Tuftabis,
It is good that you mention this, because I and some older Dutch people who were liberated by the Poles do
remember them. It is a fact that the Polish contribution to the Western allies was the largest contribution
after Great Britain, America and Canada with almost 200.000 men of the Polish army, air force and
navy under British command.
The Polish armed forces in the west fought under the British command and numbered 195,000 in March 1944 and 165,000 at the end of that year, including about 20,000 personnel in the Polish Air Force and 3,000 in the Polish Navy. At the end of World War II, the Polish Armed Forces in the west numbered 195,000 and by July 1945 had increased to 228,000, most of the newcomers being released prisoners of war and ex-labor-camp inmates.
In Arnhem, Oosterbeek and Driel (village near Arnhem where the Poles landed, fought and
died) and Breda citizens did not forget the Poles. A Dutch pilot from the Royal Airforce during
the war (student time friend of my father) told my mother at a student reunion gathering in
Leiden (where he and my father studied in the fourtees) that the Poles were the best pilots
of the Royal Airforce. I heared ordinairy British soldier who were ashamed by the mistreatment
of the Poles by the British command during and after the war. They remembered their Polish
comrades. The actions of Polish paratroopers in Oosterbeek saved many British lives due to
the coridor they created through which British and Polish soldiers could escape.
Until today the British attitude towards the past is wrong. The Dutch admidded that they
had been wrong and decorated the Polish veterans.
Tufta, the CNN is American and the Americans and Brits are close, the Americans in the
person of Roosevelt were wrong too, because they abandoned the Poles.
Churchill did not trust Stalin and did not like (in his heart) the fact that he had to
abandon the Poles. The new powers were the USA and USSR.
Montgommery's Market Garden plan was a failure, the general Patton plan was better,
and if the Americans had got their plan the war had been shorter and the Western
allies could have penetrated further in Central Europe. More territory could have been
of the Western bloq. The failure of Market Garden made the war lasting a half year
longer, with many deaths, the hunger winter in Holland and more territory for the Russians.
Pieter
Links:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_contribution_to_World_War_IIen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayalen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Polish_military_alliance
