto had become. Against all odds, elements of the Home Army had held out for almost a month there. Now cut off from ammunition, food, and water, they were on the verge of annihilation, and Bór-Komorowski gave the order to evacuate. Even so, fighting continued in other parts of the city. In Berlin, Himmler remarked to his lieutenants, “For five weeks, we have been fighting the battle for Warsaw. This is the most bitter struggle of all we have had since the start of the war.”

  An RAF bomber pilot who flew over Warsaw during the uprising later remarked that if Dante could have seen the burning city, he would have had a realistic picture of his Inferno. Yet few people in the West had any idea of Warsaw’s anguish. Except for some short news accounts and a few editorials, the drama, heroism, and tragedy of the uprising went largely unnoticed in Britain and the United States. The liberation of Paris and the Allied advance toward Germany were dominating newspaper and magazine headlines and radio broadcasts.

  There was, however, one major exception. In a piece called “A Tale of Two Cities,” The Economist, an influential British political and international affairs journal, provided a grim, “heartbreaking” comparison between Warsaw’s struggle for survival and the relatively easy liberation of Paris. Almost exactly five years earlier, The Economist pointed out, just three nations—France, Britain, and Poland—had gone to war against Germany. Since that time, the British, with help from their allies, prominently including the Poles, had managed to hold on to their freedom, and the French, with even more Allied help, were recovering theirs. But now the Poles were trying to drive out the Germans, and in this “vastly bloodier and more desperate battle,” they have been “almost unsupported by their Allies, materially or even morally.”

  Warsaw’s Stare Miasto (Old Town) in ruins after the 1944 uprising.

  The Russians’ refusal to provide military support or to allow their allies the use of their air bases was “intolerable,” The Economist added. “The rising in Warsaw is a glorious contribution to the Allied cause, and it cannot be refused. Talks are now going on about aid to Warsaw….In honor and expediency alike, they should have only one result, and that speedily. But, incredibly, the present prospect is said to be precisely the opposite. To our joy in victory, it seems that the Allies may have to add the ultimate shame of desertion.”

  The agitated Churchill was making a belated effort to forestall that outcome. He already had given in to Stalin on the question of eastern Poland; now the issue of a free and independent Poland was obviously in jeopardy. If Warsaw were ruined and the Home Army wiped out, Stalin would have a much easier time installing a regime of his own creation. The Kremlin, Churchill concluded, “did not mean to let the spirit of Poland rise again in Warsaw.”

  In a War Cabinet meeting, he discussed with its members the possibility of sending bombers to help Warsaw and having them land on Soviet airfields without permission. But in the end, the British government decided against taking unilateral action. It was, Churchill wrote after the war, another in the “terrible and even humbling submissions [that] must at times be made to the general aim.”

  Making one final push to aid the Poles, Churchill renewed his appeal to FDR to support a plan to send large-scale relief to Warsaw and also, if need be, to “gate-crash” Soviet airfields. The president, who was facing reelection in two months and wanted no hint of dissension within the alliance to harm his chances, remained unwilling to confront Stalin. Responding to Churchill’s plea, Roosevelt said he had been informed by intelligence sources that the Germans were now in full control of Warsaw: “The problem of relief for the Poles…has therefore unfortunately been solved by delay and by German action, and there now appears to be nothing we can do to assist them.” (FDR was wrong: the uprising would continue for another month.)

  Six weeks after the insurrection began, Stalin, knowing that the Home Army was doomed, withdrew his objections to the use of Soviet bases by U.S. bombers. On September 18, more than a hundred B-17s dropped containers containing submachine and machine guns, pistols, grenades, medical equipment, and food rations. The supply mission was far too late; most of the containers drifted into parts of the city already reclaimed by the Nazis. “Had the containers been dropped in the first days, when two-thirds of the city was in our hands, they might have decided the outcome of the battle,” Bór-Komorowski later remarked. Stalin, having scored propaganda points for his onetime gesture of supposed magnanimity, rejected requests from the British and U.S. military for repeat missions.

  When the commanders of the Home Army launched their uprising on August 1, they believed they would have to hold out for only four or five days before help came, which was, as it happened, the exact scenario that unfolded in Paris. In Warsaw, however, the Home Army and the city’s other residents held out—with no reinforcements at all—for sixty-three days. As SS troops pushed the Poles into smaller and smaller areas of the city, hope still flickered that outside aid would arrive in time to save what was left of them and Warsaw. But help did not come, and in early October, even hope died.

