Wojtek the Bear [paperback] (21 page)

France surrendered on 22 June 1940. Sikorski had already moved to London with the exile government,
and some 23,000 of his troops – most of them evacuated from the
ports of northern and western France – managed to reach Britain. Several thousand naval and air force personnel were already there, including the Polish pilots who were to play a decisive
part that summer with the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. But the Poles had to leave three-quarters of their men behind. Most of them became prisoners of war, or crossed into neutral
Switzerland, preferring Swiss internment to German captivity. Other Poles made their way across Spain to Portugal, hoping to travel on to Britain. Others again went underground in France itself,
and later joined the French resistance.

In Britain, now facing imminent German invasion, Churchill and Sikorski agreed that the Polish army from France should be sent to Scotland. There it could re-arm and retrain with British weapons
and equipment, and at the same time guard the Scottish east coast against a German landing. The first tented camps were set up between Edinburgh and Glasgow, near Biggar, Crawford and Douglas.
Later, more solid accommodation was found or built for the Polish forces, as their main concentration shifted to Fife, Angus and Perthshire. General Marian Kukiel, the officer commanding this 1st
Polish Corps in Scotland, set up his headquarters at Bridge of Earn. It should be added that one of Sikorski’s first acts in Scotland was to set up a detention camp for his political enemies,
mostly old Sanacja officers who were trying to undermine his authority. This camp was near Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, known to apprehensive Poles as the ‘Isle of Snakes’.

It was to be a long time before these troops were called into action. But they trained hard, once they had overcome
the gloom of their second defeat, and they were made
welcome. A Scottish–Polish Society appeared, organising hospitality and entertainment, while the lord provosts of Glasgow and Edinburgh – especially Sir Patrick Dollan
(‘Dolanski’) from Glasgow – raised funds and held supportive rallies for the Poles. A variety of special university courses were set up for the Poles, and a Polish School of
Medicine at Edinburgh University awarded degrees throughout the war.

In small-town and rural Scotland, their exotic uniforms, the strange language and the outgoing charm of the ordinary soldiers made a lasting impression on communities which had never had much
contact with foreigners before. Young women, unused to men who kissed their hands and danced like Fred Astaire, were especially taken with the Poles. This often led to complications, not least
religious misunderstandings as a Catholic soldiery sought love and friendship in a Presbyterian countryside, But over 2,500 Scottish women married Polish soldiers during the five-year stay of the
1st Corps.

As time passed, the 1st Corps grew in numbers. A few thousand Polish soldiers were able to escape from occupied Europe, mostly though Spain, Portugal or North Africa. Later, beginning in 1942,
about 7,000 men and some women arrived in Scotland from Palestine and Egypt, a small fraction of those who had escaped from Soviet captivity through Iran. (Their main body remained in the Middle
East, to form what was to become the 2nd Polish Corps commanded by General Władysław Anders.) A new source of recruits opened after the Normandy landings in June 1944, as ethnic Poles
unwillingly conscripted into the German armies surrendered and – after
screening – volunteered to join the Polish forces. Some 33,000 of these
‘
Wehrmacht
Poles’ reached Scotland in the course of 1944, followed by another 15,000 up to the end of the war.

By now, though, other Polish troops were leaving Scotland and going into action in northern Europe. Two new formations had been trained up and equipped. One was the Polish Parachute Brigade
under General Stanisław Sosabowski, which did most of its training in Fife around Leven and Largo.

Sikorski’s original idea, and the inspiration for the Brigade’s morale, had been to drop the parachutists into Poland itself, to achieve the nation’s liberation as an
advance-guard of the Western Allies.

But as the Soviet armies began to approach the Polish frontiers, long before the British and Americans could open a second front in France, it became obvious that Poland would be liberated by
the Red Army alone, and the plan to send the Brigade into Poland was shelved. In August 1944, during the doomed Warsaw Rising, the British turned down desperate but impractical Polish appeals to
let the Brigade join the insurgents. It was not until the next month that Sosabowski’s men finally went into battle, as part of the disastrous Allied attempt to seize the Rhine bridges at
Arnhem by mass parachute landings.

