After the fall of France in June 1940, Poland became Britain’s only effective ally and helped ward off the danger of a German invasion and keep the convoy routes open. But they had lost the war in Europe, and there was no prospect of Britain ever being in a position to help Poland regain her independence.
On 22 June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against Russia, and as the Soviet armies disintegrated under the impact, Stalin was forced into the Allied camp. He negotiated an alliance with Britain and, on 30 July, another with Poland, under the terms of which all Polish citizens imprisoned in Russia were to be released and formed up into a Polish Army which would fight alongside the Red Army.
This alliance was undermined by severe tensions: although Russia repudiated the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, it stopped short of recognising Poland’s pre-war frontier. Polish prisoners were released grudgingly and some were re-arrested. The new army, forming in Uzbekistan under the command of General Władysław Anders, was exposed to provocations and attempted infiltration by communists. As time passed, Anders grew uneasy about the fate of some of his colleagues. He had drawn up lists of officers he knew had been captured by the Soviets in 1939, but few of these came forward: as many as 20,000 were unaccounted for. Sikorski took the matter up with Stalin, and was fobbed off with a promise to investigate. Meanwhile, General Anders’ army was being harassed and even had its food rations withheld. The two years he had spent in Soviet prisons had taught him to fear the worst, and, against the wishes of Sikorski, who wanted to keep it on the eastern front, he decided to take his army and its horde of Polish waifs and strays, some 110,000 in all, out of the Soviet Union to Iran, where the British needed it.
On 11 April 1943 German radio announced that mass graves had been discovered in the forest of Katyn near Smolensk containing the bodies of 4,231 Polish officers, each with his hands tied behind his back and a bullet in his head. The first sample of names given (they all had their documents and uniforms) tallied with those on the list made out by Anders in 1941. The officers had been killed by the Russian NKVD in the spring of 1940, but the Russians accused the Germans of the massacre. The Polish government demanded an investigation by the International Red Cross, whereupon, on 26 April, Russia accused it of bad faith and collaboration with the Germans, and broke off diplomatic relations.
The inhabitants of Warsaw heard of the Katyn massacre one week before SS Brigadeführer Jurgen Stroop launched the operation to slaughter the remaining inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto, who had staged a last-minute desperate resistance. The whole area was reduced to rubble over the next three weeks as the Jewish fighters defied the German onslaught. The ruins were still smouldering when, in June 1943, the commander of the AK, General Stefan Rowecki, was arrested in Warsaw by the Gestapo. On 5 July, the plane in which General Sikorski was travelling back to London from the Middle East, where he had been inspecting Anders’ Second Polish Corps, crashed on take-off from Gibraltar, killing all its passengers. This string of disasters highlighted the hopelessness of Poland’s position.
Until Hitler invaded Russia, Poland had been Britain’s only effective ally. When Russia joined the Allies in June 1941, it was relegated to third place in a coalition which was still at that stage dominated by Britain. With the entry into the war of the United States in December 1941, Poland took fourth place in an alliance increasingly dominated by America. After the Russian victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, Stalin’s position in the Allied camp became unassailable, and he used it to undermine the Polish government, denouncing it as a clique with no following in the country. At the same time he began recruiting his own Polish army out of those Poles he had failed to release two years previously.
Stalin declared the Polish-Russian frontier of 1939 unsatisfactory, arguing that it should be moved westward to correspond to the areas in which Poles constituted an overall majority, and adroitly seized on the ‘Curzon Line’, a ceasefire line pulled out of a hat by British diplomats in 1920. Terrified by the possibility, however remote, that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill gave their assent and tried to persuade the Polish government to accept this frontier. Sikorski was succeeded as prime minister by Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and as commander-in-chief by General Kazimierz Sosnkowski.