World War Two: Polish Contribution

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Polish contribution to UK war effort in World War Two.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of the summer of 1939 was designed to annihilate and destroy Poland and the Polish nation. [Interruption.]

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry, Mr Kawczynski, but I remind those in the Public Gallery not to take photographs, as it is not permitted in Westminster Hall.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of the summer of 1939 was designed to destroy and annihilate the Poles. On 1 September 1939, a few weeks after that treaty between the Germans and Russians was signed, the brutal invasion of Poland by German forces took place. Despite so much subjugation—so many cities were destroyed and so many Poles were imprisoned, and tyranny was imposed on Poland in 1939 and thereafter—Poles themselves refused to be subjugated.

Poles share our values of freedom and are determined to be free people. They came from Poland in unprecedented numbers to join up with British forces and fight with their British counterparts in 1939 and 1940. The Polish Government-in-exile came to be based in London. Thanks to the hospitality and generosity of the British Government, the Polish Government-in-exile operated in London until 1989 and the fall of communism in Poland, when a democratic and legitimate Government was finally restored to Poland. The most important battle in which they participated was the Battle of Britain.

Today, I again had the great honour of speaking with Lord Tebbit about his views on the Battle of Britain. One of the most enjoyable things that I have done in my 14 years as a Member of Parliament was to join Lord Tebbit at the RAF club for an Anglo-Polish dinner, where he was the guest speaker. He said something that really resonated with me, that I will always remember, and that I wanted to share with the House. According to Lord Tebbit, the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe were so evenly matched in the summer of 1940 that the British side was beginning to lose that battle. Those were the words of Lord Tebbit, not my own.

Lord Tebbit said that replacing the planes was relatively easy—continuing production in armaments factories and creating the planes was fine—but that replacing the pilots was extremely difficult. We all know how long it takes to train a pilot, and it was very difficult to replace all the losses. According to him, the Poles coming in such unprecedented numbers to join to British forces in the summer of 1940 was what tipped the balance to the British side.

Last year, two wonderful films were released in the United Kingdom: “Hurricane” and “303 Squadron”. I have spoken about those films to colleagues, who have then watched them, and I urge you, Mr Pritchard, as my Shropshire neighbour, to watch them if you have the opportunity. They are modern-day accounts to share with the next generations the extraordinary heroism, courage and determination of those Polish pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain. The Polish 303 Squadron shot down more enemy aircraft than any other squadron in the Battle of Britain. Although it is the most famous squadron, it was only one of 16 Polish squadrons embedded in the RAF.

There are now 1 million Poles in the United Kingdom, and we benefit enormously from their contribution to our country. In the past, I have heard people talking about Poles coming to live and work here and how dependent we are on Polish plumbers and other professions, but we were so dependent on those highly skilled and brave Poles who came in 1940.

Last week, I met Mr Burakowski, the new editor of the Shrewsbury Chronicle, which is the main newspaper in my constituency. He told me about the experiences of his father, who was one of those Poles who came over during the second world war and was part of a bombing squadron.

The Poles were led out of captivity in the Soviet Union by the famous General Anders—we have on many occasions invited his daughter, Senator Anna Maria Anders, to address the Polish diaspora in the House of Commons. General Anders brought many Polish soldiers from captivity in the Soviet Union, through Iran, to join up with British forces in Palestine, where they were equipped and trained before joining the British 8th Army.

Before the revolution in Libya, I had the opportunity to visit British and Polish graves, side by side in cemeteries in Tripoli and Tobruk. It was so poignant to see just how young those boys were—in certain cases, they were 19, 20 or 21. The British and Poles fought side by side in desert terrain in Libya, hundreds of miles from their homes, so young and with so much ahead of them—the opportunity perhaps to have children and to live full and successful lives. Yet at the age of 19 or 20, they sacrificed their lives together to fight the tyranny of fascism. That is why we remember them and their sacrifices today.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Order. I am not going to put a formal time limit on speeches at the moment—it is still fluid—but if Members could keep to five minutes, that would be great.

