POLANb: Surplus Heroes

POLAND

Surplus Heros

General Wladyslaw Anders, commanding the Polish Army in Italy, flew to London from his headquarters last week. He was turned away from the Savoy by a clerk who had never heard of him, finally found a room elsewhere. Two days later he sat grimly listening to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin explain that the Anders army must be disbanded at once.

Bevin was blunt: the Polish heroes of Cassino and a hundred other battlefields had become a political embarrassment. The Russians were thundering that they constituted a British-sponsored threat to the Moscow-orientated Warsaw Government.

In Parliament Bevin had said, “When men have fought with you or stood by you it is against our religion to let them down.” Now he promised Anders that those of his soldiers who did not want to return to the new Poland could find asylum in the British Empire. Argentina and Brazil were also reported ready to offer them homes. But Britain thought the best solution would be for them to return to Poland, and Britain was circulating an appeal through the Polish Army containing the Polish Government’s pledge to treat the soldier exiles fairly.

Anders argued that he could not advise the soldiers to return to Poland unless the Polish Government promised elections this spring. Bevin, too, wanted immediate Polish elections, but both men knew that the chances were becoming slimmer.

In Poland the split between the Communist-Socialist groups and shrewd Stanislaw Mikolajczyk’s Polish Peasant Party was deepening. Security Police raids on Peasant Party headquarters were reported last week. If efforts to smash the Mikolajczyk forces failed, then the Communist-Socialist groups would fight for a late fall election, when the popularity of the Polish Peasant Party, sure winner of an election now, might have waned.

Nevertheless, Bevin argued that, elections or no, the Poles in Anders’ army should go home. Little by little Anders got the idea. Anders must depend on British transport facilities. If the general did not cooperate, he might find it even harder to rejoin his troops in Italy than to get a hotel room in London.