| On a June day, Churchill had risen to declare: 'The battle of France is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender." The courage and character that Churchill pledged for Britain had already been demonstrated by Poland. It was the first country to experience the terror of the Nazi Blitzkrieg, the first to fight back, the first to say - and mean - "We shall never surrender". Poland fell in October 1939, but its government and military refused then, and refused for the rest of the war, to capitulate. In a remarkable odyssey, scores of thousands of Polish pilots, soldiers, and sailors escaped Poland - some on foot; some in cars, trucks, and buses; some in airplanes; some in ships and submarines. They made their various ways first to France, thence to Britain to continue the fight. For the first full year of the war, Poland, whose government-in-exile operated from London, was Britain's most important declared ally. Polish pilots were ferocious fighters. With their homeland in enemy hands and news of Nazi and Soviet atrocities in the occupied Poland reaching them on almost daily basis, unsure of the fate of their close ones, they took their hate into the air with them. The English girls loved the Poles, the newspapers raved about their exploits, and King George VI visited them at their ... |
