7

Poland’s Contribution to the Allied War Effort, 1940–1943

At the end of the September 1939 campaign, Poland had lost an army: 694,000 soldiers had become prisoners of war of the Germans and 240,000 of the Soviets. Yet thousands had obeyed Marshal Rydz-Śmigły’s order to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. It was estimated that around 30,000 Polish soldiers and airmen were in Rumania; 40,000 in Hungary; 13,800 in Lithuania; and 1,300 in Latvia. Sikorski told his cabinet in 1939: ‘The re-creation of the Polish Army in its greatest size is the most important and essential goal of the Government.’ The basic Polish premise was: ‘We do not beg for freedom, we fight for freedom.’ To achieve this end the Polish Government had two strategic aims. The first was to show the world that although Poland was now under German and Soviet occupation, its armed forces were still active in the war. The second was to gain a place in the Anglo-French Supreme War Council, which would give the Polish Government a say in the allied decision-making process. This was the rationale, explained in a February 1940 memorandum by the Polish chief of staff, Major-General Tadeusz Klimecki, as to why Polish forces should participate in the proposed allied expeditionary force to Finland, which was then under attack by the Soviet Union. He argued: ‘Polish units on Finnish territory will offer vital proof that Poland exists and is fighting as part of the allied front … The very fact of Poland taking part in allied action will permit us to place unequivocally the issue of Poland’s relations with the other two Allies externally and internally.’ The Polish Government, however, met with limited success in this.¹

Under the terms of the Hague Convention, neutral countries were obliged to disarm and intern the Polish forces who entered their territory. Yet the maintenance of the thousands of Polish soldiers and airmen was prohibitively expensive, and the Rumanian and Hungarian governments either turned a blind eye to their escape or actively assisted them. In Rumania the Polish embassy worked round the clock to provide passports for escaping Polish servicemen: ‘They were well informed and enterprising people, scheming, wheeling, dealing, bribing and doing everything they could to get everybody out of Rumania before the Germans took over the country.’² The British embassy in Bucharest was also useful. A British diplomat, Robin Hankey, later related how 400 Polish airmen dressed as Jews to escape Rumania and travelled to Britain via Palestine.³ The Hungarians were even more helpful. The Polish military attaché in Budapest, Colonel Jan Emisarski-Pindelli, organised the evacuation office and worked in close collaboration with an official in the Hungarian Interior Ministry, Józef Antall, and with the Hungarian-Polish Committee for the Care of Refugees. There were three main escape routes from Hungary and Rumania: from the Black Sea ports of Constanţa and Balcik and then through the Dardanelles to Syria or Marseilles; through Yugoslavia or Greece and thence by sea to France; or overland via Yugoslavia and Italy.⁴

The Hungarian military were particularly welcoming to the Poles and facilitated their escape. The regiment of the Podolska Cavalry under Lieutenant-Colonel Gilewski was invited to be the guests of the 3rd Hungarian Hussar Regiment: ‘There, in front of the barracks, the elderly Colonel von Pongratsch was waiting along with his officer corps in ceremonial array. My regiment was given full honours as it marched on to the parade ground.’⁵ Lieutenant-General Stanisław Maczek was in a camp in Hungary where the Hungarian commandant played cards with the Polish officers and deliberately arranged to receive a report on the status of his guards while doing so, and he recommended that the Polish officers leave at the rate of no more than 10 men a night, that being the maximum number he could conceal in his records.⁶

Those troops who had crossed into Lithuania and Latvia generally had a more difficult time reaching the west. Some made it across the Baltic to Sweden and Norway with relative ease but the stories of others attest to their determination and endurance. Antoni Położyński reached Britain in January 1941 having travelled from Lithuania to Estonia and then to Finland where he stowed away on a ship bound for New York, from which he eventually travelled to Britain. Chaim Goldberg reached the Soviet Union and then travelled to Japan on a forged visa before reaching Canada where he joined the Polish Army, which had a recruitment office there, and was finally sent to Britain in October 1941.⁷

Poland’s contribution to the allied victory in the Second World War began even before the first shot had been fired. The achievement in breaking the codes created by the military German Enigma cipher machine, understanding its operation and building replicas was arguably the greatest contribution that Poland made to the allied war effort, but one that the Polish Government was of course unable to publicise. Without the ability to break the Enigma codes, the Allies would have quite simply lost the battle of the Atlantic, and with that, the war. Yet the other major Polish imput in this field was that her cryptographers kept the secret throughout the war. Had the Polish cryptographers who were captured and questioned by the Gestapo revealed what they knew, then the Germans could have made sufficient changes to block out allied decryption efforts, and thereby the invasion of Europe would have had to be made without this priceless advantage. The details of how Enigma was broken had to be kept secret for some decades after the war had ended, because many countries around the world continued to use Enigma-type ciphers, and British and American intelligence operations would have been hampered if they had changed to something less breakable. The Polish contribution was thus obscure until a book published in Poland in 1967 revealed that the Poles had broken Enigma before the war, and a book in English published in 1974 informed the world that the Allies had been able to read German messages throughout the war.⁸

In January 1929, a commercial Enigma machine was sent to Poland by mistake and the Germans drew attention to the shipment by requesting its immediate return without customs inspection. The machine was secretly examined over a weekend by Ludomir Danilewicz and Antoni Palluth, directors of a Warsaw-based communications company, AVA. Looking like a complex typewriter, the Enigma machine was based on a combination of electrical and mechanical systems with keys, rotors, a plugboard and electrical connections. It was capable of producing a vast number of permutations as the encryption keys could be changed daily. The machine was carefully repacked and returned to Germany. AVA was in close collaboration with Poland’s Cipher Bureau, which in turn had close links with the cryptologists working at the Mathematical Institute in Poznań. Three of its brightest graduates, Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, set about trying to discover the secrets of Enigma and how its codes might be broken.⁹

The military version was still more complex, and before the Poles could break its codes they had to know in detail how it worked. They never had access to an actual machine; but Hans Thilo Schmidt, who worked in the German Defence Cipher Office, provided French intelligence with an operator’s instruction manual and the key settings for September and October 1932, and the French passed them to the Poles. By the end of the year, the Poles had deduced the internal workings of the military Enigma machine, and over that Christmas Rejewski decrypted a signal sent by the Reichswehr. The AVA company then began manufacturing replica machines and the Poles developed a number of methods for automating the recovery of the keys of intercepted messages, first by means of a card index and then by perforated sheets. In late 1938 they mechanised the process by building a ‘bombe’, which was effectively the equivalent of six Enigma machines coupled together. This could recover a daily encryption key in about two hours, replacing the manual work of a hundred people. The concept of a bombe would be later developed further at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park and the technology behind it was used in the early days of computing.¹⁰

At the end of 1938, the Germans introduced two new rotor wheels and other refinements. The Poles rapidly deduced all the details of the modifications by analysing the encrypted messages created by the modified machines, but their introduction nevertheless increased the complexity of the daily key recovery by a factor of at least ten. In the summer of 1939, when war looked inevitable, the Polish General Staff decided to share their knowledge with the British and French, who had struggled for years to understand and break Enigma without success. The official British history of intelligence during the war ascribes this decision to the need for more resources to develop the equipment necessary for speedy decryption, but Rejewski claimed:

It was not [as Harry Hinsley suggested, cryptological] difficulties of ours that prompted us to work with the British and French, but only the deteriorating political situation. If we had had no difficulties at all we would still, or even more so, have shared our achievements with our allies as our contribution to the struggle against Germany.¹¹

On 24–25 July the head of the Polish Cipher Bureau, Lieutenant-Colonel Gwido Langer, and his colleague Lieutenant Maksymilian Ciężki hosted a meeting with leading British and French cryptographers in the outskirts of Warsaw. The British representatives, Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox and Alastair Denniston, and the French representatives, Gustave Bertrand and Henri Braquenié, were shown how to break the code and were given a replica machine each. When the war broke out, the Polish cryptographers destroyed all but two of their machines and fled for the Rumanian border and then travelled to France, reaching there in early October, where they set up operations near the town of Gretz-Armainvilliers, about 25 miles north-east of Paris. There they continued to read Enigma messages, reading 8,440 German messages: over 1,000 on the Norway campaign and about 5,000 on the French campaign. The French would not allow them to travel to Britain but a British cipher expert, Alan Turing, visited them in early 1940.¹²

