by Orr, Aileen;
After the war, the 1st Army became the official army of the Polish People’s Republic. But alongside Soviet security troops, the army had to fight two tragic and merciless campaigns within postwar Poland. One, which approached the scale of a civil war, was the suppression of Home Army partisans still in the forests and fighting the new Communist regime. The other campaign was an offensive against Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas in south-eastern Poland. It ended in ethnic cleansing, as the local Ukrainians were driven from their villages and resettled in the Western Territories – the lands newly acquired from Germany.
General Zygmunt Berling was eventually allowed to return to Poland, and much propaganda was made of his wartime victories. In reality, however, his contempt for some of the Communist leaders meant that he was trusted only with insignificant civilian posts. The minister of defence was now Konstantin Rokossovsky, a loyal Soviet marshal with Polish family origins who took his orders directly from Moscow and placed Soviet officers in command of all Polish army units. As a symbol of Poland’s helpless subjection to Stalinist Russia, he was hated and resented by the more independent wing of the Communist Party. But it was not until October 1956, when Stalin was dead and Poland broke away from its day-to-day obedience to Soviet directions, that Rokossovsky was finally sacked.
In Iran, the hordes of Polish soldiers and civilians emerging from the Soviet Union faced their British hosts with problems they had not expected. Nobody had foreseen the dire physical condition of the evacuees, who often reached the safety of Iran only to die there. Neither had anybody realised how many of them would be civilian family survivors. They included some 13,000 children under the age of 14, many of whom were now orphans. Boys and girls alike arrived with shaven heads, wearing cut-down army boots on their skeletally thin legs.
The first priority was health: to overcome the years of undernourishment and the ravages of disease, above all, of typhus, tuberculosis and malaria. The next priority, agreed between the British, the Polish government in London and General Anders, was to separate the army from the civilians. The troops would be moved out of Iran into Iraq. From there they would be transported to Palestine (at that time, still a British mandate). In camps near Haifa, they would be retrained, equipped with British weapons, tanks, vehicles and uniforms, and eventually sent into battle as the 2nd Polish Corps, attached to the British 8th Army.
But the tens of thousands of civilians put the British in a dilemma. Although food was scarce in Iran, there was no home for the refugees to return to while Poland was under enemy occupation. Neither could they accompany the troops to Palestine, apart from several hundred young women who volunteered to join the forces or the military nursing services. Even keeping the civilians in Iran until the end of the war was thought undesirable. The country was under joint British, American and Soviet occupation, a delicate diplomatic balance which was already putting a strain on Persian patriotic feelings.
At first, the civilians were housed in camps around Teheran. But several thousand children, almost all orphans or at least separated from their parents, were sent to Isfahan. There they were well fed, resumed their education in improvised Polish schools and even learned to weave Persian carpets.
The rest, the British decided, would have to be removed to distant parts of the British Empire and Commonwealth for the duration of the war. This deeply upset the refugees, who still assumed that they would return to a free Poland as soon as it was liberated. They wanted to remain as close as possible to their homeland, and to their husbands or sons in the Polish armed forces. But the plans for dispersal went ahead, and the families were shipped off to Rhodesia, Kenya or India, to Australia or New Zealand. A few managed to be sent to Mexico, where they were at least close to relatives in the United States. They were to remain in these sunny places of banishment until well after the war ended, hoping that if they could not go home, they would at least be reunited with the demobilised soldiers and airmen or with relations freed from the camps of Nazi Germany. Many of these families, unwilling to return to a Communist Poland, eventually opted to stay and settle in the lands of their latest exile.
It was in April 1942, as the first Polish soldiers reached Iran and set out for new bases in Iraq and Palestine, that the men in one particular truck came across a boy selling a bear cub. Later, they were to become organised into the 22nd Polish Transport Company (Artillery), and – much later still – they would go into battle. But at that stage in the war, almost the only Poles fighting the Nazi enemy on the ground were the men and women in the resistance at home.
