Brigadier General Tadeusz Sawicz died on 19 October at a nursing home in Toronto, Canada - he was 97 years old and was the last surviving Polish pilot to have fought with the RAF during the 1940 Battle of Britain. Sawicz was one of 145 Polish pilots who fought with the RAF during the Battle of Britain and was credited with three kills during his service with the RAF.
Overall, The Battle of Britain represented a disaster for the Luftwaffe and a blow to the prestige of the Wehrmacht as a whole.
The German assault on Poland began at 4:45 am on September 1, 1939. The Polish air force, dispersed prior to the invasion, instead of rising en masse to challenge the Luftwaffe, saw its numbers quickly whittled down in a misguided hope to preserve its striking power. The Polish army fought mostly alone, while German planes pounded the Polish capital. Within just two weeks, German artillery and airpower had killed over 60,000 of Warsaw's citizens.
Following the Red Army's stunning June-July 1944 defeat of Germany's Army Group Center, and the subsequent Soviet drive into Eastern Poland, one of the great tragedies of World War II unfolded in Warsaw. On August 1st 1944, the long-suffering Polish resistance and population, led by Polish Brigadier General Bor-Komorowski, launched a city wide uprising as the Red Army's 1st Belorussian Front approached Praga and crossed the Vistula.
The Second World War ended well over 60 million lives in six of the most horrific and brutal years in history. Today, we remember the war's beginning, exactly seventy years ago this September, mostly from the perspective of the German war machine's blitzkrieg across Poland. However, what is often forgotten is that even a tyrant such as Hitler still sought political cover for his war of expansion and extermination in Eastern Europe.
