Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw
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Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Neither objective nor detailed
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While I wanted very much to like this book, I cannot recommend it. It fails as a general history of the Warsaw Uprising, which is sad, because it is a subject that is quite undercovered in the English-speaking world. Like too many writers before him, Davies spends more time pointing swords at his ideological targets than dispassionately describing the course of the uprising itself, especially its military aspects. Davies is not a military historian, but this was a military event, and his lack of knowledge and experience show.
As has been pointed out repeatedly, the single most aggravating aspect of this book is Davies' decision to use English translations of Polish pseudonyms, rather than using the actual names of Poles or their actual Polish pseudonyms. What this does is render the book incompatible with virtually every other book on the uprising available in English and makes it very user unfriendly. However, much else about the book is aggravating as well.
There is not really much that is new in the book, and the axes that Davies has to grind are not new at all; one can find many of the same points in even the earliest writings on the uprising by Polish exiles.
Davies will stop at little to grind his axes and this sometimes results in what I can only describe as intellectual dishonesty. For example, he repeatedly highlights Soviet use of the word "illegal" to describe the Polish Home Army or its publications or elements. He does this to suggest a deliberate campaign on the part of the Soviets even while the uprising was going on to delegitimize the insurgents and to cast aspersions on them.
I cannot see how Davies can claim in good faith that this is so. I have read a great deal of Communist literature on partisan and guerrilla warfare in the WW2 era from a variety of east bloc countries from the Soviet Union to Poland to Yugoslavia to Albania to Czechoslovakia. What is consistent across all of these Slavic countries is that they use their equivalent of the word "illegal" (at least, the word that gets translated in English to "illegal") in a context where English speakers would use the word "underground." Thus an "illegal publication" is actually simply an "underground publication," and the use of the term "illegal" implies no value judgment on the publication itself. Indeed, it was entirely common for Communist writers in these countries to refer to their own organizations, bodies, publications, and military units as "illegal."
If I know this, I do not see how Norman Davies cannot know this as well, because it is ubiquitous when one reads Communist literature on these subjects. If this is so, then why would Davies use this tic of translation to make a point which is so patently false?
I think English readers are still waiting for a well researched well written overview of the Uprising. Until one actually comes out, I suggest people might be better off obtaining a copy of the older book on the Warsaw Uprising by George Bruce, which is considerably more objective and also more usable. It is out of print but easily obtainable as a used book.
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