Customer Reviews

Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

There are a number of reasons why I rated this newest book by Norman Davies with all 5 stars. Not necessarily in this order:

1. "Rising '44" is an excellent read, thrilling, captivating, entertaining at times, surprising and emotionally engaging. It's the style, typical of Norman Davies that keeps the reader in suspense at all times, in need to hear and learn more and more.

2. The subject of this book, the rising against the Nazis in Warsaw in late summer 1944 is a relatively little known, or forgotten (outside of Poland), yet one of the most tragic, episode in the entire history of World War II. Just like the whole world must know about the extermination of the Jews, a part of which was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the entire world, too, should know about another part of Holocaust, the immense suffering, and injustice, inflicted on Polish people.

3. Norman Davies did an extensive research, both in the West (Great Britain, USA) and in the East (Russia), not to mention Poland itself, to reach previously unknown documents that might shed some new light on the whole context of the event. Several theories or, rather, suspicions were well established for years but... no conclusive proof. By his own admission Davies did not quite succeed in his effort; neither in Great Britain nor in Russia were all archives made available even this many years after the end of the War. Still, the broad political perspective surrounding the uprising, all those dealings behind the closed doors, that he was able to portray, are extremely enlightening.

4. And morally disturbing. Poland was the first country to oppose Hitler. Great Britain and France declared war on Germany to defend Poland and its sovereignty. Or, so they claimed. If the terrible defeat Poland suffered in 1939 were not enough, not only from the hands of the Germans, at the end of the day Poland was traded for Stalin's continued participation in the war. The moral standards invoked in September 1939 vanished by 1944, another quarter million people lost their lives, and Poland did not regain its independence... while the rest of the world celebrated victory over Nazism.

The story of Warsaw Rising 1944, as told by Norman Davies, is a persuasive one and unsettling. The perception of the whole "big politics" picture, long-standing stereotypes about high moral ground subscribed to by the Allies' leaders, most notably Roosevelt himself, during the war will be very likely altered. And more truth about the real nature of the Stalin's regime will be acknowledged.

There is one drawback with this book, already pointed out by others. Indeed, I find Davies' use of his own phonetic versions of names rather than actual Polish an odd one, silly and confusing. The reader from Toronto was quite right pointing out as baffling for Davies to believe "that his English-speaking readers, all of whom have an interest in Poland and Polish history (otherwise they would not be reading Rising '44), are incapable of dealing with the Polish language." This notwithstanding I would not go so far as to label this decision "an appalling piece of Anglo arrogance" (for this arrogance was directed at the "Anglos" themselves). For some peculiar reason Norman Davies simply "goofed up".

But other critical remarks, quite limited in number, are squarely off the mark. One reader complained about not writing on the subject of the more famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. He must have missed few sections of the book for Davies gave a synopsis of the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews and wrote about the Ghetto uprising itself; quite at length as a matter of fact.

Britain went to war in 1939 in order to defend Poland and we, the Western Allies, ended up betraying the Poles first to Nazi rule and then for the next 44 years to that of the USSR. How that terrible tragedy and betrayal happened is brilliantly portrayed in this superb, easy to read and wonderfully well researched book. Christopher Catherwood, author of CHURCHILL'S FOLLY: HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL CREATED MODERN IRAQ (Carroll and Graf 2004)

I lost six family members during Warsaw Uprising in 1944. One of them was my grandfather. My Mom was only 7 when he was brought home dead from the streets of Wola district. The horror of this event is still vivid in my Mom's memory, now 67. The Warsaw Uprising was forgotten not because was unimportant or of small value but because it needed to be forgotten by those that were ashamed of not coming to the rescue. The helplessness of the Western allies was as painful as the betrayal of the Soviet Army. The 60-year "silence" was finally broken with Norman Davies book. 'Rising'44' is probably the best if not only book that describes the forgotten holocaust of Polish martyrs. Thanks to Norman Davies' book let's hope that no one will ever confuse 1943 Ghetto Uprising with 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

