Poland Kept Fighting After the 1939 Invasion

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI Guardian

 

May 8 marks the 73th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe.

In North America, too little is known about the tragic fate of Poland, caught between a Nazi Germany and a Communist Soviet Union.

When Poland was conquered and partitioned by Germany and the USSR in September 1939, much of the Polish Army was evacuated to France and then Great Britain, where it was reconstituted as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, under the command of General Wladyslaw Sikorski.

Under the guidance of the Polish government-in-exile, based in London, Poles provided significant contributions to the Allied effort throughout the war, fighting on land, sea, and air. 

A total of 145 Polish fighter pilots served in the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain in 1940, making up the largest non-British contribution. Poles who flew with British squadrons shot down 203 German planes and damaged a further 36. 

This was over 11 per cent of all the planes shot down in the Battle of Britain, and at that time the Poles made up the largest contingent of foreign pilots flying with the Royal Air Force. By the end of the war, around 19,400 Poles were serving in the Polish Air Force in Great Britain and in the RAF.

At their height, the manpower of the Polish Armed Forces under British command reached 249,000. This made them the fourth largest after the Soviet, United States and British armed forces. Of these Polish units, almost 27,000 were killed or went missing in action.

In 1940 a Polish brigade took part in the Battle of Narvik, in Norway, and two Polish divisions took part in the campaign against the Germans in France.

Later in the war in the west, Polish ground troops were present in the North Africa campaign, at the siege of Tobruk; the Italian campaign, including the bloody Battle of Monte Cassino; the 1944 liberation of France, at the battle of the Falaise pocket; and they provided one division in the Allied invasion of Germany.

In the east, Polish troops that had surrendered to the Soviets in 1939 were placed in prisoners of war camps while Russia and Germany remained de facto allies under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. 

But with the Nazi invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, tens of thousands of Polish citizens held in Soviet forced labour camps were released. They were recruited into a new Polish army under General Wladyslaw Anders. 

For the next three years the Anders Army would travel from central Asia, through the Middle East, and North Africa, to eventually confront the Germans in Italy in one of the most crucial battles of the war. 

A Polish Carpathian brigade had already been formed in Syria, then under French rule, to which many Polish troops had escaped after 1939 via Romania. It became part of the Anders Army, when the renamed Polish II Corps reached Palestine in 1942.

From Jan. 17 to May 19, 1944 the Corps played a crucial role in defeating the Germans in the battle of Monte Cassino. This hard-fought victory allowed the Allied forces to capture Rome and later, the whole of southern Europe. 

Another decisive battle fought by the Anders Army was the Battle of Ancona, in which Polish troops took over a strategic Adriatic port.

In occupied Poland itself, resistance was continued by the underground state, led by the Polish Home Army, by far the largest partisan force in occupied Europe. It confronted the Germans throughout the entire period of the Nazi occupation.

The Warsaw rising, which began on Aug. 1, 1944, and lasted until Oct. 2, saw more than 200,000 Polish fighters and civilians killed and about 85 per cent of the city destroyed by the Nazis. But resistance continued.

Poland never stopped fighting, from Sept. 1, 1939 right through to May 8, 1945.