The fall of France led to the second Polish contribution to Enigma: keeping the secret. The French and Polish cryptographers had fled to Toulouse before the armistice was proclaimed. Their boss, Gustave Bertrand, was in a dilemma: he first evacuated them to Oran in Algeria but then decided that they should return to Vichy France and re-establish the bureau at the Château des Fouzes in Uzès. The British wanted the Poles out of France but Betrand was determined to keep hold of them, and, unbelievably, the Polish Government did not realise what a priceless but extremely vulnerable asset they had in France and made no attempt to help their cryptographers escape. The Polish cryptographers maintained separate communications with the Polish Government, and such a show of independence did not endear them to Betrand. In November 1942, their position became extremely precarious when they learned, probably from the French resistance, that the Allies were about to invade North Africa and that the chances of a German occupation of Vichy France were high. The château was evacuated ahead of the German arrival, but Betrand behaved deplorably by frequently thwarting the attempts made by the Poles to escape the country. Rejewski and Zygalski managed to cross the Pyrenees into Spain, where they were imprisoned. On their release in May 1943, they reached Britain via Portugal, arriving there in July. They were sent to the Polish decryption unit at Stanmore, near London, which had a direct line to the British at Bletchley, and worked on the SS cipher and various lower-grade codes for the remainder of the war.¹³

The other Polish cryptographers underwent appalling suffering. Różycki had been drowned when the ship carrying him and his colleagues back to France from Algeria was sunk. Palluth, Edward Fokczyski, Langer and Ciężki were all captured by the Germans. Palluth and Fokczyski were sent to the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp but fortunately the Germans never realised their valuable secret. Langer was not so lucky: the Gestapo tracked him down in the internment camp at Schloss Eisenberg, near Most, and interrogated him. After the war he gave details of his interrogation:

I told him that before the war, we conducted tests, and sometimes we did find a solution, but during the war, we didn’t manage to decode anything, since the Germans had made changes, which they knew about, just before the war started.

The Germans knew from the decrypted Enigma messages found at the Polish Cipher Bureau that the Poles had broken the code but were prepared to believe Langer’s mixture of truth and lies, especially when his story tallied with Ciężki’s. Both men survived the war and settled in Britain after their liberation.¹⁴

By the end of October 1939, 3,842 Polish officers and men, of whom 1,320 were airmen, had escaped from Poland and reached France. This number would in due course reach 43,000 officers and men by June 1940.¹⁵ Even while the fighting had continued in Poland, the Polish ambassador in Paris, Julius Łukasiewicz, issued an appeal to the large community of Poles resident in France:

The one-half-million-strong Polish emigration will join its ranks, as behoves citizens of the Polish nation, to take an honourable part in liberating their homeland from the yoke of its two age-old foes. Within a few days announcements posted in all communes of the French Republic will call upon you to register; in two weeks you will come before draft boards, and subsequently a good many of you will be called into the ranks of the first Polish division in France. The tens of thousands of men who, for the time being, will remain in French war factories, working for the common cause, will be called up in the coming months to new units of the Polish Army formed beyond the borders of the Republic.¹⁶

This appeal was repeated by Sikorski’s first Order of the Day, issued on 28 September 1939. He was convinced that a Polish army of 120,000 men could be formed in France. But the French and Belgian governments proved unhelpful: both were prepared to allow recruitment to the Polish Army but insisted on exemptions for Poles working in war-related industries. This proviso exempted over 35,000 Polish miners in northern France alone. Volunteers were slow to come forward and by May 1940, the Polish Army numbered 66,953 men, barely half of what Sikorski had envisaged.¹⁷

The newly re-formed Polish armed forces met with a mixed reaction from their allies. The navy came off best, for under the agreement signed with Britain on 19 November 1939, the Polish Government retained absolute sovereignty over its navy – both ships and personnel – and their ships sailed under the Polish flag, under the command of Polish officers and under the overall command of Admiral Jerzy Świrski. All Polish ships carried a British signals officer for the coding and decoding of signals. The Polish Air Force was very keen to collaborate with Britain after the September campaign rather than remain in France with the Polish Army. The reason given was that the Poles had more familiarity, gained before the war, with British equipment but actually it was that the Poles rated the RAF far higher than the French Armée de l’Air. The British insisted that the Poles should be treated on the same lines as Commonwealth troops and swear allegiance to the king, a demand the Poles naturally resented greatly. Also the RAF was initially sceptical about the Poles’ flying abilities but soon learned that the Poles found the transfer to Hurricanes easy. There were some minor problems, such as having to remind the Polish pilots to lower their landing gear when coming in to land since the Polish fighters had been fixed-wheel.¹⁸

The Polish Army in the winter of 1939 anticipated being trained and equipped by the French and fighting alongside them when the Germans turned their attention westwards. Their training camp at Coëtquidan in Brittany had appalling conditions, and Bogdan Grodki noted his impressions on arrival:

In a dirty, muddy entrance near an inn, barns and pigsties stood in a quadrangle. I looked inside. On the pavement and concrete slabs under the feeding troughs were laid armfuls of hay covered with blankets. Here lived the future soldiers of the Polish Army in dirt and muck.¹⁹

The Poles referred to the camp as a koczkodan, best translated as an old, dirty hag. Conditions did not improve until Sikorski intervened personally. Training proceeded very slowly and most of their equipment dated from the First World War. The French did not appear to value the services of their ally: ‘There were no opportunities to make any contact with French officers and they made no effort in that direction themselves unless they had to; they kept aloof and obviously didn’t think much of us.’²⁰ Brigadier-General Stanisław Sosabowski, appointed deputy commander of the 1st Division, believed that his men became infected by the poor morale and ill discipline of the average French soldier. The Poles were blamed for the war and the French appeared to take no interest in learning any lessons about the new German form of warfare from the soldiers of a defeated nation. When Lieutenant Rolski met General Maxime Weygand, commander-in-chief of the French forces in the Middle East, he was questioned about the German tactics: ‘He listened attentively, but one could see that he put everything we said through the sieve of his own opinions and only retained the few morsels that fitted in with these.’²¹

The French cannot take all the blame for the unsatisfactory state of affairs, because the Polish Army itself was in considerable disarray. The first historian of the Polish fighting effort noted:

The Polish army formed in France in the winter of 1939 was probably the queerest lot of men that ever carried rifles and learned attack, defence, taking cover and the other secrets of the infantryman’s art. There were in the ranks diplomats, including Mr Lipski, the former Polish ambassador in Berlin, who had carried out many delicate personal negotiations with Hitler and Ribbentrop; there were also Polish miners from the north of France, some of whom had nearly forgotten their native language. Next to boys of seventeen were found university professors of fairly respectable age. There were adventurous volunteers from the Foreign Legion, former legionaries in the Spanish army at Guadalajara, and Polish settlers from Brazil and Peru. Poets, artists and writers made up a small but amusing group. There were priests and there were Jews. There were also many officers, but these were mostly army men of a fairly uniform type, unlike the privates. It was a kind of Noah’s Ark collection, with one common feature – they all believed in Poland.²²

Lipski himself found adaptation to army life somewhat difficult: ‘I must admit that the change from my former life as a diplomat was something of a shock. I had to sleep on damp straw in damp, cold barracks, getting up to the sound of the bugle at 5 a.m., eating food from an army kitchen, drilling all day long, and handling heavy machine guns to the accompaniment of an unceasing flow of scathing comment from the sergeant-major.’²³ The Poles were also highly politicised and this caused many problems. Most of the soldiers who had escaped from Poland were officers and were usually loyal to the Sanacja regime; they were therefore suspicious of Sikorski’s post-mortem of the September campaign, generally a witch-hunt against senior officers blamed for the defeat. The officers also had little in common with their men. The Polish labourers who had been working in France formed the rank and file and were generally left-wing, whereas the senior officers usually held deeply conservative and often right-wing opinions.

