The Polish Underground Army, the Western Allies, and the Failure of Strategic Unity in World War II Review

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(More customer reviews)The title of this book is a little misleading, as it discusses all aspects of Poland's involvement in WWII, and not only the Underground under German occupation.
Seldom-mentioned information is included. For instance, the hasty departure of the Polish government days after the German attack in 1939 has been misrepresented as some kind of cowardly or panicked flight that left the Polish forces to their fate. It was not. In fact, the surrender of Warsaw was ordered, from a remote location, by Marshal Smigly-Rydz. His personal emissary, Major Galinat, flew in to Warsaw from Romania with Smigly-Rydz's order to surrender. Warsaw could have fought longer, but Smigly-Rydz did not want any more loss of life and property. (pp. 20-21).
Aspects of Polish Underground activity discussed include early post-1939 resistance (e. g., Hubal), Operation Wachlarz ("Fan": Polish saboteurs working in the Soviet Union behind German lines), the foundation and operations of the AK (A. K., or Armia Krajowa), Operation Wildhorn (or Mosty "Bridges": the landing of light Allied aircraft in German-occupied Poland, the last of which involved the transfer of the captured V-2 rocket mechanism to England), attempts to negotiate with the Soviets and the unwarranted arrest of the 16 Polish Underground leaders by the Soviets, etc.
Facts and figures are provided on the meagerness of British airdrops of arms to Polish guerrillas. (pp. 120-121). Very few of even these airdrops had been accomplished by the Spring of 1943, the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Jewish complaints about the "stinginess" of Polish armed support are clearly unwarranted.
Although several decades have now passed since the event, the wisdom or folly of the 1944 Polish Warsaw Uprising continues to generate heated discussion. Peszke has the following take on the matter: "As the old saying goes, victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan...For the Poles to refuse to fight would have been a terrible political and public relations defeat, one which would never be easily explained to one's own countrymen, let alone to one's allies. To sit passively while the miniscule but vociferous Communist groups liberated Warsaw and imposed their own authority was just not possible. Without direction, there was also every reason that the populace would go to the streets." (pp. 156-157).
Much of this book focuses on the geopolitical issues surrounding Poland's borders and the kind of Polish state that would emerge after WWII. The west's sellout of Poland at Teheran and Yalta began much earlier. While the author notes the Soviet geopolitical advantage caused by the USSR doing most of the fighting and the Red Army's possession of Poland, he did not seem to consider whether or not the conditional provision of Lend-Lease aid could have been used as a tool to enforce proper Soviet behavior towards Poland.
Early failures of the west to stand up to Stalin only emboldened him. Peszke comments: "As Stalin realized that his behavior did not elicit any rebukes or negative consequences but rather extravagant adulation, while the Poles who, opposing his policies, were condemned, Soviet policy became aggressive and brutally disdainful." (p. 71).
Opinion-forming outlets in the west tended to paint the Soviet Union as a benign socialist nation. The Polish government-in-exile was demonized as one consisting of privileged landowners, and Poland was increasingly portrayed as a nuisance in Soviet-western relations.
The British were not unilaterally indifferent to their Polish ally, but this did not matter. Peszke concludes: "It is beyond doubt that many Britons were in fact quite ashamed of their passive role. Lord Ismay wrote, `Nobody can deny that the failure to secure freedom and independence for Poland has brought shame on the western Democracies.' But shame only lasts a short time and, as the saying goes, people move on." (p. 7).
The book concludes with a profuse bibliography for further study or research.


