Trail of Hope: The Anders Army, An Odyssey Across Three Continents
By Dr. Norman Davies
In the year 410 BC, 10,000 Greek mercenaries were trapped in Persia. They marched and fought their way back to Greece from deep inside a hostile empire. The book “The Anabasis” remains a classic of history and military literature for it's examples of courage, determination, and loyalty. It is not surprising I think that the greatest and most epic war in human history would produce a mass movement of armed men and their dependents on an even larger scale and for larger stakes. Let's talk about our writer first.
Dr. Davies was born on the 8th of June 1939 in Bolton Lancashire, in the United Kingdom. He would study in France in 1957 and 1958 before returning to England and earning a BA in history from Oxford in 1962. He would attain a Masters Degree from the University of Sussex in 1967. He attempted to attend university in the Soviet Union to earn his PhD but was denied an entry Visa
(Which boggles my mind. “Hi, we’re the USSR. We don’t want a western academic to come and study our history from our perspective/to be propagandized and readily turned into an agent by us” makes little sense. I suppose they were worried he was already a spy?), so instead went to communist Poland. There he researched the Polish-Soviet war; a difficult undertaking given that the stance of the government at the time was that it had never happened, because talking about the time Poles successfully resisted Soviet invasion would have been a tad inconvenient for a Soviet client state. Because of this he entitled his dissertation “British Foreign Policy towards Poland 1919-1920.” Once he had his PhD in his hands, he rushed back to the United Kingdom and published the English translation as “White Eagle, Red Star” a history of the Polish-Soviet War. He than taught Polish history at the University College in London as well as serving as a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.
His career isn't without controversy. In 1986 he was denied tenure at Stanford in a 12 to 11 vote. Dr. Davies sued, claiming that his politics played a role in the vote and while there does appear to be something to that, the lawsuit was dismissed. It was found that the politics in question were relevant to the position and classes in question. His opponents at the time accused him of being insensitive to the suffering of the Jewish people and unacceptably defensive of Poles. Part of that was his focus on the suffering of non-Jewish Poles in the holocaust and some of it seems to be his willingness to point out Soviet crimes against the Poles but let's turn to the book.
In September 1st, 1939 Nazi Germany invaded the Republic of Poland, kicking off the European Theater of WWII. What is often not really covered however is the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17th
(Bit inconvenient, as we would become allies of the USSR and bargain away Poland despite the Polish Home Army and doing a pretty good job resisting the Nazis and despite Polish pilots in exile helping defend Great Britain… Best to just ignore the whole mess of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.). This action rendered Poland indefensible as it was now fighting a two front war against two powers with vastly greater industrial strength and manpower (a situation that the Nazis would come to know intimately in the future, suggesting that karma sometimes does occur) and the Polish government ordered all troops in the field to attempt to escape to Romania if at all possible. Most of the army wouldn't make it. The Nazi marched into western Poland and proceeded to inflict their vile ideology on the people there, as we saw in Maus. The Soviets were no less determined to destroy the native culture of their slice of Poland and wipe out entire classes of people, although where the Nazis used racist pseudoscience, the Soviets would use Stalinist pseudo-sociology. Out of the 15 million Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians and others living in the 77,612 square miles that the Soviets annexed somewhere between 1 to 2 million of them would be deported. Additionally all Churches and Synagogues were closed, all Polish organizations disbanded, all privately held land was seized and schools and universities were forced to teach Russian mandated education. The laws of the democratically elected Polish government were declared null and void. These people were not fans of Russia or of communism, their experiences coming from a combination of having been invaded by the USSR in 1919 and living under the yoke of the Russian Empire. The USSR was determined to bring them to heel however. The Soviets focused on 5 groups: The first group were “illegal immigrants” made up pretty much of people fleeing the Nazis (many of them Jews). The second were Polish soldiers, officers were especially targeted with 22,000 of them disappearing permanently. The third group were the “social criminals” these were learned or well connected people could form the basis of resistance, this meant all civil servants (police, firefighters, teachers, etc), native politicians (including local communists), railwaymen, groundskeepers, professional hunters, engineers, architects, landowners. managers, business owners, linguists, and former aristocrats (the Polish Republic had abolished nobility.). The fourth group were the family and close friends of any of the above, women, small children, the elderly, etc. Families often found themselves broken up, with children split off from their parents with neither of them likely to see each other again. I imagine this may sound strangely topical to some of my readers. While I prefer to just review the damn books here, I feel given the current events in the Year of our Lord 2018, I am forced to comment. It is a terrible thing to split apart a family, children should be taken away from their parents if they are being abused or neglected by those parents. To tear them apart as a punishment is a vile act and to try to justify this with half a Bible verse is a show of amoral mania that renders one unfit for office in a free nation. My editor is an atheist but I am a Christian and the child of two pastors
(And yet, I know the Bible better than Jeff Sessions…And several other holy books.). I am not only unimpressed but would remind you that if your actions echo those of a militant totalitarian power that it may be time to ask yourself just what the hell you think you're doing. I apologize for this unpleasant divergence and we'll return to the book now. The last category of people ripped from their homes were... Random victims. The NKVD officers conducting this were given a quota and in true Soviet fashion, shoddy out of date records with which to find their victims. Knowing that the penalty for failure would be to take the place of the Poles they were hunting the NKVD would at times simply grab anyone who was nearby and take them away.
