Good decision, bad result. Bad decision, good result.

The aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising was absolutely horrifying. Because the Soviets deliberately decided to not help the Polish resistance (Home Army) in their fight with the Nazis--which, militarily, they were in a position to do--the Home Army has found itself grossly outmatched and alone in its plight. The Uprising went on for 63 days and, on average, each one of these days saw more Polish casualties then the total number of victims of the 9/11 attacks. The Home Army did not have enough resources to protect Warsaw's civilians from Nazi genocide; overall, it is estimated that the Nazis murdered about 200,000 Polish civilians. Most of those murders occurred in mass executions in which people were rounded up, building by building, block by block, and shot by the SS troops. Indiscriminately of anything. Old people were shot, as were young people, men, women, 10-year-olds, infants, pregnant women, disabled people; in hospitals, the sick and wounded were being burned alive on their beds. For example, during the 48 hours between August 4 and August 5 ("Black Saturday") of 1944, the SS murdered 35,000 helpless civilians in indiscriminate street executions (see The Wola Massacre). This was all in accordance with a personal order from Hitler. After the Home Army capitulated, its troops and almost all remaining city residents were sent to concentration camps in Germany. In the Summer of 1939, Warsaw's population was roughly 1,300,000. In the Fall of 1944, after the Uprising was over, 90% of the city's buildings lay in ruins; amongst those ruins there were about 1,000 survivors. That's what Warsaw, before the war a densely populated, modern, affluent, vibrant and culturally sophisticated city, was reduced to in the aftermath of the Uprising. Not only did the Uprising end in apocalyptic destruction, it also did not help Polish people to bargain any type of independence from the Soviets whose plans were to turn Poland into its satellite state. Which they did. Despite fighting the Nazis and bearing unimaginable costs of this fight, Poland was not granted by the Soviets any more independence than Hungary or Bulgaria--countries which not only never fought the Nazis, but were actually allied with them.

In my opinion, the Uprising's end was the worst possible scenario realized. I can't imagine how things could have gone any worse. And of course to this day, the discussion as to whether or not the decision to fight was a mistake, is extremely emotional. For now, I'd like to side step those emotions and concentrate on something admittedly very dry: how are we to decide if the Uprising was a mistake or not. Six years ago, which was the sixtieth anniversary of the Uprising, one of the largest Polish newspapers Rzeczpospolita ("The Republic") ran a series of articles which debated the question of whether the Uprising was a mistake or not. The one quote I remember is from a historian Dr. Dariusz Stol who said

Of course, the decision to launch the Uprising was a mistake; any decision that leads to a catastrophe is by definition a mistake.

This statement will be my non sequitur of the month. It is an example of hindsight bias, that is, a propensity to overestimate the ex-ante probability of occurrence of those events that actually occurred. Dr. Stol's version of hindsight bias is quite extreme; he seems to think that the outcome of the Warsaw Uprising that was actually observed was inevitable (had an ex-ante probability of occurrence equal to 1).

Nothing in life is certain or impossible. Life is a random variable. There is a certain deterministic component to it, sure; but there's a random one as well. And this is why decisions cannot be judged by their one-time consequences, because decisions can only be right or wrong on average. What follows from this is that it's possible to make a right decision that leads to disaster, and conversely, a bad decision that leads to good outcomes. For example, in poker, making large bets to chase an inside straight on the river is a very bad decision. Even if luck is on your side, you do get your straight on the river and win a large pot, you have still made a bad decision. And conversely, betting "all in" when you have a set of aces and you think your opponent only has an inside straight draw is a good decision; and even if he gets that Jack on the river and beats you, you made the right decision, and he has made a wrong one.

I do, actually, believe that the Home Army commanders made a mistake when they started the Warsaw Uprising. I believe they underestimated the probability that Soviets will not help at all. But there remains also the possibility that they were not mistaken at all: they may have estimated the relevant probabilities correctly, then simply gambled, and lost. At any rate, if they did make a mistake, it certainly was not a mistake "by definition." The actual result of the Uprising was not inevitable. The commanders didn't think the Uprising would end the way it did. The Home Army headquarters did not have a death wish: if they knew the Uprising would end the way it actually did, they would not have started it.