By 1945, the British Government widely regarded the Polish Armed Forces under its command as an embarrassment and a liability. Shortly before the 1945 general election, Churchill had promised the Poles that they would be able to stay in Britain after the war if they felt unable to return to Poland. Churchill went on to lose the election but he had committed the new Labour administration that replaced the government to a policy that would lead to a whole string of British foreign policy problems.

        The British Government tried to reassure the Poles that they had nothing to fear by returning to Poland. The Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, issued a declaration to the Polish Armed Forces in March 1946 that they should return to Poland to help in the country's reconstruction. While publicly maintaining that repatriation would be safe for the Polish forces, Bevin's officials were far from convinced. Despite talk of 'safeguards', the Poles, and many officials in the Foreign Office, knew there was little the British Government could do to protect the Poles from repression by Warsaw's secret police.

        Matters were further complicated by the fact that there existed two Polish Governments to deal with. Steering a course between the Scylla of the Moscow backed regime in Warsaw and the Charybdis of the exiled Polish Government in London, with its ever decreasing circle of friends, the British did their best, at first, to be even handed, but managed to please neither. Despite a perceived moral obligation to the London Poles, policy dictated that the future was with Warsaw and the Communists. Everything possible was done so as not to offend Warsaw and the Foreign Office was forced into all manner of contortions to keep the Communist authorities happy. Even given mass British Government disinformation about the true state of affairs in Poland and the promise of "free and unfettered" elections, many of the Poles steadfastly refused to return.

        The British Government recognised that if the Poles refused to return to Poland, then it would have to act to ensure the Poles integrated smoothly into British society and, in particular, into the British labour market. These are the roots of the Polish Resettlement Corps and the origins of the post-war Polish community in Britain. Amid the clamour that greeted the 50th Anniversary of the Victory in Europe, the voice of Poland was strangely silent in the proceedings. The Polish forces who were such a public controversy in 1945 have melted away from public consciousness and now remain a largely forgotten footnote in the history of the Second World War. Poland's contribution to the Allied victory has been extensively recorded by the Poles, both in Poland and in exile, yet the English language bibliography is fragmentary, to say the least, and the British public remains largely ignorant of the true facts. Military historians, as a rule, tend to concentrate more on battles and campaigns than on the demobilisation of armies. The role of the Polish soldiers in Italy and France has been documented in many excellent histories, yet few ever look at what became of the men who fought at Monte Cassino and Falaise. For the Polish forces the story did not stop in 1945 - a fact that is, all too often, overlooked.

        The memoirs of the players involved in the story are limited by the same shortcomings that beset the works of the professional historian. The works of former Polish soldiers that have been published in the West invariably pass over the painful post-war years while the works published in Poland over the last forty years have done much the same but for reasons of avoiding political controversy. The collapse of the Communist regime has opened the doors for the soldiers who did return to Poland after the war to record their feelings but, sadly, the passage of time has limited their numbers. To date there are few of these memoirs to be studied and fewer still that chose to discuss the repatriation issue.

        The settlement of Poles in Great Britain is also an area that has seen little study in depth. Jerzy Zubrzycki's Polish Immigrants In Britain - A Study of Adjustment (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1956) was the first major work on Polish settlement in Britain. There is also Czajkowski and Sulik's Polacy W W.Britanii (Instytut Literacki, Paris, 1961, and more recently Sword, Davies and Ciechanowski's The Formation Of The Polish Community in Great Britain (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 1989), the latter being the best on the Polish Armed Forces question. These are three islands in an otherwise barren seascape.

        Among the primary sources used in this study, the Foreign Office General Correspondence (FO371) held at the Public Record Office [PRO] has formed the back-bone of the material used. The internal memoranda between the various departments of state show a policy aimed at convincing the demobilised Polish troops to return to Poland despite knowledge of the serious security situation that existed there. The files at the PRO reveal cover-ups and conspiracies at the highest level and a campaign of misinformation aimed at keeping the Poles from settling in Britain. For the cynical historian this provides confirmation that there is no place for honour or morality in realpolitik.

        The archives in Warsaw, on the other hand, do not yield the same results as the PRO. The Archiwum Akt Nowych, the main repository for the modern day state papers, is helpful only in what it omits to reveal about the Polish Government's attitude to the repatriation of Polish troops from the West. The papers of the State Directorate for Repatriation [PUR] do not answer the fundamental question of whether the Polish Government in Warsaw wanted the Polish troops under British command to return to Poland, yet by its actions, it reveals that it probably did not. The correspondence of Major Salkowski, PUR's man in Italy, clearly reveal his own misgivings about his government's policy and the reports of the representatives of the Ministry of Information and Propaganda show a clear disregard for the welfare of returnees. This only confirms Salkowski's impression that he was working contrary to someone's hidden agenda. It may be that documents detailing Warsaw's actual position regarding repatriation indeed do exist, they have, to date, still to be discovered.

        Another archive providing material is the General Sikorski Historical Institute in Kensington which holds the papers of the exiled Polish Government and the records of the Polish Armed Forces under British command. Since British policy towards the Polish forces was carried out without the exile Government's consent and often without its knowledge, the Polish Government-in-Exile's official state papers are of little use. The war diaries of the various military units, on the other hand, are the best indication of which soldiers returned to Poland and which did not. Many of the diaries, often beautifully bound and illustrated, also give some of the most accurate breakdowns of the number of repatriations after the war and which units had the greatest levels of return. This material has yet to be adequately studied and the diaries are a valuable historical record, many of which would be worthy of publication.

        The public debate that raged in Britain after the war regarding the settlement of the Poles is highlighted in the Parliamentary debates recorded in Hansard. The Labour Government front benches fought against Conservative criticism that they were betraying the Poles in their charge, while at the same time they fought against their own back benches who accused them of jeopardizing relations with the Soviet Union for the sake of, as they saw it, "fascist" Poles. This was a debate that raged among the British public from 1945 and was only superseded by anxiety at the first waves of black immigrants from the Caribbean and the racial tension that erupted in Britain in the 1950s.

        When General Wladyslaw Anders, the commander of the Polish 2nd Corps which fought in Italy, wrote his memoirs he entitled them Bez Ostatniego Rozdzialu (Montgomery Printing Co. Ltd, Newtown, Wales, 1949) or "Without A Final Chapter". This thesis, written nearly half a century after Anders' book, is a record of that final chapter of the Polish Armed Forces under British command and of the bitterness that he and many of his men felt - a bitterness that even the passage of time has not assuaged.