Polish Exiles Trapped Abroad

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 174-178:

The Polish troops in Scotland, Italy and Normandy, like Poles all over the world, watched in agony as Warsaw fought and died. But there was little they could do. Some long-range aircraft, Polish, British and South African, managed to reach Warsaw from airfields in Italy, but they suffered terrible losses and the supplies and ammunition they dropped often fell into German hands. Predictably, Stalin refused to let the Allies use airfields in Soviet-held territory until it was too late. The British, for their part, refused to let the London Poles fly the Parachute Brigade to Warsaw.

From the military point of view, that would have been suicidal madness. But there was political reluctance too. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew that the Soviet Union was carrying the main burden of a war now approaching its climax. They were determined not to let ‘Polish problems’ disturb their partnership with Stalin.

After the collapse of the rising, the Home Army in the rest of Poland began to disintegrate. A few groups retreated into the forests and carried on a hopeless guerrilla war against the new Communist authorities. Within a few years, anyone who had fought in the Home Army fell under suspicion as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, and thousands were imprisoned. The parachute couriers from Scotland were hunted down by Soviet military intelligence, and some – caught with their radios tuned to the Polish government in London – were tried and shot as ‘imperialist spies’. The true story of the Warsaw Rising, and the main role in the resistance played by the non-Communist Home Army, became forbidden topics.

From trenches in Italy, or from camps in Lowland Scotland, Wojtek’s friends watched this process in deepening despair. Although they did not know it, their country had already been abandoned by Britain and America. At the Teheran summit in late 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that Poland should remain under Soviet occupation when it was liberated and that the new eastern frontier established by the Soviet invasion in 1939, leaving the cities of Lwów and Wilno (Vilnius) in Soviet hands, should become permanent. As compensation, Poland would be given the eastern provinces of Germany. The whole country would be shifted 150 miles to the west.

The Yalta conference in February 1945 did little more than publicly confirm these decisions. Postwar Europe would be divided into ‘spheres of influence’ – with Poland left in the Soviet sphere. Roosevelt and Churchill eagerly accepted Stalin’s assurance that there would be free elections in Poland.

It didn’t escape the soldiers’ notice that Poland was invited to neither of these meetings, nor to the Big Three Potsdam Conference after the Nazi surrender. It was behind closed doors that the ‘Victor Powers’ had dictated Poland’s political future.

General Sikorski had died in a plane crash at Gibraltar in 1943. His successor as prime minister in the London government was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, a peasant politician who tried desperately but vainly to save what he could from the Yalta settlement. But the Communist-led Committee of National Liberation had now become the provisional government of Poland. In July 1945, a few months after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Britain and the United States withdrew recognition from the London government-in-exile and transferred it to the Communist-led regime in Warsaw.

At first, the new regime pretended to be an alliance of ‘progressive forces’ and Mikołajczyk felt able to join a coalition government in Warsaw. But the Communists controlled the security police and within two years the opposition was being crushed by violence and threats. The promised free elections produced crudely faked results. Late in 1947, Mikołajczyk fled Poland, hidden in the back of an American diplomatic car. The Communist monopoly of power soon became complete.

By now, Poland was being ruled by state terror. Veterans of the AK were still being rounded up and imprisoned. The Home Army commanders were kidnapped, taken to Moscow and tried on incredible charges such as ‘collaborating with the Nazis’. Returning soldiers who had served in the Polish armies under British command were treated as suspected traitors and saboteurs.

The Polish troops in the West, by now demobilised and living in temporary camps scattered over England and Scotland, knew what was going on. The postwar British government hoped that they would go back to Poland, but – in a rare act of guilt-driven generosity – promised to care for them if they preferred to stay.

It was a miserable choice that they all faced. Most of them longed to go home and help rebuild their beloved, shattered land. But there they would be rewarded by persecution, by the sadness of life under foreign tyranny. On the other hand, what future could they have in a land whose language they hardly spoke, where they lacked friends, where their skills beyond manual labour and soldiering seemed to count for nothing?

