“We can’t expect any support from them,” Mikolajczyk added, his voice a little too loud as relief flooded over him. “I doubt if they would even allow our aircraft to land and refuel in their territory. We would have to inform them that, while joint operations against any German forces caught between us would be welcome, the Red Army must not enter any territory that we have liberated. They still have plenty to do in the Baltic republics, and they would still have southern Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary to move through.”
“They will never agree to that,” Eden said categorically. “They’ll never accept being cut off from the most direct route to Berlin, over largely flat terrain, to a long, roundabout route through the mountains of Slovakia.”
“We’re hoping that the Germans will collapse before this becomes a major issue,” Mikolajczyk answered. “We won’t be able to stop the Red Army if they do break through the Germans and reach our territory, so we would let them pass, if pass they will. At least the very fact of such a problem would mean that our men would have to be alive and in possession of some real estate, and that is a problem we would love to have.”
“The presence of British and American troops should also help prevent things from coming to a head,” Marshall suggested, and Eden cocked his head noncommittally.
“I have to note that you did not ask that any representative from the Imperial General Staff be present,” Eden commented.
“We didn’t ask for representatives from any of the national contingents,” Mikolajczyk countered. “Just the commander of the Allied forces, and General Sosnokowski, whose plan this is.”
“It will have to be staffed out, as they say,” Eden said.
“But very, very quickly,” Marshall noted as he zipped closed his leather briefcase. “General,” he said, turning to Sosnokowski, “if you will accompany me, we will do precisely what Mr. Eden has suggested and see if this dog will hunt.”
“What dog?” Sosnokowski asked as they hurried out the door.
1200 HOURS, 28 JULY 1943
BERLIN, GERMANY
Even after the elimination of Hitler and most of his clique, Dönitz had found his strategy extremely hard to sell to the fervent patriots in the officer corps. The idea that the Wehrmacht would fight to the death in eastern Poland and the Carpathians while giving ground in Germany itself was appalling to most of them, Dönitz included. The German Army had been following a scorched earth policy in all the conquered lands through which it had retreated in the preceding months: Russia, Italy, France, and the Low Countries. Whenever time allowed, mines were flooded, bridges blown, ports blockaded with sunken ships and clogged with anti-shipping mines, and factories demolished. And the army on the Eastern Front continued to leave a barren moonscape behind as it withdrew through the Ukraine and Belorussia into eastern Poland. But now Dönitz was changing all that.
Although the Wehrmacht had fought bitterly west of the Rhine to delay the advancing Americans, once Patton had bulled his way across the river, the only battles were fought in the countryside. There was no house-to-house fighting in the larger cities, and the Americans had been amazed to find entire factories, in perfect running order, falling into their hands, with half-completed trucks or planes still sitting on the assembly lines. Even the ports of Bremer haven and Wilhelmshaven had been taken by British amphibious troops the week before, with those cranes and piers spared by the Allied bombers still functioning, although the approaches had been heavily mined. Now, the remnants of a dozen infantry divisions formed an arc shielding Hamburg from the British, who had bypassed the city to the north and driven across the Jutland peninsula to Kiel on the Baltic, and the Americans to the south. But these troops had orders that, if pressed back into the suburbs of the city, they were to break contact with the enemy and evacuate to the east, leaving untouched whatever had not already been destroyed by the waves of Allied bombers over the past three years.
Some of the officers present considered this foolhardy, even treasonous behavior, but Dönitz’s opinion had won out. He had argued that whatever fell to the Soviets would be lost to the German people forever, either territory, industry, or people; but everything captured by the Allies would be available to rebuild Germany after the war. And he had emphasized that the end was all too close and completely inevitable. Nearly one hundred thousand German troops were cut off in Holland and would probably surrender in the next few days, and the skeleton garrisons in Denmark and Norway, while still in contact by sea over the Baltic, could not hold out for long if the Allies took any interest in that direction. Kesselring’s forces had been pushed back into the Alps on the Italian front, while Tito’s partisans, now heavily armed by the British, were gleefully massacring the pro-Axis Chetniks in Croatia and nibbling at the Hungarian border, and Romania had now declared for the Allies and had also attacked into Hungary. The Russians were pounding Konigsberg, the citadel of East Prussia, and the French and Canadians were clawing their way toward the Rhine through the Siegfried Line. In fact, the only good news Dönitz had received since assuming the Chancellorship had been delivered by Admiral Canaris just moments before.
“And what analysis does the Abwehr make of the loading of Polish troops on board ships in the French Channel ports?” Dönitz asked, loosening his collar in the oppressive heat of the bunker under the Berlin Zoo. The smell from the animal cages, most long empty but apparently not cleaned, hardly helped.
“Well,” Canaris sighed, “they could be on the way to reinforce the British for an attack on upper Jutland or on Norway.”
“But why the Poles?” Rommel asked skeptically. “The Poles are already on the continent, and there’s plenty of fighting for them to do just by driving across Belgium and into Germany. If they’ve got more ships than they know what to do with, there are still new British and American divisions forming in England that would have to take ship to get into the battle.”
