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Macintyre points out that one in 12 Battle of Britain pilots was a Pole, and some 250,000 Polish troops served with British forces, while a huge, largely forgotten role was also played by the Polish resistance. In fact, as the war historian and Times columnist Ben Macintyre recently wrote: "The Polish contribution to allied victory in the Second World War was extraordinary, perhaps even decisive, but for many years it was disgracefully played down, obscured by the politics of the Cold War." What is most irritating to Poles about this particular fable is that it trivialises the Polish contribution to the allied war effort, reducing it to a single moment of whimsy. The story was used first by the Nazi propaganda machine and then by its Soviet counterpart, to portray Polish officers (who were killed by Stalin en masse the next year) as absurdly careless about the lives of their troops. By the time German and Italian war correspondents got there, some tanks had arrived and they joined the dots themselves. Polish lancers, whose units had still not been motorised, did indeed charge a Wehrmacht infantry battalion but were forced to retreat under heavy machine gun fire. The most likely origin of the legend is a skirmish at the Pomeranian village of Krojanty on the first day of the German invasion, 1 September 1939. We had to append a speedy correction admitting that we had "repeated a myth of the second world war, fostered by Nazi propagandists".

The story feeds a stereotype about Polish men being hopelessly romantic, hopelessly moustachioed idiots who would actually gallop their horses at big steel tanks.Įven this newspaper fell into the trap less than two years ago, when a columnist described the mythical charge as "the most romantic and idiotic act of suicide of modern war".

If you want to wind up a Pole of a certain age, there is no more reliable means than quoting the old myth about Polish lancers charging at German panzer divisions in the second world war.