Important people passed through Gibraltar in wartime. General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the first prime minister of the Polish government in exile and now Commander-in-Chief of the Polish armed forces, landed in Gibraltar on Saturday 3 July 1943. Sikorski’s plane, a four-engined bomber, was carrying him back to London from a five-week tour of his Polish troops serving under General Anders in the Middle East. His party was accommodated at Government House and wined and dined by Mason-MacFarlane, an old and good friend of General Sikorski and all the Poles, many of whom he had helped escape from Soviet clutches when he was head of the Military Mission to Moscow in 1941–2.

Late that night, the Governor of Gibraltar learned that a plane taking the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky back to Moscow from London would also be arriving early the next morning, and the Foreign Office requested that the Russian diplomat be offered hospitality.

This was tricky. Poland no longer had diplomatic relations with the USSR. There was bad blood between them not just because Russia had helped Germany tear Poland apart in the Nazi–Soviet invasions in 1939, but because earlier in 1943 it was revealed that the Russian secret police had murdered over twenty thousand Poles, including fourteen thousand army and police officers, in the Katyn Forest massacre. The Poles and the Russians had to be kept apart in Gibraltar, with some reason found to get Ivan Maisky’s aeroplane away as soon as possible.

The governor directed the diplomatic theatricals that ensued. The Sikorski party were asked to have a lie-in on the morning of Sunday 4 July and stay quietly upstairs in their bedrooms till 11 a.m. Mason-MacFarlane cleared out early from his own set of rooms at the far end of the Convent, installed Maisky there after his arrival at 7 a.m., and joined him for a good breakfast. The elaborate pantomime included an interruption by an urgent RAF message from Air Vice Marshal Sturley Simpson, the Air Officer Commanding Gibraltar, saying that bad weather was heading for Algiers, so the Soviet ambassador’s refuelled plane would have to leave at 11 a.m. rather than 3 p.m. Mason-MacFarlane saw Maisky to the airport and returned to an amused household of grinning Poles.

The rest of General Sikorski’s Sunday in Gibraltar was busy, with meetings, tours, inspections of British and Polish soldiers. After a boozy American Independence Day cocktail party in the Garrison Library garden and a good dinner at Government House, his B-24 Liberator aeroplane AL523 took off from Gibraltar just past 11 p.m. on Sunday. There were seventeen people on board, six crew and eleven passengers, distributed five in the bomb bay, six in the fuselage. They included General Sikorski, his daughter, Lieutenant Zofia Leśniowska, his British liaison officer, Colonel Victor Cazalet MP, the Polish chief of staff, Major General Tadeusz Klimecki, the Chief of Operations Staff, Colonel Marecki, his naval ADC, Lieutenant Ponikiewski, his personal secretary Adam Kułakowski, and a Polish courier called Gralewski, as well as the British brigadier John Percival Whiteley and two civilians, Walter Lock and Harry Pinder, believed by the conspiratorial to be British secret service officers, but actually the Ministry of Transport representative from the Persian Gulf and the chief of the Royal Navy’s signal station at Alexandria.

The pilot was an experienced Czech called Edward Prchal. ‘[He took off easily with at least 500 yards in hand,’ wrote Mason-MacFarlane a fortnight later. ‘In fact, by the time he was over the eastern end of the runway he had reached an altitude of at least 2–300 feet.’ Mason-MacFarlane and Simpson both knew that Prchal liked to put his plane’s nose down first to gather speed before he climbed to cruising height, and they watched his navigation lights do that as usual.

We waited a moment expecting to see the lights start to rise again. But they never did! In fact, the aircraft flew on a level keel and apparently in perfect shape straight into the sea at an angle of about ten degrees and hit the water with a sickening crash about three-quarters-of-a-mile from the shore. A split second before she hit the water the pilot cut out his engines which had apparently been running perfectly.

Anthony Quayle was still standing there with Group Captain Bolland, the RAF Station Commander, and another ADC, John Perry. The actor did not remember an explosion or a sickening crash, just ‘a sudden cessation of noise. Silence. Bolland, standing beside me, gave a shout, “Christ, she’s gone in the drink!”’