I am sick to death of comments on the Warsaw Uprising by individuals who do not know the facts and suggest it was somehow motivated by foolish romanticism. The Underground army in Poland was controlled by the government-in-exile in London. The highest powers in Britain and the United States knew the Underground's actions and its goals. Since 1941, the Underground army had been resisting the Nazis, but its main purpose was to stage an uprising at the right time. Such an uprising would not succeed without help from outside the country. Unfortunately, the only realistic candidate for such assistance was the Soviet Union. While the exiled Polish government discussed whether the time was right for a general uprising, Soviet radio broadcasts promised support to the Underground Army, both in men and supplies, and encouraged them to stage the uprising. The Underground Army was never warned by either the Americans or the British that the Soviets would not comply. So the Soviet divisions sat by and watched the slaughter. The Allies themselves were surprised but still did not understand that this signaled the beginning of the Cold War. Incidentally, there was a prominent Polish figure that was against the Uprising at this time: General Wladyslaw Anders. His army was composed of Polish refugees from Siberian labor camps. He and his army witnessed the Soviet nightmare firsthand and he warned the West and the Underground not to trust the Soviets. But neither listened as they could not comprehend the depth of the nightmare. Finally, are Americans Americans anymore? Is not the state motto of New Hampshire: "Live free or die?"

The author of this work is very correct: most people think that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was the one and only in that city. Of course, the rising in 1944 was of much more consequence to the history of Eastern Europe, even if both were tragedies. This extremely well-written book outlines the history both before, during and after the '44 rising, and the great detail shows that there was a deliberate ignoring of the plight of the Polish patriots by their Western allies, with a stalling on the part of the Soviets until the rising was crushed by the Nazis. There were many political reasons for why both East and West acted as they did in relation to Poland, but knowing that does not excuse what was done to a brave little country that had the guts to stand up to the Germans, when all about them were caving in to pressure. The Western betrayal is the same as we read in the other recent book about Polish fighters in the war "A Question of Honor", and the harsh glow of history shines on what was not done, and what might have been done. There are vignettes inserted into the book which go into more intimate detail of the many aspects of the rising, from the point of view of participants on all sides. My one quibble was that the author used nicknames and such, rather than the real Polish names of the participants. I can understand why he did that, because Polish names are not the easiest to read or pronounce, but having grown up and gone to school with my fellow second and third generation Polish friends, I can surely pronounce them, and would have liked to see them set out in full. That, of course, does not detract from the impact of this work, and the genuine admiration the author shows for Poland and its people. I am proud to be of 100% Polish descent, and books such as this only reinforce that pride!

This is an outstanding work of history. Davies rescues the Home Army from the shadow of the equally brave and desperate gamble of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
What makes this a must read is the focus on the dynamics of the Allied Coalition and inter- and intra-agency politics in Britain and the U.S. along side the decisions of the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Home Army's leaders. It is difficult to walk away with the interpretation that the Poles were unwarranted in initiating the Rising. It is also difficult not to condemn the Roosevelt Administration and the British Foreign Ministry for taking a short-sighted and overly benign view of Stalin and Soviet intentions and methods. It is up to an historian of the Pacific War to make the case for whether Soviet aid looked and was so essential to the defeat of Japan so as not to upset the Allied Coaliton by asserting the rights of Eastern European nations in the Red Army's path. I don't know that Davies' approach would have been possbile at a time when the West claimed ignorance of Stalin's methods and relegated the Poles to the role of romantic and ill-fated cavaliers.
Davies is also to be commended for putting the Rising is a larger context of Polish-Russian and Polish-Soviet relations. However, the book could have used a slightly fuller description of Poland's inter-war government as this government was likely to color Western perspectives on the London Exiles.
I found Davies' adaptations of Polish names and the use of pseudomyms helpful given the difficulties facing a native English speaker of approaching Polish. I know enough Polish not to find him doing the principals a disservice.
An eye-opening exercise is comparing coverage of the 60th anniversary of the Rising by the BBC with that of the New York Times or Washington Post. At least the BBC addresses the issue of whether the Western powers may have shared some culpability for the Rising's fate.