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[Stephen Pound]

That is an excellent point. It is almost as if I had asked the hon. Gentleman to ask that question, but it has been a long time since I have been in the Whips Office. That is an important point. I will talk about Scotland particularly, in a moment.

We need say no more about the Polish contribution to the RAF—it has been said before and it must be said again—but I turn to the heroism of the Polish army. Those who fought with General Anders walked, marched and, in some cases, crawled from Siberia through the whole of Iran to north Africa, to turn the tide in El Alamein. As we have heard, they fought from Tobruk up through Sicily and into the impregnable mountain fortress and Benedictine monastery that could not be broken, Monte Cassino, which was occupied by a crack division of German paratroopers—in fact, the crack division of the Luftwaffe.

Those paratroopers held out against one of the biggest combined armies that has ever been assembled. There was a New Zealand regiment made up entirely of Māori, as well as people from north Africa, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the United States; but there was one group of people—the Poles—who fought their way from hilltop to hilltop, up that precipitous mound, and planted the red and white flag in the still-smoking ruins of Monte Cassino. With the nobility that typifies those people, General Anders’s army then planted the Union flag. I have climbed that hill and seen how difficult it must have been, but my memory is not just of the beautiful and newly restored Benedictine monastery; it is of the graveyard at the foot of Monte Cassino. There is an allied graveyard and a Polish graveyard. Why? There were so many Poles who died that they could not be incorporated into the allied graveyard.

At the base of that graveyard is one grave that stands alone; it is always covered in flowers, either red roses or poppies—poppies, for the poppies in the snow. It is the grave of General Anders, one of the great heroes. Like the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham, I recently had the honour of meeting Senator Anders and to briefly discuss those days. There are three sets of headstones in that graveyard: some with the Orthodox cross; some with the Star of David, because Jewish Poles fought there; and some with the Christian cross.

One of the utter tragedies is that while General Mark Clark was racing towards Rome, where the photographers were waiting for him, General Anders was told by the Supreme Commander of the British forces that there would be no return to Poland. He was told that for all the Poles had done, that was it. Because of the pact with the brutal dictator we have heard about, there would not be a British supported return to Poland. As a human being and a hero, General Anders could have done what many of us would have done; he could have said, “In that case we are going home. We are throwing down our rifles, we are taking off our packs and we are leaving.” Anders did not do that. He said, “We fight on,” and fight on they did. That typifies the strength and determination of the Polish people.

I want to touch on an area that has not been touched on in any detail, and that is the extraordinary contribution of the Polish naval forces. In 1939, the Polish navy was in quite good condition. It was a modern navy, with submarines. It managed to escape from Gdańsk and the seaports in north Poland to Leith, the port of Edinburgh, where the flagship, the Piorun—which is Polish for thunderer—was laid down in the John Brown shipyard as the HMS Narissa. She was renamed and crewed entirely by Poles. These Polish ships, which came under the command of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, made an incredible contribution in theatres of war from Narvik, Dunkirk, the Lofoten Islands and Tobruk, as well as the Murmansk convoys, where the grandfather of my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) sailed with them, to the Normandy landings.

In two particular areas, the Polish navy made an incredible contribution; I beg your indulgence, Mr Pritchard, in allowing me to mention them briefly. The first was the awful night of 13 March 1941, when more than 1,000 people in Glasgow were killed. It was called the Clydebank Blitz. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) who introduced a debate on the Floor of the House about that subject. John Brown’s shipyard and the Singer factory next to it were bombed ruthlessly, and Clydebank and Hardgate, and virtually that whole part of Glasgow, were destroyed. The opposition to the Luftwaffe was led by the Piorun. She was in harbour, undergoing repairs. She had six anti-aircraft guns and some old refitted Bofors guns—what we used to call pom-poms. She fought off the second wave of the Luftwaffe. How many lives she saved I cannot even begin to think. It is extraordinary to think that Piorun was laid down in the very shipyard that she then defended, having sailed from there to Poland and back again. It is almost as if she was born to defend her birthplace, as many a Pole would say.