They drove down to the end of the runway and turned their headlights out to sea: ‘nothing but darkness and black waves. Then the searchlights came on from high up on the Rock, sweeping backwards and forwards till they lit up a horrifying sight: half a mile out to sea, one wing of the plane was sticking up out of the water. That was all; the rest of the fuselage had disappeared.’

Quayle helped someone push out a rubber dinghy. He saw a Polish pilot stomping up and down the beach sobbing and banging his head with his fists. ‘You don’t understand,’ he kept saying, ‘You don’t understand. This means the end of Poland. The end of Poland.’ There were no air/sea rescue fast launches on the eastern side of Gibraltar so it took nearly ten minutes for them to arrive from the docks in the west. By then the plane had sunk. The motor launch recovered only three bodies: Sikorski and Klimecki were dead from head injuries, the pilot Prchal unconscious but breathing.

Lionel Crabb spent the next twelve days diving from HMS Moorhill, the RN lifting vessel. His task was to help salvage the broken aircraft and all its scattered wreckage for a court of inquiry and air-crash investigation, and to retrieve the dead bodies, ghastly-green in the underwater light: one on Monday, two on Tuesday, a couple more on Wednesday, another one on Thursday. The body of Colonel Marecki washed ashore on Eastern Beach on the Friday. Lieutenant Zofia Leśniowska, who had looked lovely in her Polish Women’s Auxiliary uniform, was among the seven whose corpses were never found.

Gibraltar is hot in summer and most dead bodies are buried within a day. Mason-MacFarlane recommended that the cadavers of Sikorski and Klimecki be flown to London immediately, but the Polish government in exile thought it would be more fitting to return them by sea for burial beside the Polish memorial at the Newark-on-Trent cemetery in Nottinghamshire, which Sikorski had much admired. They directed a Polish destroyer, ORP Orkan (G90), to carry out the task of collection and transport. Meanwhile, the two bodies would lie in state in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Mary the Crowned in Gibraltar’s Main Street until the warship arrived on Thursday 8 July.

It looks easy enough on paper, but there was frantic activity backstage. Mason-MacFarlane handed over the grislier arrangements to his ADC Anthony Quayle, who tried to fob the job off on an armed forces medic. The navy said Sikorski was a soldier who had been in an RAF plane and it was absolutely nothing to do with them; the army said he had fallen in the sea, beyond their purview; the RAF said he was definitely a soldier so therefore not their responsibility. Quayle’s next problem was that there were no coffins in Gibraltar, not even for ready money, because few people were buried at North Front cemetery any more. Most of those who died in Gibraltar during the war were slid into the sea with a weight in the foot of their sewn shroud. Quayle rang the British vice consul in Algeciras and asked for half a dozen Spanish coffins. All he could find were cheap ones made of zinc and plywood, which he put on a lorry to cross the frontier. With relish, the Spanish border officials charged £10 customs fee for each coffin.

Anthony Quayle and Ludwik Łubieński, the Polish liaison officer, met the coffins at the mortuary, a low whitewashed building by the Landport tunnel. Even in the early morning it was hot inside. The two Polish bodies lay on blankets on the floor. Łubieński identified Klimecki’s body. Sikorski must have been preparing for rest in the plane, because he was wearing a pyjama jacket with his black-striped uniform trousers on below. Quayle noticed: ‘He had various wounds about his face and a deep indentation in the corner of one eye.’

Dr Peter Sutton, the RAF medical officer who was the first man to examine Sikorski’s body the night before, had also noticed ‘this cut next to the nose, above the eye’. As he attempted to stitch it, his needle came up against something solid. Dr Sutton probed into the wound and pulled out a pencil-length wood splinter, which had gone through the whole of Sikorski’s brain.

A Gibraltarian undertaker appeared in the morgue and took off his cycle clips.

‘Do you wish to have the bodies embalmed?’ he asked.

‘Can you do that?’

‘No.’

‘In that case, it’s a silly question.’

‘Do you want them wrapped in winding sheets?’