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Poland was the first country to stand up to Germany in 1939, and maintained an underground army during the years of World War II. The underground army was organized in occupied Poland in October 1939 and worked until April 1945, hoping to establish a legitimate authority in post-war Poland while liberating territory with the aid of Polish Forces from the west. This military history covers the attempts of General Wladyslaw Sikorski and his successor (General Kazimierz Sosnkowski) to integrate the Polish forces into Western Strategy, and trying to have their clandestine forces (the Armia Krajowa) declared an allied combatant and legitimized by the Western powers before the eyes of both Germans and Soviets who sought Poland's destruction. The work opens with some general remarks on the inter-war period of 1919–1939, and then concentrates on the period of October 1939 through January 1945 and V-E Day. It covers such topics as Poland's part in the Norwegian and French Campaigns, the Battle of Britain, Polish Intelligence Services, Military Radio Network, Feluccas, the creation of the Polish Parachute Brigade, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Bomber Offensive, the Katyn graves, Polish air crews in RAF transport command, Tehran, Polish Wings in the 2nd Tactical Air Force, the Bardsea Plan, the invasion of Normandy, the Pierwsza Pancera, the Warsaw Uprising, Operation Freston, the disbanding of the Polish Home Army, and Yalta. A conclusion and several appendices (including a chronology, costs of the Polish forces based in the UK, list of Polish squadrons in UK, and the texts of Polish-British agreements) close the work.

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Poland in World War II: An Illustrated Military History (Hippocrene Illustrated Histories) Review

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(More customer reviews)"Poland in World War II: An Illustrated Military History" by Andrew Hempel is a great overview of the Polish military effort in the second World War. This book is a concise outline, and not a lengthy volume, so it makes a great introduction to the topic. With more than 50 black-and-white photographs, the people and events described are brought to life.
As this book is concise and written in a straightforward manner, it makes great reading for young people or even postgraduates like me interested in the topic.

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Poland's participation in World War II is generally little known in the West. This illustrated history presents the Polish military war effort, intermingled with factual human interest stories.

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Poland, the United States, and the Stabilization of Europe, 1919-1933 Review

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(More customer reviews)Poland jussnever received any help or relief. If America had acted on Poland's request for help, WWII could have had less horrendous outcome for Poles, the world, and Jewry.
Poland just never gets relief.

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In the eyes of the world, no European country appeared more vulnerable to its enemies or less likely to establish peace with them than inter-war Poland.This is the first full-length study of relations between Poland and the U.S. following World War I, as Poland turned to America to buttress its precarious position.Pease lucidly examines how Polish leaders of the 1920s, discerning America's essential aim of fostering stability in Europe, sought to enlist U.S. political and financial support on behalf of their beleaguered state.Drawing on exhaustive archival research, Pease unravels the fascinating ties between these unlikely diplomatic partners.He reveals how Poland not only had to fight an uphill battle against inter-war America's isolationism, but also had to counter America's reluctance to underwrite a nation surrounded by two strong and hostile neighbors, Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland's plea for political and financial backing was ultimately denied by both the White House and Wall Street with dire consequences for Poland's future and Europe's fragile peace.Authoritative and original, this book is valuable contribution to our understanding of America and Europe during the interwar years.

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Galicia: A Multicultured land Review

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(More customer reviews)Having embarked on a quest for a better understanding of my Ukrainian/Polish heritage, I found this collection to be a valuable resource. I have always been interested in my lineage beyond my nuclear family. It is a fact that on my Ukrainian side my Grandparents were Greek catholic, and on the Polish side Roman Catholic. That in itself is amazing to me and I am delighted to refer to myself and others as a "naturalized Galician"
Mssrs Hann and Magocsi have compiled an excellant work for those interested in the history of Galicia and its varied peoples. I would highly recommend for the researcher and non-researcher alike.

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Habsburg Galicia was an area in central Europe covering territory presently occupied by Poland and Ukraine that was distinctive for its multi-ethnic character. With the unraveling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the First World War, a new political map of Europe emerged, one based on the principle of the nation-state. The very concept of the nation-state, however, was problematic in culturally pluralistic regions like Galicia.
The essays in this volume examine Galicia beyond the traditional paradigm of national history, in an effort to better understand the region as a place where different ethnic communities - Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Austro-Germans - lived in peaceful co-existence. As expansion of the European Union proceeds, as migration becomes increasingly prevalent, and as the very concept of the nation-state is called into question, a look back to see how cultural diversity was managed in a pre-nationalist age is of more than antiquarian interest. The contributors to this multidisciplinary volume pursue a wide range of approaches to shed fresh light on this unique region.

