Angry Ambassador

I SAW POLAND BETRAYED (344 p.)--Arthur Bliss Lane--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

When Arthur Lane stepped into the plane that, in July 1945, was to take him to his post as U.S. Ambassador to Poland, few Americans yet realized that Lane's mission was doomed to the futilities of diplomatic protests. But no Big-Three doubletalk, no top-level deals, not even thick applications of F.D.R.'s charm on Stalin, could alter the inescapable fact: the Russians were in, the U.S. out.

Until the Warsaw government's rigged elections in January 1947, Lane stuck to his post. After that, seeing no hope of Poland's adherence to the Yalta declaration ("free and unfettered elections"), he quit, and returned home to write the saddening story of what he had seen.

Though a career diplomat, Lane has written a blunt and frank report. Where it falls down badly is in the writing. Lane uses that jargon habitual to diplomats, a dialect sometimes confused with English, which makes his occasional revelations seem as blandly dull as his report of an exchange of diplomatic amenities.

Lane found Poland run by a group of highly intelligent and unscrupulous Kremlin agents. Against such hard-bitten commissar types as Hilary Mine and Jakub Berman, who were Poles by birth but acknowledged Moscow as their capital, Lane could only play the gadfly. In Poland, they had the power and he didn't.

Note of Sarcasm. In pages likely to cause uneasiness in Democratic Party headquarters and certain to provoke angry retorts from F.D.R.'s supporters, Lane charges that during Roosevelt's and the early part of Truman's administration, U.S. Government leaders deliberately misled the public about the seriousness of the Polish situation. When Lane told President Roosevelt that strong steps should be taken to maintain Poland's independence, "the President asked rather sharply and with a note of sarcasm, 'Do you want me to go to war with Russia?' "

Roosevelt kept secret the provisions of the Teheran agreement ceding 70,000 square miles of Polish territory to Russia. Why did he? Lane, whose bitterness towards the administrations he represented permeates the book, believes that it was simply because Roosevelt wanted to win the Polish-American vote in 1944. He tells of a State Department official who tried to prevail on Franklin Roosevelt to take a firmer policy with Stalin on Poland, only to be told : " 'You may know a lot about international affairs, but you do not understand American politics.' "

Month of Stalling. The best -- and bitterest -- chapter in Lane's book, however, is his detailed reconstruction of the tragic 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis, a story full of confusion at the time, but one that in his telling becomes pathetically plain. On July 29, 1944, a Moscow broadcast urged Warsaw to revolt to hasten the entry of Russian troops, then only ten kilometers away. The underground Polish army, led by General Bor, went into action on Aug. 1. The next day it had two-thirds of Warsaw under control. As the Nazis hit back with savage plane attacks, Polish emigre leaders begged the Russians to send planes over Warsaw to drop munitions and food to the rebels. But Russian planes, which for ten days before the revolt had battled the Nazis in the air, remained on the ground.

On Aug. 14, the U.S. asked permission to send planes from England in a shuttle flight to Russia in order to drop aid to Bor's troops. Moscow stalled for a crucial month, finally allowed one flight on Sept. 18. On Oct. 3, the Warsaw insurrection collapsed. The Russians, Lane bitterly concludes, stalled before Warsaw long enough to let the Nazis kill off 250,000 Poles. That made it easier for the Russians to handle the rest.

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