There was one exception. This was the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade, composed of men who had escaped into Romania in September 1939 and had then managed to reach the Middle East by ship. They had joined the French forces in Syria, but after France’s surrender in July 1940, the French commanders at Damascus decided to stand by the Vichy regime and its cease-fire. Determined to carry on the war, the Brigade marched out of Syria into British-controlled Palestine. There the Poles attached themselves to the British army preparing to defend Egypt against the Afrika Korps, commanded by General Erwin Rommel.
They did not have long to wait. In August 1941 the Brigade was landed in the besieged Libyan port of Tobruk. After five months of hard fighting against Nazi tanks and dive-bombers, the Poles stormed a key German strong-point and effectively broke the siege, opening the way for the British 8th Army to relieve the defenders. From then on, the Brigade was almost continuously in action until the end of the war in Europe.
Back in Iraq and Palestine, making a new fighting force out of the men who had crossed the Caspian was turning out to be a slow business. Physical fitness remained a problem, and there were malaria outbreaks among the troops in some of the bleak desert camps in Iraq. Conversion to British weapons and equipment, and learning to work with 8th Army units who spoke only English, took time, and it was not until the main force settled into camps in Palestine that training really gathered speed. Unlike the Carpathian Rifles, the Anders Army was not able to take part in the North African campaigns, and only reached ‘combat readiness’ in late 1943, when the Allies had already landed in Sicily and the toe of Italy.
By then, Poland’s national future had grown much darker. In April 1943, the Germans had uncovered the mass grave of Polish officers at Katyń, and had gleefully proclaimed Soviet guilt to the world. The Polish government in London demanded a full Red Cross enquiry. In response, the Soviet Union claimed implausibly that Katyń was a Nazi crime, accused the Poles of giving aid and comfort to Nazi propaganda, and broke off relations with Sikorski’s government. Sikorski himself was killed in the Gibraltar air crash shortly afterwards. In November that year, the Big Three at the Teheran conference – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – secretly agreed to move Poland 150 miles to the west, and to let the Soviet Union keep the eastern Polish territories seized in 1939.
The Polish government’s refusal to give up these provinces – the homeland of most of Anders’s men – angered the British. Anxious not to damage the alliance with Stalin, Churchill’s team thought the London Poles were being ‘selfish and unreasonable’. The soldiers training in Iraq and Palestine did not know all these details, but the general suspicion that Poland was going to be sold out by the British and the Americans began to spread. Unlike their comrades in the West, these men knew the reality of Soviet rule all too well from their own experience.
None knew it better than General Władysław Anders himself. A fiercely patriotic cavalry officer, he had fought the Soviet invaders in 1939. After being wounded and captured, he was tortured by NKVD interrogators in Moscow’s Lubianka prison and was expecting to be shot when the Nazi invasion in 1941 led to his release. Often in conflict with Sikorski and his successor Mikołajczyk, Anders was fanatically opposed to any concessions to ‘the Bolsheviks’, especially over the frontiers.
The 2nd Polish Corps of the British 8th Army finally reached Italy in January 1944. A slow, often bungled Allied advance up the peninsula had been
halted at the defences of the Gustav Line, whose hinge was the ancient hilltop monastery of Monte Cassino. The monastery had already been bombed to rubble, and several desperate attacks up the mountain by British and Indian troops had already been beaten off when the 8th Army launched a fresh offensive in May. This time, the direct assault was mounted by the Poles. They fought their way uphill, yard by yard, over four terrible days and nights until the surviving Germans fell back and the Polish flag went up over the monastery ruins. Beyond the summit, hard fighting for the neighbouring hilltops went on for another six days.
Nearly a thousand Polish soldiers died. But the Battle of Monte Cassino was to become Poland’s mythic battle honour for the Second World War, the symbolic victory of raw human courage over entrenched fire-power. Ever since, Cassino has been the theme of films, stories and songs. Sacred canisters of Cassino earth mixed with Polish blood stand in museums. Wojtek the bear, carrying Polish artillery shells to the foot of the mountain, has shared in that immortality.
