Careful research in a field already mined with political and academic disputes leads Sarah Terry to some rather novel but well supported conclusions on Sikorski's wartime policies aimed at the recreation of an independent and viable Poland after the war. She shows how, in dealing with boundary problems (the Oder-Neisse line was one of Sikorski's desiderata, not a Communist invention), in relations with Russia, and in plans for federation with neighbors in Central Europe, he had a comprehensive set of aims directed to the dilemmas of Poland's geographic position. His effort failed, but could any alternative have succeeded?
Sarah Meiklejohn TERRY
Poland's Place in Europe: General Sikorski and the Origin of the Oder-Neisse Line, 1[zasłonięte]939-19
Wydanie: Princeton University Press
Liczba stron: 398
Contents:
Maps
Preface
Note on Geographical Terms
PART ONE – THE HISTORICAL SETTING
Introduction
The Burden of History
PART TWO – PROGRAM AND PROMISE
The Unlikely Iconoclast
Sikorski’s Russian Gambit
False start – June 1940
The Polish – Soviet Agreement of July 1941
Toward a New Central Europe
The “Western School” in Exile
The Quest for “Real Guarantees”
The Sikorski Memoranda: November 1940, April 1941, March 1942, December 1942
The Eastern Boundary: Encounter with Necessity
Synthesis: The Precarious Balance
PART THREE – AGONY AND AFTERMATH
Setting for Disaster
Uncertain Allies
Domestic Critics
Retreat from Rapprochement
Formation of the Polish Army in Russia
The Politics of Evacuation
Boundary Politics: East versus West
Did Stalin really offer an Oder Line?
The domestic connection
The Atlantic Charter: A double standard: The atlantic charter and the “Polish Question”; The Anglo-Soviet Treaty and Sikorski’s second American visit, Sikorski’s last American visit, December 1942
The Consequences of Failure
Federation: Dissolution of a Dream
Katyń and Gibraltar
After Sikorski
Epilogue: Sikorski – Realist or Visionary?
During the Second World War Sikorski became Prime Minister of the Polish Government in Exile, Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces, and a vigorous advocate of the Polish cause in the diplomatic sphere. He supported the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union, which had been severed after the Soviet pact with Germany and the 1939 invasion of Poland — however, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin broke off Soviet-Polish diplomatic relations in April 1943 following Sikorski's request that the International Red Cross investigate the Katyń Forest massacre. In July 1943, a plane carrying Sikorski plunged into the sea immediately after takeoff from Gibraltar, killing all on board except the pilot. The exact circumstances of his death have been disputed and have given rise to a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the crash and his death. Sikorski had been the most prestigious leader of the Polish exiles, and his death was a severe setback for the Polish cause.
Prime Minister in exile
In the days before Poland was invaded by Germany in September 1939, and during the invasion itself, Sikorski's request for a military command continued to be denied by the Polish Commander in Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły.[12] Sikorski escaped through Romania to Paris, where on September 28 he joined Władysław Raczkiewicz and Stanisław Mikołajczyk in a Polish government-in-exile, taking command over the newly formed Polish Armed Forces in France.[12] Two days later, on September 30, president Raczkiewicz called him to serve as the first Polish prime ministers in exile.[12][14] On November 7 he became Commander in Chief and General Inspector of the Armed Forces (Naczelny Wódz i Generalny Inspektor Sił Zbrojnych), following Rydz-Śmigły's resignation.[12] Sikorski would also hold the position of the Polish Minister of Military Affairs, thus uniting in his person all control over Polish military in war time.[12]
During his years as prime minister in exile, Sikorski personified the hopes and dreams of millions of Poles, as reflected in the saying, "When the sun is higher, Sikorski is nearer" (Polish: "Gdy słoneczko wyżej, to Sikorski bliżej").[4][12] At the same time, from early on he had to work to reconcile the pro- and anti-Piłsudski's factions.[4][12][15]
His government was recognized by the western Allies. Nonetheless Sikorski 's government struggled to get its point of view heard by France and the United Kingdom.[15] The western Allies refused to recognize the Soviet Union as an aggressor, despite the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939.[15] Furthermore, he struggled to secure resources needed to recreate the Polish Army in exile.[15]