But for the men who lived with Wojtek in the camp at Winfield, the choice was a little easier. Before they came across that bear cub in the Persian hills, they had seen the real face of Soviet Communism and had experienced on their own bodies its brutality, its callous indifference to human suffering, its hunger and its lies. If Poland were to become like that, it would no longer be a country they could live in. These were the men who had travelled the third path, and they knew only too well what they were being offered.

The third path, like the first, began on 17 September 1939, in south-eastern Poland. But this path led eastwards, into the depths of the Soviet Union. A part of the defeated Polish army was able to escape over the border into Romania and Hungary. But some 200,000 others were captured by the Soviet invaders and became prisoners of war. Some 15,000 of them, mostly officers, were moved into three prison camps in Russia and Ukraine: Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków.

All over the regions which had been Poland’s eastern provinces, Poles in responsible jobs – teachers, judges, police chiefs, mayors, editors – were arrested and imprisoned. Under directions from Moscow, the local Communist Parties in what was now Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine filled the posts with their own Belorussian or Ukrainian supporters.

But this turned out to be only the first act in an immense programme designed to obliterate Polish identity for ever in this part of eastern Europe. In February 1940, the Soviet authorities began the first mass expulsion of the Polish civilian population. Troops from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB, as the political security force) herded Polish families to railway stations and crammed them into unheated cattle wagons. From there, the trains set forth on journeys which could last many weeks, and which the old, the youngest children and the sick often did not survive, until the prisoners were dumped in Arctic labour camps, at railheads near Siberian mines or on the empty steppes of Kazakhstan.

More deportations followed in 1940, until by early 1941 something like 1.5 million Poles – Christians and Jews, Communists and Catholics – had been driven into exile. For the gulag empire, the life or death of these slave labourers was a matter of indifference. By the time that they were allowed to leave the camps, in the summer of 1941, between a third and a half of the deported Poles were dead from hunger, exposure, exhaustion and disease.

Poland's Underground State

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 170-173:

The couriers who reached London did not only bring despatches from the resistance. They were themselves direct witnesses to the appalling nature of the Nazi occupation. The messenger Jan Karski laid before British and American statesmen the full news of the Jewish genocide. Jan Nowak (Jeziorański) was sent out of burning Warsaw during the 1944 uprising to plead with the Allies for help. In the West, most people knew that the occupation was brutal, especially in its treatment of the Jews. But the governments of the democracies were slow, even reluctant, to believe the sheer scale and intensity of horror which the Polish messengers and the exile government revealed to them.

In German-occupied Poland, some 5.4 million people died in concentration camps or mass executions, 3 million of them Jews. That figure does not include casualties caused directly by war and, in all, Poland lost roughly a fifth of its pre-war population. Its industry and infrastructure were almost completely destroyed, while much of Poland’s cultural heritage was burned or looted. In 1944, the whole central city of Warsaw was blown up on Hitler’s orders and reduced to rubble.

After the 1939 invasion, the Nazis divided their half of Poland into two regions. The first consisted of territory in the west of the country which was simply absorbed into the Reich, the Polish population being driven out and replaced by German settlers. The second region was the ‘General Government’, a kind of colonial protectorate ruled from Kraków by the tyrannical Hans Frank. It was in the General Government that almost all the extermination camps were constructed for the Jewish Holocaust, the industrial murder of Europe’s Jews by gas. (Auschwitz lay just out[side] the General Government, in the Upper Silesian region absorbed by the Reich.)

In the General Government, the SS began a programme of selective genocide, designed to destroy the Polish elite and to prevent any national revival. Academics, creative intellectuals and the priesthood were targeted. A little later, the German authorities started to round up the first of 3.5 million men and women for slave labour in German war industries or agriculture. Villages which resisted were burned down; their men were shot, the women deported and the children either killed or kidnapped for ‘Germanisation’ in German families.

