Flying for Freedom

‘Machines will beat machines,’ said Winston Churchill to the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, as all serious resistance to Germany was coming to an end in June 1940. It is difficult to determine whether the British statesman was speaking from the heart at that moment or merely groping for any suitable words which might inject at least some more self-belief into the tottering French government. In all probability it was the latter, for in the same discussion on 11 June, the French had asked for yet more British fighter squadrons to be sent to their aid, and again Churchill had refused. Furthermore, the British had lost a good deal of their own machines at Dunkirk, and the prospect of fighting any kind of war on the Continent – let alone a mechanised one – was rapidly diminishing.

Churchill’s comment was almost certainly inspired by the grim fascination with which he and others had watched the German advance. Machines on the ground and in the air had dealt Europe a blow of savage intensity not seen since the days of Napoleon. Indeed, the entire doctrine of Blitzkrieg depended on machines. If one recalls the dominant images of the First World War, most likely they will involve men in trenches being pounded by artillery, and both resources were considered to be available in almost inexhaustible quantities. By the time of the Second World War, the lesson had been learned – though more quickly by the Germans than anyone else – that mechanised warfare was the future. The man on the ground would necessarily become subordinate to the aeroplane and the tank; and if one wishes to pursue that progression to its logical conclusion, the soldier of today is even more of an irrelevance. In 1940, however, the French and British military still relied most of all on the trooper to win the field; and he, no matter how valiant, was no match for the piston and the propeller.

The air war in 1940 was essentially a question of pilots and planes. The French had at their disposal not only their own national force, but a good number of Poles and Czechoslovaks, many of them trained fighter pilots, who had reorganised on French soil when their own nations had been overrun. But the French problem was not one of pilot availability, for these they had in relative abundance. Neither the Poles nor the Czechoslovaks were employed by the French in any great measure, and those who did see combat (and several were decorated for bravery) did so in largely obsolete aircraft ranged against state-of-the-art fighting machines. As a result, when the air war over France drew to its close in mid-June 1940 and the RAF withdrew its remaining reserves, many of the pilots of the other allied nations sought evacuation to Britain, some hoping to continue their war against Germany, many others hoping to play a part in it at last.

Both the Poles and the Czechoslovaks would bring various grievances with them to British shores. Neither contingent was particularly impressed with the French war effort, and each group had political scores to settle, though in this respect the Czechoslovaks had the longest agenda. Both groups felt bitter and under-employed. Air Ministry staff who were detailed to interview the men on arrival in Britain grew accustomed to vehement complaints hurled at the French for having treated them as second-class fliers with no useful purpose to serve – until the going got rough, when they were thrown into the fight with scarcely any training on unfamiliar aircraft. The sharpest condemnation of all was reserved for the attitudes of the French personnel who had actively tried to prevent them escaping after the Armistice. These and other criticisms rang in the ears of RAF personnel officers until serious work had begun on the reconstruction of the allied units. Had both groups known the whole story, however, their anger would have been magnified tenfold.

To begin with the Poles, it is well known that the British and French guarantees to Poland formed the basis of the Western allies’ entry into the war in September 1939. It is less well known that the British guarantee issued by Chamberlain in March 1939 had included the French without their formal agreement. Chamberlain was gambling on the fact that France, still smarting with guilt after the Munich betrayal, would not treat Poland in a similar fashion, but the French not only doubted whether Poland was on Hitler’s list, they also had grave concerns over the fighting capabilities of the Polish forces, meaning that if a German attack did occur, the odds were heavy indeed that France would be plunged into another war. Thus, from the start, French commitment to the Polish cause was always going to be lukewarm, and Britain’s scarcely warmer, since neither party had any real admiration for the Polish state or its right-wing government.¹ In essence, the whole business was about containing German expansion, not defending Poland. However, once given, the assurance had to be honoured for neither France nor Britain could withstand the international condemnation which would follow a ‘Polish Munich’.

Shortly before the German attack on Poland, the British had signed a pact of mutual assistance with the Polish authorities. This arrangement, though largely political in nature, rather compelled the British toengage in staff talks with the Poles. The procedure was ponderous and meticulous; sub-committees were formed, satellite discussions took place, and all the details were carefully fed back to the Foreign Office in London. The first conference took place in the afternoon of 25 October 1939, and over several hours the delegates reviewed the options available. In essence, there were only three. The first was to retain all Polish air personnel in France. This idea was supported by Gen Zajac because this meant a better chance of active service upon the opening of a hot war in the west. But if this were to be the case, the French argued, then all the Poles would be sent forward to the front line in units or sections and then attached to existing French squadrons. The Poles would have none of this, insisting that their air force retained its independence as a national fighting arm. Zajac made it quite clear that sufficient men were available to form, operate and maintain eight complete squadrons of any combination if either ally undertook to supply the equipment and the locations.

The second option was to send all the men to Britain. This was also supported by Zajac, for three reasons: first, it would strengthen the bonds which united Poland to Britain; second, the imperial connection might make recruitment in the Dominions that much easier (and here he had Canada in mind); and third, the Polish maintenance personnel were more familiar with British aero-engines. Both the British and the French rejected this option, the British claiming that they had neither the space nor the equipment to assimilate the 5,000 or so men involved, and the French because they feared that a lengthy training period would surely be necessary, and in effect this would render the contingent useless for too long. It will be seen that this was so much hot air on behalf of the French, but the French DCAS, Gen Romatet, sweetened the pill by suggesting that the entire contingent be split equally down the middle, one portion to serve on the continent in independent squadrons, the other to embark for Britain for refitting with the RAF.

This was the third option, and Romatet went on to elaborate his vision for the Polish Air Force reborn. He explained to Zajac that ‘within a few months’ France would create a Polish fighter division consisting of two squadrons, or thirty-eight planes in all, and one bomber division, again of two squadrons, with a total of twenty-six aircraft. AVM Douglas Evill then chipped in on behalf of the RAF. He flattered Polish aspirations by stating that His Majesty’s Government would be ‘very proud’ to have Polish units fighting side-by-side with the RAF, and his trump card was to hand a note to all the delegates committing the British to forming two first-line light-bomber squadrons with two more in reserve, the latter acting as operational training units. Thus, the target of the eight squadrons which Zajac had asked for would be met by the policy of division, and neither he nor the new Polish Prime Minister, Gen Wladyslaw Sikorski, had much option but to accept it, primarily because it was the only offer on the table, but also because it represented a realistic chance of getting Polish airmen into action again with reasonable resources at their disposal. Zajac later wrote to the former British air attaché to Warsaw, Gp Capt Alexander Davidson, and stressed that any units formed ‘would constitute a part of the Polish Air Forces’. This meant independent status, and with that, so Zajac argued, came the rights of inspection and creation of a separate high command. He also demanded a firm promise from both the allies that the squadrons would fight on the western front when it became active, and that all units would be returned to Poland in their entirety at the end of the war. Davidson’s reply is not known, and in any case such matters were far too lofty for a group captain to pronounce upon, but what is significant is that these issues in one form or another were to dog the Anglo–Polish relationship in the air until victory had been won, and even after.

The conference closed with each of the three parties declaring the scheme to be workable, and Evill returned to Britain in the evening and informed the Air Ministry and the Foreign Office accordingly. To the latter, Evill summarised the situation, concluding that the terms of service should be ‘embodied in a charter’ that would formalise the arrangement above and beyond the official treaty of alliance. He also sounded the first warning about ‘the administrative, disciplinary and psychological problems’ which would certainly arise from the formation of Polish units in England. Finally, in a sentence which was to cause problems in the near future, he added that the Poles had been told that any further arrivals of personnel would be concentrated at Lyons ‘and similarly dealt with’. He also knew, but did not mention, that another 6,000 Poles then resident in France had been targeted by the Polish High Command as potential recruits, but when this had been brought to the attention of the allied conference, both the French and the British threw up their hands and declared that any use of these personnel would constitute an entirely new proposal above and beyond the present arrangement which involved only those men in uniform at that time.²

The transfer of the airmen did not begin until after the Anglo-Polish Naval Agreement was signed on 18 November 1939. Within the scope of that Agreement, which was designed to incorporate Polish naval operations within the structure of the Royal Navy, provisions were made for the movement of the men to Britain at the rate of 200 or so at a time. This was to make the task of accommodating them easier, or so the story went. A few weeks after this, the first cohort arrived at Eastchurch. Much to the annoyance of the Polish authorities, each man was to be enrolled or commissioned into the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR). Formed in 1936, the primary function of the RAFVR was exactly what the name implies: to provide a pool of volunteer personnel from which reinforcements and replacements for the regular Air Force could be drawn. This was intensely irritating to the Poles, for they insisted in France – and would insist many times more in the future – that their position as a formal ally entitled them to fully independent status. In return, the British used an argument upon which they would fall back many times. RAFVR enrolment, they declared, was a much simpler method by which the new influx could be swiftly assimilated; and besides, it was impracticable to have an independent Polish Air Force in existence when half its strength would be in another country altogether. The Poles had no choice but to accept, though they were to discover that the British had secured for themselves by far the best part of the deal.

Thus, as far as the British were concerned, they had fulfilled their agreement to the letter. Groups of Polish airmen continued to arrive at Eastchurch until February 1940, but on their arrival they quickly discovered that there was nothing to do but sit in classrooms and learn English, be constantly drilled on the parade ground, and be force-fed RAF regulations. The attitude of the British officers did not help either. As Adam Zamoyski wrote, the RAF commanders thought the Poles to be ‘a rung or two lower on the ladder of civilisation’.³ There were numerous disciplinary infringements and the language barrier seemed almost impenetrable. In short, service life with the RAF seemed as inert as the situation they had left behind in France.

On 17 February 1940 the French Air Minister, Guy le Chambre, signed the Franco-Polish Air Agreement with Sikorski, now C-in-C of the Polish Forces as well as Prime Minister. The arrangement provided for the reconstitution of the Polish Air Force on French territory. Naturally enough, Sikorski expected the French to supply all possible assistance to achieve that aim, but Air Ministry records hint at a different agenda. As early as 9 January 1940, the French had been pestering the British to speed up the transfer of the Polish cohort, claiming that the delay was holding up the training of the men who were to remain in France. The British Foreign Office concurred with this view, arguing that ‘the Air Ministry’s handling of this from the very beginning has not been convincing’. As far as the Foreign Office was concerned, the whole deal had been concluded without much forethought, and in a desire not to sour relations with the French, the decision was taken to put more pressure on the Air Ministry to honour its commitments. Any action, however, should be undertaken with caution. As Roger Makins phrased it: ‘We must be careful how we set about stirring them up.’⁴

Makins wrote to Archibald Boyle, the Director of Intelligence within the Air Ministry, a man with considerable power in the field of allied air relations. Boyle had won the Military Cross in the First World War and had a range of contacts spread across Europe, which might have accounted for him being the RAF’s representative on the Joint Intelligence Committee. According to AM Sir Victor Goddard, who knew him well, his primary duty was ‘assessing the attitudes of people, including the shady ones and the twisters, British and foreign, who had associations with air power’.⁵ When he received Makins’ gentle urgings to move things along at Eastchurch, he threw part of the blame back onto the Poles themselves, insisting that they were contributing to the delay by dithering with the selection of suitable officers and men. The other part of the problem involved preparing the station itself for the incoming crews. At the time, only about 350 men had arrived, though he believed that a figure of 200 a week could be reached given favourable conditions.⁶

The Foreign Office was not convinced, believing that the French would not be pacified with such an excuse. Then the British Air Attaché in France, Gp Capt Alfred Collier, weighed in with his own views. Writing to the British Ambassador in Paris, he began by agreeing with Boyle that the Poles were showing ‘considerable muddle-headedness’, but he argued that the French were making matters worse by continually moving the men from camp to camp, and had made little or no effort to co-operate with their British allies in the transfer programme. He added:

They have received the Poles . . . without any proper arrangements for them, with the result that they have suffered seriously in morale and in health from the appalling conditions in which they have been kept. If we have not wished to take the Poles more rapidly, it has been because we were determined not to accept them until they could be properly housed and warmed. The French have done nothing with regard to the training of the Poles allotted to them.

He closed by drawing the Ambassador’s attention to the fact that three months earlier, the French ‘were clamouring and insisting that they must have all the Polish aviators. What, one wonders, would they have done with them if we had agreed to their suggestion?’ When a copy of the letter reached the Foreign Office, Makins pencilled a caustic note in the margin: ‘What would the Air Ministry have done if they’d had them all in the UK?’⁷

Thus, the Poles were in an invidious position. The French were keeping them in conditions so bad as to endanger health, while at the same time trying to push them out of the country into the arms of the British. For their part, the British Air Ministry was trying to blame the French and the Poles for the lack of progress. Small wonder, therefore, that discontent was spreading throughout the entire contingent. As one pilot so graphically put it: ‘They treated us like white niggers.’ Under heavy pressure and ‘with a great deal of fuss’, the Air Ministry finally relented and agreed to take 250 men a week, though the Foreign Office was by now well aware that future dealings with the RAF ought to be approached with much caution.⁸

That should have been the end of the affair. Throughout February and March 1940, the 2,200 officers and men were shipped over to Britain and installed at Eastchurch. Though conditions were cramped and there was much grumbling, the Air Ministry was still satisfied that it had kept its side of the bargain. Then, in late March, a new row erupted when the French approached the air attaché in Paris and informed him that a further 4,000 men were due to arrive from Romania, having escaped from occupied territory, and under the terms of the October Agreement the British had agreed to take half. Would they now do so?

An absurd argument then developed, rooted in pedantry and semantics. The British argued that, yes, they had agreed to take 50 per cent, but that figure was based on a total of 5,000 men, an estimate supplied by the Poles themselves. Nothing had been said about any further batches of escapees. The French retorted by pointing to the spirit of the agreement, insisting that no figures had ever been agreed upon in writing by either side. The Air Ministry then threw itself upon the mercy of the Foreign Office, and the latter promptly took the side of the French, checking the text of the October Agreement and curtly informing the Air Ministry that no precise expression of total numbers existed within it. The French, however, were on solid ground. It will be recalled that Evill, in summarising the October conference to the Foreign Office, mentioned that he had told the Poles that any further arrivals would be ‘similarly dealt with’: The French were well aware that any decent diplomat would interpret this as a firm promise because they immediately threw Evill’s words straight back at the Foreign Office, which in turn volleyed them on to the Air Ministry.⁹

The Air Ministry had been cornered; it had no option but to comply absolutely with the Agreement signed on its behalf by Evill in October, and this meant an obligation to take a further 2,000 men. This is not to say that compliance needed to be swift. In the wake of the Foreign Office’s decision on the matter, the Air Ministry copied letters to all relevant departments, arguing that it was the Polish High Command who were the real villains of the piece. One of the British staff in Paris interviewed a senior French Air Force officer and drew the conclusion that the Poles’ own estimates had ‘fallen far short of the true number’, and instead of informing the French and British governments of the position, they had ‘merely kept quiet and let things drift’.¹⁰ The French sympathised with this view, and also with the pleas of the Air Ministry that any further transfers would place an intolerable strain on RAF resources. Yet it made no difference – the October Agreement was sound, and promises had been made. The French repeated their demand to know when the transfers would be taking place.

The Air Ministry then changed tactics and retreated to a policy which, using the terminology of today, might be called ‘massive retaliation’. More to the point, once it discovered that it worked – for no further transfers of Poles took place before the attack on France – it became an essential part of the Ministry’s armoury. As we shall see later, it was a weapon used whenever the Ministry felt itself to be outflanked by the Foreign Office on the question of allied air personnel. Having tried hard to convince anyone who would listen that they had fulfilled their obligations to both allies, and that they were struggling already with problems of training, accommodation and equipment, they circulated memoranda and reports which – to put it mildly – cast the Poles in an unflattering light. The most crucial of these was a paper by an officer attached to the RAF reception squadron named as Flt Lt Landau. Boyle read the report and discussed its findings with Landau in late March, shortly before the Foreign Office verdict on the question of further transfers. He then sent a copy to the Foreign Office in early April.

