Stanisław Sosabowski: the Polish paratrooper of Arnhem

Stanisław Sosabowski built Poland's paratroopers to fight for the liberation of Poland. Their motto was "by the shortest way," and the shortest way home was through the air. Instead they were dropped into the Battle of Arnhem in 1944, a plan he had openly doubted, while Warsaw burned. His brigade fought bravely at Driel, and he was made a scapegoat for a failure that many historians do not lay at his door.²

A boy from Stanisławów

Sosabowski was born on 8 May 1892 in Stanisławów, then a town in Austrian Galicia. From his youth he threw himself into the movement for Polish independence, in the rifle squads and the scouts. During World War I he served in the Austro-Hungarian army.³

Officer and teacher

When Poland regained its independence in 1918 he joined the new Polish Army and became a professional soldier. Between the wars he lectured at the War College in Warsaw, the army's school for staff officers, and by 1939 he was a colonel commanding the 21st "Children of Warsaw" Infantry Regiment.⁴

Warsaw, 1939

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, his regiment fought in the defense of the capital, where Sosabowski commanded the sector at Grochów on the eastern bank of the Vistula until Warsaw surrendered. His regiment distinguished itself there, and he received the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari.⁵ › Battle of the Bzura, 1939

To France and Britain

Taken prisoner, he soon escaped and joined the first underground organizations in occupied Poland, then was ordered to make his way to France, where the Polish Army was being rebuilt. There he served in its officer corps, and when France fell in June 1940 he got his men out to Britain a few days before the French surrender.⁶

The parachute brigade

In Scotland Sosabowski created the first Polish parachute unit. In 1941 it became the 1st Parachute Brigade, trained for one purpose: to be dropped into Poland when the moment for a national uprising came. Its motto was "Najkrótszą drogą," by the shortest way.⁷

Sosabowski trained his men hard and fought for proper weapons and equipment for the brigade. In 1944 he was promoted brigadier general.⁸

That summer the British pressed for the brigade to be used in the West, and the Polish government agreed to place it under Allied command. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out on 1 August 1944, the Polish command asked for the brigade to be sent to Warsaw, and the British refused. Sosabowski's own son, Stanisław, was fighting in the uprising.⁹ › The Warsaw Uprising, 1944

Market Garden

In September 1944 the brigade was assigned to Operation Market Garden, the great Allied airborne operation to seize the river crossings of the Netherlands up to the Rhine, with the British 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem and the Poles to support it. After studying the plan Sosabowski raised serious doubts about its chances. He was ignored, and the Poles had to carry out their orders; the British would later hold his criticism against him.¹⁰

At Arnhem the British were cut off north of the Rhine. The brigade's main drop came on Thursday, 21 September, near the village of Driel on the south bank.¹¹

Driel

More than 1,000 Polish paratroopers, Sosabowski among them, came down around Driel, opposite the British perimeter. There were no boats to take them over the river; the ferry they had counted on was gone. Over the following nights they tried to cross in a few rubber boats under heavy German fire. Accounts of how many reached the other side differ, from about 150 to 250. The rest, attacked again and again, held on at Driel.¹²

On 25 September the decision was taken to withdraw what was left of the British division across the river, and the following night, with the Poles covering the retreat, the survivors were brought back across the Rhine. The brigade lost 378 men killed, wounded and missing, nearly 40 percent of those who fought. In 2006 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands honored the 93 Polish soldiers who died in the Battle of Arnhem or later of their wounds.¹³ › Operation Market Garden, 1944

Command style

Sosabowski led from the front: he jumped with his men over Driel rather than direct them from the rear. He was also blunt, a former teacher of tactics who would not keep quiet about a bad plan, and his frankness, which his allies took for insubordination, cost him dearly.¹⁴

The scapegoat

The senior Allied commanders laid much of the blame on Sosabowski, forgetting the warnings he had given before the battle and accusing him of being unwilling to cooperate. At British demand he was relieved of command of the brigade he had created by an order of 27 December 1944 and made inspector of Staging and Sentry Units. The Museum of Polish History calls the blame unjust; the IPN says the British used him to hide their own mistakes.¹⁵

After the war he refused to accept the communist government imposed on Poland and stayed in Britain.¹⁶

"Stan" and justice at last

He took the jobs he could get, first as a storeman and then as a fitter in factories. His English workmates, who knew nothing of his past, called him Stan. He wrote two books of memoirs, Najkrótszą drogą (By the Shortest Way) and Droga wiodła ugorem (The Road Led Through Fallow Land).¹⁷

He died in London on 25 September 1967, at the age of 75, and was buried in Warsaw's Powązki Military Cemetery.¹⁸

Rehabilitation came slowly. Cornelius Ryan's book A Bridge Too Far (1974) and Richard Attenborough's 1977 film, with Gene Hackman as Sosabowski, restored his good name for a wide audience. On 31 May 2006 Queen Beatrix awarded him the Bronze Lion posthumously, accepted by his grandsons, and gave his brigade the Military William Order, the Netherlands' highest decoration for bravery. The brigade's actions at Arnhem, she said, had never been formally recognized.¹⁹

British veterans of the battle paid for a monument to him in Driel themselves. In 2018, for the centenary of Polish independence, President Andrzej Duda awarded Sosabowski the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest decoration, and the 6th Airborne Brigade, which carries on the tradition of his brigade, bears his name.²⁰

Follow the battle in our account of Operation Market Garden, read about the Warsaw Uprising his men were not allowed to join, meet another Polish general of the Western front, Stanisław Maczek, and the greatest commanders in Polish history, explore World War II, or see what else happened on 21 September.