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The story of Anders’ Army is one of the most dramatic (and in some ways tragic) to emerge from the Second World War. In 1939 the Soviet Union invaded Poland as an ally of Nazi Germany, occupied the east of the country, and sent any captured Polish soldiers into brutal POW camps. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union the Poles were suddenly a useful source of manpower and were quickly formed into potential new military units. However it soon became clear that the Soviets were either unwilling or unable to equip and train these units, and the Poles ended up living in desperate conditions in remote parts of the Soviet Union, slowly falling into a worse and worse condition. Eventually the Poles and British were able to convince the Soviets to transfer this army to British control, and move it to Persia. From there they slowly moved across the British controlled sections of the Middle East, and were formed into well equipped and well training fighting units. After plenty of debate about how to use them, they moved to Italy, where they became a vital part of the Eighth Army, most famously capturing the ruins of the Abbey of Monte Casino.
A main strength of this book are the sections on the political debates within the exiled Polish army. The basic divide was between those who wanted to create a large autonomous army which would be kept as intact as possible in order to form the basis of a post-war Polish army, and those who wanted to get into action against the Germans as soon as possible and were willing to go along with British wishes about the organisation and size of their army. In the end basic practicalties meant that the second group won out, mainly because the Poles were reliant on the British for most of their supplies and military equipment.
Unsurprisingly the Soviets emerge rather badly from this story. At the start they were allies of Nazi Germany, sharing in the dismemberment of Poland. Those Poles who fell into Soviet hands were either murdered or taken to brutal POW camps. Men like General Anders were lucky to survive this phase of the war. After the German invasion and their release and formation into military units the treatment didn’t really improve, and the conditions in their new military camps were shocking. When the Soviets finally agreed to let the Poles move into British controlled territory they made the process as awkward as possible, and the move can only be described as an escape. Once these Poles were out of the Soviet Union the supply of reinforcements was cut off, partly by the formation of Soviet controlled but Polish manned units within the Red Army, and partly because the Soviets announced that any inhabitant of the eastern parts of Poland they had invaded in 1939 were now Soviet citizens (shades of the current situation in the Ukraine here). The dreadful treatment of the Poles went on to create a political problem for the western Allies, who were very wary of doing anything that might offend Stalin and perhaps drive in the worst case scenario drive him towards a peace treaty with Hitler. Unsurprisingly Anders’ Poles automatically (and correctly) believed the German version of the Katyn massacre, and condemned the Soviets. Rather naively the Western Allies then blamed the Poles for the Soviet Union’s increased hostility to them, but this was always going to be the Soviet plan.
There is also good coverage of the debate about how to organise the Polish forces in the Middle East – should they be an army, a corps or a series of divisions to be used wherever the Allies wanted them? Once this had been sorted out, the Poles began to move to Italy, and we get an excellent account of their introduction to combat, building up to the climax of the book – the attack on the Gustav Line and Monte Cassino, breaking the Adolf Hitler Line and the fall of Rome. This takes up six chapters, so over one third of the book. We get a good idea of just how brutal the fighting was in the mountains around Monte Cassino, and how the deadlock was finally broken.
This is an excellent study of one of the most unusual major formations on the Allied side, with good sections on the struggles of its formation, the escape from the Soviet Union and its most famous battlefield experiences in Italy.
Chapters
1 - The First Blitzkreig
2 - A Polish Army in the USSR
3 - Exodus to the Middle East
4 - Along British Lines
5 - A Year of Challenge
6 - Ready to Fight
7 - The Move to Italy
8 - Mountain Warfare and the Defence of the Sangro River
9 - The Monastic Fortress
10 - Preparations for Battle
11 - Assault on the Gustav Line
12 - A Brief Respite
13 - Victory at Monte Cassino
14 - Breaking the Adolf Hitler Line
15 - The Aftermath
Author: Martin Williams
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 276
Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
Year: 2017