The fall of Cassino opened the road to Rome. Anders went to the Vatican and was congratulated by the Pope, but the 2nd Corps, after rest and reinforcement, was moved across Italy to the Adriatic coast. There, in July, it led a bloody assault to capture the port of Ancona. In August, the Poles helped to pierce the Gothic Line, and early in 1945 took part in the final spring offensive across the Senio river. On 21 April 1945, the 5th Polish Infantry Division commanded by Klemens Rudnicki liberated the great city of Bologna. A week later, the German armies in Italy laid down their arms, and on 7 and 8 May the Third Reich itself surrendered untidily to the Allies. The war in Europe was over. But the Polish soldiers, who had fought it from the first day to the last, did not feel like victors.
Anders had never hidden his anger at the way Poland was being treated. His soldiers agreed with him. In July 1944, when the London Poles sent a mission to Moscow, Anders warned them that the army would refuse to obey any government which compromised over the frontiers or offered to share power with the Communists. The British commanders in Italy were horrified, and told Anders that as a soldier he should keep out of politics. He took no notice. Soviet behaviour over Operation Tempest and the Warsaw Rising that August did not surprise him.
In February 1945, the Yalta Conference confirmed what most Poles already feared. Poland would lose its eastern provinces, and would be consigned to the Soviet sphere of influence after the war. Churchill and Roosevelt prepared to recognise the Moscow-steered Committee of National Liberation as the legitimate government. When news of Yalta reached Anders, he sent a telegram to the Polish president-in-exile in London: ‘The Polish Second Corps cannot accept the unilateral decision by which Poland and the Polish nation are surrendered to be the spoils of the Bolsheviks.’ He was therefore asking the Allied commanders to pull all Polish units out of the battle line, to save bloodshed which had now become pointless.
But Anders did not go through with this tragic threat. When told that there were no reserve troops to take the place of the Poles, he announced that they would keep fighting after all. Something similar took place in Holland, when the tank-men in Maczek’s 1st Armoured Division heard about Yalta. There was no mutiny, but a number of tanks stopped and bitter discussion broke out among their crews. Maczek sent officers down to reason with them, on the grounds that there was still a job which they had sworn to finish, no matter how harsh the future looked. The tanks set off again towards Germany.
All this incited the Soviet Union to launch a hate campaign against General Anders. He was accused of keeping the 2nd Corps in arms long after the war ended, in order to use it as a Polish legion in a new war between the Soviet Union and the Anglo-Americans. There was a grain of truth in this. In 1946, when the British told him that his army must be demobilised, Anders protested that this meant that ‘all hope of returning to a free Poland was gone’. Writing his memoirs in 1947, he ended pointedly: ‘We are now living in expectation of the last chapter of this great historic upheaval. We believe . . . and we expect.’ Such talk made it easy for the new Communist-dominated ‘provisional government’ in Warsaw to smear him as a Fascist warmonger. But his old soldiers continued to adore him until he died in London in 1970.
The end of the war in Europe left Poles scattered all over the planet. By late 1945, there were nearly a quarter of a million Polish servicemen and women under British command. In Italy, there were now no fewer than 112,000 men in the 2nd Polish Corps, the Anders Army. In Germany, there were the soldiers of the 1st Armoured Division and Sosabowski’s Parachute Brigade. Back in Scotland, over 50,000 new recruits had arrived in the training camps since 1944, almost all of them either Poles who had changed sides after serving in the Wehrmacht or forced labourers who had been conscripted by the Nazi Todt Organisation. Two new Polish formations, an infantry division and another armoured brigade, had been put together in Scotland, but were not ready to fight by the time of the German surrender.
In conquered Germany and other Reich territories, the Allies found over 180,000 Polish soldiers who had been captured by the Nazis in September 1939 and were still in prisoner-of-war camps. And then, all over the world, there were the civilians. Some, the families who had escaped from the Soviet Union with General Anders, had been parked by the British in India, Africa or other parts of the empire. Hundreds of thousands of others were now ‘displaced persons’ in tents, huts and barracks throughout Germany, after their liberation from slave-labour factories or concentration camps. And there were the tens of thousands of deported Poles left behind in the Soviet Union, most of whom were being forced to take Soviet citizenship.
