The purpose of this study is to examine the political and ideological background of the Warsaw Rising and to trace the course of events which led to its outbreak. It is an attempt to establish when, how and why the authors of the insurrection decided that Warsaw should be freed from the Germans ‘by Polish effort alone twelve hours before the entry of the Soviets into the capital’. It will examine the political and ideological anatomy of the Polish underground state, whose leaders decided to stage the insurrection. The term underground state is used here to denote the political and military organisations of the Polish resistance movement loyal to the exiled Government in London.

This study is not concerned with the course of the rising itself and only those purely miliiary affairs and events are discussed, which had direct impact on the policies and decisions of the pro-London authorities. To exclude military problems altogether would have tended to obscure rather than to reveal the political aspects of the insurrection, the opening of which was intended by its authors to coincide with the climax of the Russo-German battle for the Polish capital.

Further, in order to place the events and decisions leading to the insurrection in their wider political context it is necessary to conduct a number of preliminary inquiries into the main spheres of Polish political life and diplomacy during the Second World War, to examine the genesis and development of the underground state, and to determine to what extent the decision to fight in Warsaw was consistent with the basic attitudes and plans of the pro-London leadership in Poland and abroad.