General Stanislaw Sosabowski with General Frederick Browning (Wikipedia)
Senators argue that General Stanislaw Sosabowski was made a scapegoat by the British for the failure of the operation. Some 15,000 Allied men died in the action, which later became the focus of the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far.
“We expect British authorities to publicly restore the good name of General Sosabowski,” announced Senator Bogdan Klich, former Minister of Defence, during an appeal made at the Senate building on Wednesday.
Klich claimed that this should have been done “long ago.”
The appeal coincides with the 120th anniversary of the general's birth, and was made in response to an initiative led by former combatants as well as relatives of the late commander.
Britain's ambassador to Poland, Robin Barnett, was present during the appeal.
As commander of the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade, Sosabowski joined the largest parachute drop of its day, with the Allies trying to force their way into Nazi Germany in September 1944.
Sosabowski had previously been sceptical of plans for the action.
The operation was a fiasco. Sosabowski was later accused of criticising the British high command, and the Polish General Staff was compelled to dismiss the general from his post.
British military historian William F. Buckingham is among those who feel that the general deserves to be rehabilitated, as argued in a 2004 book about the Battle of Arnhem.
“The scapegoating of Sosabowski and his men was a spiteful, unwarranted and unforgivable slur on a competent and conscientious commander whose only crime was to refuse to play the Whitehall game to [General] Browning’s satisfaction, and upon a courageous body of men whose only failing was an inability to walk on water,” he claimed.
After the communists took power in Poland following the war, Sosabowski was deprived of his Polish citizenship, and like thousands of fellow veterans, he remained in exile. The general found a job as a factory worker in London, where he died in 1967. (nh)