This is a serious book written by a serious historian. I have read another of Mr Davies's works and have become an instant fan of his writing and style. Simply put, this man is a genius. Davies certainly does his homework when researching his sources for they are plentiful. Not only that, but he gives you the whole story. He explains why something happened and what were the circumstances under which they happened. He goes back in time and describes events that occured years ago that led up to the present situation.
One can only imagine how much work, time and effort that went into producing this enormous 700+ page volume.

The story of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 is both tragic and inspiring. It is tragic because a quarter of a million people perished in it and 85% of the city was leveled by the Germans. Thousands were deported to Germany for forced labor or to concentration camps. It is inspiring in that it showed the undying spirit of the Polish people in the face of enormous odds The Polish people are lovers of freedom ....they have proven that many times during the course of their 1000+ year-old history.

A word of warning to anyone who is interested in this book and by all means get a hold of it. This is a scholarly work and not a romance novel that one can read during lunch break. Every sentence, paragraph and page requires close scrutiny and comprehension for it is filled with relevant facts and information. Buy it, read it and place it in your personal library for future reference. It is that good !!!!

As someone who felt the need to learn more about Poland in WWII, I looked forward to reading "Rising '44" and can say that by slogging through the book, I filled gaps in my knowledge. Professor Davies distinguished more clearly than I had known before between the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the event that is the centerpiece of this book. Also, I had not realized that the Home Army was so directly subordinated to, and coordinated with, the government in exile in London. Nor did I know that the Germans were compelled to recognize the surrendered Home Army combatants as legitimate POWs -- regardless of what may later have befallen many of those captives. Further, the reader will be left in no doubt about Stalin's ruthlessness toward the Poles, or the often hapless moves of the Western Allies in trying to keep faith with Poland during the war, especially near the end, as the Red Army was sweeping all before it.

Unfortunately, Professor Davies puts more than a few obstacles in the reader's path. Chiefly, there was no need for him to be so condescending as to decide that we couldn't handle Polish names, particularly since he had no such compunction about spelling Russian names in full. I found his condescension a real annoyance. Someone who decides to read a book on Polish history expects to encounter Polish personal and place names. As just one example, somewhere in this 784-page tome, he could have once spelled out "Armija Krajowa" for AK or Home Army, which was, after all, the protagonist of this bloody drama. Another annoyance was his penchant for beating the reader over the head. How many times did he write that Poland was Britain's "first ally," to hammer in the point that Britain had a special obligation to the country which had been its "casus belli" in 1939?

Not being a Central Europe specialist, suspicions linger in my mind that, despite the size and scope of "Rising '44," Professor Davies omitted or glossed over a great deal, especially in the run-up to the war. What about Poland's 1934 non-aggression pact with Hitler and its annexation of a portion of Czechoslovakia in 1938? I don't recall either from the book.

I hesitated before giving the book four stars but did so out of respect for depth of the author's research and his knowledge of the subject. In any case, looking from the vantage point of 2005, after nearly a century of pain and suffering, Poland has finally achieved its rightful place in the West, as a member of NATO and the EU.

Davies is right in pointing to the fact that in the West there hardly has been recognizing for all what happened in the East during the Second World War. At least not during the Cold War. Of course the Allied governments never took responsibility for their failures concerning the `First Ally' (as Davies keeps referring to Poland in this way). But at least the destruction of Warsaw and the slaughter of tens of thousands of Polish citizens should have its place in history. Luckily, Davies has given it.

Whether or not the Polish should have risen in 1944, it once again showed their bravery. The Polish already made name during the Battle of Britain and were unfairly blamed by Montgommery for their Arnhem 1944 participation, despite their heroic effort near the Bridge. During the Battle of Warsaw they were outnumbered in quality and quantity against special German forces, but nevertheless kept them busy for two whole months! They could have been relieved by the Russians, or been helped more by the Allies, but that wasn't to be. The rising was smashed and Poland entered 45 years of communist terror.