Landau argued that Polish discipline and organisation left much to be desired, and that officers and NCOs had little control over the other ranks. To explain this, he identified a range of causes, beginning with the defeat of Poland itself. This, he said, had caused the men to lose confidence in their commanders, and the long periods spent in Romanian and French camps had had ‘a demoralising effect on the discipline of the Polish airmen’.¹¹ He then attacked the Polish military tradition itself, suggesting that their concept of discipline ‘has never been up to the standard required in the RAF’. This he blamed on ‘the inherent individualism and egotism of the Poles’, and the observation that the officers seemed to treat the other ranks with ‘a lack of consideration unknown in our service’. Then, somewhat mystified, he observed that officers would also ‘fraternise with airmen, walk about with them and play cards with them’, and we may only conclude that Landau felt this had a confusing effect on the men, to the overall detriment of good military practice.

But all of this was only the preamble. Warming to his theme, Landau informed Boyle that promotion within the Polish Air Force was due largely to favouritism, and that this, too, gravely undermined discipline and efficiency. Then, in a swipe at the fighting spirit of the Poles, he added:

It had been hoped that the initial enthusiasm which inspired our Polish guests would enable them to overcome the difficulties arising out of the new surroundings and the new methods. Unfortunately, once they were put into British uniforms, given British ranks and British pay (far above their pay at home) and felt safe ground under their feet, this enthusiasm has worn off and matters of rank, prestige and, above all, ‘having a good time’ have become predominant.

This lacklustre attitude, he believed, might possibly be dispelled by pushing forward the programme of flying training, but more importantly, by encouraging the Poles to mix with their British colleagues so that they might ‘learn by example’.

If these were the problems, what were the solutions? First, Landau argued, ‘if the Polish air units in this country are ever to become efficient, their command must never be taken out of British hands’. He went further than the practice of duplicating senior posts, advocating that the Poles needed a British counterpart right down to flight sergeant because they were incapable of running things for themselves. To accomplish this duplication without giving too much offence, he suggested a programme of education through which the Polish authorities might come to know the complexity of the RAF organisation, appreciate the language difficulties, and fully comprehend ‘the extremely high standards’ expected from all who wore RAF blue. The British must supply as many liaison officers as it took to achieve these aims, and the Air Ministry should be prepared for the programme to last between six and nine months. Finally, to cure the problem of favouritism, he recommended that all such decisions of promotion and rank should finally rest in British hands, ‘even though outwardly the impression might be maintained that the Poles themselves had the final word’.

Some might see this as nothing but rampant bigotry; others might choose to argue that war is war and tough decisions have to be made, unpopular or not. But we can be sure that Boyle concurred with much of this, and the essence of the report – though presumably in greatly sanitised form – would be conveyed to Sikorski through the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall. Sikorski himself wrote directly to Neville Chamberlain on 4 April asking him to intervene personally and have the quota limitations cancelled, and urging him to accept all Poles from the Continent. Chamberlain replied with platitudes, promising that the matter would ‘be examined with the least possible delay’.¹² Sikorski again then directly requested a seat on the Supreme War Council, but the refusal from both the French and the British was as swift as it was blunt. The British Ambassador in Paris wrote to Makins at the Foreign Office agreeing with the view that a Polish military representative should be present at War Council meetings only for matters of Polish concern. ‘To give the Poles anything else,’ he added, ‘would be dangerous. They are much too emotional and indiscreet to be entrusted with secret plans relating to the conduct of the war.’¹³

Meanwhile, Boyle had hatched a new scheme, one which involved pacifying the French while avoiding the transfer of any more Polish airmen to Britain. The new total estimate of Polish personnel was placed at 10,000, and Britain was still bound by the October Agreement to accommodate and train half of them, or another 2,500 men in addition to the group at Eastchurch. It was argued that the Air Ministry’s main justifications for refusal should be lack of accommodation itself (though Boyle well knew, thanks to Landau’s report, that some of the earlier Polish contingent had been posted to stations across the whole of Britain, meaning that absorption would have been possible had the will been there), and the language difficulties presented by such a high number of non-English-speaking personnel. Also questioned was the likely impact on the war effort as a whole if resources were diverted to these men; this perhaps demonstrated that he too was in agreement with Landau’s view that the Poles might lack the morale to fight.

Boyle’s solution, therefore, was to inform the French that any surplus numbers should be either sent to the Polish Army in France or demobilised and employed in the French war industry. That way, the numbers would be dispersed without any serious impact on resources. It would also mean the virtual destruction of the Polish Air Force as a viable entity, though of course this was not mentioned in the plan. It was suggested that the French be told, politely but firmly, that there was simply no hope of forming more than two operational squadrons in Britain, with two more in reserve, and though Britain might be able to absorb ‘a few hundred mechanics at most’, this would almost certainly irritate the Poles into refusing such a limited transfer. Either way, Britain secured a few hundred trained specialists for nothing, or no more Poles at all. He obviously liked this idea, for he concluded his letter with: ‘We should therefore prefer no mention to be made of it, except under great diplomatic pressure, and then as the absolute limit of possible concession.’¹⁴ Thus, the Air Ministry dug in its heels: there would be no more Poles except under irresistible circumstances, and even then this would be the pick of the crop and only a fraction of the allotted number.

‘The reason why nothing was happening [at Eastchurch] was British confusion and dithering’; so wrote Adam Zamoyski in The Forgotten Few.¹⁵ But it seems clear from the full report as examined above, that it was not ‘confusion and dithering’ which the British were displaying, but an active distrust, and even dislike, of their new allies. Zamoyski also entirely ignores the debate over the excess numbers and the British commitment to absorb them, but it is apparent from the evidence that neither the French nor the British really wanted anything to do with the Poles, and that the whole thing from first to last had been an exercise in allied ‘solidarity’ which had gone hideously wrong for all parties concerned.

Zamoyski’s interpretation of Landau’s report can also leave the reader with the impression that the British to some extent caused the reduction in discipline and other factors by this ‘confusion and dithering’, when it would seem from the timing of the memoranda that the report was precisely gauged to add a powerful contribution to the continuing debate over whether or not the British should take more Poles. This is not to say that Landau’s report was accurate or even fair, but it is indicative of the lengths to which the RAF would go in order to avoid having its organisation interfered with by mere diplomats. Neither was this a solitary incident, as we shall see.

Of greater importance, perhaps, is not what the Air Ministry did, but why it did it. The answer lies deep within the pre-war relations with Poland as a state, the British military tradition in general, and the Anglo-French interpretation of East European politics. In the first place, the Chamberlain guarantee to Poland in March 1939 had little or nothing to do with protecting the Poles; rather, its primary function was to signal to Hitler that the Western democracies would tolerate no further expansion. An added bonus might be the weakening of Hitler’s position within Germany if his general staff could be persuaded to take seriously the threat of an all-out war with much the same coalition which defeated them in 1918. Secondly, Chamberlain – and to some extent the French also – was obliged for reasons of credibility to save face after the Munich betrayal. This was particularly important because, at the time, both Britain and France were entertaining hopes of Soviet resistance to Hitler – hopes dashed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. By taking a tough line on Poland, Chamberlain might convince Stalin that the West was prepared to fight this time, and it was simply impossible to reverse the guarantee once the Russians had signed their devil’s covenant with Berlin. Chamberlain, by nonchalantly offering to protect Polish honour, effectively committed Britain and France to war in defence of a country which had itself behaved disreputably during the Munich crisis and was governed by an unwholesome bunch of militarists and right-wingers.

This last point was also a factor in the guarantee. The West was fully aware that Poland could fall into the German orbit given sufficient territorial compensation and an agreeable policy over Danzig, hence the desire to strengthen Polish nerves with the offer of assistance. But Poland had delusions of Great Power status, and under Foreign Minister Josef Beck, had followed a policy of arrogant resistance far beyond her capabilities to support by force if necessary, so the West was bolstering a power which was fatally under strength at its core. The French, on their part, had signed a formal alliance with Poland as early as 1921, but even this was in connection with the French policy of preventing a resurgence of German aggression, and only loosely directed towards mutual interests. Poland therefore had no ‘friends’ in the West as such, only many fine words and promises of support from two nations which were in fact serving their own interests and completely failing to grasp the implications of the promises they had made.

For these reasons, when the Polish collapse in 1939 was so swift and resolute, France reacted not with outrage but with horror, for now all the diplomatic chickens would come home to roost. The alliance of 1921 had provided for military staff talks and a mutual exchange of German-related intelligence, but in reality there had been few moments of substantive communication between the two. The French had been similarly aloof with the Czechoslovaks, with whom they signed alliances in 1924 and 1925, and by 1939, largely through ignorance and lack of commitment, the French had formed opinions of the Polish and Czechoslovak military which were wholly negative, which accounts for the bleak treatment the air crews received when they decamped to French soil. The French held the Polish military entirely responsible not only for their own defeat, but also for the necessity of France declaring war on Germany at all. Worse still, it now appeared that Germany was free of all Eastern entanglements and at liberty to hurl her entire weight against the West. Thus the Poles became the scapegoats for French resentment and – we might say – fear of what was going to happen next.

The British position was more remote. To some extent, the Poles were an inherited ally: they came attached to the French like a bolt-on accessory to a domestic appliance. The British were only committed to liaise with the Poles after they had signed the agreement on mutual assistance shortly before the outbreak of war, and most of the knowledge the British possessed regarding the capacity and capabilities of the Polish forces was acquired second-hand from French sources. The Polish Military Mission arrived in Britain in August 1939 complete with four ships loaded with supplies. As ‘allies’ they expected much, but they obtained very little. They demanded promises of immediate intervention in the event of a German attack, but they were not to know that as early as May 1939, both the French and the British had resolved not to attempt direct military assistance.¹⁶ Neither of the general staffs expected the Poles to be able to resist a German attack for very long (and at the time this did not include the possibility of a parallel Soviet invasion from the east), and to send forces in support of such a doomed cause would amount to a suicidal strategy and might even provoke a German attack in the west. Therefore, when the defeat of Poland occurred with such resounding finality, this merely confirmed the prejudices of the British and French service chiefs that the Polish forces were simply not viable allies in combat. In the eyes of the British, the Poles were a French problem first and foremost, and that is why the Air Ministry took such a firm stance against the further transfers in early 1940.

One other factor needs to be considered: the way Britain viewed military alliances in general. As Lord Salisbury said, ‘Britain does not solicit alliances, she grants them,’ and this was very much the prevailing view in 1939, echoes of which may be detected in the way Chamberlain committed the French to the Polish guarantee without their prior approval. In one of A.J.P. Taylor’s musings on the nature of British foreign policy, he wrote: ‘Most countries have their foreign policy dictated to them by their situation and by the behaviour of their neighbours.’ To this he added Palmerston’s view that an alliance between equals is impossible, and that ‘one Power has to be dependent on the other and need protection’.¹⁷ Britain had chosen to go to war in September 1939, whereas Poland had no option but to respond to the German thrust. Moreover, Polish pre-war foreign policy was in large part a reaction to the policies of Germany and Russia, her two most powerful and dangerous neighbours. This choice on the part of Britain created in her a sense of moral superiority, for yet again Britain saw herself as acting in Europe’s best interests by attempting to maintain the balance of power. With moral superiority comes the righteous belief that one should hold the levers of power, and although this was difficult to achieve in regard to the French, it was easy when it came to the Poles. From the very beginning, therefore, both the British and the French regarded the Poles as ‘the dependent power’, to be seen and not heard while the bigger boys got on with the business of war.

All of this explains why the Poles were held in such contempt by the French, and why Polish frustrations at Eastchurch were interpreted by the British as evidence of slovenly tradition, unwarranted arrogance, overblown prestige and a hint of defeatism. It also explains why the Poles were so emphatically denied a permanent seat on the Supreme War Council. Only twice before the fall of France were Polish political and military representatives allowed to witness the Council’s deliberations, on 23 and 27 April 1940, and on both occasions the main topic of Polish interest was not allied action against their conquerors, but Polish contributions towards the Norwegian campaign. They were literally sent from the room when the Council turned to matters of strategic policy. In fact, almost the only words the Poles heard were ‘sentimental and bland expressions of sympathy and appreciation for Polish heroism’.¹⁸

Then, on 1 May 1940, at the first meeting of the Allied War Committee, similar tributes and promises of complete liaison were bestowed upon Col Leon Mitkiewicz-Zoltek, the Polish representative. Here was a man who had not enjoyed a smooth passage to this gathering. He had initially been proposed by the Poles as their representative on the Supreme War Council, and in itself this had been prompted by questions in the House of Commons in February regarding the likelihood of a Polish candidate for a seat at the top table. Encouraged by the publicity, the Poles nominated Mitkiewicz-Zoltek as their man at the centre, so in mid-March he went about his formal rounds to introduce himself to his new colleagues. But when he arrived at the War Office, he was all but ejected from the premises by officials who claimed to know nothing about him. Beside themselves with fury, the Polish authorities bombarded the Foreign Office with demands for answers and apologies, and the Foreign Office in turn (rather shocked, to judge by the tone of the correspondence) demanded answers from the War Office. It was eventually told by Gen Marshall-Cornwall that the Pole could not be received because the War Cabinet office had not been officially informed of his appointment. Worse still, the French claimed no knowledge of the man at all. The General suggested that the Poles should apply to the French for approval, then the French would inform the British. A minute to file in the Foreign Office conveys the exasperation: ‘This all seems to be unsatisfactory and to a certain extent ridiculous.’ This would seem to be a reasonable assessment, for the next two weeks were spent laboriously circumventing protocol to receive a man who for many years had been on first-name terms with the air attachés of Europe, and it was only after the War Office, under intense pressure from the diplomats, informed the French without debate that Mitkiewicz-Zoltek had been appointed that order was eventually restored. Even so, the whole affair merely illustrates still further how easy it was for the major powers to alienate and aggravate their ally – not by deliberate action, but by the perhaps more wounding and humiliating method of simply disregarding it in small but highly significant matters of prestige.¹⁹ It also reinforces the view that, as far as the British were concerned, the French still bore the greater part of the responsibility for Polish affairs.

We may therefore only imagine Mitkiewicz-Zoltek’s frustration at that meeting on 1 May as he was showered with lusty welcomes and bonhomie. He thanked the Committee, and then admitted rather apologetically that Polish input to the war effort thus far had been ‘rather limited’.²⁰ Given that his country then had at least 8,000 airmen in France and ten times as many soldiers, few of whom even had a regular pay packet to look forward to, we must record this as a monumental piece of restraint on his part. What is more, that situation changed very little when the Germans launched their assault in the west ten days later. The feeling among Polish air crews was that the French could not possibly ignore their determination to continue the fight now that the war had been brought so close to home. Of the 8,000 air force personnel, approximately 1,000 were pilots, many of whom had seen action in the battle for Poland, and it seemed inconceivable that such a wealth of training and combat experience could be disregarded. Yet it was, and to a considerable extent. It has been estimated that only 150 or so men actually flew in combat, and though at the height of the battle the Polish Air Force in France consisted of seven squadrons (four fighter, two reconnaissance and one bomber), the action was limited in the extreme, the bomber squadron being entirely unused.²¹

Hence the French were still locked into their grand hallucination. Testimonies by both the Polish and Czechoslovak air contingents clearly indicate that neither was assigned to any meaningful combat duties, save a few individuals who found themselves flying within French squadrons. Defeatism was rampant, made worse by the scale and speed of the assault. When the shockwaves hit Britain, it might have been expected that attitudes towards the Poles would have been inverted overnight, but this was not the case. Two weeks into the new war, the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff convened a meeting to discuss ‘the desirability’ of forming allied flights within existing RAF Hurricane and Fairey Battle squadrons, working on the principle that ‘around 70’ pilots with operational and/or combat experience were then in the RAFVR. The meeting instructed Boyle to prepare papers accordingly.²²

The Air Ministry’s figures of ‘around 70’ were based not on actual data of men who had seen action in the various theatres of war, but on the numbers who, at the time, were involved in operational training of one form or another – in other words, men who were being trained to RAF standards as opposed to the skills acquired from service with their own national forces. For example, by late March, the Poles had 63 officers and 163 other ranks engaged in training at the new Polish Operational Training Unit (OTU) then forming at RAF Hucknall. By late April, only a very small percentage of these men had been trained to the levels required by the RAF, and when added to the other individuals from other nations who had been inducted into the RAFVR, they formed this nucleus of allied pilots which, as the situation in France swiftly worsened, the Air Ministry now deemed it necessary to employ. By late May, the estimated number of suitable allied personnel ready for service was placed at fifty bomber pilots with combat experience and a possible ninety with other operational experience. Even so, Davidson fought shy of using Polish aviators in bombers, arguing that Poles were ‘individualists’ and that their temperament was not suited to service in aircraft with a large complement.²³

The Poles themselves had already seen the need for a rapid increase in trained men ready to fly at a moment’s notice. To that end, they had made a direct offer to the Air Ministry, giving their permission for individuals to be seconded to British fighter squadrons. Sholto Douglas, writing in early June to the Air Member for Personnel, Sir Richard Peirse, gave his blessing to the idea.²⁴ Boyle himself had only recently accepted the concept of utilising the Polish experience. From early June, therefore, it seemed that the Polish crews which had been so neglected at Eastchurch might at last find themselves back in the war.