Sikorski had hoped to form an army of two corps, each of two infantry divisions, and a large armoured unit, as well as a substantial air force in France, but had to settle for less. On 10 May 1940, when the Germans launched their attack in the west, the Polish order of battle consisted of the 1st Division, 16,000 men, commanded by Major-General Bronisław Duch; the 2nd Division, also 16,000 men, under Major-General Bronisław Prugar-Ketling; the 10th Armoured Cavalry (Mechanised) Brigade, about 5,000 men, of whom only 2,000 were fully trained, under General Maczek. The 3rd Infantry Division, about 8,000 men, under Colonel Tadeusz Zieleniewski, lacked uniforms and weapons, and the 4th Division, with 3,000, under Colonel Rudolf Dreszer, was in the early stages of formation. The best-trained and -equipped Polish formation, the Podole Rifle Brigade under Major-General Zygmunt Szyszko-Bohusz, was away in Norway when the Germans launched their attack on France. The Polish Air Force in France was commanded by Major-General Józef Zając. On paper the establishment seemed reasonably impressive: 1,449 officers, 2,836 NCOs and 2,578 other ranks; but the French had been dilatory in training the Polish pilots on the French Morane and other fighters. Consequently out of the four squadrons created, only one and a half squadrons with a total of 86 aircraft were combat-ready when the Germans attacked.²⁴

The Norway campaign in early 1940 was a brief interlude in the Phoney War and one in which the principal allied protagonists, France and Britain, did not cover themselves in glory. The origins of the allied expedition were twofold: to give aid to Finland, which had been invaded by the Soviet Union on 30 November 1939, and to deprive Germany of Swedish iron ore, which it imported for its war industries through the ice-free Norwegian port of Narvik. The Polish Government was keen for its army to be included in the allied expedition because it needed to prove to the world that Poland was still fighting and to gain the recognition from Britain and France that Poland was an ally of value, one which deserved a seat at the Supreme War Council. Political vacillations in Britain and France ensured that an allied expeditionary force was prepared too late to assist Finland, which sued for peace on 6 March. German suspicions regarding allied intentions towards Norway and Sweden – both countries having remained neutral during the First World War – had been aroused, and on 9 April 1940, Germany launched a pre-emptive strike against Denmark and Norway. The Danes capitulated quickly but the Norwegians showed every intention of putting up a fight.

Poland contributed to the Norwegian campaign both at sea and on land. Polish naval units joined the Royal Navy in its attack on the German fleet and during the campaign ten German destroyers were sunk. The Polish Navy lost a destroyer, Grom, in the battle, but its submarine Orzeł commanded by Captain Jan Grudziński had more luck. On 8 April, it spotted the 9,800-ton German passenger liner Rio de Janeiro near Oslofjord, surfaced and ordered it to stop. When the Germans refused to obey, the submarine launched torpedoes and sank the ship. The wreckage revealed that the Rio de Janeiro had been carrying German troops for the invasion of Norway. On 14 April 1940, the allied expeditionary force began disembarking at Narvik, which was already in German hands. The Polish Podole Brigade took part in the operations to recapture Narvik, taking first the town of Arkennes across the fjord and on 27–28 May the small town of Beisfjord. In the trenches outside Narvik, the Germans baited the Poles for their readiness to continue the fight, erecting boards with messages such as: ‘Why fight for England and her capitalists? The road to Warsaw is free. Cross the Swedish frontier, or throw down arms and cross singly to join us. In accordance with Marshal Piłsudski’s will we are building a new Poland with Hitler’, or ‘The Jews and English are your enemies. The Führer has conquered Holland and is marching on Paris. Your Allies are betraying you. You are fighting for the Jews and the English.’ In retaliation the Poles erected a board with a derogatory cartoon of Hitler and the Germans expended much energy on trying to destroy it. The port of Narvik was captured on the night of 28 May, but instead of holding the port and town the allied expeditionary force was ordered to destroy the port facilities and re-embark for France on 8 June because the situation there was critical. The Poles had 97 men killed whereas the Germans lost around 200 men. The Poles received little public recognition for their role, and in 1943 the Polish Ministry of Information published a largely pictorial book, Polish Troops in Norway, to put the record straight.²⁵

The German attack on the west came as little surprise to the Allies, but its speed and depth shocked them. The German plan was to advance in three army groups: Army Group B, commanded by General von Bock, drove into Holland and northern Belgium. The purpose of this attack was to entice the British and French to advance eastwards into Belgium leaving their right flank exposed. The Poles had unsuccessfully warned the Allies against mounting a defence so far forward, recommending instead that large reserves should be created and the bulk of the armour held back in strong formations. The flank of the allied armies was to be turned by the strongest German force, Army Group A, under General von Rundstedt, which would break through the Ardennes, seize crossings across the Meuse and advance on the French coast, thereby separating the allied armies in the north from the rest of France. The third German force, Army Group C, commanded by General Wilhelm von Leeb, would advance on the Maginot Line and keep the French forces there preoccupied even if it could not break the actual French line. The result was dramatic: in as short a time as it had taken the Germans to defeat the Poles, French and British armies in the north were in total disarray, retreating from the fast-moving and powerful German thrusts. On 26 May, the British began re-embarking their expeditionary force at Dunkirk, and this evacuation ended on 4 June, marking the end of the first phase of the battle for France.

The Polish Army had taken no part in the first phase: they were still undertrained and poorly equipped. On 5 June, the Germans, having brought up their infantry to join the Panzer divisions, now launched the second phase of the battle for France, the drive southwards from the Seine. The French began retreating. General Philippe Pétain now visited Sikorski in Paris and asked him to order the Poles to the front line. As Sikorski later said: ‘How could I refuse; the old man begged me to save France.’²⁶

On 26 May, the Polish 1st Division was sent to occupy the Metz sector of the Maginot Line. The haste of the despatch of these troops to the front was obvious to the Poles:

The men in my platoon were still strangers to me. We had been brought together only a few days earlier, and as yet we had had no opportunity of becoming acquainted. During the last week we had to do work which should have taken months. We were snowed up under bales of new uniforms, new weapons, and motorised equipment, so that we had hardly time to eat, and even less for sleep. We had to learn to drive our brand-new vehicles, which were not yet run in, and to make the acquaintance of the new French sub-machine guns, which we had never seen before.²⁷

The 1st Division succeeded in repelling the attack of four German divisions and this prompted Pétain, who had witnessed the battle, to comment to Sikorski: ‘if there had only been ten Polish divisions, victory would have been certain’. The division was then asked to cover the French Fourth Army as it retreated from Lorraine, and on 15–16 June it suffered very high casualties in battles in the Isiming–Arwiller sector, along the Munser–Bisping–Azondange line and finally along the Dieuze–Fénétrange line.

The Polish 2nd Division under General Prugar-Ketling was deployed in the region of Belfort near the Swiss border. It took part in battles to hold the bridgeheads over the Saone river to enable the French Army to retreat, and fought in the defence of Montbéliard, in which it sustained and inflicted heavy casualties. The Podole Brigade was rushed back from Norway and landed in Brittany, but was in no condition to be thrust into a chaotic fight: the supply units were missing, there were only between 20 and 40 cartridges per rifle and 200–300 bullets per machine gun, and they had lost all their signalling equipment. Despite this, the brigade was assigned to the defence of the railway junction in Dol, south of St Michel. The 10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade, commanded by General Stanisław Maczek, had received very little training, but now, suddenly, the Poles were given tanks and expected to learn how to drive them. On 13 June, the brigade held off the German attack in the Champaubert–Montmirail region before attacking near Montgivroux. The Poles then followed the French retreat southwards and had a brief skirmish with the Germans around the town of Montbard and seized a crossing over the Burgundy Canal. At this point the division was out of ammunition and petrol, and they destroyed the remaining tanks and other vehicles before beginning the march southwards on foot on 18 June.²⁸

The Polish Air Force had a frustrating campaign. Some Polish pilots blamed the faulty tactics employed at the time by both the French Air Force and the RAF, which consisted of flying in a V formation in small groups – which meant that the German fighters always outnumbered them. Furthermore, there was a lack of pre- and post-operative briefings and so no opportunity to disseminate any lessons learnt. The air campaign in France was also limited by the chaos caused by the rapid retreat of the French Army. One Polish pilot, Władysław Chciuk, recorded his experiences on 16 May, when he fought some German Dornier-17s; his plane was shot up and when landing Chciuk hit a tree:

Belgian rustics showed me to a French infantry unit, where I waited a whole day for transport back to the squadron. None was provided, so I set off walking. After arriving at some French headquarters, I was accompanied across the border. Then, after three days of hitchhiking, horseback, walking, and being arrested twice as a spy I arrived at my airfield. There, I learned from three mechanics left behind to burn abandoned aircraft that my unit had moved to another location – somewhere near Paris. I ordered them to repair one Morane and the next day I flew it to a new base. The airfield’s commander, General Weygand, observed my take-off. He wasn’t told that my aircraft had defective landing gear, the flaps didn’t work, the propeller’s pitch couldn’t be changed, the aircraft wasn’t armed and that I had no parachute … After landing at Le Bourget, I was told that my Groupement de Chase had already moved to Plessis-Belleville, for where I promptly took off.

