Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Eisenhower did not mention to Bradley or Patton that he had already consulted the Soviets about the possibility of dispatching U.S. forces to the Czech capital—an idea they had predictably quashed. “We Communists realized that if we let American troops enter Prague, they would be our liberators,” a Czech communist official observed years later. “The result would be an important political shift in the bourgeoisie’s favor.”

  On May 9, the day after the European war ended and four days after the Prague uprising began, the Red Army reached the outskirts of the city. Prague was now in Soviet hands, as the rest of the country soon would be. “No [Czech] citizen could misunderstand the implication of the military strategy of those last days,” the Czech diplomat Josef Korbel noted. “The West was not interested in Czechoslovak democracy; its fate was left to the Communist and Soviet forces. This realization had a shattering effect on the morale and psychology of the Czech people: after six years of agony, as in a kind of nightmare, they watched something like Munich happening once again.” Sir Orme Sargent, an undersecretary in the British Foreign Office, told a friend that, as a result of the Americans’ failure to push on to Prague, “the Russians would be glorified, and with them the Czech Communists….Czechoslovakia was now definitely lost to the West.”

  When the Red Army finally did enter the city, its forces appeared to Prague’s despairing residents to be just as predatory as the departing Germans. Acting more like conquerors than liberators, they treated the Czechs, their supposed friends and allies, in much the same ruthless manner they were now treating the citizens of the collapsed Third Reich. Eyewitness accounts reported widespread rape and drunkenness, wholesale looting, and wanton destruction of property.

  Patton’s army, meanwhile, remained in place forty miles away.

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  FROM THE EASTERN SLOVAKIAN town of Košice, Edvard Beneš watched apprehensively as the events in Prague unfolded. No one was more anxious to see it liberated by the Third Army than Beneš, who, in a voice quivering with emotion, blurted out, “Thank God, thank God,” when he heard that Patton had entered Czechoslovakia. He immediately sent a telegram of congratulations and welcome to the U.S. general.

  Like the British government, Beneš had developed severe misgivings about his cozy relationship with Stalin, which he was now beginning to view as a pact with the devil. Under the treaty he had signed with the Soviets in December 1943, he had agreed to return to Czechoslovakia by way of Moscow, as Stalin had ordered. When he and his government did so in March 1945, the Soviet leader demanded that the Czech communists who had spent the war in Moscow be appointed to head most of the major ministries in Czechoslovakia’s postwar government. Beneš, with some hesitation, finally agreed. Only two top posts were not given to the communists: justice and foreign affairs, which continued to be headed by Jan Masaryk.

  Clearly worried about the future, Beneš had gone to Moscow “without enthusiasm and with grave doubts,” recalled František Moravec, Czechoslovakia’s intelligence chief. Indeed, the Czech president had tried to postpone the trip on grounds of illness. But Stalin had insisted, and now, according to Moravec, Beneš “was moving toward the inevitable destiny which he had prepared for himself and his people by his decision to put his faith into Soviet hands.”

  Throughout the war, Beneš had shown little reluctance in following Stalin’s orders and indeed had dismayed those around him with his obsequiousness to the Russians. “Beneš dealt with the Soviet Union,” Josef Korbel observed, “not as one of the inescapable influences of Europe with which Czechoslovakia would necessarily have to reckon, but as an influence so compelling to the re-emergence and preservation of Czechoslovakia as to justify the bargaining away of his country’s central values….As at Munich, he had done little to stand up for the independence of his country.”

  Echoing that view, Moravec recalled how, late in the war, a Soviet diplomat, who in fact was an NKVD agent, had told him that Moravec would be appointed to a high post in the postwar Czech government provided he turned over information to the Soviets about the British intelligence service and about Beneš’s postwar political and military plans. “I asked him how he could dare to ask me to spy on my President and my British colleagues, whose hospitality I had been accepting for six years of war,” Moravec said. When the intelligence chief informed Beneš about the encounter, the president seemed shocked but told him that the Soviets “should not be judged by western standards of morality.”

