. of the 1st Armoured Division near
Haddington 1943. After the fall of Poland and then France in 1940, many of the remaining Poles that had fought in both campaigns retreated with the British Army to the United Kingdom.
Formation Stationed in
Scotland, the Polish 1st Armoured Division was formed as part of the
Polish I Corps under
Wladyslaw Sikorski, which guarded approximately 200 kilometres of
British coast in 1940-1941. The commander of the Division, General Stanislaw Maczek, was Poland’s premier mechanized commander, and many of his subordinate officers from the unit he commanded in 1939, the
10th Mechanized Brigade, had made their way to Britain with him. They were organized on the British Armoured Division model, equipped with British uniforms, weapons and tanks. They were initially equipped and trained on
Crusader tanks but in late 1943 and early 1944 these were replaced with
Sherman and
Cromwell tanks. They then participated in war games together with the
4th Canadian (Armoured) Division.
Normandy at the beginning of the
Falaise operation. By the end of July 1944, the 1st Armoured had been
transferred to Normandy, its final elements arriving on 1 August on Arromanches, Grayes and Courseulles sur mer where a memorial has been erected. The unit was attached to the
First Canadian Army as part of the
21st Army Group. This may have been done to help in communication, as the vast majority of Poles did not speak English when they arrived in the United Kingdom from 1940 onwards. The Division entered combat on 8 August during
Operation Totalize. It twice suffered serious casualties as a result of "friendly fire" from Allied aircraft, but achieved a victory against the
Wehrmacht in the battles for
Mont Ormel, and the town of
Chambois. This series of offensive and defensive operations came to be known as the
Battle of Falaise, in which a large number of
German Army and
SS divisions were trapped in the
Falaise Pocket and subsequently destroyed. Maczek's division had the crucial role of closing the pocket at the escape route of the trapped German divisions, hence the fighting was desperate and the 2nd Polish Armoured Regiment,
24th Polish Lancers and
10th Dragoons, supported by the 8th and 9th Infantry Battalions, took the brunt of German attacks by units attempting to break free from the pocket. Surrounded and running out of ammunition, they withstood incessant attacks from multiple fleeing
panzer divisions for 48 hours until they were relieved. The division's total losses from August 7 when it entered combat until the end of the battle of Falaise on August 22 were 446 killed, 1,501 wounded, and 150 missing, or 2,097 soldiers in total during about two weeks of fighting.
Belgium and the Netherlands After the
Allied armies broke out from Normandy, the Polish 1st Armoured Division pursued the Germans along the coast of the
English Channel. It liberated, among others, the towns of
Saint-Omer,
Ypres, Oostnieuwkerke, Roeselare, Tielt, Ruislede, and
Ghent. During
Operation Pheasant, a successful outflanking manoeuvre planned and performed by General
Maczek allowed the liberation of the city of
Breda without any civilian casualties (29 October 1944). The Division spent the winter of 1944-1945 on the south bank of the river
Rhine, guarding a sector around
Moerdijk,
Netherlands. In early 1945, it was transferred to the province of
Overijssel and started to push with the Allies along the Dutch-German border, liberating the eastern parts of the provinces of
Drenthe and
Groningen including the towns of
Emmen,
Coevorden and
Stadskanaal. , October 1944
Germany In April 1945, the 1st Armoured entered Germany in the area of
Emsland. On 6 May, the Division seized the
Kriegsmarine naval base in
Wilhelmshaven, where General Maczek accepted the capitulation of the fortress, naval base,
East Frisian Fleet and more than 10 infantry divisions. There the Division ended the war and, joined by the
Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, undertook occupation duties until it was disbanded in 1947; it, together with the many Polish displaced persons in the Western occupied territories, formed a Polish enclave at
Haren in Germany, which was for a while known as "Maczków". The majority of its soldiers opted not to return to
Poland, which fell under Soviet occupation, preferring instead to remain in
exile. Many artefacts and memorabilia belonging to Maczek and the 1st Polish Armoured Division are on display in the
Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London. ==Organization during 1944–45==