These conditions brought immense popular support for the resistance. But at first the AK concentrated on building up its strength and acquiring weapons, and it was not until 1942 that widespread attacks on the German occupiers began. The price for resistance, even for disobeying regulations, was usually death. In the cities, the Germans carried out random mass round-ups of ‘hostages’ who were lined up against walls and shot, their bodies left lying on the street as a warning against defiance or disobedience. Ghettos were set up in the towns, as a prelude to the Jewish genocide, and the penalty for hiding an escaped Jew was immediate execution for the rescuer and his or her whole family.

In spite of these risks, the underground state survived and proliferated. This was not a new idea. During and after the January rising of 1863, the insurgents had established a ‘parallel nation’ which preserved Polish identity through illegal publishing, education and even clandestine courts. The AK’s arms and explosives were captured from the Germans, and later parachuted in from the West. But the resistance was able to do little to help the Warsaw Ghetto Rising in April 1943, as Jewish fighters decided to die fighting rather than go passively to the gas chambers of Treblinka.

By the end of 1943, AK partisan units were in control of many districts of rural Poland, especially the forests and hills of the old eastern borderlands which now lay behind German lines. But once again, strategic problems emerged. In 1943, the plan of the government-in-exile and the AK command inside Poland had been to harry the Germans as they retreated and then to join the Soviet armies as they drove the Wehrmacht out of Poland. But early in 1944, as Soviet troops advanced across the pre-war Polish frontiers, it became clear that the Russians had no intention of restoring Polish authority in the regions they had seized in 1939.

Worse still, they treated the AK units which welcomed them as potential enemies. The Polish partisans were offered a choice between arrest and conscription into the Red Army. Places liberated by the Home Army were handed over to the People’s Army, the Communist partisans, and to their Committee for National Liberation (PKWN). This body had been set up in Moscow as the nucleus for a future Communist government of Poland.

Aiding the Polish Resistance

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 169-170:

The second path back to a free Poland lay through resistance within Poland itself. This meant almost exclusively resistance to the German occupation. The massive deportations of the Polish population from the eastern borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union made partisan warfare there almost impossible to organise. In any case, the Nazi invasion in June 1941 transformed the Soviet Union from enemy into ‘gallant ally’.

As the September campaign ended in 1939, Polish units – cavalry as well as infantry – were already taking to the forests and mountains. In cities and towns, centres of patriotic conspiracy sprang up. Poland had been defeated but had not surrendered, and there were to be almost no collaborators with the Nazi occupation. As the historian Norman Davies has put it, ‘there was never any Polish Quisling, for the simple reason that in Poland the Nazis never really tried to recruit one.’ Their long-term plan for the Poles was to enslave and ultimately to exterminate them, not to enlist them as allies. This gave the Poles a simple moral choice: to fight or to be obliterated.

By November 1939, Sikorski in France was in contact with many of these resistance groups, drawing them together into a coherent command structure answering to the government-in-exile. The movement eventually took the name of Armia Krajowa (Home Army) or ‘AK’ for short. After Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, a separate, militant but much smaller Communist resistance appeared, the ‘People’s Guard’ or ‘People’s Army’ (AL). But its relations with the AK were wary, and it took orders from the underground Communist leadership rather than from Sikorski’s government in London.

As German repression and deportations for forced labour grew more intense, the AK was joined by ‘peasant battalions’ raised from the countryside. By 1943, it had become the biggest resistance movement in the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe, eventually numbering over 400,000 men and women. But the AK itself was only the military wing of a complete underground state, equipped with a Delegatura representing the exile government, with ‘councils’ drawn from the main political parties, and with most of the apparatus of a normal country down to a chain of clandestine universities and a vigorous illegal press.

For the London government-in-exile, keeping in touch with the AK and its affiliates was difficult; dangerous but crucial. In Scotland, at training centres at Polmont and Largo or at the Polish ‘spy school’ in Glasgow, agents were trained as parachutists and radio operators and dropped back into Poland from long-range aircraft. Many were lost, but gradually regular and reliable radio communication between the Delegatura, the AK command and the London government was established. Even riskier was the return journey of couriers from Poland, sometimes smuggled on neutral ships through Scandinavia, sometimes – later in the war – picked up by Allied light aircraft from secret airstrips. (In July 1944, the AK used one of these flights to deliver to the British the working parts and guidance system of a prototype V-2 rocket, stolen from a Nazi missile range.)