However, while it would be pleasant to record that sheer necessity had forced the hand of the British – even if this implies that progress on the Polish issue would have remained sluggish if that necessity had not arisen – there was an added impetus behind the drive to get some of the Poles into action. On 24 May, in a long memorandum directed towards the decision-makers in the Air Ministry, Wg Cdr Cyril Porri argued that ‘an explosive representation’ might be made by the Poles unless something positive was done soon.²⁵ He added that the vast majority of the men encamped at Eastchurch had done little in the way of active war work since their arrival, and he noted that those men who had opted for service with the French were now in action, ‘and the French express the greatest admiration for their efficiency, usefulness and enthusiasm’. As we know now, the sincerity of this last statement is open to question, but Porri’s central message was clear: unless a number of Poles saw action soon, morale and efficiency would take a serious downturn, and the blame would rest squarely with the Air Ministry.

This note was read the day before the conference, which immediately gave the signal to explore the possibility of using Polish personnel, hence we may draw our own conclusions about its effectiveness. Porri emphasised his argument by pointing out that several Dutch pilots had only recently arrived in the country, yet they were already in RAF uniform and being readied for action while the Poles still languished in Kent. Porri was too canny to target any individuals as being responsible for the dilatory attitude regarding the Poles, but he skilfully laid the blame at some appropriate doors by highlighting four factors, pointing first to the ‘multiplicity of Air Ministry branches dealing with organisation and procedure’. This threw into stark relief the bald fact that the Air Ministry had no preconceived strategy for dealing with allied pilots, and proves conclusively that the ‘British half’ of the Polish contingent was taken without any basic planning being involved, making it no more than an empty gesture to the French. This was underlined by his second and third points: that the aerodrome (Eastchurch) was ‘insufficient’ in terms of suitable accommodation, and that the availability of training aircraft and RAF instructors was also poor. Finally, he pointed to a total inability ‘to obtain authoritative decisions which might accelerate action’, a charge which would have stung Sholto Douglas and Peirse as they were ultimately responsible for the allied crews.

Porri’s brief examination of the intrinsic problems within the Air Ministry would later give rise to a new RAF directorate dedicated to the administration of the allied air forces, but in the short term his observations undoubtedly inspired action, albeit limited. Approximately twenty trained Polish pilots were transferred to British squadrons in early June, but the remainder were left to continue their long vigil. Why, exactly, is a matter for our interpretation of the events and motives. Zamoyski’s view leaves the reader with the impression that British distrust and disorganisation were the principal reasons for the shambles at Eastchurch, and this assessment is not without merits, as we have seen. But we must also add the element of disinterest, for as discussed earlier, in many respects the British and the French did not even see Poland as being a viable belligerent in 1940. She had been knocked down and counted out, and the thousands who gathered in the west were, if anything, just the remnants of a shattered force to be pushed into a corner and left out of any meaningful equations.

This explains why neither the French nor the British had any assimilation programmes in place, and why they made no serious attempts to design any such programmes until they were forced to do so by political pressure, impending disaster or the threat of insurrection. To be sure, distrust played a part for military, political and even racist reasons; and sheer bloody-minded snobbery was not far beneath the surface either. In the final analysis, however, the Poles were unwelcome allies on both sides of the Channel, not because they were unfit for service or were of questionable commitment, but quite simply because they were in the way.

Confirmation that this was the dominant attitude can be found in the British and French treatment of another group of Slav exiles, the Czechoslovaks. Their experience was almost identical to that of the Poles; in fact, if anything, their position was worse. Many Czechoslovaks had been in France longer than the Poles because Hitler’s coup de grace on the torso of Czechoslovakia had occurred in March 1939, and from that date a steady stream of men managed to escape the country by a variety of routes and offer their services wherever they would be wanted. Unlike the Poles, however, the occupation of Czechoslovakia had taken place without a fight, so the contingent had to rely entirely on promises of valour, rather than proof of it.

Most of the early escapees headed for Poland, but relations between Poland and Czechoslovakia were ice-cold after the Polish seizure of the Ť images

šín territory at the time of the Munich vandalism. As a result, many men sought the embrace of Soviet Russia, only to be met with instant internment.²⁶ However, those who succeeded in crossing Poland’s border discovered that the first obstacle to be overcome was their new national status. For Germany had not merely occupied the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, she had declared the territory to be a Protectorate of the Reich. This meant that all citizens of the two provinces – mainly Czechs – were henceforth citizens of the Third Reich, and Berlin was well within its rights under international law to demand the repatriation of all such persons who might arrive on foreign soil. Similarly, all Slovaks were under intense diplomatic pressure too. At the time of the occupation of the Czech lands, Slovakia had declared herself to be an independent state, but she automatically fell within the orbit of German influence. Political pressure from the new government in Bratislava might have forced neutral or threatened countries to repatriate all Slovaks too, therefore the target nations for the exiles – principally Poland, Romania and Hungary – all had to take into account the political consequences if they aided Czech and Slovak escapees. To the credit of the Polish authorities, however, they rejected the option of sending the men back, but equally they had no intention of provoking Germany by openly integrating them into their forces. A few Czechoslovaks did see action with the Polish Air Force after the German invasion, but these were mainly men who had Polish connections and had chosen to stay behind after the bulk of the contingent left for France at the beginning of August 1939.

France was the natural destination for the Czechoslovak group because she was legally an ally by treaty. French desires to bolster her potential resistance to the Germans had led her during the interwar years to seek alliances in Eastern Europe, mainly with the small states created at the end of the First World War which were vulnerable to renewed German aggression. It seems to have escaped the wit of French diplomats that by following such a policy they were recreating the same pattern of allied encirclement which so haunted Germany before 1914. Nevertheless, French insecurity drove the policy forwards, so by 1921 she had signed an alliance with Poland, followed by the Treaty of Alliance and Friendship with Czechoslovakia in January 1924. This treaty had outlined the military dimensions only, and merely committed the powers to confer on matters of foreign policy. But after the Locarno Pact of 1925, when it became apparent that Germany’s eastern borders were still negotiable, minds in Paris and Prague were suddenly concentrated on the awful prospect of a resurgent Germany, and hence the full alliance – the Treaty of Mutual Assistance – was signed in October 1925. France also strengthened her relations with Yugoslavia and Romania.

It has been argued in the past that British reluctance to commit herself to French security forced the latter to seek her protection elsewhere.²⁷ Equally, one could level the charge at France that by unilaterally developing her own security system, she was by implication demonstrating little faith in the capacity of the League of Nations to function as an arbiter of international disputes, and this was hardly encouraging behaviour from so prominent a member. Either way, the alliances were made, and in 1939 both the Poles and the Czechoslovaks threw themselves upon the welcome of their ‘ally’.

The attitude of the French towards the Czechoslovaks was little different to the position they adopted towards the Poles. As the men arrived in France they were told quite bluntly that they would be temporarily enlisted in the Foreign Legion, and that this was not an option – refusal to comply would mean expulsion back to the occupied territory.²⁸ Some men were also told that they faced deportation to the Reich itself. Furthermore, as with the Poles, the French held the military capabilities of the Czechoslovaks in little regard. A series of derogatory articles had been published in the middle 1930s through the military journal Bulletin des armées étrangères until Gen Faucher, a high-placed sympathiser, had them stopped.²⁹ When the men arrived in the summer of 1939, a confidential report produced for the Czechoslovak Ministry of National Defence (MNO) suggested that the primary holding camp at Agde was little more than an internment area. Although they had enough food, they suffered from lack of accurate war information and the disdain of French officers to all things Czechoslovak.³⁰ Ignorance rather than blatant contempt may have been the cause here, however. The Alliance of 1924 had allowed for staff talks between the French and the Czechoslovaks, but there had been little consultation at a practical level. The French, it would seem, placed greater faith in Czechoslovakia’s defensive capabilities than her offensive strength.³¹

By most accounts, Legion life was a grim experience. Units were sent to North Africa for training, much of it characteristically brutal, and some of it, perhaps by dint of malicious irony, under German NCOs.³² After the fall of Poland, limited active service was offered to both army and air personnel, but as with the Poles, the air contingent was used sparingly, joining combat as part of French Air Force detachments rather than as independent units. One reason was that Czechoslovak airmen, having completed basic Legion training, were posted to French colonial bases well away from the forthcoming front line on the Continent.

It was not until the outbreak of war with Germany that France drew on this manpower, but by then it was far too late to successfully integrate air crews who had been lightly trained on outdated equipment.³³ Of approximately 1,000 airmen in France, one estimate places only eighty-five in combat roles, with the others ‘kept well behind the lines’.³⁴ This conflicts with the official Czechoslovak tally of 123, but this figure also includes men who flew either individually or in small groups with French squadrons.³⁵ Whichever figure is correct, it is clear that action was seen by very few. In itself, this would have been a grave disappointment to the Czechoslovaks. In a report drafted early in 1940, optimism for a fully independent force with at least one fighter squadron and two bomber squadrons ran high. Prestige was a major motivating factor, for the Czechoslovaks felt able to compete with the best the French Air Force could muster, but they were not to have that chance. Although a Franco-Czechoslovak military agreement was signed in early May 1940, it was little more than window-dressing, and actual usage remained at the levels outlined above.

The undignified scramble which attended the defeat of France in June 1940 ultimately brought these men, and the remainder of the Polish group, to England. One might suppose, not unreasonably, that the British would have undergone a rapid change of tune towards both contingents now that their Continental ally was busily engaged in making a separate peace and an invasion of the British Isles seemed more than a distinct possibility, but it should come as no surprise to discover that very little changed at all. The sudden prospect of many thousands of Slavs fetching up on British shores greatly alarmed those men of influence who had pushed back the earlier commitments to the Poles, and they continued to resist even though there was, quite literally, nowhere else for them to go. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate what would have happened if the energies of one man had not been applied to a programme of assimilation. For it was Churchill who insisted that all of the displaced allies be made welcome – a brave policy for a man whose position as Prime Minister was by no means secure. Many of the people he pointedly directed to facilitate the evacuation and absorption of the allied groups had an intense distrust and dislike of their new ‘allies’, and it will be seen that resistance continued for some time.

The headlong retreat from the Continent after the fall of France was caught by a combined naval operation sometimes referred to as Operation Aerial, though in practice this is an umbrella term for many small, independently arranged sailings ranging from Cherbourg in the north of France down to the Bay of Biscay. While neither as large nor as famous as the Dunkirk evacuations a month earlier, Aerial rescued what remained of the British forces in France and the many tens of thousands of foreign personnel who, actively or otherwise, had been in the service of the French. The figures are impressive: a total of 163,225 men and women during mid-summer 1940, rescued by a flotilla of ships flying the whole range of allied flags, plus some Egyptian and Swedish vessels which were in French ports at the time.³⁶ In addition to the naval operations, the call went out to innumerable pilots and air crews to fly their machines – or any aircraft available – to Britain. Many of them made the crossing successfully, though there were reports of some French officials disabling planes or refusing to allow allied pilots access to them. The terms of the Armistice dictated by the Germans led to many such ugly scenes as former allies turned against one another, and men of all nationalities have recalled personal moments of anxiety as they desperately tried to get away, only to be hampered by over-zealous Frenchmen, glad that their war was finally over.

In Britain, the War Cabinet watched developments with increasing alarm. On 18 June, Eden drew to the attention of his colleagues that 12,000 Czechoslovak troops were in or near Marseilles, information supplied to him by the Czechoslovak National Committee in London. The following day, Sikorski told Churchill that many thousands of Polish personnel were also in dire need of assistance if they were to reach safety. Eden declared that he had spoken to the Admiralty on both counts, and embarkation plans now existed for Bordeaux and Marseilles. Even so, although he said that he was prepared ‘to take off any Czechoslovak troops who wished to leave’, he added that he ‘would much prefer to embark Polish troops’. This indicates that rescue from French beaches was not entirely conducted under a blanket policy, and that if the situation became desperate, Polish forces would have been given preferential treatment. It has also been claimed that the British were going to give priority to Polish airmen.³⁷

The most interesting part of Eden’s speech is the comment about those Czechoslovak troops ‘who wished to leave’. This begs the question, why should they not? In fact, a sizeable proportion did stay behind. Accurate figures for Czechoslovak casualties during the German offensive are difficult to establish due to the immense confusion, but one report estimated that the tally in May and June stood at 20 killed, of which8 died in combat, the others having perished in flying accidents or from unknown causes, and a further 12 unaccounted for.³⁸ One writer has estimated that fully two-thirds of the Czechoslovak forces stayed in France after the Armistice, many of them choosing voluntary demobilisation, most of them other ranks.³⁹

This estimate is firmed up by a Chiefs of Staff report which was submitted to the War Cabinet on 26 July, placing the number of Czechoslovak servicemen then in Britain at a little under 4,000.⁴⁰ Of these, the bulk were army personnel, but of the 1,000 airmen who had been encamped at Merignac, about three-quarters made their escape. Most of these men were officers or senior flying NCOs, a factor which was to plague the Czechoslovak Air Force throughout its time in Britain as it struggled endlessly against a shortage of ground crew. Furthermore, a good number of Poles chose not to leave France either. The Polish military had a total cohort of some 83,000 men in France at the time of the German attack. It has been calculated that over 27,000 reached England in the main wave; 16,000 were captured, and a further 54,000 remained in France, sought alternative escape routes through Spain, or were stranded in Switzerland with a French corps, this latter figure being placed at 11,000. This left 29,000 men still in France or trying to reach England, and by no means that amount reached Britain later in the summer.⁴¹

It can be seen from these data that a higher proportion of the Czechoslovak group remained in France, roughly 66 per cent. Even if we allow for all of the 29,000 Poles to have stayed behind, this only accounts for 35 per cent of the total. The issue is clouded further by contemporary figures, for the Chiefs of Staff report placed the number of Poles then in Britain at 14,000 (not 27,000) and the Swiss contingent at 25,000 (not 11,000). Curiously, these figures almost balance each other out, and it is unlikely that we shall ever know the true statistics. What we can be certain of, however, is that the signals received by the British regarding the Czechoslovak numbers were not encouraging. If two-thirds chose to stay and seek reasonable treatment at the hands of the occupying powers, what did this say about the commitment of the Czechoslovaks to continue the fight? This explains Eden’s remark, and his thoughts may well have been informed by earlier prejudices.