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A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II Review

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(More customer reviews)I usually find history books dull, but this one is well written and surprisingly readable. The title implies that this book is about the Kosciuszko Squadron, but it also covers Polish history from World War I until their freedom from Soviet rule. Kosciuszko Squadron was 303 Squadron of the British Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, which with 126 kills was the highest scoring squadron of the battle. After the fall of Poland, many of its soldiers, sailors, and airmen made it to Britain where they begged to get into the fight. At first the Polish fliers were shown little regard, but when the British were in trouble, they finally let the Poles fly. 303 Squadron (and 302) in Hurricane fighters accounted for over 150 German planes shot down. The Poles also filled out squadrons of RAF Bomber Command, and along with their fellow fighter pilots, fought with distinction and high casualties until the end of the war. Poland also fielded an airborne brigade that fought in Holland, and armored division that fought in France, and several infantry divisions that fought in Italy.
Poland fought a little known war with the Soviet Union in 1919-1920 in which they embarrassed the Soviets and in particular Stalin, who would later get his revenge. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Nazi propaganda portrayed them as easy prey, using cavalry against tanks and running from battle. To some extent, this vision of the Poles still is believed to this day. This book goes a long way to dispel that misinformation. Although greatly out-gunned, the Poles put up a valiant fight with antiquated equipment, killing over 16,000 German soldiers, destroying 1/4 of their tanks, and shooting down 1/5 of their planes. The Poles were still fighting hard when Stalin stabbed them in the back when he signed a pact with Hitler and invaded Eastern Poland. The Russians murdered thousands of Polish officers and soldiers in one of the most despicable acts of World War II that they never admitted until long after the war. Throughout their occupation during the war, the Poles had a large underground army (which the Allies did little to help) that continued to defy the Germans and were prepared to fight when the allies came to liberate Poland. The Poles actually helped the Soviet cause by subtle sabotage of the rail systems that impeded German troop and supply movements to the Russian front. Unfortunately, the only Allied army to arrive was the Soviet Army, and we all know what followed for decades. Even under the Soviet thumb, the Poles refused to give up their religion and national pride and shunned Marxism. Today, Poland is again a free country thanks to the Solidarity Movement and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I was outraged to learn the details of the disgraceful treatment of the Polish Nation by Roosevelt and Churchill. We sold them out at Yalta along with millions of refugees to please Stalin. After fighting and dying to preserve freedom, they had no free home to return to. Some returned to Poland where they were not well received by the Soviet's puppet government and others scattered around the world. The final insult after the war was the British victory parade in London. Not a single Pole was allowed to march for fear of offending Stalin. When the Poles arrived in Britain, they started out as distrusted, then they became heroes due to their air exploits, and finally they sank to outcast status. They deserved better treatment than they received, certainly more than our illustrious French allies.

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Forgotten Survivors: Polish Christians Remember The Nazi Occupation (Modern War Studies) Review