During May and June, Polish fighter pilots shot down 52 enemy planes and shared 21 more kills with the French. They lost 9 pilots killed.²⁹

Historians have recently revisited the battle for France and concluded that the French performance was not as bad as it was viewed at the time. The soldiers fought with determination but were let down by their high command, who lost control of events.³⁰ Certainly the Poles were not impressed by the French attitude towards the war. One soldier from the 3rd Division noted: ‘Motorised columns were not even in retreat, but in disgraceful escape; they threw down their weapons, leaving them behind on the roads, and returned to their homes.’³¹ The French high command did little to keep the Poles informed of events and consequently, on 11 June, Sikorski left the Polish headquarters in Paris and travelled east to learn more for himself. Here the duality of his role as prime minister and commander-in-chief was to prove near disastrous; not only did he not find the French high command but he was out of communication with his own government and high command during the most critical phase of the French campaign.³²

The Polish Government moved southwards when the French Government evacuated Paris and reached a temporary resting place at Libourne, near Bordeaux. The Polish foreign minister, August Zaleski, realised that the French Government had given up the battle and made overtures to the British for the evacuation of his government and the army to Britain. On 17 June, Sikorski finally arrived at Libourne and the next day flew to Britain for consultations with Churchill, leaving Sosnkowski in command of the Polish Army. Sikorski asked Churchill if Britain would continue the war, and received a firm affirmative. The Polish Government embarked on HMS Arethusa and travelled to Britain, where on 21 June President Raczkiewicz was welcomed at Paddington station by King George VI. Sikorski visited Churchill in London on 25 June and Jock Colville wrote of the meeting: ‘His [Sikorski’s] ADC said that the way in which the French ran away was indescribable: they showed no fighting spirit. I hear from all sides that the Poles have been fighting magnificently in France: they seem to be our most formidable allies.’³³

On 19 June, Sikorski made a radio broadcast ordering all the Poles in France to make their way to the nearest port to await evacuation to Britain. General Duch and the 1st Division were still in contact with the enemy and tangled up in the French retreat: few managed to escape and most became POWs. The 2nd Division was caught on the Swiss border, too far away from any coast, so it crossed into Switzerland, where the Swiss authorities disarmed them and sent them to internment camps. The 11,000 men remained in Switzerland for the rest of the war, while the Polish Government, desperate for trained men, did try to get them released, but without success. Within the Polish community the men of this division later became known as ‘the five degrees’, since they had nothing to do in Switzerland other than to obtain more education. The 3rd Division was ordered by the French Major-General Louis-Augustin-Joseph Faury to assemble at Vannes to surrender alongside his army; they refused, but most were unable to escape and so were captured. The Podole Brigade, having suffered one debacle in Norway, was also forced to surrender. Polish airmen fared better: many pilots flew directly to England and others to North Africa, and then made their way to Britain by sea.³⁴

Elements of the Polish Army struggled to reach the French ports, where, on Churchill’s explicit instructions to the Admiralty, the Royal Navy was making every effort to evacuate them. Maczek had 500 men with him and unable to feed such a large body forced them to split into small groups. Remnants of the other divisions were following the same course. The Germans seemed to be everywhere but the French population often warned the Poles of the German presence and advised them on the best route to take. The roads were unsafe and the Michelin road maps Maczek had were of little use for travelling across country. After a march of eighteen days, he finally reached the unoccupied zone where he was relieved to enjoy a normal life: ‘being able to go to the cafe for a glass of wine and being able to sleep in a comfortable bed and have a hot bath’. Maczek was effectively stranded in Marseilles and found himself surrounded by Polish soldiers who had somehow acquired civilian clothing but still had the unmistakable bearing of the military. He eventually reached Britain via Morocco and Lisbon.³⁵

Elsewhere in France considerable confusion reigned over what the terms of the armistice signed on 22 June meant for the Poles. Article X stipulated that the French Government would cease hostilities immediately; that it would prevent members of the French armed forces from leaving the country; and that it would forbid its citizens from joining foreign armies that were at war with Germany. Nowhere did it mention the Poles explicitly; nevertheless, the French authorities were determined to prevent the Poles from leaving. Two large British transport ships arrived in the ports of Rochefort and La Rochelle on the night of 19 June. Stefan Baluk was trying to leave on a British ship and noted that when some German Dorniers appeared the French anti-aircraft gunners fled for cover. When a Polish officer fired a machine gun at the planes, the French dockworkers begged him to desist and ‘not to provoke the Germans’. Polish ships also took part alongside their British counterparts in the operations to evacuate Polish troops from the southern ports of St-Jean-de-Luz and Le Verdon. The French commander at St-Jean-de-Luz tried to stop the embarkation of Polish troops on the night of 24–25 June but was persuaded to turn a blind eye for a few hours; 3,000 men were evacuated.³⁶ After the campaign was over, Lieutenant-General Sosnkowski wrote a lengthy report for the Polish cabinet that clearly showed how the French Government and high command had hindered the efforts of the Poles to escape from France.³⁷

The Polish Army, so painstakingly built up in France, was squandered to facilitate the retreat of the French Army. It suffered 6,000 casualties, including 1,400 killed, and the majority of the troops became POWs or were interned in Switzerland. Only 19,000 soldiers and airmen were evacuated, representing under a quarter of the Polish Army in France at the start of the German invasion. This number could have been higher but many of the recent recruits who had lived in France prior to the war chose to be discharged and return to their homes to protect their families rather than join the Polish troops in an uncertain future in Britain. The historiography of the French campaign barely mentions the existence of, let alone the actions of, the Polish troops, yet in 1940 the French were grateful towards them. Weygand told Maczek: ‘I know what you and your brigade have done on the front, how you shielded the French retreat, and I thank you in the name of France’, and his unit received 38 Croix de Guerres and Médailles Militaires.³⁸ Sikorski had learnt an important lesson from the French campaign: the piecemeal fashion in which the Polish units had been thrown into battle made him determined that, in the future, when the Poles were deployed, they should fight as a clearly identifiable mass of Polish soldiery and not be scattered among allied units.