For example, in late May 1940, the Czechoslovak Air Attaché in London wrote to the Air Ministry with a feasible scheme to utilise Czechoslovak bomber crews, at that moment entirely redundant in France even though the battle was in full flood. The Attaché, Lt Col Josef Kalla, argued quite strongly for the formation of at least one bomber unit on British soil which could then be sent on specialised missions to attack enemy locations in the Protectorate. Kalla insisted that the men could be hand-picked for their geographical knowledge, and in forwarding the proposal to Boyle on 28 May, Wg Cdr Porri agreed that it would be wrong to ‘leave such potentially useful war personnel idle at this moment’.⁴² Fleshing out the idea, he suggested that seventy or eighty pilots could be absorbed into long-distance squadrons as second pilots or observers, but the reply from Boyle was unequivocal:

I very much doubt if this is worth pursuing. We don’t know (1) if there are any pilots worthy of the name and if they are available; (2) their integrity (I am doubtful of many Czechs); (3) whether their terms of agreement with the French makes them available.⁴³

Here again we see a senior British officer casting considerable doubt upon the efficiency and trustworthiness of men engaged in the common fight, with scarcely a shred of evidence upon which to base his judgement. Note also that he found it convenient to throw the responsibility back onto the French once more. Even so, he advised Porri to canvass Kalla on the availability of the men, and to explore the possibilities of incorporating those trained on fighters into home squadrons; and it is clear from later correspondence that he intended to pass the whole matter on to a higher power.

Boyle was clearly uneasy about dealing with the Poles and the Czechoslovaks, but Porri acted swiftly and interviewed Kalla, who assured him that the men were fully trained and experienced personnel with total commitment to the war effort. On 10 June Porri replied to Boyle and suggested that perhaps only thirty of the best pilots and an equivalent number of wireless operators and observers should be selected for service ‘after their integrity has been certified by the Czech Legation.’⁴⁴ To support his case, he enlisted the help of the former British Air Attaché to Prague, Gp Capt Frank Beaumont. This officer drafted a truly glowing tribute to the legend of Czechoslovak gallantry, to their ‘fibre, efficiency and indomitable spirit’, but we cannot know if these sentiments had any effect on the opinions held at the Directorate of Intelligence because by this time the French surrender was imminent. A quick response from Boyle merely stated that the matter had been forwarded to Sholto Douglas for a policy decision; and a further note on 17 June effectively shelved the issue altogether, drawing attention to the impending collapse of French resistance and suggesting instead that thoughts should now turn to evacuating all the Czechoslovak personnel from French territory.

Clearly, the French defeat had saved some high-ranking members of the RAF from a potentially embarrassing decision, but events had overtaken them. Edvard Beneš had already written to the new Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, requesting help with the evacuations, adding that the first group of thirty pilots had landed at Hendon on the night of the 17th. So, whether the Air Ministry wanted the Czechoslovak pilots or not, they were already at the door.⁴⁵

Nor were the Czechoslovaks the only contingent to be so coarsely assessed, for the Poles were also to suffer the lash of British xenophobia. Air Cdre Charles Medhurst became rather alarmed at the prospect of so many Poles arriving on British shores. Medhurst would soon be installed as the first director of a new Air Ministry department custom-built for dealing with the European air contingents, the Directorate of Allied Air Co-operation (DAAC). Early in 1941 this department was given a major overhaul and became the Directorate of Allied Air Co-operation and Foreign Liaison (DAFL), though by that time Medhurst had moved on to other duties. When it became clear at the end of June that very large numbers of Czechoslovak and Polish servicemen would shortly be arriving in the country – not by choice or invitation but by force of circumstances – the suspicious attitudes hardened. Medhurst, writing to Sholto Douglas on 3 July, warned that nearly 10,000 Polish airmen would soon be arriving, and forecast intense political pressure upon the RAF to form an independent Polish Air Force ‘entirely under Polish control’. The Army, he said, had already agreed to a form of independence for the Polish land forces, so such pressure applied to the RAF would be hard to resist. He strongly advocated that the RAF must insist on any new units being incorporated into the home force and falling directly under British command. Neither did he express his opinion of the newcomers in ambivalent terms:

An additional reason for attempting to secure this principle is that the senior Polish Air Force officers, I have been reliably informed, are completely useless and are only out to line their pockets in filling cushy jobs.⁴⁶

With views such as these, it is quite possible that he had been influenced by Landau’s negative report in March – not that such opinions were by any means unusual in the Air Ministry, as we have seen. He went on to suggest that a definite number of Polish squadrons should be decided upon at that moment, thus limiting places and excluding ‘the unskilled and inferior material’ who might be re-trained for service with Army Air Co-operation Units or ferrying duties. He estimated that no more than 40 per cent of the influx would be ‘really good material’, and surplus stock should be handed over to the Polish Army for absorption. Although Medhurst’s comments on the Czechoslovak contingent are not noted, it might reasonably be assumed that he held them in no higher regard.

On the same day that Medhurst was penning his vision of the future, Sholto Douglas received an assessment of the Czechoslovak air strength. In all, 327 flying personnel had arrived from France, of which approximately 50 per cent were officers. A further 177 ground crew had escaped, though their numbers would soon be swollen by another 300 mechanics believed to be in transit. This gave a rough officers-to-men ratio of one to five, and even the Czechoslovaks admitted that this was far too high for comfort. The reason for the imbalance was that the majority of the men who escaped occupied Czechoslovakia were career fliers, and these in the main tended to be officers or flying NCOs. When the agreements with the French allowed for the reconstitution of the Czechoslovak forces on French territory, Czechs and Slovaks who had otherwise settled in France during the 1930s were mobilised. Of these, Slovaks made up by far the greatest proportion of the ground crew in France, and after the French defeat these were the men who stayed behind together with their comrades in the Czechoslovak Army, returning to their families after the Armistice. It has been calculated that only about 14 per cent of the entire Czechoslovak Air Force which fought from Britain during the war were Slovaks, and the majority of these saw service with 311 (Bomber) Squadron, mainly as gunners, radio operators and ground crew.⁴⁷ Therefore, although most of the original ‘French’ contingent of 1,000 men chose evacuation, most were Czechs and about 20 per cent were officers, and this gave rise to some serious problems which will be examined in Chapter Three.

This flurry of correspondence on 3 July was due to a minor conference taking place on the same day, the principal item on the agenda being the absorption of the Czechoslovak airmen into the RAF structure. Porri, Kalla, Gen Karel Janoušek and Lt Col Alois Kubita all agreed that each man should, if possible, be employed within ten days, if only to maintain what was described as ‘excellent morale’. It was also agreed that there existed sufficient trained personnel to form one fighter squadron and one light-bomber squadron immediately, but in the first instance the whole cohort would be sent to a flying station, RAF Cosford, for initial assessment. Frank Beaumont, presumably because of his earlier enthusiasm for the Czechoslovaks, was nominated as commanding officer. Four training aircraft would be supplied at once and, in a revival of the earlier scheme, surplus fliers would be transferred to an Operational Training Unit to be readied for long-range bombing raids on enemy locations within the Protectorate. Men still without work after these selections would be trained for ferrying duties, and once fully operational the new bomber unit would be sent to a south-eastern station for raids against targets in France, preferably with its own fighter support to minimise the language difficulties. This last point was rejected by Sholto Douglas when the report reached him. Striking out the proposal, he commented: ‘We cannot have the Czechs conducting separate little operations of their own.’⁴⁸

A charitable interpretation of this remark might be that Sholto Douglas preferred to hold the new units rigidly under British command. Much more likely, however, is that it represented the prevailing spirit of distrust, for on 5 July he implicitly confirmed Medhurst’s anxieties concerning the new Polish influx. The latter’s suggestion for a limited formation of units found expression in the decision of the DCAS to create two fighter and two bomber squadrons from the Polish group, though this would clearly leave a vast amount of men awaiting employment from a contingent of 10,000. Untrained or partly trained men should be kept within arm’s reach for replacement purposes, though the emphasis fell upon maintaining the availability of skilled mechanics whose talents could be utilised inany squadron once they had become familiar with British machines. Medhurst’s comments on the quality of the men were neither refuted norrebuked.⁴⁹

Two Polish units were then in the process of formation: 300 Squadron, technically created on 1 July, and 301 Squadron, which existed on paper but would not be formally established until 26 July. Both units were to be equipped with Fairey Battle light-bombers, but neither could function without British personnel for maintenance and administrative purposes. The proposal was to follow Medhurst’s idea of creating two new units from the ‘French’ contingent of Poles and simultaneously replace the British personnel in 300 and 301 Squadrons with Polish mechanics. This carried a disadvantage, in that two otherwise front-line units wouldbe lost while being made operationally fit, but with the two new squadrons at least all four Polish units would be in the same group. Proposing this scheme to Sholto Douglas, the Directorate of Organisation added a sarcastic quip: ‘This would also satisfy Polish aspirations since it would go a little way towards their wish to have the squadrons grouped in what they are pleased to call “a unique command”.’⁵⁰ To some extent this was an unfair comment, not least because those aspirations had been partially encouraged by the British themselves. The war had been scarcely three weeks’ old when the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall, had written to the Polish Military Mission, newly arrived in London, and expressed the earnest wish that he would soon ‘see members of the Polish Air Force beside us in the Royal Air Force’ – a phrase which deeply implied independent status and one which set a clear precedent from the viewpoint of the Poles.⁵¹ He also added, ‘Need I say that I shall count it as an honour to have them thus with us’, and this must have rung hollow indeed with the Polish High Command after the squabbles over the transfer of men to Britain before the battle for France.

Much of the responsibility for assimilating the Poles and Czechoslovaks was now devolving upon Medhurst, yet he was still to be convinced that the RAF’s new allies were worth having. His principal concern was ‘the anxiety and trouble’ it would cause station commanders who would have to administer the Slavs in the early days. It was deemed impossible to allocate dedicated stations at that point in time, so his remedy was to supply liaison officers, one to each unit, and four or five interpreters, if that many could be found. On 7 July, he called for a full list of personnel from both groups. Armed with this information, he said: ‘we shall be able to pick out the best of the available material and grade the rest for future use if and when we want them.’ On 16 July, he wrote to all the relevant departments within the Air Ministry and further expanded his fears:

The political importance of preserving the appearance of a fully independent Polish Air Force will be strongly pressed [but it would be] detrimental to efficiency, and to national security, to permit Polish units to serve in the complex RAF organisation unless the RAF has full operational and disciplinary control . . . It is undesirable from every point of view to sacrifice operational efficiency to a point of prestige; the latter may be satisfied in many ways, the former must run no risk.⁵²

Thus Medhurst set out his stall. He had been compelled by adverse military circumstances and political decisions made at the highest level to do something with the thousands of Slav exiles streaming in from the Continent, but he did so with great reluctance and considerable apprehension.

As we have seen, there were deep political reasons behind some of this negativity, and those which surrounded the Czechoslovaks are even more complex due to the Munich affair and its aftermath. We shall examine these points at a later stage, but we may close this section by demonstrating just how flexible Medhurst could be in his official dealings with the Poles. On the same day that he warned the Air Ministry of creeping Polish expansion, he wrote to the Polish Military and Air Attaché and assured him that ‘we are, as you know, very eager to give all possible recognition to the Polish Air Force as having the status of an independent allied air force’, and he offered to release from the RAFVR all the previously enlisted and commissioned personnel ‘if the Polish Government feels it to be desirable’, which it most certainly did.⁵³ And yet even here, despite the apparent hypocrisy of his position, he was offering something which had already been decided, for the Polish High Command under Gen Zajac had taken a firm stand against any further enlistment of men into the RAFVR, insisting that all future registration should be handled by the independent Polish forces, and that all personnel formerly shovelled into the RAFVR be released forthwith.

Two days later, on 18 July, Medhurst was still clinging to the view that this policy was fraught with peril, minuting all departments that by serving within the RAFVR all men would be subject to RAF procedures and not Polish Air Force law, but under an entirely separate Polish command all control would be lost. He reinforced his opinion by adding: ‘The establishment of this precedent will undoubtedly cause trouble with the other foreign contingents, and possibly also the dominions.’⁵⁴ The only crumb of comfort was that the Poles had acceded to the British demand that the latter retain operational control.

A great deal, therefore, had occurred in thirty-eight days. The period began with some senior members of the Air Ministry holding a strong aversion to the creation of even a token Czechoslovak bomber squadron in Britain, and it ended with the establishment of 310 (Czechoslovak) Fighter Squadron at Duxford in Cambridgeshire on 10 July 1940. This was closely followed by the formation of 311 Bomber Squadron at Honington on 29 July, both units using the best-trained personnel from the Czechoslovak group which had arrived from France. Similarly, ‘completely useless’ Polish officers had, in the space of a week, been placed in positions of responsibility with dual command over hastily selected personnel. From the comments and decisions examined in this section, it is clear that there had been no sea-change of opinion within the Air Ministry during this time; and, bluntly put, the Royal Air Force had been presented with reinforcements that it did not want and did not trust. No one in July 1940 had any clear idea of what was to be done with these men, and the criticisms did not stop there, as we shall see.

THE SECOND PHASE: AUGUST 1940 TO DECEMBER 1943

Whatever negative feelings Medhurst, Boyle, Sholto Douglas and the others may have harboured towards the Polish Air Force in the desperate summer of 1940 were substantially mollified by events come the winter. All of the Polish crews proved themselves worthy of allied status ten times over during the Battle of Britain, and though little criticisms remained – such as their tendency to monopolise the radios during combat flying – by 1941 all of the serious doubts had been swept away. Indeed, even in the summer, attitudes had been changing noticeably. At first Medhurst had insisted that the ‘French’ and ‘British’ Poles were not to be mixed in squadrons if at all possible, mainly to protect the latter from defeatist influences, but Gp Capt Leslie Hollinghurst, the Deputy Director of Organisation, recorded that: ‘as a result of closer acquaintance with the “new” Poles, they [Air Intelligence] have decided that they are not such bad fellows after all and have withdrawn their objection’.⁵⁵ This view was reinforced during the autumn of 1940 when most of the senior RAF commanders and politicians from both countries conducted high-profile visits to the Polish stations, presenting medals, giving speeches, and generally talking up a relationship which was settling into a satisfactory condition.

Although the alliance was stabilising in military terms, the Poles still had two political issues which were not fully resolved from their point of view. The first was British assistance in establishing recruitment schemes abroad so that their very healthy core stock of air personnel would not be diminished by combat losses and unavoidable demobilisation due to age or disability. The second was the perpetual quest for independent status. The question of recruitment will be dealt with in Chapter Three, primarily because the Polish experience was broadly in line with that of the Czechoslovaks in that both groups suffered when they tried to export their enthusiasm to a largely disinterested North America. But, disappointing though these efforts ultimately were, the all-important need for prestige drove both of them into head-on confrontations with the British over the question of independence. It was a battle which the Poles eventually won, and one which the Czechs lost with great indignity.

Even by late 1940, the British were still reluctant to discontinue the practice of duplicating middle- and high-ranking posts within all the allied air forces (a not unreasonable decision considering the language difficulties and lack of a thorough knowledge of RAF practice on behalf of the allies), but this did not slow the political momentum behind Polish desires to achieve fully independent status. Success in this quest would be measured in various ways: (1) an agreement between the two nations that would formally enshrine the bilateral aspects of the alliance; (2) the creation of a separate Polish Air Force Inspectorate that would have full powers in the field of promotion, selection, training and administration; (3) equal, or at least substantial, representation at strategic level. This last point should not be confused with the creation of an independent stratum of command regarding missions and routine flying, for the Poles, as junior allies, were always prepared to follow the British lead when it came to active operations. Rather, as with their earlier requests for a seat on the Supreme War Council, the Poles felt entitled to a say in what course the war took, especially regarding operations or plans which affected the home territory. It was to be an unfulfilled objective, partly for political reasons on behalf of the British, many of which surfaced in the last years of the conflict, and partly because with the entry of the USA into the war after Pearl Harbor, that power automatically put many of the lesser groups into the shade, assuming an ever-greater dominance in strategic affairs which even Churchill had difficulty in resisting at times.

