The Nazis invaded Poland without any formal declaration of war, at dawn of 1 September 1939, starting with bombardment of WWW: Wielun, Westerplatte, Warsaw. Two days later, United Kingdom entered the war against Germany, followed by France and along with India, Australia and New Zealand. Argentina appeared to be 53rd having declared war on the Axis on 27 March 1945.

Encyclopedia of World War Two: A Political, Social and Military History, edited in California in 2005, comprises five volumes. American General Dr David T. Zabecki stated that in 1939 “the Polish armored force was bigger that that of the contemporary US Army”. Poland suffered staggering losses during German invasion in 1939. However, the enemy experienced some 50,000 casualties, had lost a quarter of tanks and one fifth of combat aircraft committed to the campaign.

Nazis sustained less losses from the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, although they had nine more months for preparation and had equal to Germany power on ground and in air force, enjoying superiority in tanks and, particularly, at sea. “The Poles fought Germans longer than anyone else” and were present on all fronts.

Ironically, the history of Poland still needs to be rediscovered and retold - more than sixty years after the end of military operations. The stumbling block for this was Joseph Stalin whose ‘political correctness’ dominated for many decades in East and West, including Australia. In 2004 was published in New York a book ‘A Question of Honor’ by Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud, about heroic Polish fighter pilots who helped winning the 1940-41 Battle of Britain, exemplarily:

Zdzislaw Krasnodebski, Miroslaw Feric, Witold £okuciewski, Jan Zumbach and Witold Urbanowicz. In mid 2006, the President of Poland Lech Kaczyñski has awarded prestigious distinctions to airmen of Allied missions from Italy with supplies to Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The scenario of the destroyed capital of Poland had something in common with the 2001 drama of the World Trade Centre in New York, in a multiplied dimension.

In August 2006, during the History Summit in Canberra, The Prime Minister called for “a renaissance of both interest in and understanding of Australian history” in schools, as an essential component of a drive to national identity.

Already ten years ago, Sean Brawley authored a paper A Comfortable and Relaxed Past: John Howard and the ’Battle of History’. If so, the contents of history of Poland has been taken hostage, long time ago, by financially powerful network of international, ’pseudo-intellectual terrorists’.

In ‘The Australian’ of 18 August 2006 there was published a letter to the editor from Harbord’s Anita Nicole: “…it’s not facts that are the problem but their interpretation”. In another letter to the editor, it was claimed that history can be selectively quoted to suit a particular agenda, and can be twisted by those who attempt to rewrite it to suit their own purpose. A remedy suggested by Anita Nicole is to interrogate history from left, right and otherwise, so as to “ensure that students gain a balanced perspective”. Arguably, the Socratic/Harvardian method seems to be most appropriate to serve the purpose, thus, enhancing politology.

John Howard wants the Australian history to be taught within a broader spectrum of world history. This would be compatible with experience of the German ‘flying doctor’ Matthias who lives in Port Hedland, WA with his Aboriginal wife Katherine and two children, as it was presented, in the mid September 2006, on the TV program ‘Neighbours’. In broader terms, though, a cautious approach is needed in this country where some two hundred languages are spoken.

Gallipoli or Kosovo mean something else not only to different ethnic groups but also to different generations. Restaurants Ghengis Khan commemorate the Mediaeval Mongolian emperor, whilst Russian travel agents depict him in their brochures as a barbaric warlord who savaged Matushka Rossija.

Let’s focus on Poland. Although Grunwald does not sound Polish at all, this is the official connotation for geographic location of the victorious 1410 battle of Polish King Wladyslaw Jagiello over better armoured Theutonic Knights. For descendants of Lithuanian allies the site has been identified as Zagiris, while those from across the frontline call it Tannenberg. Students in Germany are further confused because their history books refer to Tannenberg also as a place where Hindenburg’s troops took an upper hand in 1914 on more numerous Russians.

There was a good reason for Poland having been called, in the past, a bulwark of Christianity. A strategy of ‘preemptive strike’ against militant Muslims brought the Polish King Wladyslaw in 1444 as far as to Varna what is nowadays Bulgaria. In 1683, Jan Sobieski led a ‘coalition of the willing’ along with Germans, against the Ottoman onslaught. The Polish king was fluent in Turkish. Should a lesson be derived from the past, a tutor in Arabic would be welcome to the White House as a prerequisite for invasion on Iraq.

Polish leader, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski persuaded his allies, Britain and France to stage up a ‘preemptive strike’ against Adolf Hitler immediately upon him having seized power in 1933. Authors of the above mentioned book A Question of Honor’ were disgusted with the Anglo-American performance to the point that they entitled the second part of their study: Betrayal, echoed by Anita J. Prazmowska in the book Britain and Poland 1939-1943: The Betrayed Ally (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The US Secretary of State Cordell Hull was quoted as having referred to questions over Eastern Europe as “these piddling little things”. G. F. Hudson stated that for Roosevelt and Churchill, Poland’s sovereignty was nothing more than “a diplomatic trading asset”. Another Oxford historian, Norman Davies, author of the book Europe: A History (Oxford University Press, 1996), would agree. Consequently, Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud lamented: “Poland, the first ally, the country that had fought so hard against Nazi aggression, was to be treated like a defeated enemy, losing much of its territory and being forced to accept an imposed government.”

Paradoxically, Poland was instrumental in the state formation process of Lithuania, Israel, Ukraine and even Russia. However, neither of those countries would volunteer to acknowledge its relevance in their mindset. Even worse, there were largely Poland’s enemies who wrote her history after the war.

In the highly acclaimed book 2194 Days of War, as compiled in 1977 by Cesare Salmaggi and Alfredo Palavisini, there was repeated the Goebbelsian stereotype about the alleged destroying of most of the Polish aircraft on the ground and Polish cavalry having charged German armoured divisions. Both misstatements have been strongly criticised by General Dr David T. Zabecki.

History teaches us where we have been and teaches us to learn from our mistakes, whilst no emperor, president or prime minister can feel exempt from those rigidities. A prevailing leniency towards vagaries of the media and other institutional perpetrators would backfire by the young generation becoming sceptical about public statements whatsoever. This would, inevitably, diminish significance of Australian values and undermine the community harmony.

Hardly can be achieved any meaningful progress in those domains, unless we wholeheartedly support the petition of Senator Gary Humphries to the Australian Senate asking: “That slanderous, defamatory and offensive statements, oral or in writing, made about a community or a Nation or its Armed Forces, which are untrue and unsubstantiated are unacceptable, offensive and must not be made”.

dr Waldemar Niemotko