On 18 June 1940, Churchill told the House of Commons: ‘What General Weygand called the “Battle of France” is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin.’³⁹ Hitler knew that to launch a successful invasion of Britain the RAF would have to be destroyed first. The Battle of Britain fell into five phases: over the English Channel, 10 July–early August; aerial combat between the RAF and the Luftwaffe, 13–18 August; the German offensive against the RAF airfields, 24 August–6 September; the battle of London, 7–30 September to protect the capital from daylight bombing raids; and, finally, a series of minor raids until 31 October 1940. After the fall of France, the terms under which the Poles served with the RAF were amended, and the oath of allegiance to the British king was dropped. Two Polish fighter squadrons, 302 (Poznań) and 303 (Kościuszko) were formed, although a number of Polish pilots remained flying with their British squadrons. A small Polish fighter command staff was set up within RAF Fighter Command headquarters in Stanmore in 1940. A year later Polish liaison officers were appointed to all bases where Polish pilots were stationed.⁴⁰

The RAF put the Poles through an extremely demanding training schedule. The linguistic barrier was problematic: the pilots were forced to undergo a three-week-long intensive course in the English language, specifically designed to give them the necessary vocabulary for air operations. The group commander of 303 Squadron, Captain Stanley Vincent, also came up with an ingenious solution. He put the Polish fighter pilots on bicycles with radios strapped to their backs and headphones, and sent them pedalling around the airfield in formation so that the Poles soon learnt the English commands. Squadron Leader Ronald Kellett served in 303 Squadron and flew with an English-Polish glossary strapped to his knee. 302 Squadron was made operational on 15 August but was stationed at Leconfield in Yorkshire, outside the main area of the Battle of Britain. Nevertheless, on 19 August, the squadron recorded its first kill when Lieutenant Antoni Ostowicz shot down a Messerschmitt 110.⁴¹

303 Squadron would become legendary within the RAF. It was stationed at RAF Northolt, near London, and therefore in the centre of the battle. While on a training flight on 30 August, the Poles spotted the Germans and contrary to all orders immediately went to attack. Lieutenant Ludwik Paszkiewicz shot down a Dornier bomber and the RAF concluded from this unconventional action that the Polish squadron was ready to be made operational.⁴² The British had harboured doubts about the value of the Poles after the rapid defeat of the Polish Air Force in September 1939, but the Poles had no doubts regarding their own abilities, needing only a modern plane like a Hurricane. The Poles were also viewed as ill-disciplined, reckless and over-keen to fight the Germans, but as the British losses mounted among their inexperienced pilots, they would come to appreciate these qualities in the Polish pilots. A Polish pilot described his first kill:

I caught up with him easily. He grew in my sights until his whole fuselage filled the mini-circle [of the gun sights]. It was certainly time to fire. I did so quite calmly and was not even excited, rather puzzled and surprised to find it so easy. Quite different from Poland where you had to scrape and strain and then instead of getting the bastard, he got you.⁴³

The secret to their success was their ability to hold fire until they were within 100–200 yards of the German plane, whereas the less experienced British pilots started firing at 400 yards. The Polish kills mounted up and on 27 September 1940, 303 Squadron posted its one hundredth confirmed kill (but Paszkiewicz was killed too). The Czech pilot Josef František flew with 303 and was the highest scoring ace in the entire RAF during the Battle of Britain. He was killed in a crash landing on 8 October 1940.⁴⁴

When the Battle of Britain officially ended on 31 October 1940, the Poles were acknowledged as having made a contribution that belied their small numbers. They lost 33 pilots but 34 had become aces – men who had scored five or more kills. 303 Squadron had downed three times the RAF average.⁴⁵ The Poles received enormous publicity and gratitude for their daring deeds in the sky. After visiting a Polish squadron in August 1940, the king was heard to remark: ‘One cannot help feeling that if all our Allies had been Poles, the course of the war, up to now, would have been very different.’⁴⁶ The head of Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, told Churchill, ‘the Poles in our Fighter Squadrons were very dashing but totally undisciplined’. Churchill in response said: ‘one Pole was worth three Frenchmen, Gort and Dowding said nearer ten!’⁴⁷ Having a Polish fighter pilot on one’s arm became the height of fashion for young women in Britain in the summer of 1940, and jealous RAF pilots sometimes adopted phoney Polish accents to attract girls. The headmistress of a girls’ school ended her speech to the school leavers with the warning: ‘And remember, keep away from gin and Polish airmen.’⁴⁸ News of the Polish success in Britain also became widely known in Poland when the book Squadron 303 by Arkady Fiedler was published by the Polish Underground in 1943.⁴⁹

The Polish Government still had one army in the field, flying the Polish flag. Although France had been the main collection point for Poles escaping from Poland in 1939, a significant number of men had made their way to the Middle East, and were organised into the 1st Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade (1 Samodzielna Brygada Strzelców Karpackich), commanded by Major-General Stanisław Kopański, who travelled from Paris to take up the command. The brigade was based at Homs in Syria and quartered in castles dating from the time of the Crusades. It formed part of the French Army in the Middle East commanded by General Weygand, and by the time mainland France was defeated, the brigade numbered 4,000 men, trained and equipped by the French. The local French commander, General Eugène-Désité-Antoine Mittelhauser, insisted that the Polish brigade should cease hostilities along with the French forces. Kopański disagreed vociferously and, despite being threatened with arrest, he and his men made their way into British-controlled Palestine with all their equipment. The Poles were secretly aided by General René de Larminat, who would later join the Free French forces in Palestine.⁵⁰

The British, although grateful to receive a fully armed brigade, were somewhat surprised by their arrival, and unsure about what to do with them. They could not be used in the desert campaign launched by General Archibald Wavell in December 1940 because, although the Polish Government had broken off diplomatic relations with Italy, it was not formally at war with Italy. The British respected the Polish desire to take an active part in their operations, though not offensively against Italy. The British also accepted that because of Poland’s long-standing relationship with France it would be politically impossible for the Poles to take to the field against the Vichy French in Syria. From mid-January 1941 onwards, the Carpathian Brigade started the process of mechanisation and received training in mountain warfare. It was earmarked to form part of the British expeditionary force to Greece in March 1941. Sikorski strongly supported this because it fitted with his strategy: ‘The formation of a new front in the Balkans … brings us nearer to Poland. It provides conditions for a future offensive on the continent.’⁵¹ However, the departure of the Poles was cancelled at the last minute because the sudden advance of the Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel meant that the British needed every trained man in the desert. Instead, the brigade was sent to a fortified camp in Mersa-Matruh, near Alexandria, to protect the approaches to the Nile Delta and also provided troops for twelve POW camps there which housed over 65,000 Italians.⁵²

There is no space here to repeat the story of the advances and retreats of the British forces in the Western Desert. Wavell’s offensive at the end of 1940 had captured the Libyan port of Tobruk; Rommel’s 1941 spring offensive left Tobruk isolated and under siege behind German-Italian lines. In the middle of August, the British commander, General Claude Auchinleck,* informed Kopański that Sikorski, keen to see Polish troops contributing to the war effort, had agreed to a British request to send the Carpathian Brigade to Tobruk. Over ten days, 18–28 August, the brigade, now numbering 288 officers and 4,777 other ranks, was secretly shipped at night from Alexandria, replacing most of the Australian 9th Division.⁵³

The fortress of Tobruk was about the size of the Isle of Wight. The perimeter was 31 miles long and the distance from the harbour to the centre was about 9 miles.

Practically the whole of the Tobruk area was visible to the enemy from one escarpment (hill) or another. Over some parts of it you could not even walk in daylight without being shot at … The whole area is desert made up of sand and rocks. There is hardly a sign of the faintest scrub. The ground is littered with derelict tanks, aeroplanes and lorries.⁵⁴

Tobruk was defended by the British 70th Division and 32nd Armoured Brigade, a regiment of Indian cavalry, a Czech battalion and various artillery units, totalling 34,113 men all under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Scobie.⁵⁵

The Poles were sent to defend the most vulnerable western part of the perimeter, where in May the three Italian divisions along with part of a German division, a total of 33,000 men, had succeeded in making a breach opposite the Medauar Hill. An Australian soldier observed the conduct of the Poles:

They were Poles, come to Tobruk with the specific intention of killing Germans … They laughed when I first tried them with my French, in fact they laughed all the time, and they were behaving as if they had a date that very afternoon – with Rommel I think, which made them the oddest of bods.⁵⁶

One Polish officer found a German greatcoat when out on patrol, putting it on he entered the Italian lines, and for two days questioned the Italians about their defences. Then he returned to the Polish lines where he received both thirty days’ detention and a decoration for his conduct.⁵⁷

Auchinleck launched Operation Crusader, designed to drive the Germans back and relieve Tobruk, on 18 November 1941. Initial progress was good and on 21 November, the Tobruk garrison attempted to break out. The newspaper correspondent Alan Moorehead observed the Polish section:

The Poles broke out of their confinement in Tobruk with the exuberance of Red Indians and now, as their chief of staff said to us with no intention of being funny, ‘It makes a nice change for the boys. A very nice change indeed.’ It did too. They went into battle as though they were buccaneers boarding a 15th century galleon.⁵⁸

