the text - Corvinus Library - Hungarian History

Belgium, France and America to join his forces.
By the spring of 1940, he had an army of 75,000 men stationed
in France, England, and the Middle East. When France was overrun
by the Germans, units of the Polish army fought alongside the
French troops. About 10,000 Poles were caught in France where
they reinforced the resistance movement.
On August 5, 1940, the Sikorski government signed a new pact
with England which regulated the presence of the Polish troops in
England. On August 22, 1940 they came under the High Command
of the British Commonwealth of natins and fought, as allies, in the
battles of the near- and middle-East, particularly in Syria, Iraq,
Egypt, Lybia and Tunisia. They participated in the Sicilian and
south-Italian landings, the invasion of Normandy, the liberation of
France, and all the actions in Germany.
Of course the Polish government-in-exile did not give up on, or
remain neutral to the fate of, close to 200,000 Polish soldiers who
became prisoners of the Soviets on September 17, 1939. Right from
the beginning, the Soviet government did not recognize the Sikorski
government and showed marked hostility towards it. After the
outbreak of he German-Soviet war, on July 30, 1941 the Soviet-
Polish pact was signed in London. As a consequence, on August
14, 1941 an agreement was reached on the organization of the
Polish army on Soviet territory. Already at the time of the pact, the
question of the Polish officers' corps and its whereabouts was
raised but was never openly answered; their fate was kept a deep
secret.*22 Because of the tight situation the Soviet Union found
herself in, Stalin and Sikorski signed a new pact of cooperation on
December 4, 1941 in Moscow. This brought real cooperation about
and the organization of the Polish army could begin. But this
resulted in some more conflict: the Soviets at first, refused to accept
general Wladyslaw Anders *23 as Commander-in-Chief and
wanted the Polish military forces of about 100,000 men under their
own command. This jeopardized the decision-making powers of the
Polish high command. It was feared that, because of the poor
equipment of the Polish army, it will just be used as a shield and left
to bleed to death and will be fully subservient to the Soviet
command. General Anders flew to London and it is only due to the
severe pressure applied by the Allies that the spring of 1942 saw the
deployment in Iraq of the Polish army when 120,000 men left the
Soviet Union. They were then present at the great battles of the
middle-East, the landing in Italy. They also figured in the plans of
the projected landing in the Balkans.
Local resistance was reorganized in September 1939 when
general Michal Kraszewicz-Tokarzewski tried to concentrate the
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