  Not long afterward, Moravec realized that Beneš had also been approached by Soviet agents with certain demands. At one point, the president mentioned to Moravec the problem of “fascist elements in our army.” The astonished Moravec later noted that “we had no fascists in our army. But Beneš repeated that the problem had to be faced: the fascists must be silenced and removed. The communists obviously had given him a list of persons they considered politically unreliable…i.e. all those who did not happen to be Communists.”

  In early April, Beneš and his now communist-dominated government, following in the Red Army’s wake, finally arrived in Prague. Having defied the Soviets, Moravec was no longer part of Beneš’s administration: he had been fired as head of Czech intelligence and deputy chief of staff of the country’s armed forces. From then on, he wrote in his memoirs, “I was treated by the Communists as Enemy No. 1.”

  Yet even as the communists began to consolidate their political gains, the country regained several of the freedoms it had enjoyed before the war. Newspapers were allowed to publish varying points of view; bookstores sold books from the West, both current and classic, that had been banned under the Nazis; and movie theaters showed American and British films. Most Czechs basked in this seeming return to prewar normality. But some, like Moravec, who had seen firsthand what the Soviets were capable of, knew that a sword of Damocles was poised over their country, hanging by the thinnest of threads.

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  FOR THE POLES, the sword had already fallen. Their future had been settled at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, three months before V-E Day. At that point, thanks to the Soviets’ military successes, Stalin unquestionably held the initiative in eastern Europe. By the time he sat down with Roosevelt and Churchill in early February 1945, the Red Army had swept the Germans out of most of Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia and was in effective control of Bulgaria and Romania. Soviet troops had marched into Austria and were advancing deep into Germany, with units on the Oder River, just forty-five miles east of Berlin.

  The question of Poland dominated Yalta, taking up more time and causing more friction than any other subject on the agenda. Nonetheless, the discussions were an exercise in futility. As much as Churchill tried to convince himself otherwise, Stalin was determined to rule all of Poland, insisting that the puppet government he had established in the summer of 1944 would take control of the country after the war. He was supported by Roosevelt, who said that “coming from America,” he had a “distant view on the Polish question” and made plain that his interest in it was essentially limited to its effect on his own political future.

  Stalin was also aided by Roosevelt’s apparent lack of concern about leaving the Soviet Union as the Continent’s dominant military and political power. FDR made matters worse, in Churchill’s view, by telling Stalin that he planned to pull all U.S. troops out of Europe, even including Germany, after two years. To thwart Soviet dominance, Churchill “fought like a tiger” at the summit to make sure that France’s postwar role in Europe would be as strong as possible. By doing so, he thought, both Britain and France could serve—to some extent, at least—as counterweights to Russia. Under heavy pressure from the prime minister, Roosevelt and Stalin reluctantly agreed to make France one of the occupying powers in Germany.

  However, when the discussion turned to the question of creating an independent government in Poland, Churchill, who had repeatedly promised the Poles in London that he would win back their freedom, did not put up the same kind of fight as he had for France. True, early
in the discussion, he did make the argument that “Poland must be mistress in her own house and captain of her own soul.” Stalin, however, had no patience with such high-flown rhetoric and would not change his mind. Faced with Stalin’s intransigence and receiving no support from Roosevelt, Churchill gave in. He and Roosevelt accepted the Soviet puppet government, albeit one with some democratic window dressing. Under the agreement, the government would be enlarged to include several leaders from “Polish émigré circles,” and free elections to create a permanent government would be held as soon as possible. Roosevelt and Churchill decided to take Stalin’s word that the voting would be free of coercion, even though the Soviets had never allowed this type of election in their own country.

