Stalin had the last word. The Polish government
in exile in London, and the Home Army, which
took its orders from London, attempted to frus-
trate or at least impede Stalin’s plans to bring
Poland under communist control. In August
1944, as the Red Army reached the River Vistula,
the Home Army began to rise in Warsaw against
the Germans. Their intention was to prove to the
world that Poles, not the Russians, had liberated
the Polish capital. The Poles seized half the city
and fought bitterly for two months until their
capitulation to the Germans on 2 October.
Warsaw was entirely destroyed. Soviet help was
cynically withheld by Stalin. Only during the last
stages were Russian supplies dropped; they could
only prolong the doomed struggle, resulting in
the deaths of still more Polish Home Army fight-
ers holding out in the sewers of the city. The
Soviet command had even prevented Polish units
fighting with the Red Army from battling their
way to the city. Soviet airfields were closed to
relief flights from the West. Surrender terms were
finally agreed by the Home Army with the
Germans on 2 October 1944 and three days later
General Bor-Komorowski, with the exhausted
remnants of the fighters, gave up the struggle.
Surprisingly the Home Army were well treated as
prisoners of war, probably in order to increase
hatred between the Poles and the Russians.
During the early stages of the rising auxiliary
SS units committed terrible atrocities against the
civilian population, until regulars were brought in
to crush resistance. The total (mainly civilian)
casualties in Warsaw reached about 200,000. The
Germans lost some 2,000 killed and 9,000
wounded. Polish military casualties were far
higher: 17,000 killed or missing and 9,000
wounded. Politically and militarily the anti-
communist Polish underground had been de-
stroyed, leaving a vacuum which Stalin was able
to fill with communists ready to follow Soviet
orders. The Warsaw rising marked one more mile-
stone in the tragedy of Poland and signalled to
the rest of the world the ruthlessness of which
Stalin was capable in furtherance of the Soviet
Union’s post-war plans.
In the West this conflict between the commu-
nist and anti-communist resistance did not flare
into civil war but a similar pattern emerges. As the
defeat of Nazi Germany drew close, the resistance
was as concerned with questions of post-war
political power as with fighting the Germans. The
Nazi answer to all resistance from whatever
quarter was terror.
Houses were burnt to the ground in reprisals
and people not involved in the resistance were
killed wholesale. The destruction of the village of
Oradour-sur-Glane in France and of Lidice in
Czechoslovakia, and the massacres that took place
there, are among the best known of such barbar-
ities. But these were just two of the thousands of
atrocities that became a common occurrence in
German-occupied Europe. The terrible reprisals
taken by the German occupiers raise the question
whether the Allies should have actively encour-
aged resistance and parachuted agents into the
occupied countries, many of whom lost their
lives. All over Europe, from northern Italy to
Norway, large German forces were tied down.
The Nazi new order could not be imposed any-
where unchallenged, and the German forces
could not relax their vigilance amid populations
of which significant sections were hostile. Even
though the active resistance was a minority, it
made an impact out of proportion to its numbers.
The Japanese had been at war since 1937. They
sought to justify their wars of expansion at home
and abroad both as self-defence and as fulfilling a
mission of liberating Asia from Western imperial-
ism. In its place Japan would build a Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Japanese, to
emphasise the solidarity of eastern Asia against the
West, chose to call the war they had launched the
Greater East Asian War. The real intentions of the
Japanese leaders can be deduced from the deci-
sions taken at secret conferences in Tokyo rather
than from the rhetoric of their propaganda. First
consideration in all the conquered regions was to
be given to military needs. Local economies were
to be strictly controlled and independence move-
ments discouraged. No industry was to be devel-
oped in the southern region, which was to
become the empire’s source of raw materials and
a market for its goods. The Japanese saw them-
selves as the superior people who possessed the
1
THE ORDEAL OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR 271
