Abstract
A memory of the so-called Anders’ Army is a prominent part of the Polish national historical narrative. The Army was established in late 1941 in the Soviet Union. Most of its soldiers were pre-war Polish citizens sent by the Soviets to the GULAG and forced settlements in remote parts of the USSR between 1939 and 1941, when the Soviet Union occupied the eastern half of Poland. After the Nazi aggression against the USSR, Moscow joined the anti-German coalition and the British pressed the Polish Government-in-Exile to sign an agreement with the USSR. As a result, the deported and imprisoned Poles were ‘amnestied’ and allowed to join a newly established Polish army, which – commanded by General Władysław Anders – was supposed to fight together with the Red Amy against the Germans. Yet, due to the hostile Soviet policies, mutual Polish–Soviet mistrust, and as a result of a Soviet–British–Polish agreement, the Army was evacuated from the Soviet Union. Through Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt, it arrived in Europe, and participated in the Italian Campaign, including the famous battle of Monte Cassino. As Norman Davies put it in the subtitle of his great book Trail of Hope, the history of the Anders’ Army involved ‘1334 days, 120,000 people, 12,500 kilometers’.
Not surprisingly, the events of such dimensions and importance were described in hundreds of memoirs and thousands of popular and scholarly works. The book under review is the most recent addition to this literature, albeit rather unfortunate. Surprisingly, this is not really a book about the Anders Army. It gives only limited information on this topic that could fill no more than 10 pages. Instead, the author writes about rumours, behind-the-scene intrigues, quarrels, and personal animosities between the Army’s officers and Polish and British politicians. A reviewer of the previous McGilvray’s book on General Maczek and his First Polish Armoured Division, Michael Alfred Peszke, writes that the book ‘veers off into a very unsophisticated and ill-informed discourse on the Polish officer corps in Exile’ (The Polish Review, vol. 54, no. 1, 2009, 115). This also applies to the book under review.
The author butchers Polish and Russian personal and geographical names. Some of them are unrecognizable. General Bołtuć is ‘Bołtc’ (p. 16); Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski is frequently ‘Karasiewicz-Tokarzewski’ (p. 90) or even ‘Tokarczewski-Karaszewicz’ (p. 94). Some geographic names are strange combinations of its Polish and English versions, like ‘Brest-nad-Bug’ (p. 19).
The author appears to have poor knowledge of Polish history. It is not true, for example, that in November 1918, Piłsudski ‘had been sneaked into Warsaw by the German government’ (p. 50); that interwar Poland was ruled by the Polish military (p. 14), and that ‘a significant number of Polish officers [in the Anders’ Army] considered that Poland could only be restored with assistance from Germany’ (p. 95). The author seems unaware of extensive debate on Poland’s strategy in September 1939, and opens some already opened doors by criticizing a plan to defend ‘every square inch of Polish territory’ (p. 19). He also does not understand the difference between intellectuals and intelligentsia (p. 31). In several places, the author claims that Sikorski and his government in London were not aware of the horrors in Soviet-occupied Poland and ‘made no effort to try to understand’ them (pp. 31, 43). Furthermore, McGilvray argues that Sikorski was easily outfoxed by Anders at every turn (p. 54). Indeed, throughout the book, Sikorski and Piłsudski are presented as unimpressive mediocrities with no real political influence!
A part of the book is devoted to military operations. Their descriptions are difficult to follow since there is only one map in the entire book. There are also numerous factual errors in the text. For example, the author claims incorrectly that in late 1918 and early 1919 Poland did not have ‘a formal army’ (p. 5), and that a majority of Polish officers had come from the Austrian Army (p. 7). McGilvray avoids difficult topics. He ignores the sensitive Jewish issue and, in his text, the Army virtually jumps from Iran to Italy. The work under review is based on a modest selection of books and articles. The author did consult some collections of the British National Archives and the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, but he neglected Polish archival sources and used mostly outdated published sources. To quote Peszke again, McGilvray’s ‘bibliography on this subject does not come close to addressing the subject’.
It is difficult to imagine who is the intended reader of the reviewed book and what is its genre: a scholarly monograph? Certainly not. It is much closer to sensationalist journalism.