Allied Wartime Diplomacy

Originally published in 1959, this volume is a symposium from Official Government documents, Mikolajczyk''s private files and other Polish sources is an indictment of Soviet policy towards Poland and of the Western Allies'' leniency towards Stalin.-Print ed. "This study of one of the most important and most neglected aspects of American foreign policy leading up to the concluding phases of the war and the peace settlements might have been called, in a spirit of bitterness, "The Betrayal of Poland."...It is a prime piece of documentation and analysis for all who would probe the brutal reality of Soviet policy, neither a riddle nor an enigma to those with eyes to see. The story it tells is, of course, written to show the London Polish government's efforts to win and keep Polish freedom. Taken largely from the indicated Polish sources, set in their proper context, this work sketches the historical background and traces Soviet policy with great insight. But these sources...make available in a form not previously accessible to the student and scholar the twisting and turning of both British and American policy. This policy, taken up at the crucial points of 1939 and 1944 especially, was confronted by the dilemma of how to honor the British commitments to Poland without laying down a direct challenge to the declared intentions of the Soviet Union. These commitments included not only those given at the outbreak of the war in 1939 but the assurances given at the time of the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union in 1941 that Britain would not recognize "any territorial changes which have been effected in Poland since Aug., 1939." The puppet "Lublin government" of handpicked and Communist-controlled figures was intended, as the Moscow broadcasts flatly declared, to assure that "the London clique will be wiped out." By being forced into a coalition with the Lublin government, the London government-in-exile was indeed wiped out, and Mikolajczyk barely escaped with his life."