Anders' Army
Anders' Army

Author: Evan McGilvray

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2018-02-28

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1473889758

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Along with thousands of his compatriots, Wladyslaw Anders was imprisoned by the Soviets when they attacked Poland with their German allies in 1939. They endured terrible treatment until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 suddenly put Stalin in the Allied camp, after which they were evacuated to Iran and formed into the Polish Second Corps under Anders command.Once equipped and trained, the corps was eventually committed to the Italian campaign, notably at Monte Cassino. The author assesses Anders performance as a military commander, finding him merely adequate, but his political role was more significant and caused friction in the Allied camp. From the start he often opposed Sikorski, the Polish Prime Minister in exile and Commander in Chief of Polish armed forces in the West. Indeed, Anders was suspected of collusion in Sikorskis death in July 1943 and of later sending Polish death squads into Poland to eliminate opponents, charges that Evan McGilvray investigates. Furthermore, Anders voiced his deep mistrust of Stalin and urged a war against the Soviets after the defeat of Hitler.

Trail of Hope
Trail of Hope

Author: Norman Davies

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-02-25

Total Pages: 1043

ISBN-13: 1472816056

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A detailed and highly illustrated account of the Polish II Corps' (or 'Anders Army') perilous journey to fight side by side with Allied forces at the height of World War II. Following the conquest of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish families were torn from their homes and sent eastwards to the arctic wastes of Siberia. Prisoners of war, refugees, those regarded as 'social criminals' by Stalin's regime, and those rounded up by sheer chance were all sent 'to see the Great White Bear'. However, with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa just two years later, Russia and the Allied powers found themselves on the same side once more. Turning to those that it had previously deemed 'undesirable', Russia sought to raise a Polish army from the men, women and children that it had imprisoned within its labour camps. In this remarkable work, renowned historian Professor Norman Davies draws from years of meticulous research to recount the compelling story of this unit, the Polish II Corps or 'Anders Army', and their exceptional journey from the Gulag of Siberia through Iran, the Middle East and North Africa to the battlefields of Italy to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with Allied forces. Complete with previously unpublished photographs and first-hand accounts from the men and women who lived through it, this is a unique visual and written record of one of the most fascinating episodes of World War II.

From Warsaw to Rome
From Warsaw to Rome

Author: Martin Williams

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2017-04-30

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1473894905

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In May 1944, 40,000 Polish soldiers attacked and captured the hilltops of Monte Cassino, bringing to a close the largest, bloodiest battle fought by the western Allies in the Second World War. Days later the Allied armies marched into Rome seizing the first Axis capital.No-one in 1939 could have foreseen an entire Polish Corps engaged on the Italian Front. Most had been held prisoner in the USSR following Polands defeat and their release by Stalin was only achieved through the intense negotiations of British and Polish politicians generals, notably Sikorski and Anders,. The Polish Army was evacuated to Iran in 1942 and subsequently incorporated into the British Army as the Polish II Corps. Their ultimate postwar fate was shamefully ignored until too late.This book, which charts the extraordinary wartime story of the exiled Polish Army in the east, makes extensive use of undiscovered archive material. It reveals in depth the relations between the British and Polish General Staffs and the never ending hardships of the Polish soldiers.

An Army in Exile
An Army in Exile

Author: Władysław Anders

Publisher: Nashville, Tenn. : Battery Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 9780898390438

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The Eagle Unbowed
The Eagle Unbowed

Author: Halik Kochanski

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 911

ISBN-13: 0674071050

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The Second World War gripped Poland as it did no other country in Europe. Invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it remained under occupation by foreign armies from the first day of the war to the last. The conflict was brutal, as Polish armies battled the enemy on four different fronts. It was on Polish soil that the architects of the Final Solution assembled their most elaborate network of extermination camps, culminating in the deliberate destruction of millions of lives, including three million Polish Jews. In The Eagle Unbowed, Halik Kochanski tells, for the first time, the story of Poland's war in its entirety, a story that captures both the diversity and the depth of the lives of those who endured its horrors. Most histories of the European war focus on the Allies' determination to liberate the continent from the fascist onslaught. Yet the "good war" looks quite different when viewed from Lodz or Krakow than from London or Washington, D.C. Poland emerged from the war trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and it would be nearly a half-century until Poland gained the freedom that its partners had secured with the defeat of Hitler. Rescuing the stories of those who died and those who vanished, those who fought and those who escaped, Kochanski deftly reconstructs the world of wartime Poland in all its complexity-from collaboration to resistance, from expulsion to exile, from Warsaw to Treblinka. The Eagle Unbowed provides in a single volume the first truly comprehensive account of one of the most harrowing periods in modern history.