The breakout drew the attacking allied troops 10 miles from the Tobruk perimeter before a German counterattack pushed them back. The allied attack was renewed in December and the siege was broken after the battle of Gazala. Feliks Keidrowski recalled his experiences of an Italian counterattack:

We were short of ammunition so all 6,000 soldiers had four rounds each. As I was a machine-gun carrier I had 40. The order was not to fire randomly. We stayed in position without shooting facing thousands of advancing Italian soldiers. They were 50–100 yards away from us and still no single shot, our nerves wrecked by the fear of not being able to hold back the Italians, now 50 yards from us still no flare signalling to us ‘open fire’. Instead the order went out: ‘fix bayonets!’ We charged towards them with a roar and all 16,000 Italians got out anything they could wave and surrendered – just like that. We didn’t even fire a shot we took them all as prisoners.⁵⁹

The Polish brigade lost 23 men dead and 96 wounded in this battle; its total losses in the Western Desert were 200 killed and 429 wounded. In March 1942, the Carpathian Brigade was withdrawn and sent back to Egypt.⁶⁰ Despite heavy demands on manpower as Rommel drove the Allies back to the Egyptian border and the high casualties from the battle of El Alamein, the British Government did not ask the Polish Government to send its troops into the desert again. The focus for the Poles was now to build up a substantial Polish army corps in the Middle East that could be used en masse in the next major allied campaign, using the men recently released from the Soviet Union.

After the fall of France the Polish Government concentrated on building up an army in Britain capable of making a significant contribution to the outcome of the war. No plans had been made by the British Government for the arrival of the Poles in Britain: after all, no one had anticipated the terrible sequence of defeats that summer. The Polish soldiers were welcome, however, since Britain was short of troops and expected Hitler to launch an invasion imminently. Hence at the end of July 1940, Churchill sent a minute to his chief of staff, General Hastings Ismay, urging the chiefs of staff to give the Poles and the Free French priority in the rearmament of the various foreign corps in Britain, even over the Home Guard.⁶¹ In September 1940, on the first anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Churchill issued an open letter to the Polish troops:

On behalf of the Government and people of Great Britain, I am very glad to write this line of welcome to every Polish soldier, sailor or airman who has found his way over to help us fight and win this war … we in Great Britain hope that you will find amongst us a happy, if temporary home … I know that Polish forces on land and sea and in the air will play a worthy part in achieving this goal.⁶²

The terms were quickly settled and the Poles served under the Commonwealth Forces Treaty, which gave the Polish Government the same absolute sovereignty over its army that it already had over its navy. The soldiers were despatched to Scotland to begin building up the First Army Corps. Conditions were poor, particularly the food as General Sosabowski recalled:

We were even sent British Army cooks. After a few days, by which time the troops were almost on hunger strike, I asked if we could have the raw rations. We were not ungrateful, but my men just could not stomach British food cooked in the British style.

In October 1940, his men were sent to Fife to prepare anti-invasion defences on the east coast. He quickly discovered that local bureaucracy interfered with the construction of defences but ‘soon found it was best to meet the farmers, have drinks with them and get the work under way while the papers and forms slowly travelled from department to department’.⁶³

The soldiers who had escaped from Poland to Britain were mainly officers: there were too many of them, and their loyalty to Sikorski was suspect. He responded in a controversial manner by retiring many of the most senior officers and allowing a number of young officers to take up contracts with British African colonial troops. To forestall any conspiracy against him, Sikorski also established camps for officers, first in Rothesay on the island of Bute and later on the mainland at Kingleddors and Tinachbrach, which were viewed as little more than penal camps.⁶⁴

Sikorski was optimistic in his plans to rebuild the Polish Army. His original intention was to create an army corps of 4 infantry brigades with a range of support units. The Polish troops who had been evacuated from France would form the nucleus. Sikorski estimated that there were 3,000 Polish nationals in Britain, 170,000 in Canada, an unknown figure but thought to be several thousand in South America, but, above all, around 4,500,000 Polish-Americans of whom 10 per cent were thought to be Polish citizens. Sikorski’s plans proved to be wildly over-optimistic. The proposed conscription of Polish nationals living in Britain became the subject of a question in Parliament and was rejected by the British Government. The problem was that many of the Poles had arrived during the 1930s, fleeing the Sanacja regime. Some had legally been stripped of their Polish citizenship under the law that deprived Poles of their citizenship if they had spent more than five years outside Poland, and they and the other refugees had no intention of joining the armed forces of such a country and especially not to serve under officers who represented opinions in opposition to their own.⁶⁵

The failure of the recruitment drive in Britain led the new commander of the First Army Corps, Lieutenant-General Marian Kukiel, to conclude that ‘new generations, Americans or Canadians with Polish origin, were the only hope, by recruiting volunteers in America, to change the skeletal army into a powerful force’.⁶⁶ Poles in the United States had flooded into the Haller army created in France in 1917 to fight under the Polish flag, and so Sikorski and Kukiel had grounds for believing that they would surely do so again. General Haller himself spent the first three months of 1940 in the United States on an unsuccessful mission to recruit Polish nationals. In March 1941, Sikorski visited North America and held meetings with the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, and with the American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Canadian Government was prepared to permit recruitment for the Polish Army on its soil and would help with organisation and training, with the proviso that Canadian citizens and Poles from the United States would not be enlisted. Roosevelt informed Sikorski that it was illegal under United States law to advocate enlistment in a foreign army. He suggested that a way round the law was to publicise the training camps in Canada. Sikorski visited the main centres of Polish immigration: Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo and New York, making speeches to large audiences. His attitude, however, caused great anger within the Polish-American community when he announced that he did not want their money but their youths to serve in the Polish forces. Sikorski had underestimated how the values of Polonia had changed in the United States during the intervening period; the second generation of Polish immigrants felt little for Poland, considering themselves as Americans rather than Poles. As a result the recruitment drive failed and only around 700 men enlisted from North America and 900 from South America. On the other hand, when the United States joined the war in December 1941, young Poles willingly volunteered for the United States armed forces.⁶⁷

Sikorski accordingly had to scale back his plans. Instead of despatching the 4th Brigade to Canada as the officer cadre of the Polish Army recruited in North America, it became the 1st Independent Parachute Brigade (Pierwsza Samodzielna Brygada Spadochronowa) with many former officers serving as common soldiers. This brigade was commanded by General Sosabowski. The 2nd Rifle Brigade was turned into the 10th Mechanised Brigade and was commanded by General Maczek.⁶⁸

Given the shortage of troops in Britain it is worthwhile considering why the Polish Parachute Brigade was created. Poland had been one of the pre-war pioneers of military parachuting. After many years of civilian parachuting, it had launched a military programme in 1936 after the Red Army had shown the possible applications through parades and demonstrations. The plan was to create a force of lightly armed troops who would engage in sabotage operations behind enemy lines. The majority of qualified paratroopers had been taken as POWs in 1939, but two key instructors, Lieutenant Jerzy Gorecki and Lieutenant Julian Gebolys, reached Britain and were employed at the RAF parachute training base at Ringway. Polish techniques were so innovative, notably the use of a tower to train men in the correct technique of parachuting, that the British asked the Poles to train parachutists to be dropped in France, Norway, Belgium, Holland and Czechoslovakia. Many within the staff of the Polish and the British forces felt that the Polish Parachute Brigade itself was something of a luxury. Sosabowski wrote: ‘I had always felt that my unit was an Army bastard, born out of wedlock, unwanted and with most of the qualities and faults of a love-child – strength, stubbornness and determination.’ On 23 September 1941, the unit was granted the title ‘The 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade’ at a parade attended by Polish leaders and British commanders. The Polish Government then authorised Sosabowski to request volunteers from among the Polish troops in Britain. Kukiel, commander of the First Polish Army Corps, sent Sosabowski 100 men who had a long list of misdemeanours, including civil crime, against their names.⁶⁹

The Parachute Brigade remained outside the structure of British command and was to be used exclusively for operations in Poland, to provide well-trained and well-equipped support for a national uprising. At the time of the its creation little thought was given to how this plan could be put into practice. Britain was desperately short of aircraft and operations to Poland entailed great risk. (The subject of support for Poland will be covered in detail in later chapters.) The Parachute Brigade did, however, train the Cichociemni (‘unseen and silent’), men who were despatched by parachute to Poland to train the Armia Krajowa (AK) for operations against the German occupying forces. Strong links with the AK were established and, indeed, women in Warsaw designed and, hiding in the nuns’ quarters attached to the Church of the Deaconesses in Theatre Place, created a colour for the brigade:

The main cloth was in crimson silk; on one side were the national arms of Poland with the eagle and crown and the Warsaw City Coat of Arms; in each corner was a parachute badge. The reverse side depicted Saint Michael the Archangel, patron saint of parachutists; above was the inscription Warsaw 1939, and below, expressing the desire of all patriots, the motto Surge Polonia.