In 1940, however, no such obstacles existed, and it fell to the Polish High Command and political representatives to make the best possible case for the creation of independent armed forces. Indeed, all of the European allied powers felt entitled to independence in one form or another, and more often than not the air contingents were the focal point of their efforts. For its part, the War Office had no great objections to forming Army units which reflected the national character of each ally, but we should bear in mind that in 1940 there was no land war and it was relatively easy to create free-standing organisations which could, if need be, be smoothly integrated with the home Army. That was not the case in the air. Given the crises of that summer, and the obvious implications that air power would henceforth be a major strategic tool, the RAF felt wholly justified in its insistence that it retained as much control as possible over the allied groups. Equally, each allied government felt to a greater or lesser degree that the air units stood as elite representatives of their own national freedom and their determination to resist the invader, therefore the potential for conflict was vast.

As we have seen, the agreement to split the Polish air personnel between Britain and France was a separate issue dealt with in October 1939. However, the Polish terms of service were another matter, and the British side-stepped any unnecessary complications by simply rewording the Anglo-Polish naval agreement which legally formalised the collaboration at sea. This was not enough for the Poles, for in essence it meant that they were seen and described as an associated power simply assisting the British government with its war against Germany, when what they wanted, quite reasonably, was a level of international standing much higher than that. Even before the attack on France, Sikorski had been campaigning for greater recognition for the Polish presence to be embodied in the military agreements. He tried first with Chamberlain – meeting with little success – and then Churchill, who demonstrated that although the spirit was willing, the influence was weak. As far as Sikorski was concerned, Polish sovereignty rested largely upon the process of officer promotion and selection – a power which the British intended to reserve for themselves. As things stood in May 1940, the RAF had first and last say over who would receive commissions in the Polish section of the RAFVR – something which Sikorski strongly rejected. The British argument rested upon the constitutional point that only the King, ‘as advised by the Air Council, can promote officers belonging to that force’. Furious with this ill-judged and almost feudal declaration, Sikorski complained directly to Churchill, who put pressure on the Foreign Office to intervene. Within days the Air Ministry had relented, but not entirely, for the subsequent re-draft of the agreement merely permitted promotion to be considered by a joint board of Polish and British representatives, with the Poles having the final approval.⁵⁶

The air war over Britain that summer slightly delayed the negotiations leading towards the finished document, but by August all the outstanding issues had been resolved, or at least were in a state of compromise. The Poles had initially pushed for Polish military law to be applied in all cases, but this was refused by the Air Ministry with the not unsound argument that it would be unworkable where both nationalities were serving in the same squadron or on the same station. The compromise here was to insist that RAF law would apply at all times when a Polish individual was serving with the RAF in any capacity, and although in theory he would be subject to Polish military law, when the terms of Polish military law and Royal Air Force law differed, the latter would prevail. Furthermore, all disciplinary courts would consist of an equal number of British and Polish officers as judges, but with a British officer serving as president of the court and holding the casting vote. On the question of promotion, it was decided that all recommendations were to be generated by unit commanders then forwarded to the Polish High Command by the RAF for the former’s approval, but only if the RAF agreed with the recommendation in the first place. As a nod to Polish sovereignty, however, all men were permitted to take an oath of allegiance to the Polish Republic, and the agreement provided for the creation of an independent Polish Inspectorate theoretically responsible for all matters relating to the force, though in practice it represented the interface between the two air ministries, the primary channel of communication through which the RAF could monitor the condition of the Polish Air Force and, perhaps more importantly, the means by which the RAF could make its wishes known. But the Poles, and to some extent the British too, had taken for granted the creation of a formal Inspectorate as early as March 1940. In any case, it served both parties to have such a body in place: from the Polish side, it enabled them to monitor and maintain the development of the air force in exile, and from the British viewpoint, it relieved them of the burdensome task of day-to-day administration, allowing them to concentrate on the major issues of policy and deployment.

The first incumbent was Gen W.J. Kalkus, the existing head of the Inspectorate since September 1939, but when the transfers to Eastchurch were well under way, Polish requests to have him sent to Britain were at first rebuffed. The Directorate of Organisation was clearly displeased with the prospect of a senior commander viewing the shambles at Eastchurch, minuting Porri in March 1940, ‘[His visit] would not serve any useful purpose because any shortcomings that he might discover would certainly be well known to us’ – the implication being that the RAF could not stand before him covered in shame when as far as they were concerned they were only doing what was expected of them.

The attitudes changed when Davidson, the station commander at Eastchurch, supported the proposal and enlisted the help of the British Attaché in Paris. The latter described Kalkus as a man ‘with very pleasant manners’, the only serious drawback being that he spoke no English or French. Davidson concurred with this view, though he warned that the proposed Inspectorate might prove to be larger than imagined because the Poles had a few surplus officers which they wished to employ. However, the argument was clinched when the attaché added: ‘I should say that he is not a very strong man, and this impression is borne out by his nickname among his own people which is “the sheep in lion’s clothing”.’

This was more than enough to sway even the devout sceptics like Boyle who minuted all departments that Kalkus was clearly the man for the job, and that the creation of an Inspectorate within the RAFVR would ‘enhance the levels of control’ over the units in Britain. At a meeting in May, it was decided that Kalkus would be given the immediate rank of Air Commodore and have a staff of twelve, though there was still some foot-dragging over the powers he would be endowed with, and whether this would lead to a form of de facto independence by the back door. Davidson argued that the Inspectorate must be formed with all possible speed because the workload placed upon him was at times intolerable, and that the senior Polish officer, Capt Stachon, was forced to refer to his superiors in Paris before even the smallest decision could be taken. Then, in late May, AVM Paul Maltby, the AOC No. 24 (Training) Group, which shouldered most of the responsibility for the training programme at Eastchurch, wrote directly to the Air Council and complained about the expectations placed upon Davidson at Eastchurch:

[He] is becoming far too involved with all matters concerning the various Polish contingents in this country, no matter where they are stationed [and] he is being consulted not only by various branches of the Air Ministry and the Polish authorities, but even by politicians. I submit that it is quite beyond his capacity to command his station . . . if he is expected to act as an advisor on widespread policy matters at the same time.’

He closed by urging the creation of ‘some central authority’ at once, and henceforth all doubts were cast aside and Kalkus was formally installed at the beginning of June. If anything, this little episode demonstrates yet again that the British were totally unprepared for dealing with the Poles in any capacity, but also that any proposals for improving the situation had first to run the gauntlet of suspicion that by passing greater autonomy to the Polish High Command, the British would lose more of what little control they had to begin with.⁵⁷

The first Anglo-Polish Military Agreement was signed on 5 August 1940, with appropriate appendices covering the respective air, sea and land forces. Apart from defining the powers of the Polish Inspectorate, it also officially removed the entire contingent from the RAFVR and placed them under their own national banner. It went some way towards fulfilling Polish aspirations, but it had one crucial omission: it did not include any promise by the British to restore the territory of Poland once victory had been assured – something which did not pass unnoticed by the Poles. The preamble only committed the two governments ‘to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion’, a vague and slippery objective which meant that the British could avoid indelicate matters of territory and frontiers at the war’s end.

Furthermore, the Poles were not the only group whose postwar ambitions were kept at a distance by the British: the Czechoslovaks too were to discover that their new friends were inclined to shuffle and mumble when the question of ‘afterwards’ was raised, and it was even more galling to both these nations when the agreements with the other allied countries of Western Europe proudly proclaimed restoration and deliverance. This is one reason why the British preferred all of the national agreements to be kept secret between the contracting parties, and why they were never elevated to state treaties, for this would have meant parliamentary ratification, and therefore publicity. In short, although the various allied military agreements were, in the main, little more than carbon copies of each other, the essential differences lay in the amount of power each group had over its own forces, and what policies the British government intended to follow once the war had been won. Nevertheless, and perhaps wisely, the Poles did not seek further conflict over this matter, for had they done so they would have faced a wall of opposition from the Foreign Office and the Cabinet. But in 1940, looking around at the grim state of the war, this was a minor point of contention compared to the very real business of getting on with the fighting.

In the years that followed, the Polish Air Force superbly demonstrated that getting on with the fighting was something it could do without prompting from the French, the British, or anyone else. By mid-1941, most of the doubts and suspicions of darker days had been dispelled by the sheer tenacity and determination of these men in exile, to the point where the RAF started to throw open hitherto shuttered doors to selected members of the Polish High Command. This still did not extend to what might be termed ‘secret information’ or strategic briefings, but when Sikorski requested that certain of his officers might serve for a time in Command or Group Headquarters so they might learn more about the central organisation of the RAF, both the DAFL and Portal (then the CAS) signalled their wholehearted concurrence. Polish officers were gradually seconded to British squadrons, and like senior officers in other allied forces, eventually placed in command of some of them.

The social dimension was also a positive one for the Poles. Zamoyski spends considerable time describing how attractive the Poles were to British women in the first half of the war, and there can be little doubt that the Polish airman or officer was very much an exotic creature until the arrival of the Americans in large numbers. But what he lacked in spending power, the Pole amply made up for in charm, ‘traditional’ values and sheer symbolism, for he represented merely by his existence in British uniform all that was mythically wonderful about Britain’s crusade against tyranny. The Czechoslovaks also enjoyed this backwash of sympathy, though perhaps their social acceptance was promoted by a pinch of guilt over the Munich affair. Men from both groups made friends easily in Britain; several hundred married British women. For a while, too, the Pole was a social accessory in the upper reaches of the British class system. The huge amount of radio and newspaper publicity generated by their successes in the air made a token Polish officer de rigueur at any cocktail party worth the name, and although things were to turn very sour indeed for the Poles by the war’s end, the eighteen months between the Battle of Britain and Pearl Harbor proved to be a happy hunting season for all the Slavs.

If the medals, the public acclaim and the sexual conquests were indicative of the bright side of the Polish exile, there were darker aspects which exercised the diplomatic skills of the politicians. The application of Polish military discipline raised some eyebrows in the service departments and Whitehall, for although the British were the final arbiters in matters of gross infringement, minor issues were dealt with at a local level and occasionally drew unfavourable comments regarding harsh treatment meted out to men who had for whatever reason managed to transgress the Polish codes of honour and service.

Part of the cause was the defeat of Poland itself, which led to an urgent need to rebuild and restore national pride through the service arms in exile. This led some Polish officers to interpret indolence, dissent or simply fatigue as evidence of cowardice or disloyalty, and there were examples of men being humiliated or punished for offences which would have attracted lesser reprimands in the British forces. The Air Ministry decided that this was a hangover from the pre-war days, declaring some of the older Polish officers to be ‘too rigid and inflexible in outlook’. In the early part of the war, the RAF applied pressure to the Polish High Command to transfer or reassign officers whose very presence gave rise to disciplinary problems in Polish squadrons, and they also adduced this conflict between ideals and codes of practice to explain much of the tension which had plagued the exiles in the Eastchurch era. Even as late as Christmas 1940, the British were still having difficulties integrating RAF officers into some Polish squadrons within the system of dual command, and it was not until the summer of 1941 that most of the problems had been resolved. By that time, the RAF had successfully collaborated with the Polish High Command to reduce or remove the small cohort of career officers whose enthusiasm for order had threatened the stability of some Polish squadrons.⁵⁸

A case can be made for the Polish attitude, however. Having twice been on the losing side in a vicious war, the like of which had never been seen before, it is perhaps easy to understand why any behaviour which appeared to be defeatist or contrary to the cause should be swiftly and sometimes severely suppressed. Morale was a tender plant indeed in 1940, and the hideous reports of what was happening at home did nothing to raise it. As we shall see in Chapter Three, the Czechoslovaks also fell foul of the British in matters of discipline, but then it is true of all the exiled nations that they each had more at stake and more to prove, and they therefore had more to lose if they should falter again.

It is difficult to make a case for that other Polish vice, anti-Semitism. This was a Foreign Office issue, and reports of incidences of anti-Semitic behaviour within the Polish forces are evenly spread throughout the war years. We saw in Chapter One how the issue was first aired in the House of Commons during the debate on the Allied Forces Bill in 1940, but it is important that Polish anti-Semitism should not be overblown; rather, it is better to conceive of it as something which was consistently present throughout the Polish forces but rarely manifested itself in serious form. We should also be aware that anti-Semitism was present to a greater or lesser degree in every European nation. What made the difference as far as the Poles were concerned was that they had made no secret of it in the interwar years, that it was a faint but visible part of their public presence in Britain during the time in exile, and that in itself represented a facet of Nazism which everyone was aware of and which stood, albeit marginally, as an evil against which Britain was supposedly fighting. Even as late as 1944, the Foreign Office was still receiving letters of complaint concerning anti-Semitism in the Polish Air Force, and although this was a matter which the Air Ministry liked to brush aside – perhaps because it posed no serious threat to efficiency or discipline – the diplomats were still saddled with the problem at the war’s end. Indeed, there was a lengthy parliamentary debate on the subject in April 1944, leading again to the issuing of orders from the Polish High Command forbidding maltreatment of Jews. Eventually, this proved to be a trait which ultimately sullied the Polish experience in exile, and it contributed to the public backlash against them in 1945.⁵⁹

THE THIRD PHASE: JANUARY 1944 TO OCTOBER 1946

The Polish air crews were unique among the European allies in exile because they alone were denied a triumphant return home at the end of the war. After nearly six years of bitter and intense fighting, their reward was to fall into the political abyss created by the sudden upsurge in tension between East and West, and as the major powers positioned themselves ready for a new confrontation, so the Poles were swept along virtually powerless to direct events.

They themselves were aware of what was happening – or likely to happen – as the war in Europe ended. A Polish forces magazine, Robotnik, published several letters from men who complained of anti-repatriation propaganda being spread by some officers. These scare tactics, generally consisting of blood-curdling warnings of deportation or internment by the communists, were interpreted by the Foreign Office as useful indications of the growing political divisions within the Polish forces, attitudes which had been slowly developing since January 1944, when in a meeting of the Post-War Reconstruction Committee, at which a Polish representative was present, it became apparent that Poland would inevitably be occupied by Soviet forces after the defeat of Germany. ‘This had, not unnaturally, created a considerable commotion in Polish circles,’ ran a Foreign Office minute. ‘We had better deal with this dangerous rumour immediately. Our explanation would be that the Moscow Conference had a document before them – not subsequently agreed to – concerning the general administration of the liberated territories.’⁶⁰

The conference to which this rather unsettled note referred was the meeting of foreign ministers in the Soviet capital between 18 October and 30 October 1943. Their brief was to set the agenda for the first meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in Tehran at the end of November, and again the Polish government-in-exile tried in vain to have a voice. Polish–Soviet relations at this time were sour indeed. Stalin had used Polish outrage at the discovery of the massacre at Katyn to break off all diplomatic relations with the London group in April 1943, and by the end of that year the arrival of the Red Army in Polish territory was imminent. The Poles attempted to persuade Churchill to take up their case with Stalin, but the former was outflanked and isolated at Tehran by the other two leaders, and the latter had nothing to lose by ignoring the desires of the Polish government in London. In the event, the Tehran Conference decided that Poland would be shifted westwards on the map, with Stalin gaining enormous territories in the east, and the Poles being compensated by German land in the west. At Tehran, the carve-up of Poland had begun in earnest; in fact, the eventual dismemberment of all of Eastern Europe was set in motion there. When the news reached London, the Polish government redoubled its efforts to have the Western allies stand firm, but it was always going to be a fruitless exercise. The overwhelming need to have Stalin continue the war in the east and not make a separate peace with Hitler was enough incentive for Britain and America to petition him with little more than vague hopes for a sunny Polish future; anything concrete would have been waved aside. Furthermore, Churchill’s scheme for a second front rooted in a Balkan invasion was also scuppered at Tehran. Such an expedition might have brought some relief to Poland, or at least the troops of Western allies on her soil, but it was never to be. On the night of 3 January 1944, Russian troops crossed the Polish frontier, and there they were to remain for a long time.