Era of Polish Partitions & Rebellions

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 155-157:

But after the Second Partition, Poland’s last king – Stanisław August – and his advisers suddenly launched a dazzling programme of political and social reform, based on the principles of the American Revolution and the European Enlightenment. Poland set up the first ministry of education in Europe, and in 1791 adopted the Constitution of the Third of May, modernising the whole state structure and introducing a limited version of civil rights.

It was far too late. The Constitution enraged Catherine II, the Russian empress; she saw it as a deliberate provocation which would bring the democratic principles of the French Revolution up to her own borders. The armies tramped forward again, and the Third Partition of 1795 finally wiped what was left of Poland off the map. The eastern regions, later including Warsaw, went to Russia. The Prussian kings took what remained of western Poland, while the Habsburg Empire held southern Poland and the province of Galicia, including the city of Kraków.

There followed 123 years in which Poland did not officially exist. The three partitioning powers agreed that the very name should never be used again. Especially in the Russian area, there was a sustained effort to abolish Polish identity by suppressing the language, discriminating against the Catholic faith and criminalising those who tried to celebrate Poland’s rich culture or tell the truth about its history.

This policy was an almost total failure. Polish national identity retreated into a continuous national conspiracy against the foreign occupants, which preserved culture and tradition and often erupted into armed insurrections. The first of these took place in 1795, as the Third Partition closed over the country. Led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Wallace-like popular hero, peasant armies won early victories until they were overwhelmed by Russian numbers. A few years later, in 1812, Napoleon promised to restore Polish independence as he invaded Russia. Tens of thousands of Poles joined his armies, fighting not only in Russia but in Austria, Italy, Spain and even in Haiti. They shed their blood in vain, but the memory of Napoleonic reforms to Poland’s legal and administrative system was preserved, and revived when Poland regained its independence a century later.

In 1830, another insurrection – the November Uprising – broke out in Warsaw and rapidly spread. It took the Russians a year of hard fighting to defeat the rebels. Fierce repression followed, and almost the whole intellectual elite of Poland, most of whom had fought in or helped to organise the rising, went into exile in western Europe. The Great Emigration in effect made Paris the political capital of Poland for the next 80 years. And for the rest of the century Poland’s literary and musical culture – now reaching its dazzling zenith in the work of the poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and the composer Frédéric Chopin – was almost entirely created in France.

There were other, lesser, insurrections and a network of Polish patriotic conspiracies spread over Europe. But the next full-scale rebellion – the January Uprising – did not take place until 1863. Once again, the Poles fought in their streets and in their forests, and held out for over a year. Once again, the collapse of the rising was followed by hangings and police terror, and by the familiar sight of columns of chained men and women being marched away across the snow to Siberian captivity.

But the disaster of the January Uprising led to a change of mood in Poland. There was a feeling that the time for ‘romantic’, sacrificial rebellions was over. Instead, Poland should concentrate on patient, ‘positivist’ campaigns to build up the nation’s economic strength and modernise its social structures. In the Prussian partition, which after 1871 became part of a united German Empire, Polish farmers fought a long and successful struggle by legal and peaceful means to defend their land against Bismarck’s policy of German colonisation.

When Scots Profited in Poland

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 152-154:

But Poland was not always a victim nation. In the early Middle Ages, the Christian kingdom of Poland united with the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the ‘Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’, and for several centuries the Commonwealth dominated east-central Europe. It was a strange, ramshackle structure, in many ways archaic but in other ways curiously appealing to the political ideals of our own democracy. The Commonwealth, ruled by an elected king, was multi-ethnic and in general tolerant of differences. Ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Tatars, Ruthenians, Germans, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Armenians and Jews managed to live together, culturally distinct but united in loyalty to the Polish Crown. The diversity of faiths – Catholic Christian, Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Calvinist, Islamic and Judaic – caused no serious problems until the Counter-Reformation began to impose a dominant Catholic identity upon Poland.

