Who could forget the Polish squadrons in RAF Fighter Command when, in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, a British squadron leader, frustrated by the excited radio chatter on being allowed into action at last, orders 'Silence! In Polish!' Or the Polish Parachute Brigade at Arnhem, whose commander, Stanislaw Sosabowski, played by Gene Hackman in A Bridge Too Far (1977), thinking the venture disastrous, growls 'God Bless Field Marshal Montgomery' as he jumps from his Dakota?
Commander Eugeniusz Plawski, the captain of the Polish destroyer Piorun which first spotted the Bismarck and charged at her to draw fire, might be better known if he had featured in the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! - but that wasn't expedient, with the honours going instead to a Royal Navy officer. And anybody who knows about Monte Cassino, perhaps at first hand from General Wladyslaw Anders's An Army in Exile (1949), knows that it was the Poles who eventually took the monastic rubble in May 1944 after months of unsuccessful Allied attempts.
On the other hand, recognition of the 1st Polish Armoured Division in Montgomery's 21st Army Group in north-west Europe is relatively scant, which is ironic, given that their military significance was greater than their more celebrated compatriots' at Arnhem and in Italy. Of the quartet of Polish generals (including Wladislaw Sikorski, commander-in-chief of the Polish army and prime minister of the Polish government in exile until his death in 1943), Stanislaw Maczek's name is least known, even though in 1945 he became commander-in-chief of all Polish forces in Britain until their demobilisation in 1947.
In part this might be said to be due to the Attlee government's embarrassment at the presence of an army now exiled by a communist government they had just recognised. But it is also because Maczek's own memoir Od Podwody do Czolga (From Carts to Tanks) was not published until 1961. With next year marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day, they have now been translated into English on the initiative of the Polish embassy in London. Jennifer Grant, a military historian and the granddaughter of Poles released from internment by Stalin after the German invasion of Russia in 1941, to make their way via Palestine to join British forces in North Africa, has edited them with precision, percipience and lightness of touch.
Maczek was born into a professional and landowning family in Galicia in 1892.He was 'proud of his Croatian heritage through his father's ancestry', Grant writes, and 'brought up in the cosmopolitan environment of Lwow [Lemberg] to be tolerant and intellectually inquisitive'. Critically, the 'Austrian authorities permitted freer expression of Polish culture in the region than in those parts of Poland which had been annexed by Prussia, later Germany, and Russia'. As a result:
Young Maczek read patriotic Polish literature avidly: the schools and universities there encouraged discussions of Polish culture and of how Polish independence was to be achieved. In 1910, he joined the Riflemen's Association, a semi-secret society committed to training young Polish men to assume military command in future battles for Polish independence.
Before he was 30, his three younger brothers had been killed, fighting in the first world war or the Polish-Soviet war that followed.
Maczek himself had been reading natural sciences at Lemberg, then switched to philosophy; but his degree studies were curtailed after four years by conscription in 1914, after which he fought on the Italian front with ski troops. Perhaps memoirs don't really need an index, but Maczek's are so revealing that historians would find one more than a little useful.
In September 1939 Colonel Maczek was commanding the 10th Motorised Cavalry Brigade when the Germans invaded. A fighting withdrawal to Hungary followed, and then internment. After he and others of the brigade were allowed to slip away to France via Italy, there was a repeat of the fighting withdrawal in 1940. Then in the sauve qui peut after the fall of France, he managed to get to England via French North Africa and Portugal, narrowly avoiding internment the whole way. Anti-invasion manoeuvres in Scotland kept him busy throughout 1941, along with the other Poles who had managed to make it, mostly courtesy of the Royal Navy.
The following year, with the War Office keen to form armoured divisions for the eventual counter-offensive in Europe, Major-General Maczek assumed command of the newly formed 1st Polish Armoured Division. In brutal fighting in August 1944 they would close the 'Falaise pocket', sealing the fate of a great many Germans trying to get out of Normandy. They then fought on through Belgium and Holland, and in May 1945 took the surrender of the huge naval base at Wilhelmshaven.
At the conferences of the Big Three in Teheran and Yalta, however, despite Churchill's best efforts, Poland was effectively ceded to the Soviet Union. The Poles thus paid perhaps the heaviest price of Allied victory. Maczek and those of his men who chose not to return were stripped of their Polish citizenship, though he did at least live to have it restored after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the second world war the Poles had just the one armoured division, while we had six. The Price of Victory goes a long way to explaining why today they have four armoured/mechanised divisions. Nothing, however, can explain why we have none.