Airlift to Warsaw: The Rising of 1944 [Hardcover]

Neil D. Orpen (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma Pr; First edition (November 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0806119136
• ISBN-13: 978-0806119137
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,839,152 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heroic Attempts to Support a Betrayed and Foredoomed anti-Nazi Rising, October 1, 2007

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Airlift to Warsaw: The Rising of 1944 (Hardcover)

This book discusses the Polish Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and the heroic attempts to supply it with arms and ammunition, by brave aircrews, from a long distance. The pilots making the drops were composed of different nationalities, including South Africans.

The challenges were formidable. Planes had to fly a round trip of over a thousand miles across enemy-held territory. Owing to the fires set by the Germans in Warsaw's districts, it was hard for the crews to make out the marker fires of the drop zones, and the smoke pall constantly overhanging Warsaw didn't make matters easier either. Dropping supplies from low altitudes exposed the planes to ground fire, while dropping them from high altitudes caused them to miss the drop zones.

But why was such long-distance aid necessary in the first place? Although author Neil Orpen doesn't dwell on it, this book is a testimony to Soviet perfidy. The Red Army was just a few miles away, stalling in order for the Germans to have ample time to suppress the Uprising and to destroy Warsaw at a leisurely pace. Not until the Uprising was doomed did the Soviets offer some token assistance. What's more, for most of the Uprising, the Soviets had refused to allow the Uprising-assisting Allied aircraft to land on Soviet-held territory to refuel. Not until towards the end of the Uprising did the Soviets allow it. By then, only a small fraction of Warsaw was still in Polish hands, and so the Poles only got about 1/5th (p. 159) of the large airdrop of September 17, 1944.