Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In August 1944, Warsaw appeared to present the last major obstacle to the Soviet army's triumphant march from Moscow to Berlin. When the Wehrmacht was pushed back to the Vistula River, the people of Warsaw believed that liberation was at hand. So, too, did the Western leaders. The Polish Resistance poured forty thousand armed fighters into the streets to drive out the hated Germans, but Stalin condemned the Rising as a criminal adventure and refused to cooperate. The Wehrmacht was given time to regroup, and Hitler ordered the city and its inhabitants to be utterly destroyed." "For sixty-three days, the resistance battled the SS and Wehrmacht - in the cellars and sewers. Tens of thousands of defenseless civilians were slaughtered week after week. One by one, the city's districts were reduced to rubble as Soviet troops watched from across the river. Poland's Western allies expressed regret, but decided that there was little to be done. The sacrifice was in vain. Hitler's orders were executed. Poland was not to be allowed to be governed by Poles." Largely sidelined in history books and often confused with the Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the 1944 Warsaw Rising was a pivotal moment both in the outcome of the Second World War and in the origins of the cold war. Now on the sixtieth anniversary of the Rising, Norman Davies's extraordinary book brings it vividly and movingly to life.
SYNOPSIS
Not to be confused with the Ghetto Uprising of the year before, the Warsaw Rising of 1944 saw the Polish Resistance attempt to throw out the German occupiers only to be mercilessly crushed while the Soviet Army stood passively by. Before treating the events of the rising itself, Davies (emeritus, London U., UK) narrates the road leading up to the Rising from the separate perspectives of the Allies, the German occupiers, the Soviet Red Army, and the Polish Resistance, dealing with each in turn. He also explores the aftermath of the Rising up to the present time. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Carlo D'Este - The New York Times
… Rising '44 is much more than the story of the Warsaw uprising. It is one of the most savage indictments of Allied malfeasance yet leveled by a historian. Unsparing in his depictions of the slaughter of the Polish fighters and the destruction of their capital, Davies challenges the popular assumption that World War II was entirely the triumph of good over evil.
Mark Lewis - The Washington Post
Davies writes as an impassioned partisan, determined to force the world to remember the betrayal of the Poles.
Library Journal
Oxford fellow Davies recalls a turning point in World War II. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A thorough recounting of what the author considers to be "one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century"-and surely one of the most shameful betrayals in the world annals. By Davies's (History/London Univ.; The Isles, 2000, etc.) account, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 has been all but buried in Western and Russian history books as a source of deep embarrassment. It is not to be confused, he hastens to add, with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of the previous year, an attempt by Jewish partisans to break the Nazi stranglehold on the city. This uprising, equally heroic, involved elements of the underground Polish Home Army, working in collaboration with resistance units and commandos. They aimed to open a great battle within the Polish capital of Warsaw in support of the advancing Red Army, which by August of 1944 was nearing the banks of the Vistula River. They did so: 40,000 Polish fighters went up against a vastly larger German force. The occupiers were not exactly prepared for the uprising, though, as Davies notes, "Capital cities awaiting liberation were dangerous places. Everyone knew that something could erupt at any moment." Astonishingly, the Red Army halted its advance, allowing the Germans to regroup and stop the uprising. Davies charts the course of that great betrayal, which he considers a deliberate effort on the part of the Soviets to crush the non-Communist Polish resistance-which had been highly effective against the Nazi enemy, responsible for the assassination of "a whole grisly gallery of SS and Gestapo men" as well as the deaths of hundreds of ordinary German soldiers. But he also implicates the other Allies; even though Churchill had proposed sending Stalin a messagesaying, "Our sympathies are aroused for these almost unarmed people whose special faith has led them to attack German tanks, guns, and planes," in the end the West did nothing to save the Home Army. "Every single member of the Allied community [holds] a share of the responsibility" for the betrayal, Davies insists. And here he issues a resounding indictment.
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