The second thing is the extraordinary occurrences of May 1941 when the hinge of history was turning. The Germans had massive naval superiority. They had the two best ocean raiders in the world: Bismarck and Tirpitz. They also had the best heavy cruisers: Gneisenau and Scharnhorst. Had they got out into the north Atlantic, our supply routes from Canada and America would have been finished. There would have been no opportunity whatever for us to continue the war at sea. Tirpitz, as we know, was destroyed in the fjords of Norway by the RAF, but Bismarck had earlier that year, in the battle of the Denmark strait, not only destroyed the British taskforce, but sunk the pride of the Royal Navy: the mighty Hood. Many matelots of my father’s generation still say the old “Andrew” died with the Hood. She was the pride of our Navy and Bismarck sunk her and moved on.

In May, Admiral Tovey and taskforce H were sent, under the instructions of Churchill, to the area off the Norway coast to sink the Bismarck. Who was there at the front of that? Not just Rodney and Repulse, but Piorun, the Polish destroyer that steamed ahead as fast as she could, and, it is said, did not even wait for embarkation orders. She left Scotland and headed straight for the battlefield. Then, as we know, Bismarck had her steering gear crippled by a Fairey Swordfish torpedo and was slightly reduced in her manoeuvrability, but she still had powerful weapons: eight 15-inch guns in four turrets. Piorun was one of the ships in that taskforce that on 25 May 1941 received probably the most significant message received in the sea war in the last war, and it came from Bletchley. It came from a Polish interpreter who had managed to break the codes, and it told precisely what the German admiral was doing. Even though Piorun was then straddled at 12,000 metres by a complete bombardment from Bismarck, she carried on. Some say she delivered the coup de grace; some say she was the last torpedo fired into Bismarck.

I will close by saying two things. Betrayal is an ugly word, but I think that in some ways the Poles were betrayed at the end of the war. We compensated with the 1947 legislation, but in some ways we let the Poles down. I would say that the Poles never, ever let us down. It is not for me to make an obvious pro-European pro-EU statement, but is it not wonderful what we can achieve when we fight together in a common cause? If ever I have to fight anyone anywhere at any time, let it be with our brothers and sisters of the free republic of Poland, some of the bravest and most heroic people it has ever been my honour to know.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

We were going to go down to four-minute speeches, but the Minister has kindly given up five minutes of Front-Bench time, so we are back up to five minutes. Can we stick to five minutes, please?

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[Gillian Keegan]

I am glad the hon. Gentleman—

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Order. A couple of people have come in late and I have been flexible and allowed them to intervene, but coming in pretty much halfway through the debate pushes the envelope, so may I remind all hon. Members to please attend from the beginning of the debate? We all run slightly late, but to come in halfway through and expect to speak is, as I say, pushing the envelope, however good the contribution might be.

[Gillian Keegan]

The heroism of the two uprisings by the Polish are the greatest acts of resistance against tyranny that the world has ever seen. It is an enduring stain on the record of the Soviet Union’s wartime history that Stalin ordered his troops encircling Warsaw to do nothing while the Nazis put down the uprising and destroyed much of the city.

It is important to highlight the cruel fact that the majority of the Nazi death camps were built in Poland. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek were all in Poland. Those camps are believed to be where 3 million people were murdered. Over the course of the war, Poland lost 6 million of its citizens, half of whom were Jewish. We remembered them on international Holocaust Memorial Day this year in Speaker’s House, where I was proud that a Chichester choir performed the holocaust opera, “Push”, to Members of both Houses of Parliament.

There can be no doubt whatever that Poland played a huge part in the war effort both in the UK and in resisting at home. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham for securing the debate and I assure him that in Chichester we will never forget the bravery of our Polish friends and allies.