  Food, water, and ammunition were gone. Disease was rampant. In the few districts still held by the Home Army, dozens of people were crammed into every basement and cellar, many on the verge of death. Faced with the prospect of total annihilation of the city’s population, the Home Army leadership decided it had no choice but to capitulate. At 8 P.M. on October 2, Bór-Komorowski signed a surrender agreement at German headquarters.The following day, the Polish underground radio station sent a farewell message to London. The announcer’s voice cracked with emotion as he said, “We have been free for two months. Today, once more we must go into captivity.”

  A staggering 200,000-plus people—about a quarter of the Warsaw residents who had survived the war to that point—had been killed in the uprising. All those left were ordered by the Germans to evacuate their ruined city. On the morning of October 5, the survivors emerged from their cellars and shelters, most of them soon to begin an existence in German POW, concentration, and labor camps. Leading the procession out of Warsaw were Bór-Komorowski and his Home Army troops. A phalanx of SS men a
waited them several hundred yards away. As the Poles moved forward, Bór-Komorowski began singing the Polish national anthem. With tears in their eyes, his men and the civilians behind them joined in the hymn. Their voices swelling in intensity, they sang “Poland Has Not Yet Perished as Long as We Live” as they marched toward the waiting Germans.

  Hitler did not massacre the survivors of Warsaw as he earlier had vowed to do, but he made life as hellish for them as possible. Many thousands died in German captivity before the war was over. Auschwitz was the destination for more than six thousand of the city’s residents, mostly women and girls, a number of whom were Jews who had been hidden by Polish Christians in Warsaw and whose real identities remained secret. They were not sent to the gas chambers, but many succumbed from cold, starvation, disease, and physical abuse before the Soviets entered the camp in the spring of 1945.

  More than twelve thousand other women from Warsaw ended up in the unspeakable squalor of the vastly overcrowded Ravensbrück camp, where, like at Auschwitz, there was virtually no food and the sanitary conditions were appalling. Hundreds of the women were pregnant, the result of rape by German soldiers during the uprising. When the babies were born, they were deliberately starved to death. Many of their mothers died as well.

  Hitler, meanwhile, followed through on his pledge to destroy Warsaw. Nazi sappers divided the city into districts, each given a date for destruction. House by house, block by block, district by district, the remnants of the Polish capital were systematically and methodically burned and dynamited. All that was left when Russian troops finally “liberated” the city in January 1945 were ruins and the unburied dead.

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  PARIS, BY CONTRAST, was remarkably untouched when de Gaulle took control of it in late August. There was little mourning there—the uprising had claimed fewer than two thousand lives—and the city, its beauty unmarred by bombs, was once again open for both business and pleasure. The Allies took over hundreds of hotels for their own use, and within days a frenzied round of partying began. Most Parisians—and the French in general—had very little to eat, but there was a thriving black market in food, liquor, and wine for those who could afford the exorbitant prices. The city’s best restaurants, which had served members of the Wehrmacht and Gestapo just a few days earlier, were now welcoming hordes of Allied officers and journalists.

  De Gaulle, however, was not among them. His sole focus at the time was to consolidate his authority over Paris and the rest of the country and to mobilize its resources for the liberation of all of France and the final Allied assault on Germany. Within days, he had effectively disbanded the French resistance, bringing its units under the control of the regular French army and ordering SOE officers who had worked with resistance fighters to return to England.

  The general spent much of the fall of 1944 touring France’s main provincial centers and meeting their residents. In Besançon, a bustling city in the east of the country, Eric Sevareid stood in the middle of a huge crowd “jammed elbow to elbow” for two hours in a cold September rain, everyone patiently awaiting de Gaulle. Having lived in France for several years before the war, Sevareid was intimately familiar with the sourly cynical attitude of most of the French toward politics and politicians. But as he gazed at the faces around him, he observed “an intentness, an almost fanatical look of reverence such as I had never dreamed to see in this country.”

  Sevareid compared the assured, poised de Gaulle he saw that day with the rigid, unsmiling neophyte leader he had observed leading a meager parade of Free French troops in London on Bastille Day 1940. In those four years, Sevareid remarked, de Gaulle “had learned how to gesture, how to speak confidentially and colloquially to the people. He asked the people of Besançon to sing the Marseillaise with him, and then he walked slowly down the narrow streets, waving and touching the outstretched hands of hundreds. So it went, in every city and town he visited, the voice and myth becoming Gallic reality. I remembered how, in those other days, no Frenchman had seemed great to the French. Others had—Roosevelt, Churchill—but never one of their own. Now there was a great Frenchman too, and they accepted him as such.”

  So had much of the rest of the world. By early fall 1944, most of the Allied nations, including those in occupied Europe, had recognized de Gaulle and his committee as the provisional government of France. Roosevelt resisted for as long as he could, but, finding himself isolated on the issue, he finally gave in. On October 23, the United States recognized the general’s committee. FDR made the announcement without first informing Churchill, who, despite growing misgivings, had loyally continued to follow Roosevelt’s lead on matters involving de Gaulle. Caught flat-footed, the British government scrambled to issue its own announcement of recognition.

