As I’m treading water before diving down into the research and writing of my chapter on the final decade of Sir Richard Fairey’s life, here is an observation and then a series of observations linked through aviation to the project but with no other connections. Firstly, am I alone in thinking that the opening lines of ‘Jesus Alone’, the first song on Nick Cave’s critically acclaimed new album, Skeleton Tree, is not somehow a premonition of his son’s sad death at Beachy Head, but a direct reference to the Hawker Hunter which crashed on the A27 during the Shoreham Air Show last year (‘He fell out of the sky, into the River Adur…’)? Secondly, having a polemic on selection published in this week’s New Statesman (a magazine CRF must surely have loathed), I was prompted to write a second piece, on the appalling harassment of east and central European people, especially Poles, since the Brexit result. Pressure on space during the conference season means the NS can’t publish the article, hence its appearance here:
In my secondary boys school over half a century ago Nowak and Brzezicki cut lonely figures (names have been changed). Nobody seemed very interested in them, and yet their family histories no doubt reflected the appalling upheaval experienced by all Polish families after August 1939. Nowak and Brzezicki – no first names in those days – have been in my mind a lot recently; my memory of them prompted by the news that over thirty attacks upon Polish people have been reported since the Brexit vote, including the murderous incident in Harlow. Added to this are numerous unreported attacks, and the low-level abuse experienced by Poles of all ages – xenophobic behaviour, triggered by a referendum campaign in the course of which the unacceptable became acceptable, and the intolerable became tolerable. As my former class mates could remind us, for the second time in seventy years the British display deep ingratitude to those eager to be our closest friends and allies.
Britain and France offered scant military aid to their newest ally in September 1939 as Germany invaded Poland from the west, followed by Russia’s arrival in the east. Under the terms of their newly signed pact the two dictatorships occupied respective halves of Poland until Hitler ordered his forces eastwards in June 1942. Remarkably, eighty thousand service personnel avoided capture, a quarter of whom did so again when France fell in June 1940. They joined Polish air crew already in Britain, and sixteen squadrons would serve with the RAF. The most successful Hurricane squadron in the Battle of Britain was Polish. Polish squadrons would fly over Normandy on D-Day. Around twenty thousand served in the Polish Air Force, with a further three thousand in the Polish Navy. Soldiers of the First Army Corps, formed from those who got out of France, finally returned to mainland Europe in the summer of 1944; and that autumn Polish paratroopers covered British airborne forces’ withdrawal from Arnhem.
Those regular soldiers and their families who survived the onslaught of 1939 were transported to Siberia by the Russians, with the NKVD murdering hundreds of officers in the Katyn forest. When in 1943 the Germans revealed how many had died at Katyn, Stalin feigned ignorance, with Roosevelt and Churchill exercising a discreet silence in the interest of alliance real politick. For the same reason neither prime minister or president gave the exiled Polish government in London serious support when Russia allowed German forces to crush the Warsaw uprising in late summer 1944, extended its border with Poland westwards, and facilitated the imposition of a predominantly pro-Soviet regime.  Stalin’s only concession was to release the remnants of the Polish Army, which under General Wladyslaw Anders constituted a formidable fighting force. While Anders’ seventy-thousand men made their way to Palestine, their families endured a long and demanding journey to India. From there many, fearful of returning home, travelled to Britain after the war – their experience of exile and resettlement, as seen through the eyes of his grandmother, is movingly recreated in Matthew Kelly’s Finding Poland. Under Anders’ command the Polish Second Army Corps fought their way across North Africa and up through Italy, sustaining significant losses and impressing all who saw them in action. Nowhere were those losses greater than at Monte Cassino, the monastery south of Rome where today a huge Polish cemetery marks the sacrifice made in achieving victory.
Today the remarkable record of Anders and the Second Army Corps is properly commemorated in Warsaw; but during the Cold War Poland’s Communist government deliberately ignored their exploits, and those of their comrades based in Britain. Nearly two hundred thousand exiled Poles fought from 1939 to 1945, of whom well over ten percent were killed or missing.  In Europe and the Mediterranean the Poles fought bravely under British command. Yet in June 1946 the Labour Government responded feebly when Soviet pressure prevented Polish veterans from participating in London’s splendid and spectacular Victory Parade: Attlee and Bevin treated shabbily a nation still traumatised by the horrors of war and occupation.
My class’s shunning of Nowak and Brzezicki can be seen as teenagers’ instinctive suspicion of the unfamiliar. We like to think that in contemporary, multi-cultural Britain such behaviour is a thing of the past – school must be a safe environment in which all are welcome. Hopefully that can be the case, but what about parental influence beyond the playground? What of the impressionable young children exposed to toxic views at home, where prejudice constitutes the norm? Harassment of anyone settled in Britain, young or old, must be condemned unequivocally. Yet targeting Polish people seems especially obnoxious.  How cruelly ironic that too often those demonising the descendants of such staunch wartime allies should be the same people who see the Brexit result as once again ‘our finest hour.’