Rumours of the talks in Moscow and Tehran gradually filtered down to the Polish forces in exile, and the de facto occupation of Poland by the Red Army made the rumours metamorphose into grim expectancy. However, this did not lead – as one might have expected – to a sudden downturn in morale. On the contrary, the commitment to the defeat of Germany and an honourable peace remained as high as ever in the Polish forces. But, like the Czechoslovaks, the pervasive effect of the Soviet advance made itself felt in political terms. The Polish government’s efforts to play down the dark reality of events at home by continually pointing to the fact that nothing had been firmly settled and that a satisfactory deal with Stalin was still possible led men to believe that victory might still mean freedom. That attitude was not to last long, however, because the true horror for the Polish people erupted on 1 August with the Warsaw uprising. Throughout the two months of struggle, the powerlessness of the Western allies to be of any assistance was forlornly monitored by the Polish forces in Britain and Europe, and although it is doubtful that the West could have provided any substantial military aid, Stalin’s refusal to allow Western planes to use Soviet airfields for supply drops merely confirmed in the minds of many thousands of Poles that they had been sold out in the West, leaving their beleaguered homeland to be inexorably drawn into the Soviet orbit.

The Warsaw uprising and its subsequent failure dealt a shattering blow to Polish morale. Worse still, other exiles alongside whom they had fought for five years were gleefully anticipating their own return home. August 1944 had seen Gen de Gaulle, dodging Vichy snipers, marching in triumph through Paris; the battle for Belgium, though still with all too much life left in it, was going to be won sooner or later; and also in August, the Free Dutch Army’s Princess Irene Brigade began the liberation of the Netherlands, and it was only the allied failure at Arnhem which greatly stifled the process. Nevertheless, the war was clearly being won; Germans were on the run all over Europe, and yet, as one Polish pilot said: ‘As we sat around the radio, we died a little during each of those 63 days of the rising.’⁶¹ The slaughter and hideous reprisals meted out by the Germans left Warsaw as little more than an open wound, and it was all the more unbearable with so much joy all around.

It was this pain and uncertainty about what the future held which triggered the factious elements within the Polish forces. As the last full year of the war came to a close, the Chiefs of Staff report for the final quarter of 1944 merely recorded the continuation of ‘restlessness’ in the Polish Air Force, but added: ‘It has not weakened either spirit or discipline in the squadrons.’ This was true enough, but there were deeper elements at work in the minds of men who had given so much for what appeared to be so little. For it seemed to many that the cause had been lost, and that their allies had given their consent to Poland being swallowed by a hostile power. Then the final blow to Polish hearts was cruelly delivered – not by Britain, America or even Stalin – but by those very ordinary people who had once been their unreserved champions: the British public.

It was a combination of two factors, tenuously connected by the same theme: communism. As the war neared its end, and the workload fell away from the millions under arms throughout Europe, a morbid apathy descended on many Poles. The prospect of going home to what was almost certainly going to be life under a regime hardly distinguishable from the one they had fought so hard against led many men to drop their guard. Many turned to drink in an attempt to assuage the sadness which victory had brought them. Also, communist ideas were now at large in Britain in the form of pamphlets, meetings and public debates on how far the British people should move to the Left if a better world was going to emerge from the years of suffering. In short, Stalin was no longer seen as the monster he had been painted as during the interwar years, and much of the responsibility for this new political openness must lie with the British government, for it had designed and conducted the marvellous propaganda campaign in the summer of 1941 to transform Stalin’s image abroad. Communist and socialist ideas had become, if not fashionable, then at least acceptable in Britain by the end of the war, and this would reach its zenith when Attlee’s Labour Party defeated Churchill in the election of 1945.

The Poles were to reap a bitter harvest from this shift in British attitudes. The press turned against them, holding them responsible for the continuing tension in the east; graffiti appeared, taunting them with the old anti-Semitism and their prewar sympathies with the Right; and complaints from the public and its representatives flooded the authorities. A clipping from a local paper in Peebles, Scotland, carried various complaints from town councillors who resented the continuing presence of the Poles in Scotland: ‘They have overstayed their welcome,’ claimed a spokesman, ‘and it is high time they were sent back to their own country.’ Individuals also made their views unequivocally known. Kathleen Chapman from Sheffield wrote:

It is time they were back in Poland, great lusty fellows simply idleing [sic] about, with nothing to do but frat[ernise] with our girls while Poland needs them now. They are all without exception anti-Russian and have no good word for our own fine brave allies.

As a ratepayer, I should be much obliged if you would inform me why a large Polish Army (RAF) is kept standing in England? It is well known that, in the districts where Polish forces are stationed, a great deal of immorality takes place and, more particularly, to the ruin of British girls. In writing this letter I am expressing the views of very, very many British people whose families are being pestered by the Poles. How much longer is this pest to continue?⁶²

There is much to mock here from a safe distance of over fifty years, and much to deride as British xenophobia of the worst kind. One wonders also if Kathleen Chapman, when speaking of ‘our own fine brave allies’, would have had second thoughts had she known of the excesses of which the Red Army was capable. The Poles certainly did. Then again, maybe Kathleen Chapman did too, and didn’t care.

It was crystal clear to the British government that something would have to be done, but to begin with it was at a complete loss for answers. The two service groups from the east, the Czechoslovaks and the Poles, were faced with a serious problem of which each had been aware for some time: the occupation of the home territory at the war’s end by Soviet forces. Yet this was the only mutual element, for the Czechs had a slight advantage in that their troops from Britain had accompanied Patton’s Third Army into Czechoslovakia when it was partially liberated from the north-west. Patton, however, had been forbidden to go further, with the result that Soviet troops had downed tools in the majority of Czechoslovak territory. Even so, the Czechoslovak governmentin-exile under Edvard Beneš had gained a small but significant military foothold when it tried to re-establish its position. But the Polish forces of the west could only watch as Soviet troops swept across their home territory with considerable assistance from the Polish Army of the east.

As Jozef Garlinski has shown, the Polish units formed by the communists were always in a much better position in terms of manpower than their countrymen in the west, benefiting from conscriptive powers and the steady flow of recruits from the Polish Home Army, most of whom were compelled to join the ranks under direct threat of deportation into the depths of Russia.⁶³ Much of the home territory was thus controlled by a mixture of Polish and Russian forces, making Stalin’s ambition of absorbing Poland into his empire all the easier since he faced virtually no resistance. From London, the view was bleak indeed. Everything hinged entirely on Stalin’s undertaking, made at Yalta in February 1945, that he would permit free Polish elections. In the mean time, a Council of National Unity would be established, consisting of representatives of all parties, followed by a Polish Provisional Government of National Unity as soon as negotiations had been completed. That was all Churchill could wring from Stalin at Yalta, and everybody knew that the arrangement could only be to the benefit of one party. Since there was no other option on the table, though, the Polish forces in the west could only sit and wait upon events.

The Polish forces knew all about the decisions taken at Yalta, and that Stalin had insisted upon the eastern Polish territories as war booty for himself. This had the most impact upon the men of the Polish Second Corps, then in Italy, a great many of whom were natives of those lands. Morale slumped disastrously, and their ebullient commander Gen Wladyslaw Anders threatened to pull them out of the fight until he was persuaded otherwise by the British and the Americans. Nevertheless, in this one action he made a name for himself as a potential threat to stability – something which none of the major Western powers needed at such a sensitive time. A wave of communist arrests of prominent Polish political leaders in March also confirmed in the hearts and minds of tens of thousands of exiles that any return home would at best be a deliverance into the hands of the man who had colluded with Hitler in the destruction of their country six years earlier. It was a ghastly prospect, and nothing short of a major diplomatic crisis for the British.

In July 1945, the Air Ministry signalled all commands that the deteriorating situation in Poland might cause difficulties within the units awaiting repatriation. Black propaganda circulated at all levels, and the bitter political in-fighting between pro-communist elements and those who wished to continue the fight against the Russians threatened a possible collapse of discipline. ‘Any violent dissent or victimisation must be dealt with,’ ran the Air Ministry’s order, adding: ‘You are authorised to take any steps you consider necessary.’⁶⁴ With over 112,000 men in the Polish Second Corps alone, and a further 14,000 in the Polish Air Force, the British realised that a complete breakdown could lead to a disaster of considerable magnitude. Two days later, the Chiefs of Staff Committee met to discuss the position of the Polish forces in exile. Churchill had given them the lead by suggesting that a policy of segregation might be implemented. By forcibly separating those who wished to return and those who did not, Churchill hoped to smother the powderkeg before it really ignited, though he accepted with resignation that the whole issue rested on three points: (1) the wishes of the new Polish government in regard to the Polish forces abroad; (2) the readiness of those forces to obey the Polish government; (3) the British government’s intentions towards those who did not obey.

The Polish Provisional Government of National Unity had been formally created in Moscow on 21 June 1945, with seventeen communists providing the government, and only four of the London group symbolising the unity. Stalin had won total victory in Poland, and those members of the Resistance or the Home Army whom he had not imprisoned in Moscow were utterly isolated and in fear for their liberty. The Western allies could do nothing but protest. Red Army control of the eastern regions was complete; and besides, neither the British nor American public would have tolerated a renewal of the war against the Soviet Union. The last-gasp effort by free Poles to eject the communists came through the final manifesto issued by the Council of National Unity even as the government created in Moscow was preparing for business. Its Testament of Fighting Poland was a hybrid of a bill of rights and a demand for self-determination. Its publication was unanimously approved, and at that point the last vestige of democratic Poland voted itself into oblivion. Five days later, the Americans and the British formally recognised the communist-dominated government in Warsaw and withdrew their wartime recognition of the London government-in-exile.

Thus, by the first week of July 1945, the Poland for which nearly a quarter of a million men had fought had ceased to exist as a free state. A few were prepared to chance their luck and go home; others actually welcomed the change, believing the old regime to have been corrupt, militaristic, and considerably worse than the one which had replaced it. But the vast majority were dejected and confused. When the Chiefs of Staff met in July 1945, they learned that the remnants of the London government intended to hand over all their property in Britain to the British, declaring themselves to be the only true government with popular support. Churchill argued that if this were permitted to happen, ‘total breakdown of discipline might occur’. Furthermore, he reminded the service departments that Britain had footed the bill for the Polish war effort, to the tune of £5 million per year for civil costs, and a thumping £20 million per year for the military. Of this total, approximately half had been acknowledged by the Polish government in London as being a genuine debt for later repayment, the rest being written off under the Mutual Aid scheme. It was anyone’s guess whether the new government in Warsaw would honour this debt. Added to this was the burden of feeding, clothing and housing the armed forces and approximately 50,000 refugees and dependants, and it was Churchill’s view that the only option was to open negotiations with Warsaw about repatriation and keep a tally of the expenses ready for presentation when the right moment came.⁶⁵

The Foreign Office was also deeply involved with this new dilemma. Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote to the CIGS, Alan Brooke, and warned him that ‘this Polish question is full of dynamite’, and although he felt that a sizeable number of men would eventually return if the propaganda was sound enough, ‘out of our obligations of honour’ they could not force the Poles to go back against their wishes. As far as the Air Ministry was concerned, a secret ballot of Polish Air Force personnel might reveal a substantial number of volunteers for repatriation, and they added that no serious impairment to RAF operational efficiency would follow if the Polish Air Force fragmented.⁶⁶ By the end of the month, the Foreign Office had issued a formal note to the Polish government outlining British policy. His Majesty’s Government would: ‘ensure so far as possible that these officers and men should have proper opportunity of making an unbiased and unhurried decision, with a full understanding of the facts, free from fear or compulsion . . . [and] none should be compelled to go [back] against their will’.⁶⁷

The British requested the views of the Polish government regarding this policy, but again this brief quotation serves to underline the newness of the situation with which the West was faced, and the stark lack of understanding on behalf of the British of the nature and strategy of the new regime in Warsaw. For the Polish government had no intention whatsoever of forcing the men to return; it suited them admirably to have such huge numbers of restless troops dependent on their ideological opponents in the West. Besides, the return of more than 200,000 men who had been contaminated by capitalism would have been immensely destabilising. The ‘facts’ would never be presented to the exiles, but they were to have plenty of time for their ‘unhurried’ decisions.

On 1 August, the Polish government responded with a proclamation that equal rights would be extended to all Polish service personnel abroad who wished to return to their homes. Not good enough, said the Foreign Office. Large numbers of the Home Army which had survived the uprising of 1944 were now held in Soviet internment camps, and the British government wanted an absolute guarantee that freedom, not imprisonment, would greet the exiles if they went back. Meanwhile, the pressures on the British were mounting. The complaining letters from the public had start to flow in greater numbers, pro-and anticommunist propaganda was circulating freely within the Polish forces, and the service departments were warning the politicians of dire consequences if the situation was not resolved soon. In late August, the Air Ministry told the Foreign Office that it had initiated a freeze within the Polish Air Force, halting promotions, recruitment and non-essential training. The levels of guard capacity at Polish air stations had also been drastically reduced and the side-arms decommissioned.

Essentially, the Western allies were powerless in this whole tragedy, and the communists knew it. The Warsaw government issued a further statement which promised a safe return to all Polish forces in the west only if they travelled in their existing military units. Again, this was rejected by the British and the Americans. It was believed by both that the communists were fully aware of the political divisions which were widespread throughout the Polish forces; a unit-level repatriation would almost certainly provoke the consenting and dissenting elements within each group to turn upon each other. The British suggested a piecemeal return based on a slow demobilisation; the Americans argued for the return of the entire force en masse. Both proposals were rejected by Warsaw as impractical. By September 1945, therefore, the stalemate was complete.⁶⁸

The communists continued to play their games. The British representative in Warsaw, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, summarised his reading of the situation in a long memorandum to the Foreign Office in early September. He had spoken with Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Polish deputy premier, who would later be imprisoned by his own creed for advocating an independent path to socialism. Gomulka claimed that he wanted to repatriate only those men who would support the new order, but he would be happy enough to see the return of complete military units whatever their political composition might be. Cavendish-Bentinck thought this to be a lie. Gomulka had informed him that a military mission to London would soon be proposed, and all problems would be resolved through that, but the Foreign Office was promptly warned that such a mission would almost certainly exacerbate the tense situation in Britain and would lead to the break-up of the Polish forces. Such an event would play directly into the communists’ hands, for in all probability most Polish officers would urge their men to resist. This could lead to a complete loss of control, and any action they might take would be portrayed as ‘Fascist repression’. Cavendish-Bentinck closed by urging London to do everything in its power to get the Polish forces to return as complete units, whether they liked it or not, because failure to do something could lead to a civil war on foreign soil.⁶⁹

A day later, he wrote again. This time, he urged what was tantamount to the forcible repatriation of all the Polish forces in the west, preferably as complete units after segregating the ‘irreconcilables’. He argued that the potential for serious disorder was too great, and that it suited the communists to have the men sent back in twos and threes. It suited Gen Anders too, for he had been loudly advocating the return of those pro-communist elements in his forces whom he perceived as ‘troublemakers’. Both sides knew that the men who volunteered for repatriation would almost certainly support the new government and help to thwart the return of the dissenters.

These notes disturbed the Foreign Office, for on 8 September it strongly advised the immediate segregation of all those who did not want to go home, and the repatriation of those who did, without delay.⁷⁰ The service departments needed no persuading. A meeting at the War Office on 1 September had already recorded ‘two mutinies simmering in Scotland’, and a letter from Lord Murray, who had enjoyed close contact with the Polish forces in Britain throughout the war, spoke of mounting disorder in all three services. He argued that three broad political groups existed: men, mainly from western Poland (many of whom were farmers and skilled artisans) who wished to return at once to reclaim their land and their jobs; men who had lived in eastern Poland and had suffered at the hands of the Soviets in 1939, who did not want to return at all, and younger men who hoped, rather than expected, to find work and a normal life in the country of their birth. He also referred to an extant plan to gather up all the volunteers in southern England, claiming this to be a mistake:

I don’t think official quarters . . . realise the amount of persecution which [they] have suffered during the last few weeks. The officers can avoid it as they remain in their lodgings, but the men are pestered wherever they go.

