Who could forget the Polish squadrons in RAF Fighter Command when, in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, a British squadron leader, frustrated by the excited radio chatter on being allowed into action at last, orders ‘Silence! In Polish!’ Or the Polish Parachute Brigade at Arnhem, whose commander, Stanislaw Sosabowski, played by Gene Hackman in A Bridge Too Far (1977), thinking the venture disastrous, growls ‘God Bless Field Marshal Montgomery’ as he jumps from his Dakota?
Commander Eugeniusz Plawski, the captain of the Polish destroyer Piorun which first spotted the Bismarck and charged at her to draw fire, might be better known if he had featured in the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! – but that wasn’t expedient, with the honours going instead to a Royal Navy officer. And anybody who knows about Monte Cassino, perhaps at first hand from General Wladyslaw Anders’s An Army in Exile (1949), knows that it was the Poles who eventually took the monastic rubble in May 1944 after months of unsuccessful Allied attempts.
On the other hand, recognition of the 1st Polish Armoured Division in Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in north-west Europe is relatively scant, which is ironic, given that their military significance was greater than their more celebrated compatriots’ at Arnhem and in Italy.
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