  The announcement that the two Western Allied leaders had handed over the governance of their nation to a Soviet-controlled communist regime came as a stunning blow to the Poles in Britain. Before climbing into his RAF bomber on the night of February 13, a young Polish navigator, who had been a prisoner in one of Stalin’s gulags early in the war, sat down in despair to write a letter to a friend. “Just think, I and so many others knocked about the world, fleeing like criminals, starving, hiding in forests—all only in order to fight for…what?” He was flying that night, he wrote. “It’s the proper thing to do, they say, although anger and despair are in our hearts….If the Germans get me now, I won’t even know what I am dying for. For Poland? For Britain? Or for Russia?” Ten days later, he was killed on another mission over Germany.

  Calling the Yalta Agreement a basic violation of the principles for which the Allies had fought, the Polish government in exile refused to accept it. The government, however, did instruct Polish forces to continue fighting, to “keep peace, dignity and solidarity, as well as to maintain brotherhood in arms with the soldiers of Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and France.”

  In Italy, General Władysław Anders and the men of the Polish II Corps, most of whom had also been in Stalin’s gulags early in the war, were inclined at first to lay down their arms. But II Corps, which had captured Monte Cassino in May 1944 and was regarded as among the best units in the British Eighth Army, was playing far too important a role in the Italian campaign to be taken out of the line now, and the British high command denied Anders permission to withdraw his men. The Polish general obeyed, ordering them to fight on. The Polish corps continued its drive, storming and capturing Bologna a few weeks before the end of the war.

  In their sweep north, as the men of II Corps liberated one small Italian town after another, they were surrounded by crowds of smiling, cheering people, many of them shouting “Viva Polonia!” Women threw flowers, men handed them glasses of wine, girls hugged and kissed them. For the Poles, it was a bittersweet time. “On the one hand, I was happy that I could bring freedom to these people,” recalled one soldier. “But on the other hand, I was disappointed that this was not a Polish street that I was walking on, that I wasn’t bringing freedom to my people and my nation, that this was not the fulfillment of our dreams.”

  Scarcely a month after the Yalta Agreement was signed, reports reached London of mass Soviet arrests of Poles in Kraków and other major cities. Thousands of Poles had already been shipped off to Soviet gulags, while others, mostly Home Army officers and men, were being accused by the NKVD of spying for Britain and the London Poles, whom the Soviets called “fascists.” The Home Army troops “are starved, beaten, and tortured,” according to one account from the Polish underground. “There are many deaths.”

  In late March 1945, sixteen prominent leaders of the Polish resistance disappeared after being invited to a meeting with Soviet military commanders. A number of the missing men would have been prime candidates for top positions in a broadly based postwar Polish government. For the next six weeks, Soviets ignored repeated British inquiries about them; finally, they revealed that the Poles had been arrested. The leaders were later tried and sentenced to long terms in prison. Four of them died there.

  Notwithstanding all these reports of savage Soviet treatment of the Poles, Britain and the United States, still chasing the chimera of “Allied unity,” withdrew formal recognition from the Polish government in exile on July 5, 1945, and bestowed it on the communist government in Warsaw. “The Poles,” Max Hastings noted, “ended the war as they began it, human sacrifices to the reality of power.”

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  NEAR THE END OF JULY, Britain held its first general election since 1935. When the votes were tallied, Winston Churchill, so inspirational in wartime, had been unceremoniously turned out of office by weary, war-sick voters, who decided that they preferred the Labour Party to manage their crippled economy. The voters seemed to think that Churchill, having spent almost his entire life dealing with foreign affairs, wasn’t up to these new domestic challenges. They had a point. Now seventy years old, he was still looking mainly abroad, more and more concerned about the growing Soviet dominion over most of central and eastern Europe. The situation in Poland especially haunted him. From his unaccustomed seat on the minority benches of Parliament, he urged the British not to turn their backs on the Poles, failing to mention the large part he had played in settling Poland’s fate.

  The new prime minister, Clement Attlee, and his Labour government felt rather differently about what was going on. If anything, they were more eager than Churchill had been to establish and maintain good relations with Moscow and were disinclined to do anything that might jeopardize the achievement of that objective.

