Wrogowie naszych sojuszników. Kwestia (nie)istnienia stanu wojny między Polską a Włochami. 1940

Abstract

The article presents the Polish government’s attitude to the issue of participation of Poland in the war against Italy. On the one hand, it was affected by direct Polish interests, which required the policy of restraint (moderation) without getting involved in this conflict and, on the other hand, by Poland’s obligations as an ally of France and Great Britain, which were at war against Italy since 10th June, 1940. This problem became particularly acute when likelihood of a potential military conflict between Polish and Italian forces increased due to the deployment of Carpathian Rifle Brigade first to Palestine and then to Egypt. In result of the conviction that maintenance of political compliance between Poland and Great Britain was a supreme objective, on 19th August 1940 Polish government agreed to use Polish forces against the Italian army. Nevertheless, this consent did not entail that Poland declared war against Italy. Polish government claimed that it was exempted from such a decision because after 17th September 1939, French and British governments did not declare war against the Soviet Union against which Poland, in turn, was at war. Although the analogy invoked by the Polish government was debatable, it provided a possibility of reminding the British ally that Poland was also a victim of Soviet expansion in the face of increasingly intensive critique of the USSR after the annexation of Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina. The article has been mostly based on resource materials. Documents of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the Hoover Institute collection, whose microfilms were handed over to the Central Archives of Modern Records and then made available online in the Integrated Archive System, were particularly important. Documents from the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London were also used herein and, additionally, documents from the British National Archives. A query in Italian archives was not carried out for the needs of this article; yet published Italian documents were used herein.