‘Do you have a winding sheet, or a couple of them?’

‘No.’

‘Then that is another useless question.’

Quayle helped Łubieński fold the thin blankets over the bodies of his two compatriots and lifted them into the flimsy coffins.

‘Do you wish the coffin sealed?’

‘Yes. Please get on with it.’

The undertaker used a soldering iron to weld the thin zinc lid and screwed down the slender veneer. Quayle got out his penknife and scratched ‘S’ in the varnish of one coffin, ‘K’ on the other. The bearer party from the Somerset Light Infantry arrived with two open lorries and a pair of Polish flags to process the bodies solemnly to the Catholic Cathedral of St Mary the Crowned. The cortège crossed Casemates Square to Line Wall Road and then turned up into Main Street and marched south. The governor, the Flag Officer Gibraltar and other senior figures joined the procession. Polish soldiers mounted a vigil around the clock, through Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On Wednesday the 7th the British garrison spent hours rehearsing and timing every move of the next day’s funeral ceremony, and high-ranking Poles arrived to stay at the Convent.

It was gone midnight when Brigadier Reggie Parminter, Royal Army Ordnance Corps, looking grave behind his monocle, shook Anthony Quayle to life in his bed.

‘Are you awake?’

‘Yes. This is me. I’m awake.’

‘You’re sure you’re quite awake?’

‘Of course. What is it?’

‘General Sikorski has burst his coffin.’

Around midnight, Łubieński had been paying his last visit to his late commander-in-chief when he found the Honour Guard clustered outside the cathedral, chattering fearfully about ‘ghosts’. He went in through the west door. There was a nauseating stench and strange noises emanating from the temporary catafalque. Beneath the flag he found that the chemical process of decomposition in almost African heat had bloated Sikorski’s body enough to split open both solder and veneer. Vile gases escaping swollen orifices burbled and squealed and the weird farting groans from Klimecki’s coffin indicated that he was bursting too.

Fresh coffins were found, the cathedral fumigated. Quayle searched for sheets of lead to lap the bodies. Perry drove Victor Cazalet’s body to the ORP Orkan at Gun Wharf but Orkan’s superstitious captain refused to accept it. Engineers in shorts manhandled Quayle’s lead sheets on board at the last minute. Nobody spoke much English or could understand why it was necessary.

It was 8.15 a.m. on 8 July. Hundreds of British soldiers stood with heads bowed and arms reversed, hands folded on the butts of their Lee-Enfield .303 rifles, barrels down on the right boot, the front sight resting in the crease between leather lace and gleaming toe-cap. The two coffins were carried aboard and laid on deck; the band played the Polish national anthem; the echoes of a seventeen-gun salute sent ORP Orkan off to Plymouth.

On 9/10 July Operation Husky began: the Allied invasion of Sicily. Meanwhile, Nazi radio propaganda was having a field day. Clearly, General Wladyslaw Sikorski had been murdered by the British secret service, just as the inconvenient Admiral François Darlan had been assassinated by them six months before. How could any foreigner trust the perfidious British? Gibraltar was a snake-pit of spies, Churchill a complete gangster.

*

For decades, controversy has surrounded the plane crash in which General Sikorski died. The official inquiry in 1943 concluded that the pilot had not been able to pull ‘the stick’, his control column, backwards to make the plane climb because something – perhaps a bottle which had rolled or a piece of luggage which had slipped – had jammed the control rods running to the ailerons or flight control surfaces which alter the aeroplane’s pitch. This banal explanation did not convince everyone. A clever mystery is better than a stupid accident, a conspiracy more exciting than a cock-up. People asked the old lawyer’s forensic question, Cui bono? – ‘Whose interest could this have served?’ – and came up with various explanations for the death of Polish hopes in the cold sea off Gibraltar.

