some ex-war-prisoners who had not had time to be incorporated in the Anders Army.
There were others who had come voluntarily, to escape from the Germans in 1941, but
how many of these could be called real Poles—rather than Ukrainians, Belorussians or Jews— was in some doubt; and, altogether, it seemed doubtful whether many of these
people were "Polish Patriots" in the Moscow sense. Even a well-known Russian said to me, when he heard of the decision to form a Polish division on Russian soil, that he did not quite see how it could be done, for it was not much use putting nothing but
Ukrainians or Jews into the "Polish Division", and as for real Poles, the only ones who would be willing to enter such a division would be Polish Communists; and these were a rara avis.
Yet neither the Union of Polish Patriots, nor, still less, the Polish Division (later followed by three more divisions formed on Soviet soil) turned out to be a joke, as not only the enemies of the whole scheme, but also many friendly sceptics seemed to expect at the time. It was not until the Kosciuszko Division made its appearance in July 1943 that most of the sceptics recognised that the Russians had, somehow, pulled it off. As for the Union of Polish Patriots, nondescript though it may outwardly have been, it had created the ideological basis for that New Poland, of which the Kosciuszko Division was to be the first important manifestation.
It was certainly not accidental that throughout April all the loyal friends of the Soviet Union should have been built up in the Soviet press. It was as if their activities were being compared with the "reprehensible and shortsighted" conduct of the London Poles.
Thus, great publicity was given to the Czechoslovak unit that fought its first great action
—a very costly but successful action—on the Soviet front. Great prominence was also
given to the resistance movements in France, Belgium, and Norway, and more
particularly to the French Normandie Squadron already fighting on the Russian front on de Gaulle's initiative.
The Czechoslovak unit fighting on the Russian front won the greatest fame of all during those days. It was not a large unit— 2,000 or 3,000 men under the command of Colonel Svoboda, who was later to become Minister of War in the Czechoslovak Government in
Prague. In March it went into action and on April 2, the Russian communiqué told the story of its first great engagement. Two things were, politically, of the greatest
importance; first, that, unlike the Anders Army, the Czechoslovak unit was fighting on the Soviet front; secondly, that it was doing so with the blessing of the Czechoslovak Commander-in-Chief, President Benes, and of the Czechoslovak Government in London.
The unit was, of course, under the operational command of the Russians.
On April 8, Alexander Fadeyev wrote a glowing account of the Czechs' heroism and, two days later, warm congratulations were sent to Colonel Svoboda by President Benes, by the Minister of Defence (also in London), and by the Czechoslovak Communist deputies who were then in Moscow, Gottwald, Kopecky and others. Captain Jaros who was in
command of one of the companies during the heavy fighting in the Kharkov area, and had been fatally wounded, was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Svoboda received the Order of Lenin, and eighty-two other men of the Czechoslovak unit were decorated by the Russians.
Such relations with the Czechs contrasted strangely with the first-class row with the London Poles which was on the point of reaching its climax.
From the beginning the Polish Government's principal worry had been the fate of the
Polish officers who had been in the Soviet Union since the debacle in 1939. Where were they? In their many conversations with Stalin, Molotov and Vyshinsky during the winter of 1941-2, General Sikorski, General Anders (who had himself been in Russian prisons for many months), Ambassador Kot, and other Polish representatives kept on raising this question. The Russians (according to the Poles) never gave a definite answer, saying that these prisoners would eventually turn up or that they had perhaps escaped to Poland, or Rumania, or Manchuria or, finally (a very belated afterthought of Stalin's) that some of them might have been trapped by the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union.
The announcement by Goebbels's propaganda machine in the middle of April, 1943, that the Germans had found several mass graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk
containing the bodies of thousands of Polish officers, was therefore well timed to
exacerbate further the strained relations between Moscow and the London Poles.
The Germans had set up a much publicised Committee of Inquiry which had "proved"
that these Polish officers had been shot by the Russians in 1940.
The news was sprung on a startled Russian public in an official communiqué on April 16:
"Goebbels's gang of liars have, in the last two or three days been spreading revolting and slanderous fabrications about the alleged mass shootings by Soviet
organs of authority in the Smolensk area, in the spring of 1940. The German
statement leaves no doubt about the tragic fate of the former Polish war prisoners who, in 1941, were in areas west of Smolensk, engaged on building, and who,
together with many Soviet people, inhabitants of the Smolensk Province, fell into the hands of the German hangmen, after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from
Smolensk... In this clumsy fabrication about numerous graves which the Germans
are supposed to have discovered near Smolensk, Goebbels's liars mention the village of Gnezdovaya; but they deliberately omit to mention the fact that it was precisely here, near Gnezdovaya, that archaeological excavations were in progress on the so-called Gnezdovsky Tumulus... With this faking of facts, and these stories of Soviet atrocities in the spring of 1940, the Germans ... are trying to shift on to the Russians the blame for their own monstrous crime...
"These professional German murderers, who have butchered hundreds of
thousands of Polish citizens in Poland, will deceive no one with such lies and
slander..."
All this was a little mystifying; for it seemed to suggest that, although the Poles had no doubt been murdered, the Germans had invented the story about the mass graves at
Smolensk. It was not at all clear what the Gnezdovsky Tumulus had to do with it all.
The position became a little clearer a few days later; or, at least, one thing now became perfectly clear—and that was that Goebbels had engineered a first-class diplomatic row.
On the 19th, the Pravda editorial indignantly wrote:
Goebbels's fabrication has been taken up not only by his German scribes, but, to
everybody's amazement, by the ministerial circles of General Sikorski... The Polish Ministry of Information knows perfectly well the purpose of this German
provocation, for it says itself: "We are used to the lies of German propaganda, and can understand the purpose of its latest revelations." Yet, in spite of this, the Ministry of Information can think of nothing better than to appeal to the
International Red Cross with the request to "investigate" something that never existed, or, rather, had been fabricated by the hangmen of Berlin, who are now
trying to attribute their crime to the Soviet organs [i.e., the NKVD]. They have been caught by this German bait. It is not surprising that Hitler should also have
appealed to the International Red Cross. Yet this is not the first case of its kind: already in Lwow in 1941 they staged "The victims of Bolshevik Terror".