The other formation created in Scotland was the 1st Polish Armoured Division. Led by the legendary General Stanisław Maczek, it numbered about 15,000 men. Maczek embodied Polish military
history in his own person. By the time that his division landed in Normandy in July 1944, he had fought in the First World War (in the Habsburg army), in the defence of Lwów against the
Ukrainians in 1918–19,
in the Polish–Soviet war of 1920, in the September campaign of 1939 in Poland, and in France in 1940.

At the climax of the Normandy fighting, the Polish tanks were sent to close the Falaise Gap, the exit from a pocket in which two German armies with several Panzer divisions had been encircled.
Maczek’s men, heavily outnumbered, took the full force of the German armour trying to escape. The Poles held on, and Falaise turned into the bloodiest defeat the
Wehrmacht
experienced
at the hands of the Western Allies. Later, the 1st Armoured Division drove eastwards across France and into the Low Countries. The Poles are still joyfully remembered for liberating the Dutch city
of Breda, and streets are named after General Maczek there and in Antwerp.

At the end of the war, the division fought its way into northern Germany. But after the Nazi surrender, both the 1st Armoured Division and the Parachute Brigade (which had also entered Germany
in early 1945) took on a new role: the rescue of the enormous mass of Poles who had landed up in Germany as slave workers, concentration camp prisoners, prisoners of war and even children removed
from their parents by the Nazis for ‘Germanisation’. Hundreds of thousands of penniless, emaciated human beings were now on the roads, seeking food, shelter and repatriation. To help
them, the Polish Army took a bold step. With British permission, they took over the town of Haren, expelled all its German inhabitants, renamed it ‘Maczków’ in their
general’s honour and converted it into a huge reception centre for displaced Poles.

The second path back to a free Poland lay through resistance within Poland itself. This meant almost exclusively
resistance to the German occupation.
The massive deportations of the Polish population from the eastern borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union made partisan warfare there almost impossible to organise. In any case, the Nazi invasion
in June 1941 transformed the Soviet Union from enemy into ‘gallant ally’.

As the September campaign ended in 1939, Polish units – cavalry as well as infantry – were already taking to the forests and mountains. In cities and towns, centres of patriotic
conspiracy sprang up. Poland had been defeated but had not surrendered, and there were to be almost no collaborators with the Nazi occupation. As the historian Norman Davies has put it,
‘there was never any Polish Quisling, for the simple reason that in Poland the Nazis never really tried to recruit one.’ Their long-term plan for the Poles was to enslave and ultimately
to exterminate them, not to enlist them as allies. This gave the Poles a simple moral choice: to fight or to be obliterated.

By November 1939, Sikorski in France was in contact with many of these resistance groups, drawing them together into a coherent command structure answering to the government-in-exile. The
movement eventually took the name of
Armia Krajowa
(Home Army) or ‘AK’ for short. After Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, a separate, militant but much smaller Communist
resistance appeared, the ‘People’s Guard’ or ‘People’s Army’ (AL). But its relations with the AK were wary, and it took orders from the underground Communist
leadership rather than from Sikorski’s government in London.

As German repression and deportations for forced labour grew more intense, the AK was joined by ‘peasant battalions’ raised from the countryside. By 1943, it had
become the biggest resistance movement in the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe, eventually numbering over 400,000 men and women. But the AK itself was only the military wing of a
complete underground state, equipped with a
Delegatura
representing the exile government, with ‘councils’ drawn from the main political parties, and with most of the apparatus of
a normal country down to a chain of clandestine universities and a vigorous illegal press.

For the London government-in-exile, keeping in touch with the AK and its affiliates was difficult; dangerous but crucial. In Scotland, at training centres at Polmont and Largo or at the Polish
‘spy school’ in Glasgow, agents were trained as parachutists and radio operators and dropped back into Poland from long-range aircraft. Many were lost, but gradually regular and
reliable radio communication between the
Delegatura
, the AK command and the London government was established. Even riskier was the return journey of couriers from Poland, sometimes smuggled
on neutral ships through Scandinavia, sometimes – later in the war – picked up by Allied light aircraft from secret airstrips. (In July 1944, the AK used one of these flights to deliver
to the British the working parts and guidance system of a prototype V-2 rocket, stolen from a Nazi missile range.)

