The Eagle Unbowed, Kochanski - B

                          The subtitle of this 591-page book is  "Poland and the Poles in the Second World War".  The author is a British Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the daughter of Polish parents who were granted U.K.  citizenship for fighting with the Allies.  As Polish hopes were collapsing in the spring of 1945, one of Churchill's last acts was to recommend citizenship for the many who had taken up arms.
                          Neither Germany nor Russia accepted the Polish state resurrected, after over a century, by the Versailles decision makers in 1919.  The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression signed in August 1939 secretly set the border for the division of Poland.  What the Poles called the Fourth Partition was implemented within two weeks of the start of war.  You couldn't find two worse occupiers if you tried. The Nazis considered the Poles 'untermenschen' fit only for hard labor and starvation. They immediately began the liquidation of elites and since they considered people who had attended high school elite, they went after everyone who contributed to the fabric of the society.  Stalin's hatred and fear of foreigners led to similar actions highlighted by the atrocity of Katyn. Those Poles who the Reds didn't kill were transported to the East, primarily Kazakhstan.  After Germany invaded Russia, many of the Kazak Poles were allowed to leave in order to take up arms at the request of Churchill.    
                        The Poles fought with the Americans and Brits in Italy, France and Germany. A handful of Polish pilots served heroically in the Battle of Britain. In Poland, the Nazis exterminated 3 million Polish Jews and as many Christians.  Warsaw was destroyed completely during the Ghetto Uprising in 1942 and the Uprising in 1944. Stalin refused to pay heed to the London Poles, recognized his own puppet government  in Lublin, moved the Polish eastern border far to the west and evidenced his intent to viciously dominate the country by the time the war ended in May 1945. It was his intransigence on issues of Polish governance that were the first indications that we were headed to Cold War. The Poles wondered how they became the only Allied country to be occupied at the end of the war. It only got worse as freedom would wait another forty-four years.