Description: Colin Smith, war correspondent, expert on military history, war reporter and author of fiction
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On 1 st August 1944 Andrzej Borowiec, a 15-year-old boy who was short for his age and hadn't started shaving, threw a grenade through the already shattered window of a Warsaw apartment block onto some Germans running below. As he did so he thought: 'I'll never be able to live back with my mother after this.'
This was Day One of what became known as the Warsaw Uprising. It lasted another 62 while Stalin kept his army the wrong side of the River Vistula to give Hitler time to finish off the Polish nationalists who would have made it so much harder to turn Poland into the kind of post-war Communist satellite it became. (Not the first time the two monsters colluded against Poland.) When it had finished at least 150,000 people had died, 700,000 of its citizens were displaced about the countryside, and at their Führe