  Three weeks later, Churchill made his first visit to liberated France. Given the extremely turbulent relationship between the prime minister and de Gaulle, both French and British officials feared the worst. “We all tremble for the result,” said a British Foreign Office staffer. He and the others needn’t have worried. As insufferable as de Gaulle had been in adversity, he was, as one historian wrote, “magnanimous in victory.” On November 11—a bright, cold Armistice Day—the people of Paris and their leader gave Winston Churchill a welcome so warm and joyous that “it had to be seen to be believed,” marveled Duff Cooper, the new British ambassador to France. “It was greater than anything I have ever known.”

  More than half a million Frenchmen lined the flag-bedecked Champs-Élysées and nearby streets as de Gaulle, Churchill, and the top officials of their governments strode down the wide thoroughfare to a dais half a mile away. Some in the massive crowd “were cheering; some were laughing; some were sobbing; all were delirious,” remembered General Pug Ismay, who was among the officials in the procession. “All we heard was ‘Vive Churchill!’ ‘Vive de Gaulle!’‘Vive l’Angleterre!’ ‘Vive la France!” From the dais, the prime minister and general stood at attention as French and British troops paraded past. On de Gaulle’s orders, a French band played a popular military march, “Le Père la Victoire” (“Father Victory”). “For you,” de Gaulle said to the beaming Churchill. In his memoirs, de Gaulle noted, “It was only his due.”

  Caught up in the emotion of the day, both leaders put behind them, at least temporarily, their bitter antagonisms. For Churchill, it was a magical moment. From the day his beloved France had fallen in 1940, he had insisted to all naysayers, including Roosevelt and many in the prime minister’s own government, that it would, like a phoenix, rise from the ashes one day. That day was now here, and he paid tribute to the Frenchman who had shared his belief and done so much to make it a reality. In a speech to French resistance leaders, Churchill described de Gaulle as the “incontestable leader” of France. “From time to time,” the prime minister conceded, “I have had lively arguments with him about matters relating to this difficult war, but I am absolutely sure that you ought to rally round your leader and do your utmost to make France united and indivisible.”

  De Gaulle returned the favor, acknowledging the vast debt he and France owed to Churchill and the British. At a lunch honoring Churchill, he noted, “We would not have seen today if our old and gallant ally, England…had not deployed the extraordinary determination to win and the magnificent courage which saved the freedom of the world….I do know that France…will not have forgotten in a thousand years what was accomplished in this war through the blood, sweat, and tears of the noble people whom the Right Honorable Winston Churchill is leading to the heights of one of the greatest glories in this world. We raise our glasses in honor of Winston Churchill…and England, our ally, in the past, the present, and the future.”

  Though clearly heartfelt at the moment, that concept of partnership and unity would be badly strained in the difficult months to come. And as the British and French officials toasted each other, a more immediate shadow darkened their celebration: Allied victory, which had seemed so tantalizingly close at the time of Paris’s liberation, had s
lipped, for the moment, out of reach.

  After the liberation of Paris, the Allied juggernaut continued its mad dash across France. In the north, the Twenty-first Army Group, commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, moved along a front sixty miles wide, covering 250 miles in four days and freeing a string of French cities and towns. Belgium’s turn came next.

  Montgomery’s forces, which included British, Canadian, Polish, Belgian, Czech, and Dutch troops, began marching into Belgian cities in the first days of September. On September 3, the Welsh Guards liberated Brussels. After watching its delirious residents throwing flowers and bottles of beer into Allied jeeps and trucks, a British correspondent wrote, “The joy of Paris was a pallid thing compared to this extravaganza.”

  The next day, Antwerp was freed—a particular triumph because of its deepwater port, the second largest in Europe, which before the war had handled up to a thousand ships a month. Until Antwerp’s liberation, only one other port, Cherbourg in northern France, had been available to unload the supplies needed to continue the Allied drive toward Germany. At that moment, all three Allied armies were running desperately short of just about everything, especially gasoline, which made Antwerp more important to the Allied cause than Paris or any other liberated city.

  It was thanks to the Belgian resistance that Montgomery’s troops were able to seize the huge thousand-acre port complex intact. Before his multinational force reached Antwerp, resistance fighters had overwhelmed the port’s German garrison, preventing its soldiers from detonating the explosives they had defensively prepositioned throughout the facility. Resistance members also acted as guides for British tanks as they threaded their way around entrenched German positions outside Antwerp and entered the city along a less defended route.