Above: Smoke over Warsaw, a photograph from a Luftwaffe pilot’s album (World War II Pictorial Collection, Box fEC)
Documents, correspondence, and writings of General Wacław Stachiewicz (1894–1973), the chief of staff of Poland’s armed forces during 1935–39, have been received by the Hoover Archives. Stachiewicz was largely responsible for Poland’s defensive preparations and the subsequent armed response to the invading armies of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia in September 1939, the first month of World War II.
Wacław Stachiewicz was born in Lwów (now Lviv in the Ukraine), a large Polish city in Austrian Galicia, the south of the country occupied by the Habsburgs since 1772. He graduated from a local gimnazjum and went on to study geology at the Polish University of Lwów. During this time he was a member of Polish patriotic and paramilitary organizations. When World War I broke out in 1914, he joined the Polish legions, which, under the command of Józef Piłsudski, were fighting Russia on the side of Austria. When the Habsburg monarchy failed to live up to its promises to help in the restoration of an independent Poland, Stachiewicz deserted the Austrian side and joined the Polish armed underground in central Poland. After Poland regained its independence in November 1918, Stachiewicz advanced rapidly in the military. He participated with distinction in the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920, which stopped the Soviet advance into Europe. During 1921–24 he studied in the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris. After returning to Poland he was promoted to the rank of colonel and given successive commands of infantry regiments. In 1935 he was appointed brigadier general and chief of staff of the Polish armed forces. He supervised the restructuring and modernization of the army, establishing more efficient mobilization procedures, and strategic plans in the event of war with Russia and Germany.
All this came to naught in 1939. Poland was a poor country, slowly recovering from more than a century of foreign rule and the utter devastation of World War I. It was no match for Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia. By the late 1930s, after the German absorption of Austria and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia, Poland’s only hope were its strategic alliances with France and Britain. When the Nazi armies attacked on September 1, 1939, and the Soviets followed on September 17, Poland was left alone. The French and the British did honor their commitments to Poland by declaring war on Germany on September 3, but, despite their decisive advantage in military strength on the German western flank, did nothing to help their ally, engaging in what journalists dubbed the Phony War, with no major military operations on the Western Front until the Germans attacked France and the Low Countries in May 1940. Poland, the first country to resist Hitler, fought alone for a month; its armed forces, infrastructure, and industrial base were destroyed, with about two-hundred thousand casualties, as well as the loss of its independent existence and its territory partitioned between Germany and Soviet Russia. An opportunity to stop Hitler in his tracks in 1939 was completely wasted. The Phony War blunder would cost Europe many millions of lives in the years that followed.
General Stachiewicz was in Warsaw when the war began. He later moved east with his staff to avoid being cut off in the capital. After the Soviet forces invaded eastern Poland, he crossed into Romania along with the Polish government where he was interned. He escaped in 1940 and made his way to Algeria, where he was interned again, this time by the French. He was clearly scapegoated for the Polish defeat in September 1939. Stachiewicz was eventually able to make his way to London, but the Polish government in exile there, refused his services. After the war, Stachiewicz moved to Montreal, Canada. Here he devoted his time to research and writing about Poland’s preparations for war. He also assisted his wife, Wanda, in organizing the Polish Library at McGill University. General Stachiewicz died and was buried in Montreal in 1973. Wanda Stachiewicz, a regular visitor to Hoover in the 1980s, donated the typescript of her own memoirs to the Hoover Archives. The general’s son, Bogdan Stachiewicz (aka Bob Stack), for many years an engineer with the Stanford Research Institute, donated his father’s remaining papers to Hoover. Hoover’s Stachiewicz Papers complement the papers given earlier to the Piłsudski Institute in London.
Maciej Siekierski siekierski@stanford.edu
