Polish 'liberator of Holland andFrance' launches famous siege of Falaise 73 yrs ago
On August 8, 73 years ago, the First Polish Armoured Division under the command of General Stanislaw Maczek,as part of the Allied invasion of Normandy, launched an attack on Falaise to circle German troops positioned there.
General Bernard Law Montgomery, commander-in-chief of the 21st British Army Group taking part in the Normandy landing operation, praised the efforts of Polish soldiers at Falaise saying,
"Under Falaise we locked the Germans like they were in a bottle, and the Polish Armoured Division was the cork in this bottle".
By August 21, the Allies destroyed most of the Wehrmacht forces in Normandy.
The Polish 1st Armoured Division of the Polish Armed Forces, created in February 1942 in Great Britain, was part of the Allied Forces.
It was commanded by General Stanisław Maczek (see: NOTE) and at its peak, numbered approx. 16,000 soldiers. It was planned for a future invasion of northern France occupied by Germans.
"Fight hard but knightly", General Maczek addressed his soldiers on August 6
, emphasising that the fight against the German occupation in France was part of the division's way to Poland.
The Polish attack on Falaise began on August 8. Despite the fierce fighting, it did not
at first bring the expected results.
The second phase of the battle began on August 14. Polish and Canadian soldiers resumed attacks on the enemy positions. Gen. Maczek
split his division into two clusters, which seized Chambois and Mont Ormel, partly encircling the German troops and blocking their escape route. Most of the enemy forces defending Falaise were captured. The Polish division has taken over 5,000. prisoners while losing about 450 soldiers. German material losses amounted to over 400 tanks and 7,000 other vehicles and nearly a thousand guns.
The
Allies' victory over Falaise destroyed the Germans' plans to maintain France. The day after the battle, the Western press wrote about the progress in the offensive in France praising merits of General Maczek's soldiers.
NOTE: General Maczek, born close to pre-war Poland's Lviv on 31 March 1892, used to say that "the Polish soldier fights for freedom of other nations but dies only for Poland". "He was a soldier and commander who has never lost a battle", Piotr Potomski wrote about the general in his book on the outstanding commander.
Drafted into the Austrian army at the outbreak of World War I, soon after graduating from the university in Lviv, Stanislaw Maczek fought on the Russian front in the Carpathian Mountains and on the Italian front in the Alps. He joined the Polish Army immediately after Poland regained its independence in 1918. He was already a major by 1920 when assigned the command of an assault battalion during the defence of Lviv in the war against Soviet Russia.
Next, after completing his studies in a military academy in Poland, he formed the Polish Army's first armoured brigade which fought against the 13th Panzer Division in the opening days of World War II. Interned in Hungary, he fled to France and after its capitulation in 1940 to Britain where as major general he was named commander of an armoured brigade and in 1942 of the 1st Armoured Division of the Polish Army.
The Division took part in the Allied invasion of Normandy and played an instrumental role in the battle of Falaise by circling the 7th (Wehrmacht) Army and 5th Panzer Army, and in liberating the Dutch town of Breda as well as capturing the German town of Wilhelmshaven. General Maczek himself accepted surrender acts form Wilhelmshaven Kriegsmarine base command, Ostfrisland fleet, 10 infantry divisions, 8 infantry regiments and the artillery.
In the course of Belgian town Ypres recapturing by General Maczek's division, he noted in his log: "The history is looking upon us not only from the hights of this medieval city walls (...) but also from thousands of crosses dug after the previous war into the Allies' cemeteries that we pass on our way (...) Today the tactics of the speed prevails"
In 1945 General Maczek was awarded the French Legion of Honour and until demobilisation commanded Polish troops in UK. Soon after Gen. Maczek was stripped of Polish citizenship by communists and forced to stay in England, where refused a military pension,
he worked as a bartender at an Edinburgh hotel until late 1960s. In 1971 he regained Polish citizenship.
He was promoted to the rank of a Polish three-star general in 1990. In 1992 the "liberator of France and Holland" received the highest civilian order in Poland, the Order of the White Eagle. At the request of 40,000 inhabitants of Breda who signed a petition, General Maczek received Dutch honorary citizenship.
General Maczek died in 1994 at the age of 102 (in Edinburgh). According to his last wish, he was laid to rest among his soldiers at the Polish military cemetery in Breda, the Netherlands. (PAP)
