Product Description

Rising '44 is a brilliant narrative account of one of the most dramatic episodes in 20th century history, drawing on Davies' unique understanding of the issues and characters involved. In August 1944 Warsaw offered the Wehrmacht the last line of defence against the Red Army's march from Moscow to Berlin. When the Red Army reached the river Vistula, the people of Warsaw believed that liberation had come. The Resistance took to the streets in celebration, but the Soviets remained where they were, allowing the Wehrmacht time to regroup and Hitler to order that the city of Warsaw be razed to the ground. For 63 days the Resistance fought on in the cellars and the sewers. Defenceless citizens were slaughtered in their tens of thousands. One by one the City's monuments were reduced to rubble, watched by Soviet troops on the other bank of the river. The Allies expressed regret but decided that there was nothing to be done, Poland would not be allowed to be governed by Poles. The sacrifice was in vain and the Soviet tanks rolled in to the flattened city. It is a hugely dramatic story, vividly and authoritatively told by one of our greatest historians.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25403 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 776 pages

Review
"Davies reveals a comprehensive design, tremendous narrative power a remarkable gift for compression, and a shrewd sense of overall balance."

John Crossland, Sunday Times, 2 November 2003
'Passionate and impressive'

Daniel Johnson in Daily Telegraph, November 2003
This is a splendid book, long overdue and a worthy memorial to its noble subject.

Customer Reviews

Hard to better by any historians, including Poland's own
This book has finally and definitively placed the Warsaw Rising of 1944 on the map of World War II. Norman Davies shows how the Rising, far too long overlooked, confused with the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or downright forgotten, marked the start of the War's endgame, contributed to the shaping of post-War Poland and the division of Europe, anticipated the disintegration of the wartime Alliance and the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Norman Davis approaches the Rising from many angles: political and military, national and international, collective and individual. The author presents many a detail unknown or vaguely realized even by Poles, and explains how the Rising spawned persistent myths, both negative and heroic.

He does it all in an immensly readable style and innovative form, known from his previous work, inserting "asides" into the exhaustively researched and coherent narrative, free-standing testimonies by individual participants from all sides to illustrate their personal experience of the Rising and its aftermath, which he extends up to our own times.

Perhaps it may be too much to expect that Rising '44 should become a world bestseller, illuminating the subject for all and once for all, although the book certainly deserves it. But at least from now on there will be no excuse for those who pronounce on the subject, in or outside Poland, to misconstrue the facts and perpetuate ideologically-based misconceptions.

It would be petty to point out insignificant and inconsequential errors and omissions (very few and far between). However, one might question the stylistic device of weeding out and translating ALL but a handful of Polish personal and place-names. The author explains, feasibly, that he aimed to spare his global readership the confusion of exotic Polish spellings, but, perhaps, that has been taken a name too far.

This reservation does not detract, though, from the immense achievement of the best among contemporary historians writing on Polish affairs, and that includes Poles as well.

A mammoth book; a must-read
I was born after the war, and have, I suppose, an average amount of knowledge/ignorance about it. I had some awareness of the Ghetto Uprising, but had never heard of the Warsaw Uprising until I visited Warsaw with my Polish son in law. He explained in simple terms what had happened in 1944 as we walked round the city centre and the restored 'old town'. I was returning to Poland this summer, shortly after the release of the paperback edition of this book, so could not resist taking it with me.

This is a mammoth book. Really it is more than one book. The Warsaw Uprising is at its centre, but it would also serve as a good general introduction to the Second World War in Europe as well as the Cold War that followed and the recent emergence of modern Poland. It is thoroughly reseached with a great variety of sources, and written in a very readable style.

Davies seems to have a mission to tell the world about Poland. He loves Poland and the Poles love him. (During my recent visit he starred on at least two current affairs TV programmes, speaking perfect Polish of course.) This, together with the passionate pro-Polish stance of the book, makes me wonder whether it is as balanced as it is possible to be, but never mind. Who wants a fence sitter, anyway?

The descriptions of the fighting, the backstage political machinations of all the allies, and the great variety of individual characters involved are gripping. The book is long but not tedious; I was left with the feeling of having read several books and of having learned a lot about a subject that is more interesting and more central to the story of modern Europe than I had ever imagined.

I had one or two beefs about the style and layout. I don't really think Davies needed to take all of those liberties with Polish personal and place names, and to refer to Poland not by its name but as 'The First Ally' throughout the first section of the book was a bit annoying. The 'capsules' interspersed throughout Davies' narrative were all very readable, but made the reading of the book a rather disjointed experience. Perhaps it would be better to ignore them initially, and read them all afterwards. But these are minor irritations that could never detract from the five star status of this book.

The obvious comparisons are with Antony Beevor's books on Stalingrad and Berlin. Like Davies, I may be a little biased due to my Polish connections, but I think this book knocks spots off both of them.

A Comprehensive New Work
The only other work dedicated to the uprising that I could find available in English was T. Komorowski's "The Secret Army." This new book goes much deeper into the political dealings surrounding the decisions made and provides a much more comprehensive look at the subject using the latest and best sources currently available. I really liked this book. I have been a big fan of Norman Davies’ work for some time and I like some of the techniques he uses in the book, including the vignettes. But I absolutely hated his use of Anglicized names for the Polish proper names and place names. I found it completely distracting to have to refer to the appendices to find who or where he was talking about. I think it would have done a greater service to readers interested in Polish history to keep the names in Polish and cross reference them to English in the Appendix and not the other way around. A cross reference of the key players and their positions in the organizations would have been helpful as well. All in all I found the book to be an excellent read and I highly recommend it.