Wojtek the Bear [paperback] (24 page)

None knew it better than General Władysław Anders himself. A fiercely patriotic cavalry officer, he had fought the Soviet invaders in 1939. After being wounded and captured, he was
tortured by NKVD interrogators in Moscow’s Lubianka prison and was expecting to be shot when the Nazi invasion in 1941 led to his release. Often in conflict with Sikorski and his successor
Mikołajczyk, Anders was fanatically opposed to any concessions to ‘the Bolsheviks’, especially over the frontiers.

The 2nd Polish Corps of the British 8th Army finally reached Italy in January 1944. A slow, often bungled Allied advance up the peninsula had been halted at the defences of the Gustav Line,
whose hinge was the ancient hilltop monastery of Monte Cassino. The monastery had already been bombed to rubble, and several desperate attacks up the mountain by British and Indian troops had
already been beaten off when the 8th Army launched a fresh offensive in May. This time, the direct assault was mounted by the Poles. They fought their way uphill, yard by yard, over four terrible
days and nights until the surviving Germans fell
back and the Polish flag went up over the monastery ruins. Beyond the summit, hard fighting for the neighbouring hilltops
went on for another six days.

Nearly a thousand Polish soldiers died. But the Battle of Monte Cassino was to become Poland’s mythic battle honour for the Second World War, the symbolic victory of raw human courage over
entrenched fire-power. Ever since, Cassino has been the theme of films, stories and songs. Sacred canisters of Cassino earth mixed with Polish blood stand in museums. Wojtek the bear, carrying
Polish artillery shells to the foot of the mountain, has shared in that immortality.

The fall of Cassino opened the road to Rome. Anders went to the Vatican and was congratulated by the Pope, but the 2nd Corps, after rest and reinforcement, was moved across Italy to the Adriatic
coast. There, in July, it led a bloody assault to capture the port of Ancona. In August, the Poles helped to pierce the Gothic Line, and early in 1945 took part in the final spring offensive across
the Senio river. On 21 April 1945, the 5th Polish Infantry Division commanded by Klemens Rudnicki liberated the great city of Bologna. A week later, the German armies in Italy laid down their arms,
and on 7 and 8 May the Third Reich itself surrendered untidily to the Allies. The war in Europe was over. But the Polish soldiers, who had fought it from the first day to the last, did not feel
like victors.

Anders had never hidden his anger at the way Poland was being treated. His soldiers agreed with him. In July 1944, when the London Poles sent a mission to Moscow, Anders warned them that the
army would refuse to obey any government which compromised over the frontiers or offered to share power with the Communists. The British
commanders in Italy were horrified,
and told Anders that as a soldier he should keep out of politics. He took no notice. Soviet behaviour over Operation Tempest and the Warsaw Rising that August did not surprise him.

In February 1945, the Yalta Conference confirmed what most Poles already feared. Poland would lose its eastern provinces, and would be consigned to the Soviet sphere of influence after the war.
Churchill and Roosevelt prepared to recognise the Moscow-steered Committee of National Liberation as the legitimate government. When news of Yalta reached Anders, he sent a telegram to the Polish
president-in-exile in London: ‘The Polish Second Corps cannot accept the unilateral decision by which Poland and the Polish nation are surrendered to be the spoils of the Bolsheviks.’
He was therefore asking the Allied commanders to pull all Polish units out of the battle line, to save bloodshed which had now become pointless.

But Anders did not go through with this tragic threat. When told that there were no reserve troops to take the place of the Poles, he announced that they would keep fighting after all. Something
similar took place in Holland, when the tank-men in Maczek’s 1st Armoured Division heard about Yalta. There was no mutiny, but a number of tanks stopped and bitter discussion broke out among
their crews. Maczek sent officers down to reason with them, on the grounds that there was still a job which they had sworn to finish, no matter how harsh the future looked. The tanks set off again
towards Germany.

