Their Prospects will not be Bright

On 6 July 1945, less than two months after the end of the second world war in Europe, the British government announced the withdrawal of its recognition from the exiled Polish government in London. The announcement, timed to coincide with a similar American statement from Washington, also accorded recognition to the de facto authorities established in Warsaw under Soviet supervision, the Polish Provisional Government. In many quarters, the British decision aroused dismay and evoked angry protests. Not only were the 'London Poles' the legal successors to the Polish government in support of which Britain had gone to war in 1939, but the legality of this transplanted government had never been questioned during the years when its soldiers, sailors and airmen were making a notable contribution to the allied war effort. By the war's end the Polish Armed Forces in the west under British operational command, but owing allegiance to the Polish government in London contained an estimated 250,000 men and women in its ranks.' Although large numbers of these troops returned to Poland at the end of the war or migrated to third countries, a considerable proportion remained in Britain. The question of how tens of thousands of Poles were settled into civilian life in this country following the second world war has received surprisingly little attention from scholars. Historians, it is said, do not like lost causes. Certainly the majority of Poles who remained outside the borders of their homeland after 1945 experienced the irony of being on the winning side militarily and yet in political terms also defeated. Yet apart from the political ramifications arising from the resettlement of over 150,000 Poles in Britain in the late 1940s, it

Economic history · Political science · History · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies

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