The standard was consecrated in Warsaw on 3 November 1942, but only reached Britain in 1944 when it was presented to the brigade at an official ceremony on 15 June 1944. It came on the same plane that brought out parts of the V-2 rocket. The emotional importance of such links between the exiles and those trapped in the nightmare of occupied Poland cannot be exaggerated.⁷⁰

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 offered the prospect of easing the manpower shortages of the Polish armed forces. The new Polish Army created in the Soviet Union, partly evacuated to Iran, meant that the Polish armed forces might now be in a position to make a notable contribution to the defeat of Germany. The question to be answered was: where should this army be concentrated so as to have the greatest impact? Accordingly, in April 1942, Sikorski convened a meeting in London attended by all his senior commanders. The Polish forces in Britain were represented by the commander of the Polish First Army Corps, Kukiel; the commander of the Polish Parachute Brigade, Sosabowski; the chief of staff, Klimecki; and General Stanisław Ujejski and Admiral Jerzy Świrski, for the air force and navy, respectively. From the Soviet Union came Anders, who was joined by the commander of the Carpathian Brigade, Kopański, in representing the Polish Army outside Britain. This conference was so heated that even the minutes could not be agreed on.⁷¹ The contingent from the Polish Army in Britain naturally wanted the entire Polish Army to be concentrated there because any allied invasion of Europe would be launched from Britain. Kukiel argued that he needed an absolute minimum of 30,000 men to bring his existing units up to full strength and to create a reserve. Ujejski and Świrski also appealed for men to increase their establishments. Opposed to them was Anders, who wanted the entire Polish Army concentrated in the Middle East ready to support allied operations in the Balkans, which offered a shorter route back to Poland. Sikorski’s response was: ‘It was not possible to say which road to Poland will turn out to be the longest and which the shortest.’ He wanted to keep the options open and brokered a compromise which ended up satisfying no one: he proposed that 15,000 troops, later reduced to 8,000, should be sent to Britain from the Middle East as reinforcements. Of these, 5,500 would be allocated to the First Army Corps, but this figure was too low for Kukiel to fill his establishment.⁷² Out of these, 300 were sent to the Parachute Brigade, but:

Many were unfit to be in the army, let alone the Parachute Brigade. Their physical condition after months of starvation and lack of exercise in concentration camps had left them weak and skinny. Bad food had resulted in swollen stomachs, yet they were perpetually hungry. We gave them special rations and extra vitamins and slowly their health improved.⁷³

Ujejski argued that he needed 4,000 men just to maintain his current level of strength but received only 1,500. The Navy received 1,000, too few to allow Świrski to take up the British offer of two new destroyers. The remainder of the Polish Army from the Soviet Union was to remain in the Middle East under the command of Anders, but Sikorski hoped that more Polish troops would be recruited in the Soviet Union where they would fight alongside the Soviet forces.

During 1942 a new source of potential recruits appeared: Poles from Upper Silesia and Pomerania who had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht. In June 1942, Captain Alan Graham asked a question in Parliament drawing the attention of the secretary of state for war, Sir John Grigg, to the existence of these estimated 170,000 conscripted soldiers and requesting that ‘he will afford every encouragement and facility to such Poles to desert to us’ and that they should then be handed over to the Polish authorities. Grigg replied that he was uncertain as to whether any of these Poles were serving in German front-line forces.⁷⁴ By 1943 it was clear that they were, when some became POWs in the Western Desert, and the British authorities were helpful about directing them towards the Polish armed forces. As early as 1941 procedures had been established to cope with the small numbers of Polish soldiers reaching Britain after the fall of Poland and France. Then the Foreign Office had asked the Polish Government to give them a list of Polish nationals travelling to Britain from places such as Lisbon, along with a testament to their political reliability. This would prevent the Poles from having to remain in the Royal Patriotic School, the clearing station for foreign nationals entering Britain, before the Polish military collected them. Therefore, in 1942 when the issue of Poles who had served in the Wehrmacht arose, the Polish authorities already had a screening process in place. This was designed to interrogate a POW on whether he had joined the Wehrmacht voluntarily or had been forcibly conscripted, and also on details of his service.⁷⁵ In October 1943, questions were asked in Parliament concerning the security vetting of those men now recruited into the Polish Army and their numbers. Grigg confirmed that he was content with the vetting but would not divulge the numbers.⁷⁶ In fact they were only in the low hundreds until the Allies regained a foothold on the continent, when they began to rise dramatically.

Sikorski and the Polish commanders could never form a clear strategy, because they were operating in the dark. Without a seat on the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, they had little idea of the future plans of the Allies. After the entry of the Soviet Union and the United States into the war, Poland’s value as an ally waned because there were simply too few Polish troops compared to the vast forces the new allies could field. These realities were recognised by the Polish Government after Sikorski’s death in July 1943. Kopański, the new chief of staff, wrote a memorandum for the new commander-in-chief, General Sosnkowski, in which he argued that the small size of Poland’s army meant that it should abandon its hope of a ‘Polish’ theatre of operations and simply be satisfied with a more general contribution to the allied war effort, in division strength only if necessary.⁷⁷ Kopański’s views agreed with those of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In a directive issued in July 1943 they acknowledged the limitations imposed by the manpower shortage and concluded that Polish forces should not be used in the initial assaults, but would form part of the general reserve to be employed later, wherever and whenever they could make a decisive contribution. It also stated: ‘The Polish Parachute Brigade will be reserved for direct action in Poland, but the moment and method of this employment must be governed by the availability of aircraft.’⁷⁸

Poland acknowledged before the outbreak of war that the Polish Navy would be trapped in the Baltic by the far larger German fleet and that its chances of making any useful contribution to the war effort would be minimal. Consequently plans were prepared whereby the Polish destroyers would head for British ports when war seemed imminent. On 30 August 1939 three Polish destroyers – Błyskawica, Grom and Burza – sailed for Leith in Scotland, arriving there on 1 September. The submarine fleet joined them in Britain since submarines would have little chance of success for long in the relatively shallow waters of the Baltic. Orzeł was briefly interned in Estonia, and arrived in Britain on 14 October.⁷⁹ According to the Admiralty report:

They only had three requests: to land the sick cook, to replenish their water supplies and to be given breech blocks for their guns. They were then prepared to go to sea forthwith on whatever patrol it pleased the British Navy to employ them.⁸⁰

Poland’s merchant fleet also escaped the Baltic. Pre-war legislation had compelled all ship owners to place their vessels at the disposal of the government in the event of war. In late August 1939, the Polish Naval Headquarters warned all ships to head for British, French or neutral ports. As a result virtually the whole of Poland’s merchant marine, around 140,000 tons, escaped to contribute to the allied war effort.⁸¹

Under an auxiliary agreement with Britain, the Polish Government was loaned ships. The destroyer HMS Garland was the first to be transferred to the Polish Navy, on 3 May 1940. Further ships were given after the fall of France when French and Belgian ships, abandoned in British ports by their crews who returned home, were turned over to the Polish Navy. These included twelve trawlers, two submarine-chasers and an old French destroyer, Ouragan. This last ship was in a poor state of repair and was eventually returned to the Free French Navy on 4 April 1941. In October 1940, the Poles received a new British destroyer, HMS Nerissa, which they renamed Piorun. Further ships followed, including motor-torpedo boats. On 15 January 1943, the Polish Navy received an old British cruiser, HMS Dragon, which it wanted to rename Lwów, but, given the sensitivity of relations with the Soviet Union, the British Government threatened to take it back if it was called Lwów, so it remained Dragon.⁸²

