Poland was the only Allied country to fight in the European Theatre of World War II from the first day of the war until the last, almost six years later.

Polish men and women gave their lives on many fronts—on land, at sea and in the air, where they distinguished themselves with courage and self-sacrifice at Westerplatte, Warsaw, Narvik, the Battle of the Atlantic, Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Normandy, Wilhelmshaven, Caen, Arnhem, Berlin, and in Poland under the brutal German occupation.

Polish men and women gave their lives on many fronts—on land, at sea and in the air, where they distinguished themselves with courage and self-sacrifice at Westerplatte, Warsaw, Narvik, the Battle of the Atlantic, Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Normandy, Wilhelmshaven, Caen, Arnhem, Berlin, and in Poland under the brutal German occupation.

The Polish intelligence service and Polish mathematicians provided the Allies with the means to break the German Enigma cipher machines several weeks before the war. During the war Polish intelligence work permitted the Allies to learn the secrets of the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket which were wreaking destruction on London and southern England; and the Poles actually stole V-2 parts, sending them to England via clandestine air transport.

In a tragic turn of events, Poland was consigned to the post-war Soviet sphere of influence by Roosevelt and Churchill at their Tehran and Yalta summits with Stalin, to which Poland was neither invited nor represented.

Knowing that the Poles hated the Russians as much as they hated the Nazis, Stalin's communist regime sought to control post-war Poland through two basic tactics: (1) physical terror (arrest, torture, execution, deportation of Polish military and civilians); and (2) an insidious propaganda campaign aimed at re-writing history within the country, and discrediting Poles in the eyes of the international community outside the country—an effort which unfortunately continues to have repercussions even today. Only since the fall of communism in 1989 have the true facts begun to resurface.