AIRLIFT TO WARSAW - The Rising of 1944 by Orpen, Neil

University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1984. US 1st edition. hard bound in dust jacket, 6 x 8 1/2, FINE/VG CONDITION, ( very minor dj edge wear & light scratches to rear dj cover), viii, 184 pages, illus., notes, bibliog., index.------------------------------------In the last full year of World War II, with the retreating Germans occupying Warsaw and the Red Army closing a ring around it, the half-starved, desperate Poles and their underground army rose up from cellars, factories, and offices armed with home-made bombs and stolen rifles. Their spirit of unity and resistance to foreign domination and encroachments on citizens' liberties exploded in the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Their story has no more dramatic and heroic parallel in all the annals of World War II resistance movements.---------------------------------------Airlift to Warsaw raises the curtain on an episode of the Rising not previously told: the attempt of the Allied forces to arm and supply the Warsaw nationalists. For two months during the Rising, airlifts to the insurgents were launched by Polish, British, and South African airmen of the Allied Mediterranean Air Force. The operation was doomed to failure. Persistent bad weather, great distances between takeoff points and the target, and well-positioned German air defenses within the city took an appalling toll of men and aircraft. Enemies that proved as formidable as the German gunners were international politics (the Red Army controlled the Warsaw airfield but would not allow Allied planes to land) and priorities in other theaters of the war.----------------------------------------Acts of heroism alone could not assure the success of the airlift, as Neil Orpen points out, yet we can marvel at that heroism. After extensive interviews with strategists such as Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, who commanded the RAF forces in the Mediterranean, and with surviving members of the aircrews who flew the Warsaw run in 1944, he has recaptured the tension in the messes and barracks, the frustrations of delays caused by bad weather, the insurgents' agonized pleas for help, the fighting in Warsaw from street to street and building to building, the climactic moments in the night sky over the city among the flares and the flak, and the bitter anguish of the aircrews when the suicidal missions were halted.Readers familiar with the standard histories of the war will discover here a little-known strand of that complex tapestry. From these wrenching events of forty years ago we come to understand a little better the Poles of today.