My father served as a soldier from shortly before to shortly after the Second World War, first as a cadet officer in the Polish Army and then as a Second Lieutenant in "Polish I Corps" of the British Army. I thought I'd post a few of the more interesting souvenirs and photographs that have been handed down to me from this period in case they're of interest to military historians.
As far as I'm concerned, all the images on this page are in the public domain, so feel free to download any that you want to reuse in books, research papers or other websites (click on any image to open a full-size version in another window). I'll be very pleased if anyone does this, although I'd appreciate being informed of the details (admin at andrew hyphen may dot com, or via Twitter/X @DrAndrewMay). I might also be able to provide higher resolution scans if required.
[Postscript: I'm very grateful to the "Polish Exiles of WW2" website, who have kindly cross-posted these photos to a page there, together with some additional info I wasn't aware of]
For the most part I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, mainly because I have very little background information on dates, locations etc (if anyone can help with this, it will be very welcome!). But here is a quick overview of my father's military career as far as I've been able to reconstruct it:
(1) My father was born Leopold Majcherczyk in November 1915 (he abbreviated his surname to May before I was born). At some point in his early 20s he entered the Polish Army - I think there's just one photo from this period that shows him in uniform.
(2) After the German invasion in September 1939, he was interned in Russia for the duration of the Soviet/German non-aggression pact. I only know this from family anecdotes - the next datable documents are a couple of ID cards from 1941-42 where he is listed as a Cadet Sergeant Major in the "Polish Forces in the USSR". I think that's what Wikipedia describes under the heading of Anders' Army.
[Since writing this, Krystyna from Polish Exiles of WW2 has added some helpful additonal details here: "He was assigned to the 14th Armoured Regiment of the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Brigade. After evacuating from the USSR, he trained in the Middle East and then participated in the Battle of Tobruk in northern Africa."]
(3) The later of the two ID cards (left side of the header image above) is dated August 1942 - I think he must have arrived in the UK soon afterwards. That was when he was merged into Polish I Corps under British Army command, and most of the below photographs date from after this time. I'm not sure of his exact movements, but identifiable locations include Scotland, Wiltshire, Belgium and the Netherlands.
(4) In 1947 he was transferred from the 1st Polish Anti-Tank Regiment (part of the 1st Polish Armoured Division) to the Polish Resettlement Corps - the right-hand side of the header image is from a document relating to this transfer. He was finally demobilized from the Army in 1949, and then in 1951 received a letter explaining that he'd been promoted to 1st Lieutenant in 1946 but due to an administrative error wasn't informed at the time!
To start with, here's what I think is the only military-themed photo I have that was taken in Poland before WW2. It shows soldiers wearing uniforms that are very different from the British-style battledress adopted by Polish forces later on. I think the soldier seen in profile on the right may be my father, though I can't be certain.
Here are a few more images from the same ID booklet shown at the top left of this page. This dates from August 1942, towards the end of my father's time in the Soviet Union. It is in 3 languages - Polish (as seen in the photo above), Russian (top half of the right-hand image) and English (bottom right).
[Reminder - click on any of these images to enlarge them in another window if you want to make the details clearer]
You can see the exterior of the preceding ID card at bottom left in the following photo. To its right is an earlier version of the same ID, with most of the contents torn out. But you can still see the date - 7 December 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The patch at top left is from the Polish 1st Armoured Division (cf the emblem shown on this Wikipedia page). The items to the right of that include a button, cap badge and bracelet bearing the Polish eagle, and a 2nd Lieutenant's shoulder pip. I'm not certain that the watch is army issue, but its Omega brand and utilitarian styling suggest it probably is.
The most historically significant of my father's photos are a group of three featuring General Wladyslaw Sikorski, head of both the Polish government-in-exile and the Polish Armed Forces in the early stages of WW2. Sadly the prints haven't survived the intervening years as well as some of the others, but they're still quite evocative even so.
I previously included these three images in a blog post from 2013. As I said there, I took the pictures to the Sikorski Museum in London, where they were able to identify the location as Scotland although they didn't know what specific event is depicted.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there aren't any photos that show actual fighting. But as second best, here are a few containing military hardware. As with the Sikorski pictures, they're not in great condition, but interesting due to their "candid" unposed nature. For example, the dog seems to be the only one in the top right photo that's aware it's having its picture taken!
Here's a group of three pictures showing a border crossing of some kind. Presumably it's somewhere on the continent, between two different areas/countries controlled by the Allies, but I don't know specifically where.
For a change of pace, here are two "tourism" pics - Stonehenge on the left, and Place Royale, Brussels on the right. Presumably the latter was taken not long after the liberation of Brussels in September 1944, and before the Dutch photos further down this page. As for Stonehenge, I'd guess it ties in with some pre-June 1944 training in Wiltshire, though I can't be certain of that.
Here are two nice street scenes from wartime Britain. I'm not sure where the first one was taken, but judging by the posters the second one is somewhere in Salisbury.
... and a couple of pictures showing two different modes of troop transport - a train on the left and a ship on the right (Krystyna from Polish Exiles thinks these may relate to the journey back to the UK from occupied Germany after the war):
There are quite a few photographs taken in Holland post-liberation - here are three that feature both Dutch locals and Polish soldiers. I think the main action they saw involved chasing retreating Germans out of various Dutch towns and villages.
My father isn't in the top photo, but he's on the right of the middle one and in the foreground of the bottom one (with the dog and child). That bottom picture is one the very few that has an inscription on the back - it reads "Rosmalen, Holland, 1945".
There are also several candid photographs of soldiers just basically sitting or standing around in barracks etc. Given that I have no idea when or where these were taken, I'll just include one example here which shows my father, on the right, and another soldier (Krystyna has suggested this may be have been taken in Germany during the occupation by the 1st Polish Armoured Division within the British Zone). Although the picture was taken in the 1940s, it shows my Dad looking exactly as I remember him from the 1960s (he died in 1970, so never really looked any older than this).
He didn't keep many documents from his time in the army - the image below shows the handful I've got that are in English. The top three relate to his transfer out of the Army and into British civilian life via the Polish Resettlement Corps, and the bottom two are notifications of campaign stars. Wikipedia describes the France and Germany star as being for service in western continental Europe between 6 June 1944 and 8 May 1945, and the card has my father as serving 10 of those 11 months. The other star is for 2 months service in Africa, presumably covering his involvment in the Battle of Tobruk.
There are also a couple of documents in Polish (which I'm afraid I can't read, but I got my cousin to translate them for me). One is for another campaign medal, the Army Medal for War (Poland), which Wikipedia describes as being created by the Polish government-in-exile to reward Polish ground forces for service during WW2, with eligibility criteria including 6 months of operational service. The other is the amusing letter I mentioned earlier, written in 1951 but belatedly notifying my father of a promotion that was actually awarded several years previously. Here it is:
Copyright © 2024 Andrew May (words only - pictures are public domain)