VE Day and the Poles: time for an apology
Katyn memorial in Gunnersbury Cemetery
The VE celebrations this week are not the 80th anniversary of the march-pasts and Buckingham Palace balcony salutes. They took place a year later: in 1946, not 1945. In May 1945, British soldiers were still thousands of miles from hearth and home — utterly exhausted, as was the entire nation. The fear of being killed was over — in Europe, at least. But the question of whether Britain would return to the politics, economics and foreign policy of 1939 remained to be answered.
This was also a moment of shame for the British establishment. The Conservative-dominated National Government, having handed part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938, went to war, nominally to defend Poland. But when Poland was invaded in September 1939 by two massive armies — the Germans from the West, the Soviet Union from the East — the British were in no position to help. Despite fighting against overwhelming odds against two superpowers, the Polish Army held out longer than the French and British armies did against the Germans in the summer of 1940.
In 1940 the Russians went on to murder some 22,000 Poles: army officers — who had surrendered, expecting to be treated as prisoners of war — police officers and government officials, lawyers and professors. They were buried in Katyn, near Smolensk in Russia. The crime was discovered when Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The Red Cross were invited from Switzerland to examine the bodies: each was killed in cold blood with a bullet in the back of the head.
Around 28,000 Polish soldiers and airmen made their way to Britain after their nation’s occupation. They distinguished themselves throughout the war: as pilots in the Battle of Britain, as troops fighting under Montgomery in North Africa, at Monte Cassino, in Normandy and at Arnhem.
When the war ended they looked to return home and create a democratic Polish state. It was not to be. To its eternal shame, the post-war Labour government licked the boots of the Soviet government and refused to acknowledge any of the history of invasion, occupation and mass murder.
The giant VE parades of 1946 had troops from every imperial nation and colony, troops from every country that had landed in Normandy or fought in Europe, Africa or Asia.
With one exception. No Polish soldier, airman or sailor was permitted to put on their medals and march with comrades in arms they had fought with to defeat tyranny.
Worse: the Labour Government was embarrassed by the Poles in Britain. British women who married Polish soldiers and returned to Poland were made to renounce their citizenship. Polish soldiers, who were conscripted to work in British mines to dig coal for export, were snubbed by the communist-influenced National Union of Miners. The NUM refused to let members work on the same shift as Poles and would not let the Poles use their working men’s clubs.
The Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin wrote on Foreign Office blue notepaper in Polish to every Polish soldier, urging him to return home and live under the new communist dictatorship. Needless to say, his letter was ignored.
The English establishment seems to have had a permanent psychological problem with Poland. Polish veterans sought to get a memorial built to their comrades murdered by the Russians in 1940. Ground was found in Kensington which was popular with Polish exiles. But the Anglican church opposed the erection of a monument.
Finally ground was found in west London in the Gunnersbury Park cemetery. 8,000 Polish veterans attended the opening ceremony of the Katyn memorial in July 1976. But the then Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, threatened to cashier any British officer, even those whose fathers who fought for Britain in 1940-45, who attended the ceremony.
During the Blair government, as Labour’s Minister of Europe I sought to make a small amends by laying a wreath at the Katyn monument. I asked the Foreign Office historical department to write an account of Katyn and the failure of all British governments since 1945 to acknowledge the truth of the Soviet Union’s worst war crime.
Poland will be present at the VE commemoration this month. Since the end of communism Poland has been a star performer in Europe. Economists reckon Poland’s GDP per capita has overtaken that of Japan and if Brexit Britain continues on its current trajectory of low or no economic growth, before long Poland will be richer as a nation than the UK.
The behaviour of the Attlee government is still a long-remembered hurt in Poland and amongst the 700,000 British citizens of Polish descent. In the run-up to Brexit Nigel Farage and tabloid editors promoting cutting links with Europe described Poles working in Britain as unwelcome and responsible for various crimes.
It would be no bad thing if Sir Keir Starmer could make amends by apologising in the Commons for the anti-Polish line of his predecessors, Clement Attlee and James Callaghan. He should make clear that Britain is a friend and ally of Poland even if Britain has turned its back on the EU.
Denis MacShane was Minister for Europe under Tony Blair. He wrote the first book on Polish Solidarity in English and was imprisoned briefly by the Polish communist authorities in 1982 when caught running money to the underground Solidarity opposition.
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