All this incited the Soviet Union to launch a hate campaign against General Anders. He was accused of keeping the 2nd Corps in arms long after the war ended, in order to use it as a Polish
legion in a new war between
the Soviet Union and the Anglo-Americans. There was a grain of truth in this. In 1946, when the British told him that his army must be
demobilised, Anders protested that this meant that ‘all hope of returning to a free Poland was gone’. Writing his memoirs in 1947, he ended pointedly: ‘We are now living in
expectation of the last chapter of this great historic upheaval. We believe . . . and we expect.’ Such talk made it easy for the new Communist-dominated ‘provisional government’
in Warsaw to smear him as a Fascist warmonger. But his old soldiers continued to adore him until he died in London in 1970.

The end of the war in Europe left Poles scattered all over the planet. By late 1945, there were nearly a quarter of a million Polish servicemen and women under British command.
In Italy, there were now no fewer than 112,000 men in the 2nd Polish Corps, the Anders Army. In Germany, there were the soldiers of the 1st Armoured Division and Sosabowski’s Parachute
Brigade. Back in Scotland, over 50,000 new recruits had arrived in the training camps since 1944, almost all of them either Poles who had changed sides after serving in the
Wehrmacht
or
forced labourers who had been conscripted by the Nazi Todt Organisation. Two new Polish formations, an infantry division and another armoured brigade, had been put together in Scotland, but were
not ready to fight by the time of the German surrender.

In conquered Germany and other Reich territories, the Allies found over 180,000 Polish soldiers who had been captured by the Nazis in September 1939 and were still in prisoner-of-war camps. And
then, all over the world, there were the civilians. Some, the families who had escaped from
the Soviet Union with General Anders, had been parked by the British in India,
Africa or other parts of the empire. Hundreds of thousands of others were now ‘displaced persons’ in tents, huts and barracks throughout Germany, after their liberation from
slave-labour factories or concentration camps. And there were the tens of thousands of deported Poles left behind in the Soviet Union, most of whom were being forced to take Soviet citizenship.

What was to become of them all? The choice was simple only for the Poles in the USSR: even in a Communist Poland, life would be heaven compared to Siberia or the Kazakh steppe. In Germany, many
civilians freed from Nazi servitude trekked eastwards to find out if their families were still alive or their houses still standing. Others hesitated, while the British – anxious to get rid
of this enormous responsibility – urged them all to go back to Poland and rebuild their country. At Yalta, Stalin had told Churchill and Roosevelt that there would be ‘free
elections’ in Poland. The British, without much confidence, hoped that most of the Poles in the West would decide to go home once they were convinced that Stalin’s assurance would be
honoured. They were not convinced, and it was not honoured.

But this did not prevent Churchill’s government from recognising the provisional government in Warsaw on 5 July 1945. At the same time, recognition was withdrawn from the Polish exile
government in London, which had been Britain’s loyal ally from the first day of the European war to the last. In a final clumsy insult, which hurts Poles to this day, no Polish troops were
invited to take part in the international victory parade in London. Later in July, the general election threw out Winston Churchill and replaced him with a Labour government led by Clement Attlee
as
prime minister and Ernest Bevin as foreign secretary. But this did not change British policy towards Poland and towards the hundreds of thousands of Poles left in
Britain’s charge.

It would be unfair to see British behaviour as simply heartless. There was much agonising. It’s difficult in retrospect to blame Churchill’s government after 1941 for putting the
need to keep the Soviet Union in the anti-Hitler coalition ahead of the need to do justice to the Poles. Equally, the decisions at Teheran and Yalta to leave Poland in the Soviet ‘zone of
influence’ after the war, ugly and hypocritical as they were, were little more than recognitions of the inevitable.

There was no way that the British and Americans could reach Poland before the advancing Russians, and no way short of a third world war that Soviet power in eastern Europe and the Balkans could
be forced back to its own frontiers. Nonetheless, the British were well aware of the contradiction between what they saw as ‘strategic necessity’ and what they named as Britain’s
‘obligation of honour toward the anti-Warsaw Poles’. They hoped to soothe their consciences by handling the problem of the Polish armed forces in a generous and humane way. An Interim
Treasury Committee for Polish Questions was set up immediately after the London government was derecognised. In effect, this meant that Britain, although exhausted and bankrupt the end of nearly
six years of war, was taking on the duty to pay and maintain and house the Polish armed forces in the West.

