Author: Peter Zablocki Publisher: Frontline Books ISBN: 1399039261 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
The plane crash at the height of the Second World War which claimed the life of the Polish Prime Minister, General W?adys?aw Sikorski, ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the conflict. It was a death that shifted European alliances and loyalties, brought Stalin into the Anglo-American camp, and sealed Poland's fate for the remainder of the twentieth century. Poland and the Soviet Union’s historically precarious relationship had taken an even darker turn in September 1939 when the Third Reich’s Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin divided the nation and forced its government to relocate first to France and then to Britain in 1940. Sikorski’s Polish government-in-exile established a military, political, and personal relationship with Winston Churchill’s government, only to see it fractured by the United States’ entrance into the war and the Western Allies’ courtship of Stalin following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. The Allies overall support of Stalin’s denials following the 1943 discovery of 20,000 bodies of Polish officers murdered and buried by the Soviets in Katyn Forest only made matters worse. Sikorski’s open protests against describing the Soviet dictator as a benevolent ‘Uncle Joe’ made him publicly and privately ‘difficult’ to the new Anglo-American-Soviet coalition. As per reports of the British and Polish intelligence services, seemingly not doing enough to stand up to the Soviets had also strained Sikorski’s relationship with different Polish government factions. Leaving from a layover stop at Gibraltar on 4 July 1943, having visited Polish Army units in Iran, Sikorski's RAF Liberator, AL523, crashed into the sea just sixteen seconds into its flight. while Stalin privately blamed Churchill, the Germans were more public in accusing the British. Others pointed to the Soviets or even the Poles. A British Court of Inquiry convened in 1943 presented an inconclusive report on the crash’s cause or foul play and locked up most of its files until 2043. Lacking a respected leader, Poland fell out of favour with the Allies, who allowed Stalin to redraw the Polish borders and establish a pro-communist puppet state in Poland until 1990. Not only exploring what happened on that fateful day in 1943, but also the events leading up to it and those that followed, The Death of General Sikorski is more of a political thriller than a conspiracy book, telling an often complex, and enthralling story of a tragedy within a tragedy – that of a man and his nation.
Author: Chris Wroblewski Publisher: Grub Street Publishing ISBN: 1911714600 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
On the night of 4 July 1943, transport aircraft Liberator AL523 took off from Gibraltar’s North Front tarmac and within moments crashed into the sea with only one survivor, the pilot. The commander-in-chief of the Polish army and prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, General W?adys?aw Sikorski, was dead. Rumours as to the cause of the crash abounded. Was it pilot error? Was it, as officially classified, merely an accident, or was it, as the authors conclude in this riveting and meticulous study, an act of sabotage? In this extensive piece of research, Chris Wroblewski and Garth Barnard examine numerous primary sources, including the complete court of inquiry transcripts, produce detailed analysis of aircraft components and systems and unearth many little-known eyewitness accounts to give this investigation a compelling conclusion. Within the book the authors also dispel several conspiracy theories that have emerged since this catastrophe; particularly that this event was a disastrous assassination attempt with blame on the British, Soviets and Nazis. This is an exhaustive piece of investigative journalism that puts the record straight once and for all.
Author: Evan McGilvray Publisher: Pen and Sword Military ISBN: 1526795175 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
General W?adys?aw Sikorski was the Head of the wartime Polish Government and Polish Commander-in-Chief, 1939-1943. Sikorski rose to prominence in Poland between 1910 and 1918 as part of the movement towards Polish independence, achieved in 1918. In 1920 Sikorski was largely responsible for the defeat of the Red Army. In 1926 he fell from favor following a military coup. During this fallow period, 1926-1939, Sikorski traveled, mainly in France. He also wrote influential military-science treatises. In September 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and annexed Poland. Sikorski, his military offices refused by the Polish Government, fled to Romania. There he was intercepted by the French ambassador to Poland and taken to Paris where he established a Polish Government-in-Exile and rebuilt the Polish Army. In May 1940 France was overrun by Germany. Sikorski removed himself and his government to London. There he began to re-build the Polish army largely lost in France. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Sikorski was forced by the British Government to accept the Soviets as allies. This led to a larger Polish army being formed in the Soviet Union and sent to the Middle East, commanded by General Anders who was to become a thorn in Sikorski’s side. By 1943, the two men were clearly enemies. Sikorski died in an air crash off Gibraltar. The cause has never been satisfactory established.