He concluded by suggesting that the government should issue an official request for people ‘to stop abusing these unfortunates’, thus striking a blow against the Chapmans and the Aspinalls of middle England.

None of the Polish squadrons were even close to going home by September 1945 – which must have been particularly galling because the Czechoslovaks, after much dithering on the part of the British, had revelled in their own return the previous month and flown in triumph over Prague. To the dismay of the Poles, the only air display to take place over Warsaw was composed entirely of Russian aircraft which had fought over the eastern front. The British Air Attaché in Warsaw, Gp Capt Burt-Andrews, described the whole performance to the Foreign Office in a long memo, commenting: ‘There is good reason to believe that many of the pilots were Russians, and all of the ground staff visible were certainly so.’ In the speeches that followed, no mention whatsoever was made of the British contingent, though the attaché’s attention was inexorably drawn to the Russian orchestra, ‘which played with more volume than melodiousness [and] greeted the entry of His Majesty’s ambassador and his staff with a vigorous Russian version of “Roll Out The Barrel”.’⁷¹

Whether or not the British party enjoyed the experience of being welcomed by a crude drinking song is not recorded in the files, but the men in Whitehall were growing hardened to the apparent hopelessness of the situation as the Soviets and their puppets began to consolidate their position. What little chance remained of a reasonable settlement lay with the Polish Military Mission, led by Gen Modelski, scheduled to arrive in Britain in mid-October. But in the event it came, it went, nothing of any substance was discussed, and despite official urgings to clarify matters, Modelski merely repeated his orders to refer all matters of policy and practice to his superiors in Warsaw. Cavendish-Bentinck had offered a ray of hope when he reported a conversation with Marshal Rola-Zymierski, the Polish Minister of Defence, who solemnly promised that no officer returning to Poland would be deprived of his rank or suffer molestation by the security police, and if he was so molested, he was ‘entitled to withdraw his revolver and fire’. This was brushed aside by the Foreign Office. For one thing, it spoke only of officers and not other ranks; and besides, they took all such oaths with a pinch of salt. One clear detail emerged from the conversation, however: there could be no place in the new Poland for Generals Anders and Sosnkowski, both of whom could be relied upon to cause trouble if given the opportunity.⁷²

By the autumn of 1945, all the service departments were deep into the process of calculating who would go back and who would not. The War Office and the Admiralty reported that of a combined total of 207,000 men and their dependants, only 37,000 (or roughly 18 per cent) were prepared to return to their homeland. The Air Ministry produced even more disturbing figures. From a total of 14,700 men, only 7 officers and 50 other ranks had volunteered for repatriation. Sholto Douglas, then in command of the occupation air forces in Germany, sought out Rola-Zymierski in Warsaw. The latter expressed his government’s wish to have a couple of middle-ranking officers fly to Warsaw and begin negotiations; senior officers, said the Marshal, were likely to be ‘contaminated with political ideas’. He then astonished Sholto Douglas by expressing his surprise that the entire air force had not already been sent home, and according to Sholto Douglas he implied that the British were keeping them back for some obscure purpose of their own. Sholto Douglas partially agreed, but added that his government felt obliged to retain them in Britain because they could not be repatriated ‘without any guarantee of their subsequent treatment’. Rola-Zymierski thought these sentiments to be noble indeed, and although he was happy to welcome back the entire air contingent en bloc, many senior officers who were politically compromised would not be welcome.⁷³

This cut no ice with the Foreign Office. As far as they were concerned, the official position remained the same: Warsaw would accept only unit-level returns. But at least the Poles had one true friend left. A headteacher named Alice Chatterson wrote from Braintree in Essex and implored the government not to forcibly send the Poles home ‘to a land whose politics are distasteful to them’. She added that the British ‘must never forget that in 1940, the Polish were almost our only friends . . . many of them laying down their lives to save us in the battle of Britain’.⁷⁴ She was promised in reply that no man or woman would be sent back against their will, and although it is unlikely that Ms Chatterson changed British policy with her letter, she wrote at a time when everyone officially connected with the Polish forces was undergoing a change of attitude. British foreign policy is renowned for its cautious and ponderous nature, but by November 1945 it was becoming pretty clear to most that diplomacy was failing and that Warsaw held all the aces. Furthermore, the strain on the exchequer of supporting 200,000 men and dependants with little or no hope of reimbursement was becoming so great that politicians began to steel themselves to accept defeat. A new idea was needed.

Sholto Douglas had one last crack at Rola-Zymierski. He suggested that two Polish group captains should visit Warsaw and smoothe the way. Since this was the Marshal’s own preferred plan, Sholto Douglas was on to a sure winner, but again it was vetoed by the Foreign Office. They were not convinced that Rola-Zymierski spoke with sufficient authority; and besides, they had recently been informed by Warsaw that the army would be dealt with separately from the navy and the air force. Whitehall was convinced that this was yet more obfuscation designed to split the Polish forces into manageable units and destroy whatever solidarity remained. Sholto Douglas was disappointed, for he believed that he had it within his grasp to secure the promise of return for the whole Polish Air Force, yet it seems to have escaped his notice that virtually none of them wanted to go at all.⁷⁵

Just before Christmas 1945, an inter-departmental committee met at the Foreign Office and declared that the climax of the crisis was fast approaching. Warsaw had cabled to tell London that all Polish personnel would be unconditionally received back into their homeland, and they refused to elaborate or continue with seemingly pointless negotiations. The British decided that every man would be informed, and would have six weeks to make up his mind. The meeting prepared itself for large numbers who would choose not to return, and they presumed that the Polish government would immediately denationalise them, effectively making them stateless refugees. If that should come to pass – and it was likely – then the entire burden of maintaining them would fall upon the British.

In early January 1946, the Inspector of the Polish Air Forces, Gen Mateusz Izycki, wrote to Lord Tedder and informed him that more than 99 per cent of the men under his command would refuse to return. This marked the turning point in the RAF’s attitude towards the Polish Air Force. It was at once apparent to all that the loyalty which the Poles had shown throughout the war, despite all the troubles in the past, was of such magnitude that no matter what the politicians did or said, the RAF would ensure that their debts to their allies would be repaid. There would be no pressure placed by the RAF on the Poles to go home.⁷⁶

Evidence that the sea change of attitude had taken place exists in the British reaction to a new scheme hatched by Rola-Zymierski. In mid-January he wrote and offered to send another mission to Britain, this time with full powers to negotiate on behalf of his government, but it was swept aside by the Foreign Office. The Marshal was curtly informed that the British were reviewing their position, and that his offer, though carefully noted, was being placed in suspension until that review had taken place. This moment also marks the division between the attitude of the service departments and the politicians. The new British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was about to inform the Cabinet that ‘information of a discouraging nature about the prospects for those who did not return’ was going to be circulated among the Polish forces. In other words, he would use black propaganda designed to frighten or coerce the men into going home.

Bevin’s statement to the Cabinet was discussed at the Air Ministry in mid-January 1946. No one doubted the reasons for using such methods to encourage repatriation – and it was noted that the trades unions were uneasy about such huge numbers being thrown onto the British labour market – but it was decided that when the ‘hard core’ of the Polish Air Force was exposed to such pressure, the RAF would ‘reserve [its] right to dispose of it under such conditions as will in every way fulfil our obligations.’ In a lengthy paper prepared for the Cabinet, the Air Ministry insisted that certain factors made the Polish Air Force a special case. The main points were:

1 under the existing agreement, all men of the Polish Air Force were eligible for service with the RAF;

2 the two forces had lived and fought side by side for more than six years;

3 they came to the aid of the allies in their time of need, and greatly expanded their force under allied direction;

4 they knew more about Britain and the RAF than a great many of the Polish Army, ‘100,000 of whom have never lived in Britain’;

5 Polish officers and airmen were, for all practical purposes, already in the RAF, and because the two forces were so closely integrated, the Air Ministry felt that it had ‘a nearer and more intimate responsibility’ for the Polish Air Force than had the War Office for the Polish Army.

Thus the Air Ministry set out its stall, and in so doing positioned itself for potential conflict with Attlee’s government. Of course, purists might argue that time had confused the Ministry’s memory a tad, but the basic message was clear enough. It was felt that men who had served for more than three years should be considered for British citizenship, and if they rejoined the RAF after the Polish Air Force had been dismantled, naturalisation should be automatic. The Air Ministry was also the first to suggest that advice on employment and the rigours of civilian life should be offered to each man through a dedicated agency. In an eloquent passage, the RAF sealed its honour thus:

Whilst fully understanding the cold and dispassionate attitude which must at this stage be adopted by His Majesty’s Government in handling a situation of tremendous difficulty, we cannot escape the fact that the Royal Air Force have both a great regard for and obligation to the Polish Air Force, and we feel that neither they nor the British public would condone unfair treatment of [the] strongest, the most loyal and faithful, and the most persistent European ally of all those who fought with us in the air in the west. The debt owed [can] only be satisfactorily repaid by giving them special and generous consideration at a time when their Air Force, of which they were intensely proud, and which they had built up with such hopes for the future, crashes to the ground.⁷⁷

These fine words and noble sentiments demonstrate that the wheel had indeed turned full circle, that Medhurst’s ‘completely useless officers’ of 1940 had been transformed by courage and loyalty into allies of the first order. More to the point, the Poles were allies by whose side the RAF was going to stand firm.

Bevin was also in the mood to stand firm. He said in Cabinet on 22 January that while he understood the position of the service departments, his policy of leaning on them to go home would remain unchanged. The presence and maintenance of the Polish forces, he argued, ‘was a source of increasing political embarrassment in our relations with the Soviet Union and Poland’, and he placed the financial costs to the Treasury at £2.5 million per month. The only crumb of comfort seemed to be in his reluctant acceptance that some might eventually join the British forces.

But Bevin’s intentions depended entirely on a factor beyond his control – the Warsaw government. It had recently informed London that any Polish air units returning intact would remain as viable squadrons, but the Foreign Office doubted this, not least because the Polish civil air service, LOT, was under the extensive influence of Moscow, therefore it seemed unlikely that military formations would receive special consideration once they were on home soil. The Air Ministry concurred with this view, and its own policy was to give no hint to the Polish air personnel that they might be permitted to join the RAF if they stayed behind. It was a shrewd decision, for at once they could not be accused by Warsaw of placing temptation before the men to refuse repatriation, and they could also avoid the Cabinet’s wrath by not deliberately cutting across ministerial policy. It was the Air Ministry’s belief that a substantial hard core of men would not return at any price, but a few of the lower ranks might go back, if for no other reason than that they perceived their chances of advancement in Britain to be limited.⁷⁸

In a letter to Viscount Stansgate, Bevin said that he understood the RAF’s plea for special consideration for the Poles, but nevertheless he could not grant it: ‘Great though our obligations are, are they necessarily any greater than to those Poles who fought at Tobruk, Monte Cassino and Arnhem?’ In the margin to this letter, copied to the Foreign Office files, an unknown hand pencilled ‘Yes.’ Whether this is true or not is largely a matter for each individual to decide, but there can be no question that support for the Polish Air Force was gathering weight and momentum. If his own ministers and mandarins were starting to fall in behind the Air Ministry (an unusual event in itself), then Bevin was in for a hard fight indeed.⁷⁹

Bevin prepared his message to the Polish forces slowly. Versions of it appear in numerous files, and various changes to the text are apparent. By mid-February 1946, however, it was in print waiting for distribution. In essence, he was going to scare them into going home by bluntly stating that the British government could promise no more than assistance to start a new life outside Poland, but this did not extend to preserving the structure of the Polish forces, which would be disbanded in a short while; and neither would he guarantee that any man would be offered British nationality or rights of settlement in British territory. It was calculated that this threat of being stateless and homeless would be sufficient motivation to drive the men back in their thousands.

However, three problems loomed suddenly before the Foreign Secretary. The first was the declaration by Warsaw that the Polish Army in Italy constituted a threat to the Yugoslav–Italian frontier. It meant nothing in real terms, and both sides knew it, but it sent a signal to Bevin that the communists were getting ready to play rough. The second was a cable from the British representative in Italy which warned of the potential for serious disorder if Gen Anders was not permitted to return to England to open negotiations concerning repatriation. Here, the Foreign Office and the Air Ministry parted company in their assessments of Anders: the former saw him as a reactionary who would stir up trouble against repatriation, and the latter held him to be the key to the whole problem, knowing him to be an officer who commanded enormous respect within the Polish Air Force. Finally, Warsaw threw everything into confusion. A telegram from the British Embassy to the Foreign Office on 19 February indicated that the Polish government was preparing to break relations with the USA and Britain. To force the hand of the West, it declared that no mass repatriation would be acceptable any more, leaving each man to apply individually through the Polish consulate if he wanted to return home. Cavendish-Bentinck interpreted these moves as a deliberate attempt to wreck the British proposals to return as many home as possible, and it laid in ruins all of Bevin’s hopes at one stroke. It was estimated that it would take five weeks to have his open letter to the Polish forces printed in sufficient numbers and distributed to a quarter of a million men at the same time on the same day, but it would be a bankrupt policy long before then if Warsaw could not be persuaded to retract from its new position.⁸⁰

The Polish note also stated that all men of Polish nationality were to be placed under the command of officers appointed by Warsaw, and would henceforth have to obey any orders generated by them or the Polish government. The Foreign Office saw this as a deliberate attempt to provoke rebellion within the Polish ranks – disturbances which the British would be forced to suppress. Nevertheless, it was decided to push ahead with Bevin’s plan. The Air Ministry cabled all commands on 12 March and warned them (rather hopefully) to expect a wave of potential volunteers for repatriation, the calculation being that if men came forward in large enough numbers, the Warsaw government might scrap the plan for personal applications, or at least waive it pending further developments. Warsaw had promised that ‘no punitive measures or reprisals would be carried out against returning officers or men’ (save those who had aided or served with the Germans), and the British hoped this might be enough to inject confidence into the great mass of undecided men. The date for the publication of Bevin’s statement was set as 18 March, following which a period of six weeks would be allowed for consideration.⁸¹

On 15 March, Gen Anders arrived in Britain from Italy. As Poland’s most senior soldier abroad, no one doubted his influence with the men, or his capability to make or break policies in an instant. At once he was taken to meet Attlee and Bevin, who impressed upon him the need for orderly thought and the maintenance of military discipline. The publication of Bevin’s statement had been put back two days at Ander’s request to allow him time to speak with other senior commanders, but he saw an advance copy and promised his full support for the policy. As all three men agreed, demobilisation was inevitable sooner or later, so if Warsaw was holding out even the thinnest of olive branches, perhaps now was the time to grasp it. On 16 March, the Air Ministry cabled all commands and instructed all RAF personnel to support the policy of His Majesty’s Government no matter what their personal views might be. The telegram also reinforced the RAF’s own policy that not one word should be spoken about the possibility of future RAF membership for men who refused to go. This was the Air Ministry’s own trump card, and it was keeping it well hidden.

A thoroughly tragic letter from Gen Izycki landed on Lord Tedder’s desk towards the end of March 1946. The Inspector-General promised that he would not fight political battles and would uphold the British policy, as was his duty. And yet, he argued, it would not be Bevin’s ‘enticements or persuasions’ which would help the men to make up their minds, but ‘the true picture of the situation in our unhappy country’. Many thousands were only too aware that their long-cherished dreams of freedom had vanished. He reminded Tedder that the Polish Air Force had suffered much, yet not once had it turned from its duty. It had been abused, ignored, ridiculed and condemned, but had fought from the first day of the war to the last, longer than any other nation save Germany itself, and now here it stood on the eve of its destruction. Izycki closed by justifying his thoughts and the letter itself, ‘as history will one day hold me responsible for the destruction of the Polish Air Force’.⁸²

The day before, on 21 March, Bevin’s statement had been distributed to a quarter of a million Poles ‘without incident and in an atmosphere of calm efficiency’. Anders had given orders that no man, of whatever rank, was to engage in political conflict with any other; and no one, under pain of severe punishment, was to attempt to persuade any man to reach a judgement against his will. It was widely expected that no one would make his decision until Anders had spoken his own thoughts, but no one in the Foreign Office by now doubted that the respect Anders commanded was enormous. It was also felt that if this campaign did not produce the desired results, then Warsaw would immediately launch a violent propaganda campaign and do everything in its power to provoke what would be a communist uprising in exile.