And Poland became rich. From the fifteenth century on, the demand for Polish wheat to feed the rapidly-growing populations of the Netherlands, northern France and England began to make profits for Polish landowners. It was now that the Polish connection with Scotland began. From the early sixteenth century, carefully recruited groups of Scottish settlers sailed across the North Sea and the Baltic to Danzig (Gdańsk) and fanned out across the basin of the Vistula river. Along its tributaries, they founded small, tightly structured colonies which organised and financed the transport of grain down to the Baltic. Their numbers are disputed, but the Scots who joined these colonies over their two centuries of peak prosperity, most of them from the east and north-east coast of Scotland, must have been counted in the tens of thousands.

It was Scotland’s first planned stride into the outside world. And yet this episode was until recently almost completely forgotten by Scottish historians – although well remembered by the Poles. Scots enjoying the Crown’s protection became generals, bankers and even potentates – Alexander Chalmers from Dyce, near Aberdeen, was several times mayor of Warsaw. The traveller William Lithgow, from Lanark, who walked through Poland in the early seventeenth century, wrote that ‘for auspiciousness, I may rather tearme [Poland] to be a Mother or Nurse, for the youth and younglings of Scotland who are yearly sent hither in great numbers . . . And certainely Polland may be tearmed in this kind to be the mother of our Commons and the first commencement of all our best Merchants’ wealth, or at least most part of them.’

But by the early eighteenth century, the Commonwealth was growing weaker. On either flank of Poland, new and hostile states were emerging. The duchy of Muscovy expanded to become Russia of the Tsars, consolidating central power over what is now European Russia and pushing eastwards to grasp the infinite wealth of Siberia. To the west, small and backward German princedoms along the Baltic coast now merged under the new and formidable kingdom of Prussia.

The Polish Commonwealth was really a ‘pre-modern’ state. Central authority was weak, regional diversity was wide and political influence lay in the hands of the nobility. The new Russia and Prussia, by contrast, represented a very different and ‘modern’ model of power. These were grimly centralised and authoritarian states, intolerant of ethnic or religious diversity and – above all – obsessed with the training and equipping of large professional armies.

Culturally, the Polish Commonwealth considered itself more civilised than its big neighbours, whom Poles regarded as primitive. In return, the despots of Prussia and Russia loathed the relative freedom of Polish society, regarding it as a threat to their own strictly controlled systems of government. In addition, both had historical reasons to resent Poland. On the Prussian side, the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in the fifteenth century, frustrating their drive to conquer the whole Baltic region. The Russians had suffered repeated Polish invasions and political interference in earlier centuries, in the times of Muscovy’s weakness, and saw Poland as a deadly rival for control over Ukraine and Russia’s western borderlands.

Food Rationing in Scotland, 1945

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 61-62:

In Scotland the food allowance each person had to get by on at that time included the following: 2 ounces of bacon or ham, a finger of cheese (1.5 ounces), 7 ounces of butter or margarine, 2 ounces of cooking fats, 8 ounces of sugar, 2 ounces of tea (about 20 teabags), 4 ounces of sweets and 1 shilling’s-worth (5p) of meat. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Except this wasn’t a day’s ration – it was for one full week. Except for the bacon. That was two weeks’ allowance. Other staples such as bread, bananas and even potatoes (throughout 1947) were also rationed. As for fresh eggs, you could have one a fortnight – if you could lay your hands on one. Most urban families made do with the vile-tasting powdered version for the skimpy amounts of baking they could eke out of their precious rations of flour and sugar. On the plus side, people were allowed three pints of milk a week.

In fact, milk was just about the only commodity with which the Attlee government was generous; as part of its drive to maintain the nutritional health of the country’s children, in 1946 free school milk was introduced for all pupils up to the age of 18. This was later reduced to primary schools only. A quarter of a century later, free school milk was finally phased out by Margaret Thatcher. She was dubbed Thatcher the Milk Snatcher by her political opponents.