Author: Frank Bull, Chris Bonnett, Steve Adamson Publisher: Lulu.com ISBN: 132645420X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 326
Book Description
As its title suggests this is not just a list of names and dates but a serious research into the people behind the names on the various WW2 memorials in Bridlington including all the old boys of Bridlington School who died in WW2. The book begins with a detailed look at where the memorials are, when they were made and the names that appear on them. This is followed by the roll of honour itself, an alphabetical listing which gives a full page to each person named on the memorials. The Authors have used 'typical' family history resources in order to give as much biographical detail as possible, who they were, their parents, husbands / wives and children, where and how they died and what they did before enlistment. Some died in well-known land battles, some went down with their ships, while others were in aircraft that failed to return home. Not all were in the armed forces and these met their deaths through bombing raids and accidents of war. This is their story.
Author: Nicholas Rankin Publisher: Faber & Faber ISBN: 0571307736 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 581
Book Description
Adolf Hitler's failure to take Gibraltar in 1940 lost him the Second World War. But in truth the formidable Rock, jutting between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, was extraordinarily vulnerable. Every day, ten thousand people crossed its frontier to work, spy, sabotage or escape. It was threatened by Spain, Vichy France, Italy and Germany. After the USA entered the war, Gibraltar became General Eisenhower's strategic headquarters for the invasion of North Africa and the battle for the Mediterranean.
Author: Andrzej Paczkowski Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 9780271047539 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 608
Book Description
The Spring Will Be Ours focuses on the turbulent half century from the outbreak of World War II in 1939, which started the chain of events that would lead to the communist takeover of Poland, to 1989, when futile attempts to reform the communist system gave way to its total transformation. Andrzej Paczkowski shows how the communists captured and consolidated power, describes their use of terror and propaganda, and illuminates the changes that took place within the governing elite. He also documents the political opposition to the regime - both inside Poland and abroad - that resulted in upheavals in 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980. His narrative makes evident the pressures that the elite felt from above, from Moscow, and from below, from the population and from within the party. The history of Poland and the Poles is of special interest because on numerous occasions in the twentieth century this relatively small country influenced developments on a global scale.
Author: Lucy Beckett Publisher: Ignatius Press ISBN: 1681495147 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Winner of the 2015 Aquinas Award for Fiction! An octogenarian bookseller living alone in London has found a description of his father, as a young doctor in 1920s Breslau, in a story about Weimar Germany. Perhaps his own story might be worth telling? In 1945, as a sixteen-year-old boy rescued from the ruins of Europe, he arrives at a Yorkshire farmhouse. Working on the farm for two years in the strange atmosphere of rural England immediately after World War II, he learns to deal with his memories of what happened to him and to his family and to trust, up to a point, those around him in a foreign country. London in 1947 is stranger still. But the boy is lucky, as he has been since 1941, when marksmen tried to shoot him into a pit full of corpses in a Lithuanian forest. The year before, different executioners in a different forest further east had shot and killed his father. Those who faced the worst atrocities of World War II, which were inflicted on people in the "bloodlands" of eastern Poland and western Russia, knew that there was little to choose between the two mighty machines, Nazi and Soviet. How was it possible for the individual to survive the crushing wheels of ideology, terror, and mass murder with his integrity intact? The Leaves Are Falling, a sequel to A Postcard from the Volcano but a stand-alone story, explores this question.
Author: Peter Zablocki
Author: David John Cawdell Irving
Author: David John Cawdell Irving
Author: Chris Wroblewski
Author: Evan McGilvray
Author: Frank Bull, Chris Bonnett, Steve Adamson
Author: Nicholas Rankin
Author: Andrzej Paczkowski
Author: Don Hale
Author: Lucy Beckett