Army and Nation
Army and Nation

Author: Steven Wilkinson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-02-12

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0674728807

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Steven I. Wilkinson explores how India has succeeded in keeping the military out of politics, when so many other countries have failed. He uncovers the command and control strategies, the careful ethnic balancing, and the political, foreign policy, and strategic decisions that have made the army safe for Indian democracy.

Kursk 1943
Kursk 1943

Author: Anders Frankson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 113526810X

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The battle at Kursk in 1943 is often referred to as the greatest tank battle in the history of warfare. This volume makes extensive use of German archival documents as well as various Russian books and articles. As well as an account of the battle, it addresses methodological issues.

A Train to Palestine
A Train to Palestine

Author: Randy Grigsby

Publisher:

Published: 2019-10-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781912676279

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In October 1938, eight-year-old Josef Rosenbaum, his mother, and his younger sister set out from Germany on a cruel odyssey, fleeing into eastern Europe along with thousands of other refugees. Sent to Siberian slave labor camps in the wildernesses, they suffered brutal cold, famine, and disease. When Germany invaded Russia many refugees were forced out of Siberia to primitive tent camps in Uzbekistan, accompanied by the Polish army-in-exile previously imprisoned by the Soviets. Within weeks the commander of the army, General Wladyslaw Anders, received orders to relocate his army to Iran to train to fight alongside the British in North Africa. Instructed to leave without the civilians, Anders instead ordered all evacuees, including Jews, to head southward with his troops. Joe and the refugees were again loaded on trains, accompanied by the Polish soldiers, and sent to the port of Pahlavi on the Caspian Sea. Then, transported by trucks over treacherous mountain roads, they finally arrived in Tehran, where they struggled to survive in horrifying conditions. In October 1942, the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem accepted responsibility for the nine hundred orphaned Jewish children in the camp, and by January 1943, the agency secured travel certificates for the Tehran Children to evacuate to Palestine. Joe and the other children, after five terrible years, finally reached safety at the Athlit Detention Camp, north of Haifa, on 18 February 1943. Readers will find the story is one of the swift brutalities of war, and the suffering of civilians swept up in the maelstrom of fierce conflict. A Train to Palestine recreates a remarkable, and little-known story of escape and survival during the Second World War.

Inhuman Land
Inhuman Land

Author: Jozef Czapski

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2018-12-18

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 1681372576

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A classic work of reportage about the Katyń Massacre during World War II by a soldier who narrowly escaped the atrocity himself. In 1941, when Germany turned against the USSR, tens of thousands of Poles—men, women, and children who were starving, sickly, and impoverished—were released from Soviet prison camps and allowed to join the Polish Army being formed in the south of Russia. One of the survivors who made the difficult winter journey was the painter and reserve officer Józef Czapski. General Anders, the army’s commander in chief, assigned Czapski the task of receiving the Poles arriving for military training; gathering accounts of what their fates had been; organizing education, culture, and news for the soldiers; and, most important, investigating the disappearance of thousands of missing Polish officers. Blocked at every level by the Soviet authorities, Czapski was unaware that in April 1940 many officers had been shot dead in Katyn forest, a crime for which Soviet Russia never accepted responsibility. Czapski’s account of the years following his release from the camp and the formation of the Polish Army, and its arduous trek through Central Asia and the Middle East to fight on the Italian front offers a stark depiction of Stalin’s Russia at war and of the suffering, stoicism, and bravery of his fellow Poles. A work of clear observation and deep compassion, Inhuman Land is one of the twentieth century’s indispensable acts of literary witness.