“Exactly,” Canaris went on. “We do have some preliminary reporting that they’re going to Poland.”
The eyebrows of several of the generals seated around the conference table rose noticeably.
“Impossible!” Chief of Staff Kluge snorted. “They can’t have that low an opinion of either the Luftwaffe or our navy to try to thread their way through the Danish archipelago. The Baltic is still a German lake! Our E-boats would cut them up, and our submarines would finish the job.”
Admiral Raeder, now commander of the navy, joined in. “We have only six seaworthy U-boats left in the Baltic, and perhaps a dozen E-boats. We also have some experimental piloted torpedoes that suicide commandos could ride into the side of enemy ships in restricted waters like those. We could certainly make them pay their passage.”
“We could, but we won’t,” Dönitz announced, slapping the conference table with the flat of his hand.
There was a confused hum of conversation around the table, but Canaris nodded and smiled. Kluge attempted to argue, but Dönitz held up his hand to silence him.
“The only thing I regret is that the Poles only have a handful of divisions. I wish they had twenty.”
Kluge had turned red in the face and could only sputter.
Dönitz laughed. “The war is over, my dear general, and the Russians are coming. There is nothing that I would rather see at this time than a strong, independent, well armed Poland sitting astride the road from Moscow to Berlin. If there is anyone who has more cause to hate the Russians more than we do, it’s the Poles. They may even hate them more than they hate us at the moment.”
Canaris rolled his eyes, and Dönitz coughed slightly.
“Well, perhaps not,” he corrected himself. “But I propose that we allow the Poles through. Maybe harass them a bit, and make them fight their way ashore, but put them in the same category as the Americans or British. We will make them pay for their victory, in order to make them all the more ready to negotiate a peace, but still concentrate our main effort at holding off and punishing the Russians. We will test the viability of a new Polish state
in the crucible of war, then leave them to their godforsaken country. We will pull our eastern forces back into East Prussia and down into Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and of course along our own eastern border, and let the Poles serve as a shield for us against Stalin. If they can establish themselves, that will be the time for us to seek final peace terms from the West. And our men must fight hard every day, against all our enemies, for at any moment they could reach their breaking point and ease their terms for peace, and we must be in as strong a position as possible whenever that happens. With luck, perhaps half of Germany proper can be spared the pain of the war passing over it, and hundreds of thousands of our men will live to help rebuild Germany after the war.”
Kluge just shook his large head and hid his face with his hands.
“It’s the only way, my friends,” Dönitz concluded. “Some of our brothers had the duty of giving their lives in defense of the Fatherland. It is our unpleasant duty to supervise the dismantling of the Reich while safeguarding as many of the building blocks as possible with which to construct our nation anew.”
1400 HOURS, 29 JULY 1943
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
Allen Dulles had wanted to play a significant part in the Allied war effort, and as the chief representative of the Office of Strategic Services on the continent during the heyday of the Reich, he had been at the vortex of the storm that was breaking over Europe. He had assumed that, while neutral Switzerland would undoubtedly continue to be a hotbed of espionage activity by all parties, German, American, British, French, and Soviet, the relative importance of his own role would diminish as the Allied armies rolled over Western Europe and the end of the Reich came visibly closer. He had badly miscalculated.
Since the assassination of Hitler, and it was now his firm belief that Hitler’s own generals had done the deed, he had served as the most direct contact between Berlin and the Allies for the first tentative feelers for an ultimate peace. There had been other approaches, in Sweden, Argentina, and Turkey, but in Geneva senior German officials could actually conduct meetings, face-to-face, with him or other Allied representatives, who could now travel freely to Geneva via liberated France, and both sides could get prompt answers from their respective governments.
Now, as he sat in his office in the American consulate, Dulles had just completed a lengthy session with General Hans Oster, a fellow intelligence officer and deputy to Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr. Oster had delivered the most concrete proposal yet received from the Germans related to a possible surrender. It had just been an opening bid, of course, and would not be accept able to any of the Allied governments, but it was a serious offer, nothing like Hitler’s ultimatums from early in the war in which the Allies would have to accept a German victory and hegemony over Europe if they wanted any hope of peace. Now the Germans only seemed interested in salvaging something like a sovereign German state, and to keep the Russians out.
Oster had made some startling concessions for this early in the game, Dulles thought. The Germans would accept responsibility for the war and, in theory, the obligation to pay reparations to the victims of her aggression. They would return to their pre-1938 borders, without the Anschluss with Austria or the Sudetenland, much less any of their later conquests. They would even accept limitations on the size and composition of their armed forces and military-related industry, only asking that enough remain to provide for “territorial security,” presumably against the Russians, although that would entail quite a force. Even more striking was the suggestion that some senior Nazi officials would be surrendered to the Allies for trial for “crimes against humanity,” something that Dulles knew the Allies would insist upon but that he never expected the Germans to offer up unilaterally. The one sticking point was that Oster insisted that Germany must be allowed to police herself and that foreign occupation must be ruled out, claiming that popular disgust with the presence of foreign troops on German soil would result in a complete breakdown of society, the collapse of the current government, and probable civil war, in which he hinted heavily that the Communists would likely emerge victorious.
