ABSTRACT
For the Poles, who faced genocide at the hands of the Nazis, and, on a lesser scale, the Czechs, the problem of organising escape routes from unoccupied France was more urgent.1 In the eight months between Hitler’s conquest of their homeland and the fall of France, the Poles had set up a government-in-exile in Paris and proceeded to regroup and re-form Polish forces on Allied territory. A number of their naval vessels and the bulk of their merchant fleet had found refuge and a new operational base in Great Britain. It was in Britain, too, and with the support of the RAF, that senior Polish air force officers would have preferred to concentrate the effort to rebuild an air force. But General Sikorski, who was both Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, believed profoundly in France as he remembered it from 1918 and wished this to be done in France. Under the terms of a compromise reached at the end of October 1939, Polish air force personnel who had made their way to the West were divided equally between the two countries. The new Polish army was wholly raised and equipped in France, however, though one brigade had been reconstituted in Syria, then French mandated territory.