Each of these five groups were subjected to show trails, where they were not informed of the charges and allowed no defense. The punishment was always the same. Exile to the remote reaches of the Soviet Union. This was not the first or the last group that the Soviet Union did this to; Stalin specifically was fond of taking troublesome groups and flinging them thousands of miles from their homes into extreme and underdeveloped regions as if he was some modern day Assyrian Emperor. Thousands of Poles would die on route as they were barely fed and transported in box cars with standing room only
(Common motif in WW2). Thousands more Poles would be worked to death in camps in Central Asia, or near the Arctic or on the western edge of Siberia. The fate of the exiles seemed grim, but everything changed when the Nazis attacked. Stalin opened communications with the western allies, among them the Polish Government in Exile,and a deal was worked out. The Polish prisoners would be released in an “Amnesty” in exchange a Polish army under Polish Officers but Russian central command would be raised from among the prisoners to fight the Nazis. General Wladyslaw Anders, currently rotting in a NKVD prison cell was chosen to lead the army, one moment he was wondering when his execution was going to occur and the next the NKVD had pulled him out of a cell, given him a hot shower and clean clothes, a hot meal and asked if he would like to be a Polish General again. Let's meet our army commander.
General Wladyslaw Anders was born in 1892 to polinized Germans. This was when Poland was still divided under the rule of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires. When he was a teen he was recruited by Russian General impressed with the skilled horsemanship and courage he showed in controlling a pair of bolting horses. He would serve in the Tsar's armies in the first World War and resign to join the Polish Army when Poland declared independence. He fought with some distinction in the Polish-Soviet War and sided with the Republican government during the coup of 1926. His division was fighting the Nazis and was working to evade them and escape into Romania when captured by the Soviets. His battles were honestly just beginning as the process of recruiting and mustering an army from the Polish captives of the USSR would prove to a campaign in and of itself.
The Soviet Union was under massive assault at this point, with Leningrad under siege and powerful Nazi armies pushing deeper and deeper into Russia. Combined with the sheer indifference that the Soviets had for the Polish prisoners meant that little provision was made for transporting and caring for the people who at this point had suffered roughly 2 years of hard labor and near starvation. Many Poles found themselves once again riding boxcars with standing room only. Others, when they heard of the amnesty, were literally thrown out of their labor camps on the tundra and told to get walking. NKVD officials at every step looked for every way to stop or slow those heading to join the army. Walk they did though, a torrent of humanity over a hundred thousand strong heading towards the mustering point in central asia. Even for those who reached the recruitment center, the troubles weren't over. The NKVD, the internal security force of the Soviet Union which served as counter intelligence, secret police, and public law enforcement rolled up in one, was intent on enforcing the idea of Soviet sovereignty over the Polish areas they had conquered. One tactic they adopted was trying to restrict who the Polish Army could recruit. Declaring that only ethnic Poles were allowed and others, such as Jews, Ukrainians and Belarusians were forbidden. The Jewish declaration became a heavy point of contention as NKVD officers would often claim to Jewish men and women that it was a declaration that came from the Polish high command not the Soviet Union. Despite that 5000 Jewish soldiers were enrolled and 5 rabbis recruited, that said accusations of antisemitism would dog the Polish Army for the rest of it days and the officers of that army til they died. There likely were, if we're going to be honest, a good number of anti-Semites in the army, Poland was frankly full of anti-Jewish bigots after all, as well as having people who were sympathetic to the Jewish people. Some Jewish troops did report ill treatment, while others reported not being treated any differently than any other soldier. So it wouldn't shock me if there were officers who were more happy than others to comply with the order and others who rejected it entirely. In the end when the Army reached Palestine many of the Jewish troops would desert (2/3rds out of the 5000) some went to join British units, others joined the active Zionist paramilitary groups that were mustering in expectation of having to fight either the Arabs or possibly the Nazis if things went really badly. General Anders to his credit held his ground and demanded that the right of enlisted be given to all people who were Polish citizens in 1939 and did so to Stalin's face. Additionally he gave the order that Jewish deserters were to be allowed to go their way in peace, reasoning that if they felt the cause of a Jewish homeland strong enough, or were convinced that they couldn't get fair treatment in the army, it would be better to part on as friendly terms as possible. As if this wasn't enough the army was often starved of supplies because even supplies donated strictly for the Poles use were often stolen by Russians. The revelation that thousands of Polish officers had been murdered by the Russians in Katyn forest was the breaking point making it impossible for the Poles to fight under Russian command. Instead the Polish Army was re-dubbed Polish II Corps and sent to Iran to fight under British command where they would see action in the Italy campaign.