Dulles prided himself on having a pretty good poker face, and it had taken all of his skill to remain noncommittal with the German, limiting himself to pointing out some of the obvious flaws in the German position, but otherwise only promising to pass the proposal along to his superiors. He had sensed a certain desperation in Oster, a need to get something moving, but against a very tight deadline. Dulles knew that they were all at a dangerous crossroads right now. If the Allies wanted, they could almost certainly obtain a very favorable peace settlement with the Germans by freezing out the Russians, but Stalin, as paranoid as he was reputed to be, would undoubtedly see that as a betrayal by the West, and feelings in Russia against Germany were justifiably fervent enough that the price of an easy peace now would be another war in the near future. And this time the enemy bent on revenge wouldn’t be a crushed and partitioned enemy, as Germany had been after World War I, but an immensely powerful, victorious nation, just really coming into its own and with a worldwide network of ideological converts at its beck and call. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had made it clear that any agreement with Germany had to be arrived at by all the major allies, including the Soviet Union and now France, or there would be none at all. It might make things difficult in the short run, but Dulles recognized that this was the only viable solution.
0500 HOURS, 1 AUGUST 1943
WARSAW, POLAND
At only twenty-four years of age, Mordechai Anielewicz was rather young to command what amounted to a brigade-size force, the entire combat strength of the ZOB in the ghetto, and he had no military experience; but he did know the streets and alleys of Warsaw better than the rooms of his parents’ apartment from before the war. He may not have been in the army, but he had been fighting all his young life, one way or another, though he had never felt the rush of emotion he did now.
For two years he had watched in rage and frustration as trainload after trainload of Jews had been shipped out of Warsaw, stripped of their possessions and every scrap of human dignity, never to return. His decision in January, taken with other young Jews, to fight rather than submit had just been their way of dying with dignity, not in any hope of actually succeeding. But now things had changed. During the night hundreds of Allied bombers had droned over Poland dropping thousands of canisters filled with rifles, Sten guns, grenades, mortars, and ammunition. While most of this bounty had gone to the Home Army units scattered in a corridor from Warsaw north toward the coast, in anticipation of the delivery, the Home Army had transferred to the ZOB nearly 500 captured German Mauser rifles, with which his fighters were already familiar, along with some machine guns, panzerfaust anti-tank rockets, and plenty of ammunition for all, every gun and every bullet of which was dragged through sewers or over unguarded stretches of the ghetto wall by teams of experienced “smugglers,” some of whom were barely ten years old. This more than trebled the firepower with which he had expected to face down the more than 2,000 SS troops known to be encircling the ghetto and preparing their assault.
Even more important, the Home Army would be launching an attack of their own throughout the capital and all across Poland while the attention of the Germans was focused on the Jewish ghettos. Some of Anielewicz’s subordinates had howled that the Poles would betray them and that the Allies would never come, mostly diehard Communists, but the very real evidence of the arms deliveries had quieted their protest almost immediately.
He could hear the growl of truck engines and the high pitched squeal of tank treads as the German forces moved into position for what they hoped would be a surprise assault on a largely defenseless people. The attacking units were actually mostly composed of Ukrainian and Lithuanian fascists in SS uniform, very brutal and quite adequate for bludgeoning unarmed men and women in the streets, but not exactly elite combat troops.
The ghetto was an irregular sector of northwest Warsaw some fifteen blocks from north to south and
from three to five longer blocks east to west. The southern third of this area, known as the “small ghetto,” was nearly cut off by a corridor of German occupied land, and so was left out of Anielewicz’s defense strategy, which would concentrate on the “productive ghetto,” where the factories were located manufacturing goods for the Wehrmacht; the “wild ghetto,” a now largely uninhabited stretch slightly to the north around Powiok Prison; and the “central ghetto” north of that, since this was where most of the ghetto’s remaining tenants lived. From the sounds of mobilization beyond the wall, and reports coming to Anielewicz over a field phone line laid by the Poles from the Aryan side, it seemed that the Germans, under the command of SS General Jurgen Stroop, planned to carve off sections of the ghetto and annihilate resistance in each before moving on. They were now poised at the southern end of Nalewki Boulevard to drive north to Muranewski Square, thus slicing away four blocks of the old “brushmakers’ district,” but the Jews were ready for them.
In the pale predawn light, from each end of Nalewki Boulevard, a squad of Jewish policemen now appeared, nervously filing past the barricades and into the ghetto, but the defenders could see the shadowy forms of German infantry dodging from cover to cover along either side of the street behind them. One part of Anielewicz felt sorry for these traitors, whose families were held hostage and who cooperated with the Germans in their searches for “selected” Jews for shipment to Treblinka under the threat of being sent themselves in the place of any shortfall. There were others who risked their lives by working with the ZOB, passing information about planned sweeps or even stealing weapons for the resistance. But there were some who seemed to relish their power and authority, and there was, in any event, no means of separating one from the other now. When they had advanced about one hundred meters, the first armored cars appeared rolling quickly forward, two with each column, and each followed by a densely packed mob of infantrymen. This was the moment they had been waiting for.
Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History) Page 32
