The Death of General Sikorski by Peter Zablocki (.ePUB)
File Size: 4 MB
The Death of General Sikorski: The Polish Leader’s Last Flight in 1943 and The Tangled Web of Poland, the Allies, and the Soviets by Peter Zablocki
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 4 MB
Overview: The mysterious 1943 plane crash that killed Polish Prime Minister General Władysław Sikorski shifted European alliances, strained Polish-Soviet relations, and led to Poland’s marginalization and Soviet domination until 1990.
The plane crash at the height of the Second World War which claimed the life of the Polish Prime Minister, General Władysław Sikorski, ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the conflict. It was a death that shifted European alliances and loyalties, brought Stalin into the Anglo-American camp, and sealed Poland’s fate for the remainder of the twentieth century.
Poland and the Soviet Union’s historically precarious relationship had taken an even darker turn in September 1939 when the Third Reich’s Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin divided the nation and forced its government to relocate first to France and then to Britain in 1940.
Sikorski’s Polish government-in-exile established a military, political, and personal relationship with Winston Churchill’s government, only to see it fractured by the United States’ entrance into the war and the Western Allies’ courtship of Stalin following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
The Allies overall support of Stalin’s denials following the 1943 discovery of 20,000 bodies of Polish officers murdered and buried by the Soviets in Katyn Forest only made matters worse. Sikorski’s open protests against describing the Soviet dictator as a benevolent ‘Uncle Joe’ made him publicly and privately ‘difficult’ to the new Anglo-American-Soviet coalition.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
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