On 27 March the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Policy), AVM William Dickson, prepared a series of briefing notes for a private meeting between Tedder and Izycki, called at the latter’s request in his earlier communication. Dickson felt that the Polish general was seeking ‘just one word of encouragement’ from the British to do his utmost to preserve the core of the Polish Air Force intact. He had already blessed the formation of a Polish Air Force Association (Great Britain) and had asked for RAF recognition. This had been denied pending ‘very high level consultation’, but had been viewed sympathetically for all that. He had also let it be known that he might approach the RAF to become procurator of all Polish Air Force records, histories, funds and so on, but all of this was technically the property of the Polish government in Warsaw. As Dickson wrote, ‘whether we like them or not, we could lay ourselves open to receiving stolen property’.

The end of March 1946 saw a complete change of policy by the British. One can view it as a pragmatic approach to an insoluble situation, or simply a total capitulation in the face of an invincible opponent. Either way, the decision to give up trying to get the Poles back home, and to find an alternative means of dispersing them must be interpreted as a defeat for the British in the opening skirmishes of the Cold War. On 4 April, the first meeting of a new Polish Forces Committee with a very high-level membership convened to discuss the structure of what would eventually become the Polish Resettlement Corps (PRC). During that meeting, the RAF won its case and secured a promise that the majority of men in the Polish Air Force could join the RAF, and with that came an undertaking to lower the waiting time for nationalisation from five years to two. Men who refused to re-enlist in any service would be offered other means of supporting themselves, either through the labour market in civilian life or by emigration to sympathetic countries. No man would be compelled to follow any of these routes, but his only option would then be to risk the uncertainty of a displaced persons’ camp. In all, nearly 14,000 men and women of the Polish Air Force would be offered the chance to continue their careers in peacetime or, depending on the point of view, accept a life in permanent exile.⁸³ The concept of the PRC was given almost unanimous support, the only serious dissent issuing from the War Office, which thought the project unworkable.

In all, less than 10 per cent of the Polish air personnel had responded favourably to Bevin’s repatriation campaign. Many men and their families were expected to go to America, which had signalled its approval of the policy of encouraging emigration there, but had stipulated that only men with recognised trades would be accepted. In a moment of fine historical irony, it was Sir Douglas Evill who suggested that the RAF could absorb 4,000–5,000 men at once, and the rest in phased intakes. The smaller numbers involved with the Polish Air Force were less of a concern to the RAF than the huge task which faced the War Office, but the Air Ministry immediately offered to share the burden by making temporary jobs for 7,000 Poles to work with prisoner-of-war gangs clearing sites and dismantling stores. Towards the end of April, the Air Ministry announced that it would turn the former Polish depot into a resettlement centre and use the existing Polish Air Force headquarters as the primary channel for communications. Evidence that such creative thinking and commitment was urgently needed came when the six weeks deadline expired for Poles to register their desire to go home. Out of a quarter of a million men, only 2,600 opted for repatriation.⁸⁴

On 19 May, the Foreign Office despatched a wonderfully defiant telegram bluntly informing the Warsaw administration that His Majesty’s Government had now established a Resettlement Corps, and that no man would be confronted regarding his repatriation options, and neither would he be expected to decide by any firm date. It was emphasised that the entire scheme was non-compulsory, but the British position now was to give every assistance to those who chose to remain in the West. There were private concerns that the Polish government would retaliate with a black propaganda campaign against the PRC, but a delighted Izycki met Slessor at the Air Ministry on 21 May and brushed aside any such complications. Hopes for a separate air wing within the PRC were mentioned by the Poles, but it was clear that the RAF had pledged its full support for the scheme and the absorption of as many Poles into its organisation as possible This did not stop the Poles protesting the need for the PRC’s very existence, however. Their primary concern was that the Warsaw government would now completely abandon any plans to hold free elections or maintain democratic principles, but their greatest fear was that the PRC should not be seen as ‘the closing chapter’ to the story of Poland’s war. In Italy, Anders issued a statement informing all Polish personnel that the national war aims had not been achieved, but although it was full of bluster and rhetoric, it contained no criticisms of the PRC or British policy in general.⁸⁵

The royal warrant which legally established the Polish Resettlement Corps was signed in August 1946, followed shortly by two more which created a women’s section and, much to Izycki’s satisfaction, a special RAF division. But his request for the Polish units to remain intact within the RAF was rejected by the Foreign Office. To have an exiled force permanently established on Western soil while the politicians grappled with the complexities of the developing Cold War would have been too strong a provocation to the East. It was part of British policy from the start to ensure that the Polish armed forces were disbanded and demobilised. Anders complained, but Bevin would have none of it. Izycki also lobbied for a skeleton Polish Air Force to remain intact, but this too was refused. In truth, neither of the two commanders relished the prospect of telling their men that the Polish forces had ceased to exist after all they had been through, but there was no other option.

The PRC was split into two broad divisions: the army and navy in one part, and the air force contingent in another, for with only 4,000 personnel in the navy, it seemed an unnecessary extension of the scheme to provide a separate administration. The Air Ministry undertook the responsibility of controlling its own section, while the War Office took charge of the rest. The whole scheme came under the auspices of the National Assistance Board. The RAF made six airfields available for billeting and initial registration, and by June 1946 most of the personnel had been assembled. The ground crew presented no problems, for most of them had been trained and trade-tested up to RAF standards, but many pilots found themselves on ferrying and transport duties, or assigned for further training as Britain moved towards a peacetime footing. As for the Polish Air Force, its symbolic demise came on 18 September with a farewell parade at Coltishall attended by every brass hat who could be mustered. Glorious speeches were made and returned, ensigns were exchanged, hopes for the future solemnly expressed, but no one could hide the fact that it was all over.⁸⁶

All that remained was to complete the process of assimilation and dispersal as smoothly as possible and with minimum impact upon the tired and unhappy Poles. A Cabinet report in early October 1946 reveals that 75 per cent of the men had opted to enlist with the PRC, some 17 per cent were considering repatriation (in large part motivated by Warsaw’s threat to denationalise them if they remained in voluntary exile), and 8 per cent flatly refused to do either. This last group was to be told firmly that they had one month to make up their minds or face transfer to a displaced persons’ camp in Germany to join 280,000 of their countrymen left stranded by the war. This figure dropped sharply after this knowledge became common, and the eventual number transported to the Continent in early 1947 was about 200, some of whom had served time in British jails.

As for the Air Ministry, it maintained its support by producing a bilingual pamphlet outlining all the options available to the air personnel, and only fifty-seven of the total number of 14,000 chose to go home. In mid-November, Izycki issued a proclamation urging the men of the Polish Air Force to accept this new challenge to them and their homeland, for theirs was to be a permanent exile. They had fought hard with dignity and courage, but the long battle for liberation had been lost. Paying tribute to the Royal Air Force and its loyalty to their Polish comrades, he reminded his men that Polish freedom would live on in the hearts of all who kept the memory alive, and those who had fallen had not died in vain if their sacrifice would never be forgotten.⁸⁷ It was to be many years before their Poland was truly free again, but it would be difficult to deny that the participation by all the Polish forces in the Second World War bequeathed to the Polish people an indelible determination to survive which even the injustices of communism could not erase.

NOTES

1. This was by no means a uniform view, however. In July 1939, Clifford Norton in Warsaw wrote a long, sentimental letter to Orme Sargent in the Foreign Office extolling the virtues of Josef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister. Norton, who was deputising for Ambassador Kennard, even praised Beck’s assistance in the destruction of Czechoslovakia, ‘regarded by Poland as an arm of Russia thrust along her southern border’. An unknown hand pencilled ‘this is rather farfetched’ in the margin. (FO 371/23022: Norton to Sargent, 3.7.39.)

2. FO 371/23156 and FO 371/23022: Minutes of Inter-Allied Conference, 25.10.39; Evill to Foreign Office, 2.11.39; Zajac to Davidson, 31.10.39.

4. FO 371/24463: Minute to file, 9.1.40. Roger Mellor Makins CMG was educated at Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford; appointed to the Foreign Office 1928; promoted 2nd Secretary 1933; Acting 1st Secretary 1939; Acting Counsellor 1940; Counsellor 1942; knighted 1 January 1944.

8. Zamoyski, p. 45; FO 371/24463: Minutes, Air Ministry/Foreign Office meeting, 19.1.40

11. AIR 2/4213: Report by Flt Lt Landau through Boyle, 29.3.40. All subsequent quotations are from this text unless otherwise noted.

12. FO 371/24466: Sikorksi to Chamberlain, 4.4.40; Chamberlain to Sikorski, 12.4.40.

15. Zamoyski, p. 62. Zamoyski also attributes Landau’s report to the British liaison officer to the Polish Air Force and Station Commander at Eastchurch, Gp Capt A.P. Davidson, though there seems little doubt that he would have seen the report in any case.

16. Prazmowská, A., Britain and Poland 1939–1943: The Betrayed Ally (Cambridge University Press 1995), pp. 33–4.

17. Taylor, A.J.P., From the Boer War to the Cold War (Hamish Hamilton 1995): ‘The Traditions of British Foreign Policy’, pp. 9–12.

21. Cynk, J.B., History of the Polish Air Force (Osprey 1972), Chapter 1, passim; see also Zamoyski, pp. 44–56 – ‘French Fiasco’.

22. Two excellent works which cover the French defeat of 1940 are: Guy Chapman, Why France Collapsed (Cassells 1968), and Alistair Horne, To Lose A Battle (Macmillan 1969); The DCAS, AVM Sir W. Sholto Douglas GCB KCB CB MC DFC, was educated at Tonbridge School and Lincoln College, Oxford; RFC 1917; RAF 1918; Director of Staff Duties, Air Ministry, 1936–7; ACAS 1938–40; DCAS 1940; AOC Fighter Command 1940–2; AOC Middle East Command 1943–4; AOC Coastal Command 1944–5; AOC British Air Forces of Occupation in Germany 1945–6; Marshal of the Royal Air Force 1946; C-in-C and Military Governor, British Zone of Germany 1946–7; retired 1948; created First Baron of Dornock 1948; decorated by more than thirteen countries for his services in the Second World War; AIR 2/7196: Minutes, DCAS Conference, 25.5.40.

26. The enmity between the Russians and the Czechoslovaks was not as severe as that between the Russians and the Poles. Many of the Czechoslovaks interned by the Soviets were slowly released and allowed to proceed to the west. Some unfortunates were held in Siberian labour camps until the German assault on Russia began in June 1941, when they too were released and offered service in the Red Army (see: White, L.M. (ed.), On All Fronts: Czechoslovaks in WW2 (Vol 1) (East European Monographs, Boulder 1995); Kaspar, Miloslav F. ‘Polish Campaign 1939’, passim).

28.

apka, J., Red Sky At Night (Anthony Blond 1958), p. 23; see also Darlington, R., Nighthawk (William Kimber 1985), p. 25.

32.

apka, pp. 30–1; Darlington, p. 26. These accounts were dismissed by Miroslav Liškutín as ‘silly propaganda nonsense’. (White, op.cit., Liškutín, M.A. ‘The Czechoslovak Air Force In War’, p. 127.)

35. [VHA] VKPR 27/3/1/5: Report of French Campaign, 20.4.42. In addition to the 123 pilots, around another 100 men were employed in the combat zones as ground crew, bringing the full total to 220–40. (VKPR 25/3/1/3: Summary of events of the Czechoslovak Air Force overseas, produced in the summer of 1941.)

36. White, op.cit.; Kordina, Zdenek, ‘The 1940 Evacuation of the Czechoslovak Armed Forces From France’, pp. 63–80 passim. See also ADM 1/10481: Admiralty Report on Operations Aerial and Cycle, 18.9.40.

39. White, op.cit.;N images

mec, Jaroslav, ‘The Crisis of the Czechoslovak Army in England in the Second Half of 1940’, p. 86.

46. AIR/2/5153: Medhurst to Sholto Douglas 3.7.40. Medhurst’s anxieties about independence were soon justified. On 12 July, Newall wrote to the C-in-C Polish Forces (Gen K. Sosnkowski) informing him that the legal status of the Polish Air Force would ‘be the same as that of the Polish land forces and the Polish Navy’. In reply, the General accepted the logic of having the Polish squadrons organised on RAF lines, but still the principle of Polish independence was established by this exchange (AIR/8/295: 16.7.40.)

ACM Sir Charles Edward Hasting Medhurst KCB CB OBE MC (1896–1954) was educated at Rossall, St Peter’s at York and Sandhurst; served on the Western Front 1915–18; RAF 1919; RAF Staff College 1931–3; Deputy Director of Intelligence 1934–7; Air Attaché Rome, Berlin, Berne and Athens 1937–40; Director of Allied Air Co-operation 1940; Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Intelligence) 1941; ACAS (Policy) 1942; Commandant RAF Staff College 1943–4; AOC C-in-C RAF Mediterranean and Middle East 1945–8; retired 1950. Medhurst was also awarded the Czechoslovak White Lion, Class II, in 1944 for services to the allied air forces.

47. Rajlich, J., Sehnal, J., Slovenšti Letci [Slovak Airmen] (Label 1991), p. 7.

52. AIR 2/5153: Medhurst to the Directorate of Organisation and other departments, 7.7.40.

56. FO 371/24467: Summary of correspondence, Air Ministry– Foreign Office, 28.5.40.

57. AIR 2/5093: Summary of correspondence, formation of Polish Inspectorate; 8.3.40 to 6.6.40.

60. FO 371/47677: Review of Robotnik, 20.8.45; FO 371/39434: Report PWRC meeting, 21.1.44.

62. FO 371/47676: Peebles Town Councillor, 21.8.45; Kathleen Chapman to Foreign Office, 21.8.45; FO 371/47689: A. Aspinall to Foreign Secretary, 4.12.45.

63. Garlinski, J., Poland in the Second World War (Macmillan 1985), ch. 23 ‘The Last Soviet Offensive’, passim.

70. FO 371/47677: Cavendish-Bentinck to Foreign Office, 6.9.45; Foreign Office memorandum to all service departments, 8.9.45.

71. FO 371/47677: Burt-Andrews to Cavendish-Bentinck and Foreign Office, 5.9.45.

73. FO 371/47686: Interview, Sholto Douglas with Marshal Rola-Zymierski, 1.11.45.

74. FO 371/47686: Ms Alice Chatterson to Foreign Office, 6.11.45; and reply, 24.11.45.

76. FO 371/1155: ‘Disposal of the Polish Armed Forces’, 5.1.46; minutes, inter-departmental meeting, 21.12.45; Izycki to Tedder, 8.1.46. Mateusz Izycki had replaced Gen Stanislaw Ujejski as Inspector-General on 1.9.43.

81. AIR 8/1156: Foreign Office to Warsaw, 6.3.46; Air Ministry circular, 12.3.46.

83. AIR 8/1156: Polish Forces Committee; minutes, 4.4.46. The numbers in the Polish Air Force at that time were given as: 2,144 officers, 10,412 other ranks, 50 PWAAF officers, 1,123 PWAAF other ranks, and 185 apprentices – a total of 13,914.

CHAPTER TWO

Poles and Czechs

THE FIRST PHASE: SEPTEMBER 1939 TO JULY 1940

THE SECOND PHASE: AUGUST 1940 TO DECEMBER 1943

THE THIRD PHASE: JANUARY 1944 TO OCTOBER 1946

NOTES