  At that point, more than 200,000 members of the Polish military were in Britain—veterans of campaigns on virtually every front in Europe and the Middle East, from Norway and Libya to France and Italy. Attlee’s government called the presence of the Poles a “source of increasing political embarrassment” and pressured them hard to return to communist Poland.

  Britain’s military brass, particularly the RAF’s high command, responded to that pressure with fury. While understanding the rationale behind the government’s “cold and dispassionate attitude,” the RAF made it very clear that it would not turn its back on the “strongest, the most loyal and faithful, and the most persistent European ally of all.” An Air Ministry report declared in January 1946 that Polish pilots “are part and parcel of the RAF, they have fought with us during the whole of the war, they were with us in the Battle of Britain, and with us from D-Day onwards to ‘the kill’ in Germany. To contemplate, in their tragic hour, anything short of sympathetic and generous treatment is unthinkable.”

  The report was an indication of how dramatically the RAF’s attitude toward the Poles had changed. When the Polish pilots had arrived in England six years earlier, they had been greeted with disdain by many of their British counterparts. But their courage, tenacity, and flying skill—and, above all, their crucial role in winning the Battle of Britain—had swept away most of the prejudice and replaced it with gratitude and friendship.

  Although the Attlee government rejected the RAF’s appeal for preferential treatment for the 14,000 Polish pilots and ground crew in Britain, it halted its campaign to try to force the Poles to go back to their homeland. The vast majority of Polish military personnel had already made it clear that they would not return to a Soviet-controlled Poland, even though most had homes and families there. Resigned to the reality that a great many Poles would be staying in Britain, the British government set up an organization called the Polish Resettlement Corps, which offered them temporary jobs until they could find permanent work.

  Having been given asylum, tens of thousands of Poles settled in postwar Britain, trying to rebuild their shattered lives. General Anders remained there, as did General Stanisław Sosabowski, the commander of the Polish parachute brigade at Arnhem, and Count Edward Raczyński, Poland’s ambassador to Britain, who praised Britain’s magnanimity in his memoirs. “Throughout our history, there is no country in which Polish exiles have enjoyed more generous and imaginative help,” Raczyński wrote. “The kindly attitude of the authorities has been matched
by the friendliness of the British people.”

  Raczyński, however, had far greater advantages than other Poles. He had lived for many years in London and knew it well. He also had money and high social status; most of his compatriots did not. In the bleak austerity of postwar Britain, they struggled to find jobs and decent places to live. They also grappled with the grim probability of a lifetime of permanent exile, of never seeing their country or loved ones again.

  Adding to their pain was the Attlee government’s attempt to draw a veil over Poland’s many contributions to the Allied triumph. On June 8, 1946, Britain staged an elaborate victory parade, inviting armed forces from more than thirty Allied nations to London in a joyous celebration of their collective effort. Czechs and Norwegians marched down the Mall that day, as did Chinese and Dutch, Frenchmen and Iranians, Belgians and Australians, Canadians and South Africans, Sikhs and Arabs, and many, many more. However, the Poles—the fourth largest contributor of manpower to the Allied effort in Europe—were nowhere to be seen. They had been deliberately and specifically barred by the government, for fear of offending Stalin.

  While church bells pealed and crowds cheered, Polish war veterans stood on the sidewalks and watched. One Polish pilot looked on in silence as the parade passed. Then he turned to walk away. An old woman standing next to him looked at him quizzically. “Why are you crying, young man?” she asked.

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  AS THE POLISH EXILES worked to make new lives for themselves in Britain and elsewhere, about 30,000 of their countrymen—15 percent of the Poles in Great Britain at the end of the war—did decide to return home. Their yearning for their country and families proved stronger than their fear of a future under Soviet control. Among those who went back was Marian Rejewski, the young Polish cryptographer who had first broken the Enigma cipher. Rejewski had spent the last two years of the war in Britain but never had been allowed inside Bletchley Park. At the end of the war, virtually no one working there had any idea how much they owed him and the other Polish cryptographers who had made Ultra possible.