There were no operations which could be described as solely ‘Polish’: rather a consistent contribution to the overall allied war effort. For example, the Polish Navy took part in the invasion of Norway, during which Grom was sunk; convoys to Malta, across the Atlantic and to the Soviet Union; the defence of the Western Approaches; and offensive operations such as the Dieppe operation, and the landings in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Normandy. The only occasion when the Polish Navy received a significant amount of credit for its contribution was for the part played by Piorun in the sinking of Bismarck. Under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Eugeniusz Plawski, the Piorun had been the first ship to spot Bismarck, on 25 May 1941, after the last plane following the German ship had returned to Ark Royal. The press lauded the Polish crew on its return to port and Plawski received the Distinguished Service Cross.⁸³

The first Polish submarine fleet was bedevilled by mechanical problems which limited its usefulness. On 8 April 1940, however, Orzeł sank the German transport Rio de Janeiro, which was carrying German troops for the invasion of Norway. The Orzeł was lost at sea in May 1940. Poland also received submarines from the British, Sokol and Dzik, and from the United States, Jastrząb, which was sunk by a Norwegian destroyer in a ‘friendly fire’ incident in May 1942 during an Arctic convoy.⁸⁴

Two Polish liners, Batory and Sobieski, helped in the evacuation of the Polish troops from France in June 1940 before serving as troop ships. The Polish merchant marine took part in the Atlantic and Arctic convoys and lost seventeen ships in the process.⁸⁵

The Polish Navy suffered less from manpower shortages than the other Polish armed services because two training ships, Iskra and Wilia, had made it into British waters before the outbreak of war and these naval cadets supplied the Polish Navy with its junior officer corps. By November 1944, the Polish naval establishment was 3,545 officers and men and the losses during the war were 431 officers and men. The Polish Navy sank 7 enemy ships and damaged a further 11, sank 2 submarines and damaged a further 9, sank over 80,000 tons of enemy merchant shipping and shot down seventeen German aircraft.⁸⁶

Like the Polish Navy, the Polish Air Force did not make a contribution to the allied war effort that was demonstrably Polish. Their bombers shared in the highs and lows and appalling losses of RAF Bomber Command. In 1940 Polish bombers took part in bombing raids to destroy the German invasion barges being gathered at Calais, Boulogne and Ostend. In March 1941 the Polish bombers made the first of many bombing raids on Berlin,⁸⁷ and continued to participate in the strategic bombing of Germany. Bombers were the only aircraft capable of reaching Poland, and in February 1941 Sikorski asked the Air Ministry to release some Polish aircrews from Bomber Command for special duties flights to Poland. This was granted and on 7 November 1941 the first successful flight to Poland was completed, with three instructors and some equipment for the AK dropped.⁸⁸ There were continuing tensions between the Poles and the Air Ministry over the use of Polish bomber crews for the strategic bomber offensive because the Poles wanted them for flying supplies to Poland (this debate will be covered in a later chapter).

The British were grateful for the Polish contribution. For example, in 1942, the minister for air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, wrote to Sikorski:

Polish crews took part in large scale operations in Cologne and Ruhr. The Royal Air Force has learned to admire the valour, tenacity and efficiency of their Polish Allies. In these operations again they here show how admirable is their contribution in support of our common cause to the destruction of the war power of the enemy. We are grateful to you and to Poland for these redoubtable squadrons.⁸⁹

The Polish Air Force suffered from a shortage of manpower and so the number of Polish bomber squadrons remained constant throughout the war. The RAF assisted by turning a blind eye to the fact that they only had 80 per cent of the required ground staff. Reinforcements arrived in Britain from the Poles evacuated from the Soviet Union but these 1,500 men needed to be nursed back to health after the trauma of their imprisonment. The psychological scars were evident too. For example, after one pilot was shot down, his colleagues opened the suitcase he had kept under his bed and found it contained only a set of woollen underwear and a supply of dry biscuits.⁹⁰ The 304 Bomber Squadron was part of Coastal Command, spending hours searching the Atlantic and Western Approaches for U-boats. There were also Polish units in Transport Command, operating on the Canada–Britain–Middle East route, and in India and Burma. Women pilots served in the Air Transport Auxiliary Service.⁹¹

After the success of the Battle of Britain, Polish fighter squadrons continued their form. In 1942 they filled the first three places in a gunnery competition held by the RAF. During the Dieppe operation in August 1942, five Polish fighter squadrons formed a Polish wing commanded by Major Stefan Janus, shooting down 16 German planes, 18 per cent of German aircraft destroyed during this operation. Polish fighter squadrons then joined the RAF Tactical Air Force in 1943, training for close cooperation with the ground forces in the planned invasion of France.⁹²

Until the publication in 2005 of the Report of the Anglo-Polish Historical Commission on Intelligence Co-operation between Poland and Britain During World War II, relatively little was known about the extent of this cooperation. In Britain the Polish Government re-established its intelligence department, the II Bureau, based on the French Deuxième Bureau, under Colonel Leon Mitkiewicz. The AK in Poland operated its own intelligence organisation which reported to London. Under the terms of the Anglo-Polish intelligence agreement of September 1940, the Poles agreed to pass all information they received to the British unless it concerned purely internal Polish affairs. The Poles were in a unique position since their presence as forced labourers or as underground fighters throughout occupied Europe enabled them to gather information to a degree unequalled by any other power. This contribution was quantified in a British report in 1945: it claimed that of the 45,770 intelligence reports from occupied Europe processed by the Allies during the war, 22,047, or 48 per cent, emanated from Polish sources. Wilfred Dunderdale, the report’s author, paid tribute to the Poles:

It will thus be seen that Polish agents worked unceasingly and well in Europe during the last five years, and that they provided, often at great danger to themselves and to their relatives, a vast amount of materials of all kinds on a wide variety of subjects.

The Polish intelligence service grew enormously during the war, from 4 stations with 30 employees and 30 agents to a vast organisation of 8 stations, 2 independent intelligence stations and 33 cells with 1,666 registered agents.⁹³

Polish intelligence operated worldwide but was mostly active in Europe. After France fell the former Polish consul at Lille, Aleksander Kawałkowski, remained behind to organise an intelligence and resistance movement from among the Poles living there.⁹⁴ The topics covered in the intelligence reports reflected the Allies’ anxieties. From France and Switzerland reports were generated on the output of factories producing munitions and armaments for the German war machine. The French Navy was kept under observation at its main base in Toulon. Polish intelligence produced some unique reports: only their agents reported the imminent departure of Rommel’s Panzer troops for North Africa at the end of 1940. The British did not believe this, and, consequently, Wavell’s desert army was surprised to encounter the Afrikakorps.⁹⁵ The Poles also had the only allied agent with a network in North Africa, Major Mieczysław Słowikowski, who reported on the attitudes of the Vichy French. The United States consul in Algiers was able to forward his reports to London in his diplomatic pouch because the United States was not at war with Vichy France. Słowikowski warned the Allies that Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, would encounter French opposition, and he also listed precisely which French regiments were likely to desert to the allied side once the opportunity arose.⁹⁶ A Polish woman in the Swiss capital, Berne, served as the link between British intelligence and the anti-Nazi head of the German Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.* It also appears that Polish intelligence ran two high-level operatives in the German high command.⁹⁷

The intelligence organisation of the AK had a reach far beyond the borders of Poland. All of its reports were analysed in Poland by the Office of Economic Studies and the Economic Council before summaries were generated for transmission to London. Reports were sent monthly, weekly or sometimes even daily according to the urgency of the material and the demand for it. The reports covered a wide range of intelligence, from the AK’s warning of the German build-up for Operation Barbarossa, to, in the spring of 1942, detailed intelligence on the movements of German troops on the Eastern Front, all of which indicated that the main thrust of the German spring offensive would be towards the central Don river and the Caucasus. Thereafter it continued to provide information on the identity of German units, their strength and armaments. The Poles also intercepted 3,000–3,500 letters home from German soldiers and supplied reports, often including direct quotations, summarising the state of their morale.⁹⁸