What was to become of them all? The choice was simple only for the Poles in the USSR: even in a Communist Poland, life would be heaven compared to Siberia or the Kazakh steppe. In Germany, many civilians freed from Nazi servitude trekked eastwards to find out if their families were still alive or their houses still standing. Others hesitated, while the British – anxious to get rid of this enormous responsibility – urged them all to go back to Poland and rebuild their country. At Yalta, Stalin had told Churchill and Roosevelt that there would be ‘free elections’ in Poland. The British, without much confidence, hoped that most of the Poles in the West would decide to go home once they were convinced that Stalin’s assurance would be honoured. They were not convinced, and it was not honoured.
But this did not prevent Churchill’s government from recognising the provisional government in Warsaw on 5 July 1945. At the same time, recognition was withdrawn from the Polish exile government in London, which had been Britain’s loyal ally from the first day of the European war to the last. In a final clumsy insult, which hurts Poles to this day, no Polish troops were invited to take part in the international victory parade in London. Later in July, the general election threw out Winston Churchill and replaced him with a Labour government led by Clement Attlee as prime minister and Ernest Bevin as foreign secretary. But this did not change British policy towards Poland and towards the hundreds of thousands of Poles left in Britain’s charge.
It would be unfair to see British behaviour as simply heartless. There was much agonising. It’s difficult in retrospect to blame Churchill’s government after 1941 for putting the need to keep the Soviet Union in the anti-Hitler coalition ahead of the need to do justice to the Poles. Equally, the decisions at Teheran and Yalta to leave Poland in the Soviet ‘zone of influence’ after the war, ugly and hypocritical as they were, were little more than recognitions of the inevitable.
There was no way that the British and Americans could reach Poland before the advancing Russians, and no way short of a third world war that Soviet power in eastern Europe and the Balkans could be forced back to its own frontiers. Nonetheless, the British were well aware of the contradiction between what they saw as ‘strategic necessity’ and what they named as Britain’s ‘obligation of honour toward the anti-Warsaw Poles’. They hoped to soothe their consciences by handling the problem of the Polish armed forces in a generous and humane way. An Interi
m Treasury Committee for Polish Questions was set up immediately after the London government was derecognised. In effect, this meant that Britain, although exhausted and bankrupt the end of nearly six years of war, was taking on the duty to pay and maintain and house the Polish armed forces in the West.
In March 1946, almost a year after the war, the 2nd Corps was still in uniform and encamped in Italy. Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin sent for General Anders to break the news that his army would be demobilised. They added, naïvely, that his men should prepare to return to Poland and vote there, in order to save democracy from the Communists.
Almost all of them refused. Out of those 112,000 in the 2nd Corps, only seven officers and 14,200 ‘other ranks’ opted to be shipped back to Poland. Anders noted with grim satisfaction that a mere 310 men among the thousands who had actually experienced life in the USSR chose repatriation. The pattern in the 1st Corps, previously based in Scotland and now quartered in Germany, was much the same. As for the 50,000 or so Poles still in Scotland, there was little motive for them to go home, and the Wehrmacht past which many of them had unwillingly endured was thought to have made them unfit for occupation duty in Germany. So they stayed where they were.
In May 1946, Bevin announced that the 2nd Corps would be brought from Italy to Britain, with all its families and dependants. At the same time, a Polish Resettlement Corps (PRC) would be formed, to absorb all those Polish ex-servicemen and -women who did not wish to return home. The PRC was to be ‘essentially a transitional arrangement, designed to facilitate the transition from military to civilian life’ in Britain or elsewhere; its members would be given skill training, including English language courses. The British still hoped that as many Poles as possible would opt to go home, instead of joining the Resettlement Corps, and offered a fairly mean bribe – two months’ army pay and a demob suit – to anyone who chose repatriation. But by early 1948 over 98,000 men and women had enlisted in the PRC, of whom only 8,300 decided to return to Poland.