The escape to Iran and movement through the middle east was challenging but widely celebrated, because for the Poles this was considered nothing less than an escape from bondage. The civilian dependents (along with thousands of orphans and Polish civilians who walked from the arctic to Iran to escape the Soviet Union) would be scattered to refuges in Africa, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and India. The troops would move from Iran, to Iraq, Palestine, Egypt and finally Italy. Where they fought in the battle of Monte Cassino leading the Fourth and final assault on the abbey that after having been reduced to rubble by an American bombing run, was fortified by the Germans and anchored the defense of Rome. Three times the allies had attacked and been driven off with heavy casualties for light German loses. The Polish II Corps would fight through heavy German artillery bombardment and take the abbey and the mountain it rested on, raising the Polish flag on May 17th of 1944. They would go on to carry out a number of offensives in Northern Italy gaining high praise from Allied command. However in 1945 with the announcement of Poland becoming part of the Soviet sphere. An act many of them felt was a betrayal by the Western Allies who accepted the Soviet announcement and even spread Soviet propaganda that the Polish Army was a band of secret fascist trouble makers looking to undermine the peaceful and freedom loving Soviet Union (
That’s because it was a betrayal{Perhaps but what we were going to do, fight our way through 13 million angry Russians when Europe was already a ruin?}
). Most of the members of the army would never get to go home; they would spend the rest of their days in exile in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Others would come to the United States or other nations to build new lives but always knowing that their homeland was under foreign rule and occupation because the Polish People's Republic was a puppet state of the Soviet Union. While the Polish People's Republic would invite the enlisted soldiers back, very few took up the invite. Of the ones that did, many were arrested, given a show trial and declared traitors to the Polish people and jailed or killed. General Anders himself would die in 1970 stripped of his Polish citizenship and rank, a member of the Polish government in exile. He never saw Poland freed of Soviet influence and was buried in Italy, among the dead Polish troops of the battle of Monte Cassino.
Trail of Hope is a massive book at almost 600 pages. Dr. Davies uses a combination of first hand accounts from interviews of the survivors, as well as their children and grandchildren. He also used dairies, journals, as well as official and unofficial army documents dating from the time. He does seem to avoid using Soviet sources and while he never directly addresses that, he gives the impression that he considers them untrustworthy. Frankly I don't think he's wrong
(Depends on which ones. The inaccuracies are often more in what’s missing than what’s in the official documents. Also narrative. But if you want to know how many people died in a given Gulag in a given year, you’re probably fine…). The book is also filled with a large number of photos taken by members of the army and others showing the troops, children, and others in a variety of day to day settings. Additionally he scouted out the trail that the army and many of its followers marched. Going into modern day Russia, Iran, through the middle east and into Italy. There he hunted down and spoke to natives who interacted with the Polish army, or found the children of Polish civilians who intermarried and stayed behind. Dr. Davies focuses more on the movement of the army to Italy and doesn't really cover the battle of Monte Cassino in depth, feeling there are plenty of other histories that do so. There are stories of heartbreak, such as the Polish orphans sent to New Zealand, many of whom would stay there because they dared not trust the Soviet Union, who to them was the entity that devoured their entire families with no trace. Even today their grandchildren and great grandchildren live as citizens of New Zealand and remember. There are humorous stories such as the story of Wojtek, the soldier bear taught to carry artillery shells and brought from Iran to Italy as a mascot. Wojtek ended his days comfortably in the Edinburgh zoo, visited by his fellow veterans
(Best Bear Ever. He loved cigarettes. Not smoking them of course, but eating them). He even has a beer named after him. I tried to find some in Phoenix but I am sad to say it doesn't seem to be sold in the Western United States. There are romances, as General Anders met his second wife who traveled with the army as part of the entertainment division. They married after the war and remained married until his death. This is, in the west at least, a long forgotten part of World War II that deserves to be remembered. It's a stunning logistical achievement and a testament to the determination and courage that normal people can display in abnormal times.
Trail of Hope: The Anders Army, An Odyssey Across Three Continents By Dr. Norman Davies gets an A from me. Give it a look.
So this was a long review but thanks for sticking it out with me! Next week we'll be covering Black wings which talks about Black pilots in the US. Afterwards we'll cover 1776, and we'll be covering an independent author book Shadow of an Empire with the last two weeks in July being given over to Watership Down (the book) and the French Canadian cartoon that was created afterwards, as this was requested by a pair of readers of this review.
Keep Reading!
This review edited by Dr. Ben Allen.
