Until Poland applied to join the EU in the 1990s, the biggest single influx of Poles into this country was in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. Around 200,000 Poles who had fought for the Allies chose to seek refuge here, rather than return to their homeland and face life under Stalin.
Many of them had been members of the most curious of all the armies that took part in the conflict: the Polish Army of the Soviet Union and the Middle East, otherwise known as the Anders Army. From 1941 the magnetic General Wladyslaw Anders, a cavalry officer in a Russian Tsarist regiment during the first world war, commanded a force which for the next three years made an epic 9,000-mile journey through Siberia, central Asia, the Middle East and Africa, eventually to confront the Germans in Italy for one of the most crucial battles of the war.
It is a stirring story, little known until now, movingly told by Norman Davies, the passionate populariser of East European history.
In France and Britain the six months after September 1939 were the ‘phoney war’, la drôle de guerre.
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