Stanisław Sosabowski: Freely I served

I’m not one for reading memoirs of military men, but I made an exception for this one. Major-General Stanisław Sosabowski was the founder and commanding officer of the 1^st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade, in which my father served, in the medical company, and took part in the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944. I’ve been doing some family history research, which is quite difficult given his life story, and it was time to fill in a couple of pieces of the jigsaw.

Sosabowski tells his own story: from humble beginnings in Austro-Hungarian Galicia to a military career during the Great War and also in the Polish Second Republic. He took part in the September 1939 campaign against the Nazi invaders and helped in the defence of Warsaw. Almost immediately after the Polish defeat, he became involved in the resistance, which eventually became the Home Army; he was soon sent on a mission to Rumania, and laconically records that, after that departure from Poland, he never saw his homeland again.

It’s things like that which bring home to me the sadness and bitterness of refugees, which we cannot understand from our positions of comfort and security. My father never saw his parents again after he was called up in August 1939, but he was fortunate and adventurous enough eventually to make the journey to the Belorussian SSR and revisit when he was born and grew up.

Sosabowski, because of his involvement with the underground, came via France to the UK; Polish forces at that time were based in Scotland and he had the idea of founding a parachute brigade which would eventually be able to take a lead part in the liberation of Warsaw. One of life’s great bitternesses was that when the call eventually came for help on August 1^st 1944, the British would not allow the Poles to go…

Sosabowski succeeded in building up and training a highly professional organisation, which was not under Allied command but responsible to the Polish Government-in-exile in London; the British Army coveted the brigade and spent much time and effort manoeuvring to get it under its control. Eventually the Polish Government allowed the brigade to be used in the wider European theatre of war, and it saw action in the disastrous and ill-planned Arnhem action. There are detailed accounts of a horrendous battle over several days, and Sosabowski analyses the reasons for the debacle from his point of view: what he says seems to make clear sense to this non-expert reader…

He acknowledges himself that throughout his army career he was rather an awkward customer and always spoke his mind; this did not go down well with the British, especially when he was right! And because the time was one of greater scheming and politicking among the Allied powers, Sosabowski’s dismissal from his command was engineered by the British government and armed forces. One gets the impression of a very shabby episode, with various people scurrying to cover their own backs, in the context of a wider sell-out of the Polish nation, for whom Britain had originally gone to war in the first place. The book was a decent read and I felt rather better informed about times my father chose not to speak of.