The legendary fighting formation was formed after Stalin released hundreds of thousands of Polish prisoners of war in 1941 to help fight the Nazis. Men, women, and children fled the USSR under Anders and traveled thousands of miles through the Middle East, Iran, and Italy. Professor Davis is the author of “Trail of Hope”, a book that chronicles this remarkable odyssey to freedom.
Stalin’s original plan had been for the freed Polish forces to fight alongside the Red Army on the Eastern Front, three years before Monte Cassino. Instead, they were transferred to Iran to protect oil fields that were being targeted by the Nazis. A change of plan then saw the British move the army on to Palestine.
“Very large numbers of dependents and children were moved to various parts of the British Empire,” Davies explains. “Anders did a wonderful thing, he gave priority to Polish children in Russia who'd lost their parents, there were thousands of them, orphans wandering around the wastes of Russia, and they were distributed around the world… It was a huge, huge logistical operation.”
The 2nd Corps was then moved to Italy in 1943 under Anders. Despite having served as a young soldier in the Tsarist cavalry, “Anders was a symbol of the pre-war Polish Army, which was multinational,” Davies explains. “It was made up of Polish citizens, not ethnic Poles. He [Anders] was a Polonized Polish German. A lot of the conscripts of 1939 were Ukrainians. A lot of them were Jews. There were about 5,000 Jews in the Anders army. Anders was very clear… It doesn’t matter whether you're a Pole or a Lithuanian or Jewish or Muslim or whatever. We’re all together.”
“And the army was multinational in character,” Davies continues. “It’s Piłsudski's view of old Poland, multinational, equality of all, all that. Very modern in a way, inclusivity.”
Once in Italy, the Poles were given the eastern Adriatic coast to liberate, from where they pushed into central Italy, until they came to Monte Cassino.
“Monte Cassino is a great sort of bluff, a mountain right in the middle of Italy, and ideal for defense,” says Davies. “The Germans were dug in on the top, and it took four months of various allied armies to dislodge the Germans.”
But the Germans came back and occupied the ruins until “the Poles, as it were, were the last major unit that hadn’t been given a try, and they were the last to try and the first to succeed.”
