The death of General Sikorski

On 4 July 1943, at about 11.07 p.m., a four-engined RAF transport aircraft, Consolidated B-24 Liberator serial AL523, took off eastwards from the airfield at Gibraltar. A dozen or so seconds later, less than a kilometre beyond the end of the runway, it struck the surface of the sea. There were seventeen people on board. Sixteen were killed, among them the Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces, General Władysław Sikorski. The only survivor was the first pilot, the Czech Eduard Prchal.

Sikorski was returning to London from a tour of inspection of Polish troops in the Middle East lasting several weeks. He died at the worst possible moment for Poland: two months after Moscow had broken off relations with his government, and a few days after the Gestapo had arrested the commander of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa). A British board of inquiry found that the crash had been an accident caused by jammed elevator controls, but could not explain how this had come about. That gap, the political context and a series of strange circumstances turned the Gibraltar air crash into one of the most frequently discussed mysteries of the Second World War. None of the assassination theories has ever been proved.

Poland after Katyn

Since the autumn of 1939 Sikorski had combined the two most important offices of the state in exile: he headed the government and commanded the army. After the Polish authorities crossed into Romania and were interned, it was he who rebuilt the Polish army and administration, first in France and then in Britain. He was the only Polish politician to whom Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt really listened.

After Germany attacked the USSR, Sikorski concluded the Sikorski–Maisky agreement with Moscow on 30 July 1941, and in December he signed a declaration of friendship and mutual assistance with Joseph Stalin. He believed that cooperation with the USSR was the price Poland had to pay for its place in the coalition, and that the question of the eastern border could be put off until the end of the war. In the Soviet Union, General Władysław Anders’s Polish Army was formed, and in 1942 it was evacuated to Persia and then to the Middle East.

In the spring of 1943 this policy collapsed. On 13 April the Germans announced the discovery of graves at Katyn, where in the spring of 1940 the NKVD had murdered Polish officers in the Katyn massacre. The Polish government asked the International Red Cross to investigate, and Stalin, treating this as collaboration with Hitler, broke off diplomatic relations with Sikorski’s government on the night of 25–26 April. Immediately afterwards a Polish division began to be formed in the USSR under Lieutenant Colonel Zygmunt Berling, politically subordinate to Moscow. In June Sikorski called it “a Polish communist division of a subversive character”, and Berling himself a deserter.

At the same time the Prime Minister was losing support in his own camp. Among Anders’s soldiers, many of whom had passed through Soviet labour camps and prisons, there was deep distrust of any attempt at an understanding with the USSR. Rumours circulated of plots against the Commander-in-Chief. On 11 May two ministers, Wacław Komarnicki and Marian Seyda, warned him in a letter that the mood in the army, “inflamed by the criminal agitation of certain elements”, made a journey to the Middle East dangerous. Sikorski replied that considerations of personal safety could not come into it. On 30 June 1943 the Gestapo in Warsaw arrested the commander of the Home Army, General Stefan Rowecki, known as “Grot”.

The journey to the Middle East

The inspection was meant to raise the morale of an army that felt abandoned after the break with Moscow, and to strengthen the Commander-in-Chief’s authority in the face of growing opposition. On 24–25 May Sikorski flew from Britain to Cairo in a Liberator of No. 511 Squadron RAF, a transport squadron. The aircraft was not his personal machine: the squadron flew regular services for the British and their allies. It was piloted by Eduard Prchal, a Czech airman and former fighter pilot. When the general learned that he had a Czech pilot, he decided to make a political gesture towards the Czechoslovak government, with which the Poles were on cool terms, and asked Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder to have Prchal fly the aircraft on the return journey as well.

For several weeks Sikorski toured the units of the Polish Army in the East, stationed mainly in Iraq, as well as units in Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. He held talks with Anders, addressed the troops and took the salute at parades. According to the writer Ksawery Pruszyński, on 2 July in Cairo he spoke of the need to come to terms with a change in Poland’s eastern border and of the need for a new departure in relations with the USSR. It is not known how far this heralded a real change of policy and how far it was musing among trusted companions.

For the return journey a different Liberator was made ready, AL523, a converted bomber stripped of its armament. The passengers sat on two benches in the rear of the fuselage or lay on the baggage in the former bomb bay. On 3 July the aircraft took off from Cairo with Sikorski and ten other passengers and, after a flight of more than ten hours, landed at Gibraltar at 2.37 p.m. The general stayed with the Governor, General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, and the next day attended a farewell reception at his residence. On the same day, 4 July, the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, passed through Gibraltar on his way to Moscow. This coincidence later became one of the pillars of the conspiracy theories, although there is no evidence that the two politicians met.

