GEN. SIKORSKI

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 5, 6 July 1943, Page 5

GEN. SIKORSKI

KILLED IN AIR CRASH

POLISH PREMIER (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright.) Ree. 9 a.m. LONDON, July 5. An Air Ministry communique announces that General Sikorski, the Polish Premier and Commander-in-Chief, was killed last night when a Liberator in which he was travelling crashed shortly after taking off from Gibraltar. General Sikorski was ac eorapaned by Major-General Klimecki and other members of his staff. General Sikorski's daughter and also Major Victor Cazalet, British liaison officer, were among the victims. The only survivor-of the accident is the pilot, who was seriously injured. The Polish Cabinet is in special session in London, considering the situation created by General Sikorski's death. It was announced tonight that General Sikorski's body will be brought to London from Gibraltar escorted by representatives of the Polish Government and army. The late General Ladislaus Sikorski achieved distinction in three fields. As a soldier he led his troops to victory, and in peacetime organised the Polish army; as a statesman he steered his country through a grave internal crisis and consolidated its international position; and later he revealed himself to be an authoritative writer on military matters and a journalist of unusual ■ distinction. General Sikorski was born in Galicia. He took his degree in civil engineering at Lwow Polytechnic, and he probably owed not a little of his clear thinking and his cool judgment to the scientific training of his early years. While quite a young man he was drawn into those underground politics in which many patriotic Poles of those days were engaged, and he became a member of one of the secret associations which were biding their time until they could throw their weight into the balance for the freeing of Poland. It was in those pre-war years that he first met Pilsudski, whose Legionaries he joined at the beginning of the 1914 war. By 1919 Sikorski was already .a general, in command of the Fifth Army. In 1920, at the head of the Third Army, he rolled up

Budenny's Russians, and jhis brilliant operation put him at once in the front rank of Polish generals. In 1921 he was Chief of the General Staff, and in 1922, at the age of 41, he took office for the first time as Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior. The situation was troubled. The President of the Republic, Narutowicz, had just been assassinated. The eastern frontiers of Poland had not yet been internationally accepted. Not only did the new Prime Minister restore confidence and order, but on November 14, 1922, he was able to secure the recognition by the Great Powers of the Russo-Polish line ot demarcation. During 1924 and 1925 he was Minister of War. In 1926, at the time of Pilsudski's coup d'etat, Sikorski was back with the army in charge of the South-east-ern Command, with headquarters at Lwow. Two years later, however, his growing disapproval of the methods of Government and of the policy of'the Marshal's nominees made his further retention of the command impossible, and he went on to half-pay full of forebodings. For the next ten years he held no public office. ' He retired to Paris, there to study and work, living in the same modest little hotel in the rue Jacob where in September, 1939, after the fall of Poland, he formed his Gqvernment in exile, which took up its seat in London in June, 1940. It was said that no one. was more fitted to carry out the task of leadership than Sikorski, with his 'smiling realism and his profound sense of duty. During his years in; Paris,: in addition to countless newspaper articles, General Sikorski wrote three remarkable volumes: ''The Russo-Polish Campaign of a 920," with a preface by Foch, "Peace Problems,*' for which Painleve wrote a foreword; and "Modern Warfare," prefaced by Marshal Petain.