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Owing to obvious misunderstandings, the very title of this book needs clarification. The concept of "forgotten", not elaborated by Lukas, goes far beyond which side has done a better job of presenting its sufferings to the American public. It goes right to the heart of (1). Which side has the power and influence to get its message out, (2). Which side is in a position to control the very language of the debate, and (3). Which side has the political clout to have its sufferings enshrined in American educational law. As for (1), American Jew Novick pointed out in his book, THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE, that Poles "never had the political, cultural, or financial resources to press their case." As for (2), George Orwell noted that those who control the language control the debate. Note contemporary Newspeak, in which there is no generally-recognized term for prejudices against Poles, only Jews (anti-Semitism), no special term for a massacre of Poles, only Jews (the pogrom), and no special term in existence for the German genocide of Poles, only Jews (the Holocaust). In this review, I use the term Holocaust (sensu Universal) to include ALL victims of Germany, including Poles. As for (3), are we supposed to believe that it is by accident that American children are required, in many US states, to learn about the murder of 5-6 million Jews in appreciable detail, as if it were something higher than the sufferings of others in WWII? Finally, the fact that Jewish spokesman have forcefully opposed the teaching about the 2-3 million murdered Poles alongside that of the 5-6 million murdered Jews (except perhaps as a footnote in order to deflect the argument) should serve as crowning proof that "forgotten" is FAR more than simply a matter of which side has done a better job of communicating its sufferings to the general public.
Lukas has done a great deal of commendable work to counter the foregoing trends. This book is an anthology of Polish survivors of German Nazi persecution, a persecution that cost the lives of 2-3 million Poles, including over half of Poland's prewar intelligentsia. WARNING: The descriptions of German methods throughout this book are often graphic, and may upset the sensitive reader. The content focuses on the September 1939 German conquest and five-plus years of occupation, the unrelenting German terror, the mass executions, Gestapo methods, the hellish German concentration camps, Jan Komski's paintings of Auschwitz (pp. 58-on), the atrocious treatment of Polish forced laborers (2 million of them), Zegota, the betrayed Warsaw Uprising, and the "liberation" of Poland by a new occupant (the USSR).
The 5-year survival rate for Poles at Mauthausen Concentration Camp was only 8 out of 200 (Antoni Palmowski, p. 109), and the several-month survival rate for Poles incarcerated at Auschwitz, following the foredoomed Warsaw Uprising, was still a small 300 out of 3,000 (Stanley J. Sagan, p. 163). Such was the starvation in the work camps of Flossenburg concentration camp that Polish inmates killed and ate a German shepherd guard dog that belonged to one of the SS men (Paul Zenon Wos, p. 217).
Some seldom-discussed German barbarities are mentioned throughout this anthology, including the bleeding of Polish children for blood transfusions to wounded German soldiers (Bozenna Urbanowicz-Gilbride, p. 198), and the sterilization of Polish forced laborers (Katherine Graczyk, p. 34; Bozenna Urbanowicz-Gilbride, p. 197). No one mentions the KL Warschau extermination camp, where some 200,000 gentile Poles were gassed and cremated Auschwitz-Birkenau-style.
Various incidental details, while not intended for this purpose, help rebut common Polonophobic mischaracterizations. For example, the well-worn tale of Polish cavalry charging German tanks, originating from wartime German propaganda, is once again refuted (Notes, p. 212). And, contrary to accusations, Polish Jews were actually walled off into ghettos by the conquering Germans (Barbara Makuch, p. 85), not by the prewar Poles. The shortage of food in the countryside (Jan Porembski, p. 134), caused by German confiscations, enables the reader to understand why some Poles did not help fugitive Jews, and even betrayed or killed Jews who stole food from them. Against the claim that the German-appointed Polish police were collaborationists as such, it turns out that 90% of them were involved in the Polish Underground (Paul Zenon Wos, p. 214). The Jews of Torczyn (near Warsaw) were initially trusting of the German conquerors (Halina Martin, p. 91, 99), adding rebuttal to the argument that Polish Jews immediately feared Germans, and that this (imagined) fear is what drove the widespread Jewish-Soviet collaboration in eastern Poland that occurred in the first stages of WWII. The actions of incarcerated Poles against incarcerated Jews, simplistically blamed on anti-Semitism, must be balanced by the actions of incarcerated Jews against incarcerated Poles (Dr. Stanley Garstka, p. 26).
Finally, consider the "All Jews Were Victims of the Nazis" argument, a common rationalization for the primacy of Jewish sufferings in American social studies classes. Antoni Palmowski (p. 113) describes the fate of Jews brought to Mauthausen Concentration Camp: "Early in 1945, new transports, mostly from Auschwitz, arrived...What was unusual was that the Jews were clean, blue and gray striped prisoner uniforms....The Germans began to treat Jewish prisoners much better than before. They even increased their rations. We joked that the Germans `smelled' the end of the war, which they realized by now they could not win." It is obvious that not all known Jews were slated for extermination, even among already-apprehended Jews, and the killing of every last possible Jew was clearly NOT a priority of the dying Third Reich.