The night of 4 July

In the evening mail and baggage were loaded aboard. Only two civilian passengers went through baggage checks; the Polish delegation was exempt. At about 10.25 p.m. cars brought Sikorski and his companions, by about 10.45 p.m. everyone was on board, and the aircraft taxied to the western end of the runway. At 11.05 p.m., after clearance from the tower, the Liberator began its take-off run eastwards, out to sea.

The aircraft left the runway and began to climb, but according to the pilot, after reaching a height of a few dozen metres the elevators stopped responding. Prchal later described how, having pushed the control column forward to gain speed, he could no longer pull it back. He throttled back the engines and warned the crew over the intercom. About 16 seconds after take-off the aircraft, banking on its left wing, hit the water roughly 600 metres from the end of the runway. The fuselage broke into several pieces, which within minutes sank to the bottom a few metres down. Because of the layout of the airfield, the crash could not be seen from the spot where the guests had been seen off.

A few minutes later, at 11.14 p.m., an RAF rescue launch reached the scene, followed by other boats. The bodies of Sikorski and Klimecki were pulled from the water, along with the dying Brigadier Whiteley and the unconscious Prchal. The pilot was wearing a life jacket, although, according to people who knew him, he did not usually put one on. Prchal later explained that he must have put it on instinctively when he realised the aircraft was in trouble. This detail, noticed by the Governor himself as he watched the rescue operation, still feeds suspicion today. In the following days divers recovered the main parts of the wreck. The sea washed the last bodies ashore on 8 and 9 July. The bodies of five people were never found.

The victims

There were eleven passengers and six crew on board. Killed together with the Commander-in-Chief were his daughter and secretary Zofia Leśniowska; the Commander-in-Chief’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Tadeusz Klimecki; the head of the staff’s 3rd (Operations) Section, Colonel Andrzej Marecki; the general’s aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Józef Ponikiewski (PL) of the Polish Navy; his civilian secretary Adam Kułakowski (PL); and Jan Gralewski, believed to have been a Home Army courier. Also killed were two British Conservative MPs in uniform – Colonel Victor Cazalet, liaison officer to Sikorski, and Brigadier John Percival Whiteley – as well as two civilians, Walter Heathcote Lock and Harry Pinder, an employee of the naval dockyard at Alexandria. Five British members of the crew were killed, including the second pilot, Squadron Leader W. S. Herring.

Some writers later gave a higher number of people on board, as many as twenty-odd, and also questioned whether Zofia Leśniowska had been on the aircraft at all. Legends grew up around her fate, including stories that she had been seen in a Soviet labour camp after the war. None of them has been confirmed.

The investigation

As early as 5 July Air Marshal John Slessor ordered a Court of Inquiry to be convened. Its three members, presided over by Group Captain J. C. Elton, flew to Gibraltar and from 8 July heard witnesses. An officer of the Polish Air Force was present during its work. The court focused above all on the guarding of the aircraft at the airfield and the possibility of sabotage, which mattered for the safety of other Allied leaders using the same route. It found that the aircraft had been properly guarded and found no evidence of sabotage.

The court accepted as the cause of the crash a jamming of the elevator control system, which made the aircraft uncontrollable immediately after take-off. At the same time it admitted that it was impossible to establish from the evidence gathered and the examination of the wreck why this had happened. It exonerated the pilot. A communiqué was published in September 1943, and the files were classified. The report was released only in 1972. A Polish commission chaired by Judge Tadeusz Cyprian, relying on the British report and the findings of the Polish Air Force inspectorate, concluded that in the absence of evidence of sabotage the crash had to be regarded as an accident “from causes not more closely explained”. It added that sabotage could be ruled out completely only once all the parts of the aircraft had been recovered.

Later researchers into the crash, notably Jerzy Zięborak of the Institute of Aviation (2012) and the pilot Mieczysław Jan Różycki (2016), pointed to a combination of technical and human factors. In their view the aircraft was overloaded and its centre of gravity lay outside the permitted range. Nobody had weighed the VIP passengers’ baggage, and the runway at Gibraltar, which was lengthened only in August 1943, was short for such a heavy aircraft. Added to this were the night take-off, the winds coming off the Rock and Prchal’s limited experience on Liberators. Zięborak believed that the autopilot had been switched on just after take-off, which could have had an effect similar to jammed controls. Różycki thought the aircraft had left the ground too early, begun to lose height and stalled. Both also argued that the British court had chosen a formula convenient for both governments, one that did not require details of the wartime transport of important persons to be disclosed.

