The Sacrifice

German might, Russian policy and the calculated indifference of Britain and the U.S. last week wrote bloody finis to a chapter of Polish history.

In 1939, as the Germans stormed into blazing Warsaw after a 20-day siege, the Warsaw radio went off the air playing Polish funeral hymns. Last week Warsaw died again (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS). After a 63-day siege, a ferocious fight from building to building and block to block, the Partisan forces of General Bor (Lieut. General Tadeusz Komorowski) surrendered to the Germans. This time there was no aerial music.

There had been little aerial help either. During the first few weeks of the uprising, the Russian Army twelve miles away did nothing to aid the Partisans, who were under the command of the Polish Government in Exile. Instead it disarmed Partisans. When Madame Helena Sikorska (widow of Poland's late great Premier and commander in chief) and 15 leading Poles protested, Prime Minister Winston Churchill fumed. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden lectured Premier Mikolajczyk. But R.A.F. flyers from Italy made a 1,750-mile round trip to drop a pathetic driblet of supplies to the besieged. Polish paratroops, idle in Scotland, had to remain idle in Scotland.

Then Russia, stung in part probably by foreign criticism, in part probably mindful of the effect on those parts of Poland controlled by the Lublin government, began to send aid to Warsaw. But when General Bor was made commander in chief of all the Polish Government's forces, the Lublin government denounced him as a "criminal." threatened to arrest and try him if he fell into their hands. Promptly, when General Bor surrendered to the Germans, the Lublin Poles cried: "Traitor!"

The Germans were delighted. They began to posture as a friend of Poland. Polish slave laborers in Germany were permitted to remove the big P (for Pole) from their coats. Few Poles, familiar with the horrors of German friendship, would be deceived by the tactic. Nor could it greatly affect the military situation in Poland. But responsibility for the fact that at this late day in the war the Germans could still make use of such a tactic lay squarely with Moscow--and, to a lesser extent, with the U.S. and Britain.

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