A controversial German play, Soldiers: an Obituary for Geneva, became notorious in 1967. Its main theme was supposed to be the wickedness of the Allied air campaign against German civilians in the Second World War. But a sub-theme of the play accused Winston Churchill of acquiescing in the murder of General Sikorski because the Polish soldier’s indictment of the Katyn massacres carried out by the Soviets was alleged to be endangering Churchill’s wartime alliance with Joseph Stalin. The author of the play, Rolf Hochhuth, who as a boy had been in the Hitler Youth, said that SOE men on board axed the general to death at the western end of the runway and then slipped out of the plane before it took off and crashed into the sea. Hochhuth claimed to have been told this by a former member of SIS and to have proof locked in a Swiss bank vault. A paranoid and nervous man, Hochhuth was convinced that he too was now the target of British Secret Service assassins.

At the urging of his literary manager, the fashionable Kenneth Tynan, Sir Laurence Olivier proposed to stage Hochhuth’s play at London’s new National Theatre. It was a controversial choice. The then British prime minister, Harold Wilson, having ordered up and read the still secret RAF crash inquiry report, said Hochhuth’s allegations against Winston Churchill should be brushed aside ‘with the contempt they deserve’. A flurry of lawsuits erupted: both the Czech pilot of Sikorski’s plane, Edward Prchal, and an SOE man alleged to be in on the plot, Bickham Sweet-Escott, sued Hochhuth for defamation. At the same time, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper denied Tynan’s claim that he believed in the murder conspiracy and remained unmoved by Tynan’s subsequent threat to sue for libel.

What also emerged in 1967 was the source of Hochhuth’s ideas about the death of the Polish general, the right-wing revisionist historian David Irving, who brought out his book Accident: the Death of General Sikorski to coincide with the intended London production of Soldiers. Irving, then a twenty-nine-year-old independent researcher and writer, was not yet the Holocaust denier and distorter of historical evidence that later law courts judged him to be. Accident, as published, is an investigation of Sikorski’s air accident, not a murder mystery. David Irving clearly collaborated with Rolf Hochhuth, whom he first met in January 1965 (the day after Churchill died), and had begun the researches for the book at Hochhuth’s insistence. In Accident Irving made insinuations but avoided the playwright’s overtly conspiratorial conclusions. This is probably because the publisher William Kimber personally had the book ‘lawyered’ extensively for libel, and rewrote Accident’s final chapter, ‘Open Verdict’, which suggests that some of the mailbags loaded in the bomb-aimer’s compartment at the front of the (slightly overloaded) plane may have come loose from their hatch and fallen into the nose-wheel compartment. (This suggestion also helps explain the mysterious single mailbag found on the runway afterwards.) The bags that did not fall out of the plane may have become entangled with the retracting nose-wheel, which, thus jammed, would have affected the elevator controls.

Another investigative book, by the Argentine actor and writer Carlos Thompson, called The Assassination of Winston Churchill, appeared in 1969. This devastating work, for which Thompson sought out every living witness or participant, demolishes the allegations by Rolf Hochhuth and David Irving, and vigorously defends Churchill against the charge of murdering an ally. The favourable review of Thompson’s book in the London Sunday Times, ostensibly by ‘Robert Blake’ but actually written by Hugh Trevor-Roper, dismissed Soldiers as a ‘drivelling farrago of lies’. Irving threatened to sue Carlos Thompson for defamation, but could not afford to because he was caught up in another major libel case resulting from what he had written in his 1968 book The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17.

Rolf Hochhuth’s thesis, Churchill-as-murderer, was, unsurprisingly, the very same line put out by Joseph Goebbels’s Nazi Propaganda Ministry soon after the fatal aeroplane crash at Gibraltar. According to Gdansk University Professor Jacek Tebinka, an expert on twentieth-century Polish–British relations, interviewed in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza on 28 June 2013:

The assassination theory was made up by Germany to drive a wedge between the Poles and their Western Allies. Goebbels’s propaganda proclaimed that the Soviets killed Sikorski with the approval of the British, because he dared denounce the Katyn massacre and turned to the Red Cross for help. [The Nazis] treated the general’s death as an opportunity to extend the Katyn propaganda launched by them in April 1943 … It was widely believed in Arab countries. In the summer of 1943, Polish diplomats and the British were horrified by just how popular in Cairo was the theory that London was behind the death of Sikorski.

