Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw

'Norman Davies knows more about Poland than any other historian in the West . . . a moving elegy for those doomed romantics who fought so nobly, and to such tragic purpose, in Warsaw in the autumn of 1944' Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph

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 Polish Home Army took to the streets in celebration, but the Soviets remained where they were, allowing the Nazi forces time to regroup and Hitler to order that the city of Warsaw be razed to the ground. For sixty-three 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 announced that there was nothing they could - or would - do. The Soviet tanks rolled in to the flattened city and Poland would be under the Russian yoke until 1989. Rising'44 tells the breathtaking story of one of the most dramatic episodes of the Second World War and it is vividly and authoritatively told by Norman Davies, one of our greatest historians.

'A passionate and impressive indictment' John Crossland, Sunday Times

'An extraordinary story, and it is fairly and honestly told here. Davies is an intelligent and balanced guide through its intricacies, and he is always entertaining . . . one comes to realize that this powerful book is not so much about the Warsaw uprising as about the defeat of liberal democracy in the Second World War' Adam Zamoyski, Spectator