Władysław Anders: from the Lubyanka to Monte Cassino

Anders served in three armies and fought in three wars before the one that made him famous. A cavalryman from the Tsar's service, he came out of the Lubyanka prison in 1941 and built an army out of starving men in a country that had imprisoned them, then took it, and the families that followed it, across three continents to fight its way up Italy. To the Polish exiles he became the symbol of a Poland that would not accept Yalta; to the communist regime in Warsaw, one of its greatest enemies.²

Early life

Władysław Albert Anders was born on 11 August 1892 at Błonie, in the part of Poland then ruled by the Russian Empire, into a gentry family. He went to school in Warsaw and was called up for service in the Russian army. From 1911 to 1914 he studied mechanical engineering at the Riga Polytechnic.³

From the Tsar's army to Poland's

In World War I he fought in the Russian army and rose to be chief of staff of the 7th Rifle Division. After the February Revolution of 1917 he joined the Polish corps being formed in Russia under General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki and later joined the new Polish Army.⁴

In early 1919 he took part in the Greater Poland Uprising against Germany, and in the Polish-Soviet war of 1919 and 1920 he commanded a regiment of Greater Poland uhlans and was badly wounded. After the war he studied at the War College in Paris and served as a staff officer and then a commander of large cavalry formations, reaching the rank of general.⁵ › Battle of Warsaw, 1920

1939 and the Soviet prisons

When Germany invaded in September 1939, Anders commanded the Nowogródek Cavalry Brigade in the Modlin Army, guarding the border with East Prussia, then fought around Płock and later in the Lublin region. He was wounded in the fighting after the Soviet Union also invaded Poland on 17 September, and he was taken prisoner by the Soviets near Lwów on 29 September 1939.⁶

He spent the next twenty-two months in Soviet prisons, first in Lwów and from February 1941 in Moscow, in the NKVD's Lubyanka. Unlike thousands of Polish officers sent to the camps, he was held there, brutally interrogated and repeatedly pressed to join the Red Army.⁷

The army in the USSR

Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 changed everything. On 30 July the Polish government in exile and Moscow signed the Sikorski-Mayski agreement, Polish prisoners and deportees were amnestied, and Anders was released and given command of a Polish army to be formed on Soviet soil. Men came in from prisons, labor camps and places of exile, and civilians, women and children came with them. Britannica puts his strength at 80,000 men; the dzieje.pl history portal at about 78,500 soldiers.⁸

The Soviets cut food rations as the army grew and pressed to send its unfinished divisions to the front. Anders concluded that an army under Soviet control had no chance of liberating Poland, and refused to commit it piecemeal. Stalin agreed to let it leave. The first wave, some 33,000 soldiers by the IPN's count, crossed into Iran in late March and early April 1942 with thousands of civilians; the rest followed in August. The totals vary between sources: the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) gives over 120,000 people, among them 78,500 soldiers and about 18,000 children, its history article about 115,000, and the two Museum of Polish History articles more than 115,000 (78,000 soldiers and 37,000 civilians) and almost 120,000.⁹

The road to Italy

In Iran, Iraq and Palestine the army was rested, equipped by the British and retrained. On 21 July 1943 the units were formed into the 2nd Polish Corps under Anders; dzieje.pl attributes the order to General Władysław Sikorski, while the IPN's history of the Carpathian Rifle Division attributes it to his successor, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, since Sikorski had been killed in an air crash at Gibraltar earlier that month.¹⁰

At the turn of 1943 and 1944 the corps, with the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division, the 5th Kresy Infantry Division and the 2nd Armored Brigade, was shipped to Italy and placed in the British Eighth Army.¹¹

Monte Cassino to Bologna

Since January 1944 the Allies had tried three times to break the German Gustav Line at Monte Cassino, the hill and monastery that barred the way up the Liri Valley to Rome, and had failed each time.¹²

In May 1944, in the final Allied offensive against the Gustav Line, Anders' corps attacked the massif of Monte Cassino, the key to the line. After days of fierce, sometimes hand-to-hand fighting under constant artillery and mortar fire, the Poles secured the monastery hill on 18 May. A patrol of the 12th Podolian Uhlans raised a Polish flag over the ruins, on 18 May according to the IPN's Trails of Hope, on 19 May according to its history of the Carpathian Rifle Division. The National Army Museum calls the battle for Cassino the bloodiest of the entire Italian campaign.¹³ › Battle of Monte Cassino, 1944

The corps then moved to the Adriatic coast. In July it fought its way north and on 18 July took the port of Ancona, then broke through the Gothic Line and fought in the Apennines. In the final offensive of April 1945 Polish troops crossed the Senio and on 21 April entered Bologna.¹⁴

Command style

The Museum of Polish History calls Anders a defiant officer who was not afraid to criticize his superiors and often presented them with his decisions as a fait accompli. The evacuation from the USSR is the clearest case: against those who wanted Polish divisions thrown in on the Eastern Front, he decided to take the army and the civilians out, judging that the Red Army might collapse and that his men would otherwise die of hunger or be used up under Soviet command.¹⁵

He was a cavalryman by training and a commander who led from personal authority. His soldiers, most of them former Soviet prisoners, trusted him completely; the IPN describes him as the undisputed authority for his subordinates, and the Museum of Polish History notes that in Italy he organized their social and cultural life and treated them almost as his own sons.¹⁶

Exile and death

From February to May 1945 Anders served as acting commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces. After the Yalta conference handed Poland to the Soviet sphere, he cabled the Polish president in exile that the 2nd Corps did not recognize "the unilateral decision of leaving Poland and the Polish nation to the Bolsheviks."¹⁷

He never went home. The 2nd Corps was shipped to Britain in 1946 and disbanded there. Anders settled in Britain, where he served as inspector general and commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces in exile, president of the Polish Educational Society and chairman of the Polish Cultural Foundation, and became a leader of the anticommunist emigration. On 26 September 1946 the communist government in Warsaw stripped him of his Polish citizenship and his rank. He died in London on 12 May 1970 and, as he had asked, was buried among his soldiers of the 2nd Corps in the Polish War Cemetery at Monte Cassino.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

For the communist authorities he remained one of their greatest enemies. Their propaganda called the 1942 evacuation a cowardly desertion and mocked the hope, widespread among Poles, that he would one day ride into Warsaw on a white horse; for many at home, the Museum of Polish History notes, he remained the embodiment of military virtue. For the emigration, Britannica notes, he was a leading figure. The IPN credits him with rescuing more than a hundred thousand Polish citizens from Soviet camps and prisons, and its "Trails of Hope" project follows the route of his army and its civilians across the world.¹⁹

Read about the Battle of Monte Cassino, his fellow exile Stanisław Maczek, or the other greatest Polish commanders.