In March 1946, almost a year after the war, the 2nd Corps was still in uniform and encamped in Italy. Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin sent for General Anders to break the news
that his army would be demobilised. They added, naïvely, that his men should prepare to return to Poland and vote there, in order to save democracy from the
Communists.

Almost all of them refused. Out of those 112,000 in the 2nd Corps, only seven officers and 14,200 ‘other ranks’ opted to be shipped back to Poland. Anders noted with grim
satisfaction that a mere 310 men among the thousands who had actually experienced life in the USSR chose repatriation. The pattern in the 1st Corps, previously based in Scotland and now quartered
in Germany, was much the same. As for the 50,000 or so Poles still in Scotland, there was little motive for them to go home, and the Wehrmacht past which many of them had unwillingly endured was
thought to have made them unfit for occupation duty in Germany. So they stayed where they were.

In May 1946, Bevin announced that the 2nd Corps would be brought from Italy to Britain, with all its families and dependants. At the same time, a Polish Resettlement Corps (PRC) would be formed,
to absorb all those Polish ex-servicemen and -women who did not wish to return home. The PRC was to be ‘essentially a transitional arrangement, designed to facilitate the transition from
military to civilian life’ in Britain or elsewhere; its members would be given skill training, including English language courses. The British still hoped that as many Poles as possible would
opt to go home, instead of joining the Resettlement Corps, and offered a fairly mean bribe – two months’ army pay and a demob suit – to anyone who chose repatriation. But by early
1948 over 98,000 men and women had enlisted in the PRC, of whom only 8,300 decided to return to Poland.

There was a worrying domestic background to these
events. The Poles had been welcomed in the early war years as valiant comrades. But by 1945 resentment at their presence
was building up, especially in Scotland. Left-wingers, many of them in the trade union movement, were upset by the ‘anti-Soviet’ bias of most Poles, and saw the arrival of the 2nd Corps
from Italy as the import of a ‘Fascist foreign legion’ hungry to start a third world war. Although there was a desperate labour shortage, the National Union of Mineworkers was hostile
to Polish miners entering British collieries. And by 1945 there was a constant flow of ‘send the Poles home’ demands from other, more middle-class groups, including the churches and
many local councils.

‘They have overstayed their welcome’ was the theme of most of these protests, accompanied by fantasies about ‘overpaid’ Poles in uniform crowding into expensive Edinburgh
restaurants. Also, and inevitably, there was an attempt to smear the Poles by religious bigotry. In June 1946 the odious John Cormack, leader of the Protestant Action Society and a demagogue on
Edinburgh City Council, managed to fill the Usher Hall with an anti-Polish rally. Cormack attacked the Poles as dangerous Papists out to take over Scotland, and denied that Poland had ever been an
independent state. Here and there, tense feelings exploded into drunken brawls, and there was an ugly fight between Scots and Polish servicemen in Irvine that September.

But this was the low point, and relations between Poles and Scots began to improve again in 1947. There were several reasons for this. One was political sympathy. By the end of that year,
British public opinion had begun to understand how repressive and harsh life had become in Poland, and throughout the zone of Europe under Soviet
control. A second reason
was that the British government grew worried about bad feeling in working-class Scotland, and began to redirect the incoming Poles to England. According to Tomasz Ziarski-Kernberg’s
invaluable book
The Polish Community in Scotland
, Parliament was informed that by late 1946 there were 36,000 Polish troops in Scotland, as against 72,000 elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
Another 52,000 were expected, but they would be billeted in England and Wales.

A third reason for this cooling of passions was that the Poles in Scotland became much less visible. The 2nd Corps arrived from Italy, bringing with them some 10,000 family members and
dependants, but their demobilisation took place mostly in England. Out of 161 camps set up for them, only eight were in Scotland: three for soldiers – including the camp near the River Tweed
at Winfield where Wojtek and his friends were settled – and five for the civilians who came with them. Their legendary wandering across the face of the earth, which had begun in Poland,
driven them on through Siberia and central Asia to the Caspian Sea, then on again through Persia, Iraq, Palestine and the battlefields of Italy, had come at last to a standstill in exile.