Poland, even with its territories occupied, still commanded substantial armed forces: the Polish Navy had sailed to Britain,[16] and many thousands of Polish troops had escaped via Romania and Hungary or across the Baltic Sea. Those routes would be used until the end of the war by both interned soldiers and volunteers from Poland, who jocularly called themselves "Sikorski's tourists" and embarked on their dangerous journeys, braving death or imprisonment in concentration camps if caught by the Germans or their allies. With the steady flow of recruits, the new Polish Army was soon reassembled in France and in French-mandated Syria.[17][18] In addition to that, Poland had a large resistance movement, and Sikorski policies included founding of the Związek Walki Zbrojnej (Union of Armed Struggle), later transformed into Armia Krajowa (Home Army), and creation of the Government Delegation for Poland position, to supervise the Polish Underground State in occupied Poland.[12]
In 1940 the Polish Highland Brigade took part in the Battle of Narvik (Norway), and two Polish divisions participated in the defense of France, while a Polish motorized brigade and two infantry divisions were in process of forming.[19] A Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade was created in French-mandated Syria.[16] The Polish Air Force in France had 86 aircraft with one and a half of the squadrons fully operational, and the remaining two and a half in various stages of training.[16] Although many Polish personnel had died in the fighting or had been interned in Switzerland following the fall of France, General Sikorski refused French Marshal Philippe Pétain's proposal of a Polish capitulation to Germany.[4] On June 19, 1940, Sikorski met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and promised that Polish forces would fight alongside the British until final victory.[4] Sikorski and his government moved to London and were able to evacuate many Polish troops to Britain. After the signing of a Polish-British Military Agreement on August 5, 1940, they proceeded to build up and train the Polish Armed Forces in the West.[4] Experienced Polish pilots took part in the Battle of Britain, where the Polish 303 Fighter Squadron achieved the highest number of kills of any Allied squadron.[20] Sikorski's Polish forces would form one of the most significant Allied contingents.[a]
The Fall of France weakened Sikorski's position, and his proposal to consider building a new Polish army in the Soviet-occupied territories led to much criticism from within the Polish community in exile.[15] On 19 July Raczkiewicz dismissed him from his position as the Prime Minister, replacing him with August Zaleski, however within days pressure from Sikorski's sympathizers, including the British government, made Raczkiewicz reconsider his decision, and Sikorski was reinstated as the Prime Minister on 25 July.[15]
One of Sikorski's political goals was the creation of a Central and Eastern European federation, starting with the Polish-Czechoslovakian confederation.[21] He saw such an organization as necessary if smaller states were to stand up to traditional German and Russian imperialism.[22] That concept, although ultimately futile, gained some traction around that time, as Sikorski and Edvard Beneš from the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, signed an agreement declaring the intent to pursue closer cooperation on 10 November that year.[15] On 24 December 1940 Sikorski was promoted to generał broni.[15] In March 1941 he visited the United States; he would visit USA again in March and December 1942.[5][15]
Sikorski (left) with Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle
Władysław Anders and Sikorski with Joseph Stalin (1941)
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union ("Operation Barbarossa") in June 1941, Sikorski opened negotiations with the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, to re-establish diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union, which had been broken off after the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939.[15] In December that year, Sikorski went to Moscow with a diplomatic mission.[4] Polish Government reached an agreement with the Soviet Union (the Sikorski-Maisky Pact of August 17, 1941), confirmed by Joseph Stalin in December of that year. Stalin agreed to invalidate the September 1939 Soviet-German partition of Poland, declare the Russo-German Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 null and void, and release tens of thousands of Polish prisoners-of-war held in Soviet camps.[4][15] Pursuant to an agreement between the Polish government-in-exile and Stalin, the Soviets granted "amnesty" to many Polish citizens, from whom a new army (the Polish II Corps) was formed under General Władysław Anders and later evacuated to the Middle East, where Britain faced a dire shortage of military forces.[4][15] The whereabouts of thousands more Polish officers, however, would remain unknown for two more years, and this would weigh heavily on both Polish-Soviet relations and on Sikorski's fate.[4]