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Wanda Lorenc watched horrified as the first Wehrmacht soldiers stormed into Warsaw. Jan Porembski witnessed the mass executions of Polish civilians. Barbara Makuch became a courier for the Polish underground until she was caught and tortured. Jan Komski was thrown into the very first transport to Auschwitz and observed its rapid expansion firsthand. But, unlike the nearly three million other Polish Christians (and three million Polish Jews) who died during World War II, they survived. Richard Lukas presents the compelling eyewitness accounts of these and other Polish Christians who suffered at the hands of the Germans. They bear witness to unspeakable horrors endured by those who were tortured, forced into slavery, shipped off to concentration camps, and even subjected to medical experiments. Their stories provide a somber reminder that non-Jewish Poles were just as likely as Jews to suffer at the hands of the Nazis, who viewed them with nearly equal contempt. Zbigniew Haszlakiewicz remembers being brutally whipped and tortured-hung by his arms and legs, hands tied behind, and repeatedly stabbed: "I prayed to lose consciousness, but it was impossible. The Gestapo soon tired and started to drink beer and smoke cigarettes as they sat at that big desk. And I hung like a hammock." Lorenc tells of encountering starving Jews: "I broke an end off one loaf [of bread] and threw it to a woman in the group. An SS guard saw what I had done, rushed over to me and began to beat me with her stick. When I fell, she beat me with her boots. Two of my teeth dislodged and my mouth filled with blood. When I returned to the barracks, no one recognized me." But Dr. Jan Moor-Jankowski also recalls: "One night they took a prisoner and hanged him. He died in front of our eyes. I remember seeing a tiny twig of a tree from the window. As time passed, I saw a bud on the twig and soon leaves came out. It was something that gave me hope." Through the survivors' voices we also learn about the Polish underground, the Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota), the Jewish Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Home Army's heroic battle during the Warsaw Uprising in late 1944. Lukas places the narratives in their historical context and Jan Komski's drawings capture the horror of concentration camp life. This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.

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Balkan Breakthrough: The Battle of Dobro Pole 1918 (Twentieth-Century Battles) Review

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(More customer reviews)The story of a little-known battle of a little known front of World War I. The Macedonian front doesn't get a lot of ink in English speaking countries (or elsewhere, I'd wager) but this is a readable and thorough account of that front's final battle, written from the point of view of the main Central Power's protagonist there: the Bulgarians. A worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in WWI, if only for the subject's obscurity. The book is actually well-written and provides the whole context to the First World War in the Balkans.
The book gets 3 stars from me for 2 reasons. It certainly could have used a good editor. In fact, some of the sentences are so mangled that one has to wonder if the author's first language is English. Additionally, the maps suffer in quality and quantity. Dozens of places are mentioned in the text that don't appear on any map. The maps themselves have little detail and aren't terribly helpful to the reader who is trying to follow the campaigns. The author should have been aware that most readers aren't familiar with southern Balkan geography.

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With the transfer of German units to the western front in the spring of1918, the position of the Central Powers on the Macedonian front worsened. Materielbecame scarce and morale among the Bulgarian forces deteriorated. The EntenteCommand perceived in Macedonia an excellent opportunity to apply additional pressureto the Germans, who were already retreating on the western front. In September,Entente forces undertook an offensive directed primarily at Bulgarian defenses atDobro Pole. Balkan Breakthrough tells the story of that battle and its consequences.Dobro Pole was the catalyst for the collapse of the Central Powers and the Ententevictory in southeastern Europe -- a defeat that helped persuade the German militaryleadership that the war was lost. While decisive in ending World War I in theregion, the battle did not resolve the underlying national issues there.

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