Other conspiracy theories about who might have murdered Sikorski involve right-wing renegade Poles, or Hitler and the Abwehr, or, and this is top of the list for many Poles, Joseph Stalin and the ruthless Russian secret service, the NKVD. The presence of the Russian ambassador Ivan Maisky’s aeroplane for a few hours at the same airfield and on the same day as General Sikorski’s aircraft has given rise to intense speculation that this was the perfect opportunity for the Russians to sabotage the Polish general’s aircraft. The fact that Kim Philby, the Soviet double agent, was on the SIS Section V Iberia desk at the time excites even more synaptic connections. Was the great British traitor implicated in a Soviet Communist plot to silence a Polish patriot? The spy-novelist and fabulist John le Carré thinks it possible; the historian Norman Davies even claims that Philby was actually working on the Rock of Gibraltar at the time, but there is absolutely no evidence at all for that.

General Mason-MacFarlane stated that Sikorski’s ‘machine had a Commando and RAF guard on her during the whole stay on Gibraltar aerodrome while Sikorski was on the Rock’. Carlos Thompson points out there was even a man stationed inside Sikorski’s Liberator plane to make sure no one else got in.

In 2008, Ewa Koj, the head of the investigative division of the Katowice branch of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (a Polish government-affiliated research institute, founded by the Polish parliament in 1998 to investigate and prosecute crimes against the Polish nation), started to look into the death of Sikorski as a possible ‘Communist crime’. General Sikorski’s poor body, which had already been moved from Newark in England to Poland in 1993, was duly exhumed from its resting place among the nation’s kings and bards, St Leonard’s Crypt beneath Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, to confirm the identity of the corpse and to try to establish whether he had been murdered in the aircraft (as Hochhuth claimed) before the plane crashed. DNA tests proved this was indeed the general’s body, and the new autopsy showed no axe-cuts to the head, just death ‘by trauma to internal organs caused by an accident’. The investigation petered out.

*

And then, on 10 April 2010, there was another disastrous accident when a Polish air force Tupolev Tu-154, carrying an official party to Russia to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn massacre of twenty-two thousand Poles, crashed in thick fog near Smolensk North Airport. All ninety-six people on board were killed including the President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, with his wife, and the Chief of the Polish General Staff, the top military and intelligence officers, plus senior government officials, civil dignitaries, parliamentarians and clergy, as well as relatives of victims of the massacre.

At first, the tragedy helped thaw Polish–Russian relations. State TV in Russia showed Andrey Wajda’s film Katyn, the state archive released previously secret files, and the Russian Duma passed a resolution admitting that Stalin had authorised the Katyn massacre. Two investigations found the crash was an accident in thick fog. Nevertheless, paranoid conspiracy theories started to mushroom, once again. Was Poland under some malevolent curse? Hadn’t there been a mysterious explosion on board? Wasn’t the whole event a mass assassination, ordered by Russia’s ex-KGB strongman, Vladimir Putin?

*

The seventieth anniversary of the Sikorski air crash in 2013 brought a large Polish delegation to Gibraltar, with representatives of the Polish government and military and Polish veterans of the Second World War coming to pay tribute to a great Pole.

The Governor of Gibraltar, Sir Adrian Johns, reminded people at one of the ceremonies that two hundred thousand Polish soldiers, sailors and airmen fought alongside the Allies, gaining victories in the Battle of Britain and at Monte Cassino. He praised the Polish intelligence networks and the Polish mathematicians who first broke the Enigma enciphering machines and so helped shorten the Second World War.

Bishop Józef Guzdek celebrated a High Mass in the Cathedral of Mary the Crowned in Main Street, Gibraltar, the place where Sikorski’s body had lain, and said that his loss was a national tragedy and source of enduring grief for Poland.

The danse macabre continues. In November 2016, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party, headed by Jarosław Kaczyński, ordered the body of the late president, his twin brother Lech, killed in the air crash, to be exhumed from the cathedral in Krakow for further post-mortem investigations, just as General Sikorski’s body had been.