THE MILITARY TRADITION 199on to form a new Polish army, it is not surprising that they found great difficulty
in working together.
To a certain extent, the Polish Legions of the 1914-17 campaign re-enacted
the scenario of their Napoleonic predecessors, after whom they were named.
Their goals were not fully achieved, either in the military or in the political
sphere. Piteudski's idea of fighting for Polish Independence under Austrian
orders proved no more practical than Dabrowski's scheme of fighting for
Napoleon in the hope of restoring the old Republic. The political conditions laid
down in 1917 by the Germans within the command of the Central Powers
proved quite unacceptable. (See Chapter 18.) Yet the psychological impact of
the Legions was again great; and the sudden emergence of national indepen-
dence only seventeen months after their forcible disbandment gave an unparal-
leled opportunity for the ex-legionnaires in the military dispositions of the
Second Republic. Apart from Piteudski himself, Generals Jozef Haller
(1873-1961), Marian Kukiel (1895-1976), Kazimierz Sosnkowski (1885-1963),
and Wladyslaw Sikorski (1881-1943) all gained early military experience in the
Legions.^6
The role of the army in the life of the Second Republic was of paramount
importance. The army was largely responsible for guarding and preserving the
manna of independence which so fortuitously dropped from heaven in 1918.
The General Staff's confidence in Poland's military capacity proved illusory; but
in 1939 the devotion and courage of the ranks in impossible conditions was
often exemplary.^7 (See Chapter 19.)
In the Second World War, control of numerous Polish military formations did
not lie in Polish hands. In 1940, the reconstituted army which fought under
French orders at Narvik and in France numbered 80,000 men. After the fall of
France, the remnants passed to Great Britain to be reformed as the First Polish
Corps under British command. After 1941 two separate Polish armies were
raised in the USSR. The first, the Polish army in the East, formed largely from
released deportees and commanded by General Wladyslaw Anders, left Soviet
territory for the Middle East, where they were eventually incorporated into the
Second Polish Corps of the British Eighth Army. Their extraordinary odyssey,
from prison camps in Siberia and Central Asia to Buzuluk on the Volga, to
Tashkent, to Pahlevi in Persia, to Baghdad, Jerusalem, Cairo, Tobruk, Anzio,
Rome, to the Sangrio and the Gothic Line, has never been satisfactorily
recounted to western readers. The second appeared in 1943 as the Kos'ciuszko
Infantry Division. Politically subordinated to the Polish communists in
Moscow, it was entirely subject to the Soviet Command. In March 1944, under
General Zygmunt Berling (1896—1980), it emerged as the First Polish Army and
participated in the campaigns of the Eastern Front. At this stage, the Poles fight-
ing in the British Army numbered some 195,000; those under Soviet orders,
78,000. In 1944—5 these figures were increased to 228,000 and 400,000 respec-
tively - the latter by conscription in liberated Polish territories. All those men
were called to make great sacrifices whose ultimate purpose was somewhat