Theories and controversies

Because of the political context, suspicions arose at once that the crash had been no accident. German propaganda presented it as a planned assassination and blamed it on the British, with the aim of driving a wedge between the Poles and their allies. In the following decades various versions were put forward: a Soviet assassination carried out with the help of the NKVD agent in British intelligence Kim Philby, who in 1943 was dealing with Iberian affairs in MI6; a British assassination intended to remove a Pole who was obstructing an understanding with Stalin; and a plot by Sikorski’s Polish opponents. In 1967 the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth suggested in his play Soldiers that Churchill had ordered the killing. The play caused a scandal in Britain and led to libel actions brought by Prchal.

The theories rested on genuine uncertainties: the unexplained cause of the jammed controls, the pilot’s life jacket, the bodies that were never found, Maisky’s presence in Gibraltar and, finally, the fact that Sikorski’s body was buried without a post-mortem. Some authors claimed that the aircraft had not crashed but had ditched gently, and that the passengers had been killed by assassins before or afterwards. Historians pointed out, however, that each of these versions requires many assumptions that no document supports. The British hoped that Sikorski would help to calm the Polish–Soviet crisis, and the historian Jacek Tebinka noted that his death ran counter to the interests of British diplomacy and of Churchill himself.

In September 2008 the investigative branch of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) opened an inquiry into a possible assassination. On 25 November 2008 the remains of Sikorski, as well as those of Klimecki, Marecki and Ponikiewski, were exhumed. In January 2009 the experts announced that the general had died of multiple organ injuries typical of victims of road accidents or falls from a height – that is, at the earliest at the moment the aircraft hit the water. They did not rule out drowning as a contributory cause. The fractures had been sustained while he was alive. The examination ruled out death by gunshot, strangulation or stab wounds, and disproved the versions according to which Sikorski had been killed before the flight, as well as the gentle-ditching theory. In December 2013 the IPN discontinued the inquiry, stating that the evidence gathered allowed sabotage of the aircraft to be neither confirmed nor ruled out. The accident hypothesis thus remains the best documented, and the assassination theories have not been proved in any way.

The funeral

Sikorski’s coffin was carried to England by the Polish destroyer ORP Orkan, which arrived in Plymouth on 10 July. After funeral ceremonies in London, including a Mass at Westminster Cathedral, the general was buried on 16 July 1943 in the Polish airmen’s cemetery at Newark-on-Trent in the English Midlands. President Władysław Raczkiewicz posthumously awarded him the Order of the White Eagle. Churchill, who had known him since 1940 and valued him as an ally, paid tribute to him in the House of Commons.

Sikorski lay at Newark for fifty years. For decades the émigrés refused to allow his remains to be moved to a country ruled by communists. Only on 17 September 1993, in the presence of President Lech Wałęsa and the last President of Poland in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, was the coffin laid in St Leonard’s Crypt in Wawel Cathedral.

The successors

Sikorski’s death forced President Raczkiewicz to fill two posts at once, and to do so without breaking up the fragile émigré coalition. It was decided to separate them. On 8 July 1943 Raczkiewicz appointed as Commander-in-Chief General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, once Piłsudski’s closest associate and an opponent of concessions to the USSR. The British received the appointment with displeasure. On 14 July Stanisław Mikołajczyk, leader of the Peasant Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe) and until then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, became Prime Minister. Brigadier General Stanisław Kopański succeeded Klimecki as the Commander-in-Chief’s chief of staff.

The division of power between a Prime Minister and a Commander-in-Chief who took different views of policy towards Moscow proved a source of constant conflict. Neither successor had Sikorski’s authority, either at home or among the Allies.

Place in the war

The Gibraltar crash was a blow to the Polish cause that can hardly be overstated. Sikorski was the only Polish leader who combined authority at home and in the army with the trust of Churchill and Roosevelt and a readiness to seek an understanding with Stalin. With his death Poland lost a voice the Allies listened to. The two centres of power in London, Mikołajczyk’s government and the Commander-in-Chief, Sosnkowski, pulled in different directions, while Moscow, which had had no relations with the Polish government since April, was building its own Polish political and military base around Berling’s division and communist activists.

The consequences became apparent within a few months. At the end of 1943, at the Tehran Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed with Stalin, without the participation or knowledge of the Polish government, that Poland’s eastern border should in principle follow the Curzon Line. For the next year Mikołajczyk sought an understanding with Moscow in vain, and in November 1944 he resigned. Sosnkowski was dismissed in September 1944, after his criticism of the Allies during the Warsaw Uprising.

It is impossible to know whether Sikorski, had he lived, could have changed the course of events: Poland’s fate was decided above all by the position of the Red Army and the interests of the great powers. For many Poles, however, his death became a symbol of the moment when the Polish Republic in exile lost its last real chance of having a say in its post-war borders. The disputes over the cause of the crash, still unresolved after eighty years despite successive investigations and exhumations, are to a large extent an echo of that sense of isolation in the face of both allies and the eastern neighbour.