And this latter subject is relevant, as Davies points out. The war hadn't a happy end for Poland in 1945: the horror simply continued. One third of the book is dedicated to the years after the final shot was heard, but I think it's relevant. It only describes better how tragic this Rising ended. Another third Davies dedicates to the build-up, but it completes the whole picture he wants to give. So, readers only interested in the actual fighting can find their satisfaction in two hundred pages. The remainder of the book only adds more drama to the story.

Finally, I share criticism about Davies handling the names of the Polish involved. He uses their `nicknames' to make them easier to remember, but I think he's wrong here. Let's hope a reprint will see this changed.

~Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw~ is an intriguing if not fascinating sketch of the Polish Resistance to Nazi German occupation. However, the melancholy of this book is all to real. It's very depressing if not gloomy, as is the barbarity of the Nazis and the so called "liberators" in the Red Army. Davies is probably one of the leading English-speaking historians on Polish history and intimately familiar with their struggles. As such, he offers an appreciative if not romanticized account of the Polish resistance in Warsaw and surrounding areas. Norman Davies has sketched an awe-inspiring, but rather bleak and depressing history of the resistance perpetuated by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa - AK) in Warsaw and the aloof exiled Polish government in London. August 1, 1944 marked the impetus of the Warsaw Rising in Poland as nearly 40,000 members of the Home Army descended from the sewers and ghetto cellars. The rising was brutally crushed, as the Red Army "liberators" looked on. The sad and sometimes forgotten reality is that the Red Army halted their advance and sat idle across the Vistula River as the Wehrmacht and SS completely crushed the Polish insurgents.

The Warsaw Rising is often confounded with the Ghetto Rising of 1943 due to Soviet-era miseducation and a general Marxist-Leninist disregard for the historical struggles of Polish nationalists. It covers a near decade of Stalinist tyranny in the later leg of the book, which I didn't have patience to do anything more than skim. Most nations having endured such struggles as the Poles did in the mid-1940s tend to have welcomed liberation. For the Polish people, they had no such good fortune. The Soviet "liberators" merely coopted them from one form of totalitarian tyranny and repression to another. Gestapo and SS torturers were exchanged for NKVD and Red Army butchers. The Warsaw the Soviets "liberated" was nothing more than rubble and ash heap. Thereafter, the Soviets supplanted the Nazi genocidal terror that afflicted the Poles with their own political repression, mass-murder, and gulag enslavement. The Soviets even tried covering up their atrocities by passing the buck to the Nazis, such as the Katyn Forest Massacre that executed over 4,000 Polish military personnel leaving them in mass graves. The liberated Warsaw was barren desolate, but rebuilt anew for political and ideological reasons. Ironically all the monuments were to the Soviet Red Army with obfuscatory history of their Great Patriotic Struggle. The Soviets would have had the memory of the Polish Resistance go down the Orwellian memory hole. Liberation really didn't come until fifty years later. During the 1980s President Reagan played hardball with the Soviets and covertly supported the anti-Soviet Solidarity movement. Shortly thereafter, in the 1989 the Iron Curtain began to crumble and roll back east.

The narrative is interspersed with short capsule stories of the resistance which are informative to say the least. Davies has a certain snide cynicism about the readers' ability to read and comprehend Polish names, so he abbreviates the surnames, which is a rather irritating quirk. Well, I nearly drained a highlighter going through this massive tome. I think it Davis' work was perhaps overkill in terms of the size and scope of the work, as the narrative has a lot of extraneous information and makes a prolonged trek into Soviet era which I didn't care to read in aggregate. He is cognizant of tensions that developed between Jews and Poles when historians engage in competitive martyrdom (or the fights where they claim one another's dead as their own.) As a result, Davies has always approached World War II and Polish history with a measure of sensitivity and objectivity without an ideological agenda. Overall, this book is very erudite, compelling if not gut-wrenching account of the Polish Resistance and Warsaw Rising of 1944.

Post Tenebras Lux (After Darkness Light)