Those of us of a certain age well remember the crates of one-third-of-a-pint bottles which had to be humped in from the playground into the classrooms. For some unfathomable reason, once indoors, the crates always seemed to be stacked next to the school radiators, ensuring the milk was lukewarm by the time it was dispensed. It is one of life’s ironies that, despite food shortages and rationing, the children of postwar Scotland were better fed than many of their modern counterparts. That, in large part, was down to the free milk ration and free school meals (about half the UK’s pupils qualified for them), plus daily doses of free cod liver oil and concentrated orange juice which mothers determinedly rammed down the throats of protesting offspring.

Polish General Maczek in Scotland

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 22-24:

Younger generations have little notion of the huge number of people that moved in great waves through Scotland during and immediately after the war. Many were military personnel sent to the oddest corners of the country in strategic deployments against the German juggernaut. Tens of thousands of soldiers were bivouacked in normally sparsely populated areas of countryside. The military equivalent of fully fledged townships would spring up in fields virtually overnight, like mushrooms. It meant a tremendous influx of people into rural areas, and the Borders was no exception.

During the war years a large contingent of Polish soldiers lived in camps in nearby Symington and Douglas. They were under the charge of General Stanisław Maczek who was impressed by the warm reception from local communities. But then news of the Poles’ courage and tenacity in battle had reached Scotland long before the men, so the Scots already knew the value of those soldiers as allies.

A legendary commander, respected by friend and foe alike, General Maczek led the only Polish units not to lose a single battle after Poland was invaded by the Germans in 1939. Under blitzkreig attack, his forces made a dogged defence but their efforts were eclipsed when Russia invaded from the rear and they were forced to withdraw. Maczek was loved by his soldiers, who called him Baca, a Galician name for a shepherd, not dissimilar from the Scottish Gaelic word, Buachaille.

When Germany finally capitulated, General Maczek went on to become commanding officer of all Polish forces in the United Kingdom until their demobilisation in 1947. After the war he chose to remain in Scotland, a de Gaulle-like figure who epitomised the struggle for a free Poland. Like many other Polish soldiers, he felt unable to return to Poland under the Soviet regime.

The thousands of Polish servicemen left their mark on the Scottish Borders in many ways. Some stayed and created new lives and new families. One of their most enduring gifts was the open air map of Scotland they built in the grounds of what is now the Barony Castle Hotel in Eddleston, Peebleshire. While fighting in Holland, General Maczek once had been shown an impressive outdoor map of land and water in the Netherlands, demonstrating the working of the waterways which had proved such an obstacle to the Polish forces’ progress in 1944. At Eddleston the general and his fellow exiles decided to replicate the Love at First Sight 19 map; they conceived the Great Polish Map of Scotland as a permanent, open-air, three-dimensional reminder of Scotland’s hospitality to their compatriots. In 1975 the coastline and relief map of Scotland were laid out precisely by Kazimierz Trafas, a young geography student from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków. An infrastructure was built to surround it with a ‘sea’ of water and, at the general’s request, a number of Scotland’s main rivers on the map were even arranged to flow from headwaters pumped into the interiors of its mountains. It was, and still is, an amazing feat of engineering and design.

Sadly, it was allowed to fall into disrepair. After long years of dereliction, the first steps are now being taken towards its restoration. One day soon people will again marvel at General Maczek’s Great Polish Map of Scotland in the grounds of Barony Castle, once the home of the Murrays of Elibank, and later the Black Barony Hotel. In the war years the house and grounds seem to have been in use by Polish forces, and even then an outdoor outline map was one of the features used to help plan the defence of the Scottish coastline which was under threat of invasion after the fall of Norway. Whether this was really the case, I have not been able to ascertain. Returned to commercial use in the late 1940s, years later the hotel came into the possession of a member of the Polish community who had been billeted there in wartime. He was a great friend of the general, and gave him permanent use of a suite in the hotel.

General Maczek never did return to live in his beloved Poland; by the time it achieved genuine freedom, age and infirmity had taken their toll. In his later years he lived in Edinburgh. He died in 1994 at the age of 102, his name still synonymous with the history of World War II.