The couriers who reached London did not only bring despatches from the resistance. They were themselves direct witnesses to the appalling nature of the Nazi occupation. The messenger Jan Karski
laid before British and American statesmen the full news of the Jewish genocide. Jan Nowak (Jeziora
ń
ski) was sent out of burning Warsaw during the 1944 uprising to plead with the Allies for
help. In the West, most people knew that the occupation was brutal, especially in its treatment of the Jews. But the
governments of the democracies were slow, even
reluctant, to believe the sheer scale and intensity of horror which the Polish messengers and the exile government revealed to them.

In German-occupied Poland, some 5.4 million people died in concentration camps or mass executions, 3 million of them Jews. That figure does not include casualties caused directly by war and, in
all, Poland lost roughly a fifth of its pre-war population. Its industry and infrastructure were almost completely destroyed, while much of Poland’s cultural heritage was burned or looted. In
1944, the whole central city of Warsaw was blown up on Hitler’s orders and reduced to rubble.

After the 1939 invasion, the Nazis divided their half of Poland into two regions. The first consisted of territory in the west of the country which was simply absorbed into the Reich, the Polish
population being driven out and replaced by German settlers. The second region was the ‘General Government’, a kind of colonial protectorate ruled from Kraków by the tyrannical
Hans Frank. It was in the General Government that almost all the extermination camps were constructed for the Jewish Holocaust, the industrial murder of Europe’s Jews by gas. (Auschwitz lay
just outwith the General Government, in the Upper Silesian region absorbed by the Reich.)

In the General Government, the SS began a programme of selective genocide, designed to destroy the Polish elite and to prevent any national revival. Academics, creative intellectuals and the
priesthood were targeted. A little later, the German authorities started to round up the first of 3.5 million men and women for slave labour in German war industries or agriculture. Villages which
resisted were
burned down; their men were shot, the women deported and the children either killed or kidnapped for ‘Germanisation’ in German families.

These conditions brought immense popular support for the resistance. But at first the AK concentrated on building up its strength and acquiring weapons, and it was not until 1942 that widespread
attacks on the German occupiers began. The price for resistance, even for disobeying regulations, was usually death. In the cities, the Germans carried out random mass round-ups of
‘hostages’ who were lined up against walls and shot, their bodies left lying on the street as a warning against defiance or disobedience. Ghettos were set up in the towns, as a prelude
to the Jewish genocide, and the penalty for hiding an escaped Jew was immediate execution for the rescuer and his or her whole family.

In spite of these risks, the underground state survived and proliferated. This was not a new idea. During and after the January rising of 1863, the insurgents had established a ‘parallel
nation’ which preserved Polish identity through illegal publishing, education and even clandestine courts. The AK’s arms and explosives were captured from the Germans, and later
parachuted in from the West. But the resistance was able to do little to help the Warsaw Ghetto Rising in April 1943, as Jewish fighters decided to die fighting rather than go passively to the gas
chambers of Treblinka.

By the end of 1943, AK partisan units were in control of many districts of rural Poland, especially the forests and hills of the old eastern borderlands which now lay behind German lines. But
once again, strategic problems emerged. In 1943, the plan of the government-in-exile and the AK
command inside Poland had been to harry the Germans as they retreated and
then to join the Soviet armies as they drove the
Wehrmacht
out of Poland. But early in 1944, as Soviet troops advanced across the pre-war Polish frontiers, it became clear that the Russians
had no intention of restoring Polish authority in the regions they had seized in 1939.

Worse still, they treated the AK units which welcomed them as potential enemies. The Polish partisans were offered a choice between arrest and conscription into the Red Army. Places liberated by
the Home Army were handed over to the People’s Army, the Communist partisans, and to their Committee for National Liberation (PKWN). This body had been set up in Moscow as the nucleus for a
future Communist government of Poland.