Initially, Sikorski supported the Polish-Soviet rapprochement, which reignited criticism of his person from some Polish factions.[4][5] Nonetheless, Sikorski soon realized that the Soviet Union had plans for Polish territories, which would be unacceptable to Polish public.[5] The Soviets began their diplomatic offensive after their first major military victory in the Battle of Moscow, and intensified this policy after the battle of Stalingrad, showing less and less regard for their deals with Poland.[5][15] In January 1942 British diplomat Stafford Cripps informed General Sikorski that while Stalin planned to extend Polish borders to the west, by giving Poland Germany's East Prussia, he also wanted to considerably push Poland's eastern frontier westwards, along the lines of the Versailles concept of the Curzon Line, and acquire Lwów and Wilno, if not both.[23] Sikorksi's stance on eastern borders was not inflexible; he noted in some documents that some concessions might be acceptable, however, giving up both Lwów and Wilno was not.[23]
Katyn revelation and death
Main articles: Katyn massacre and 1943 B-24 crash in Gibraltar
In 1943 the fragile relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile finally reached their breaking point when, on April 13, the Germans announced the discovery of the bodies of 20,000 Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviets and buried in Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, Russia.[4] Stalin claimed that the atrocity had been carried out by the Germans,[24] while Nazi propaganda orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels successfully exploited the Katyn massacre to drive a wedge between Poland, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union.[25] The Soviet Union, and subsequently Russia, did not acknowledge responsibility for this and similar massacres of Polish officers until the 1990s.[26]
When Sikorski refused to accept the Soviet explanation and requested an investigation by the International Red Cross on April 16,[27] the Soviets accused the government-in-exile of cooperating with Nazi Germany and broke off diplomatic relations on April 25.[5][28]
Beginning in late May 1943, Sikorski began visiting Polish forces stationed in the Middle East.[5] In addition to inspecting the forces and raising morale, Sikorski was also occupied with political matters; around that time, a conflict was growing between him and general Władysław Anders, as Sikorski was still open to some normalization of Polish-Soviet relations, to which Anders was vehemently objected.[5] On July 4, 1943, while Sikorski was returning from an inspection of Polish forces deployed in the Middle East, he was killed, together with his daughter, his Chief of Staff, Tadeusz Klimecki, and seven others, when his plane, a Liberator II, serial AL523, crashed into the sea 16 seconds after takeoff from Gibraltar Airport at 23:07 hours.[5][29] Only the pilot, Eduard Prchal (1911–1984), survived the crash.[5] Sikorski was subsequently buried in a brick-lined grave at the Polish War Cemetery in Newark-on-Trent, England on July 16 that year.[5] Winston Churchill delivered an eulogy at his funeral.[30] On September 17, 1993, his remains were exhumed and transferred to the royal crypts at Wawel Castle in Kraków, Poland.[5]
Aftermath and remembrance
Biuletyn Informacyjny from July 15, 1943 informing about the death of general Władysław Sikorski and ordering a national day of mourning
Immediately after the crash, a Polish officer who had witnessed the event from the airstrip began sobbing quietly and repeating: "This is the end of Poland. This is the end of Poland." ("To Polska stracona!").[4] General Sikorski's death marked a turning point for Polish influence amongst the Anglo-American allies. No Pole after him would have much sway with the Allied politicians.[31] Sikorski had been the most prestigious leader of the Polish exiles and his death was a severe setback for the Polish cause.[31] After the Soviets had broken off diplomatic relations with Sikorski's government in April 1943, in May and June Stalin had recalled several Soviet ambassadors for "consultations": Maxim Litvinov from Washington, Gusev from Montreal, Ivan Maisky from London. While Churchill had been publicly supportive of Sikorski's government, reminding Stalin of his pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and their joint attack on Poland, in secret consultations with Roosevelt he admitted that some concessions would have to be made by Poland to appease the powerful Soviets. The Polish-Soviet crisis was beginning to threaten cooperation between the western Allies and the Soviet Union at a time when the Poles' importance to the western Allies, essential in the first years of the war, was beginning to fade with the entry into the conflict of the military and industrial giants, the Soviet Union and the United States.[31]
The Allies had no intention of allowing Sikorski's successor, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, to threaten the alliance with the Soviets. No representative of the Polish government was invited to the Tehran Conference (28 November 28 – 1 December 1943) or the Yalta Conference (4–11 February 1945), the two crucial events in which the Western Allies and the Soviet Union discussed the shape of the post-war world and decided on the fate of Poland.[32][33] Only four months after Sikorski's death, in November 1943, at Tehran, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed with Stalin that the whole of Poland east of the Curzon Line would be ceded to the Soviets.[32] In Teheran, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt objected to Stalin's suggestion that the Polish government in exile in London was not representing Polish interests; as historian Anita Prażmowska noted, "this spelled the end of that government's tenuous influence and raison d'être."[34] After the Teheran Conference, Stalin decided to create his own puppet government for Poland, and a Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) was proclaimed in the summer of 1944.[32] The Committee was recognized by the Soviet Government as the only legitimate authority in Poland, while Mikołajczyk's Government in London, was termed by the Soviets an "illegal and self-styled authority."[35] Mikołajczyk would serve in the Prime Minister's role until 24 November 1944, when, realizing the increasing powerlessness of the government in exile, he resigned and was succeeded by Tomasz Arciszewski, "whose obscurity", in the words of historian Mieczysław B. Biskupski, "signaled the arrival of the government in exile at total inconsequentiality."[32][36] Stalin soon began a campaign for recognition by the Western Allies of a Soviet-backed Polish government led by Wanda Wasilewska, a dedicated communist with a seat in the Supreme Soviet, with General Zygmunt Berling, commander of the 1st Polish Army in Russia, as commander-in-chief of all Polish armed forces.[37] By the time of the Potsdam conference in 1945, Poland has been relegated to the Soviet sphere of influence; an abandonment of the Polish government in exile that has led to the rise of the Western betrayal concept.[38][39]
A number of poems dedicated to Sikorski have been written by Polish authors during the war.[5] In its aftermath, in the People's Republic of Poland, Sikorski's historic role, like that of all the adherents of the London government, would be minimized and distorted by propaganda, and those loyal to the government-in-exile would be liable to imprisonment and even execution. In time, restrictions on discussing Sikorski 's begun to ease; on a centennial anniversary of his birth in 1981, commemorative events were held on the Rzeszów Voivodeship, including an academic conference, and revealing of plaques in Nisko and Leżajsk.[5] Ryszard Zieliński published a novel on him, Wejście w mrok (1971), and in 1983 a movie, Katastrofa w Gibraltarze by Bohdan Poręba, was made.[5] The Polish government-in-exile, of which Sikorski was the first Prime Minister, would continue in existence until the end of communist rule in Poland in 1990, when Lech Wałęsa became the first post-communist President of Poland.[40] On 17 September 1993 a statue of Sikorski, sculpted by Wiesław Bielak, was reveled in Rzeszów.[5] In 1995, Sikorski became the patron of the newly formed Polish 9th Mechanized Brigade.[41] In 2003, the Polish parliament (Sejm) declared the year (60th anniversary of Sikorski's death) to be the "Year of General Sikorski".[4] A number of streets and schools in Poland bear Sikorski's name.[5]
Memory of General Sikorski was also preserved both in Poland and abroad, by organizations like the Sikorski Institute in London.[5] In the UK, Sikorski received honoris causa degrees from the University of Liverpool and University of St Andrews.[5] In 1981, a commemorative plaque was revealed at Hotel Rubens in London,[5] where during the war Polish Military Headquarters, including Sikorski's office, were located.[42] He is commemorated in London's Portland Place, near the Embassy of Poland, with a larger than life statue, unveiled in 2000.[43]
