Until 2009, there was no national memorial in Britain to all the Poles, across all of Europe, who had died in the Second World War. A prominent monument in Cardiff commemorated those killed in the Royal Air Force and the Polish Armed Forces in the West. Smaller memorials existed at airfields and cemeteries. But for the soldiers of the Polish Underground who died in Warsaw, for the sailors lost at sea, for the partisans murdered behind the lines - there was nothing in Britain that gathered them all in one place. The Polish Forces had fielded the fourth-largest Allied army of the war, fighting from the first day to the last on land, sea, and in the air. Many were stationed in Britain. After 1945, many could not safely go home: returning to Communist-controlled Poland would have meant arrest or worse for soldiers who had served with the Western Allies. They stayed, built lives in Britain, raised children. Some of those children and grandchildren would eventually fund this memorial.

The final design followed the toy-soldier model. The Polish sculptor Robert Sobociński, commissioned to create the work in his Poznań foundry, cast four bronze figures standing back-to-back beneath the outstretched wings of a Polish eagle. Each figure represents one branch of the wartime Polish forces. The airman wears the uniform of 303 Squadron RAF, the Polish fighter unit that scored more kills during the Battle of Britain than any other in Fighter Command - a fact that survived the postwar political airbrushing of Poland's contribution from Allied victory parades. The soldier wears the uniform of the troops who took Monte Cassino in May 1944, where Polish forces broke a German line that had defeated Americans, British, French, and Indians in turn. The sailor wears the uniform of the crew of ORP Błyskawica - the destroyer that fought alongside the Royal Navy from 1939 and still survives today as a museum ship in Gdynia. The fourth figure is a woman in civilian clothes: an underground courier of the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, whose work has been least visible in the historical record.

The choice to include a female courier of the Home Army carried weight. The Armia Krajowa was one of the largest organised resistance movements of the war, and the couriers who moved between cells - carrying documents, orders, weapons, intelligence - were overwhelmingly women, often very young. They walked or cycled across occupied Poland with materials hidden in shopping bags, baby carriages, false-bottomed suitcases. If caught, they faced torture and execution, often in the cellars of Pawiak prison in Warsaw or the camps at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. Their work was invisible by design - no uniform, no rank, no identifying badge - and that invisibility carried through into postwar memory. The Polish Forces Memorial brings the courier out from anonymity and places her on equal footing with the airman, the soldier, and the sailor. The four figures are bound together by the wings of an eagle that, in Polish heraldry, has guarded the country for nearly a thousand years.

The bronze statue sits within an eighteen-metre architectural surround, a stone circle inset with explanatory plaques that walk the visitor through Polish involvement in the war year by year. The Polish Ex-Combatants Association, the Polish Air Force Association Charitable Trust, the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, and the Association of Polish Knights of the Sovereign and Military Order of Malta in the UK acted as principal sponsors. The chairman of the project committee was Dr Marek Stella-Sawicki, with Dr Meeson-Kielanowski - the original prototype-maker - serving as deputy chairman. The casting took place in Poznań, then the bronze figures and supporting stonework were shipped to England and assembled at Alrewas in early summer 2009. The unveiling came that September, deliberately timed to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of 1 September 1939, the day German forces crossed the Polish border.

The National Memorial Arboretum opened in 2001 on the site of former gravel pits beside the River Tame, with the intention of becoming Britain's central place of remembrance outside London. The Polish Forces Memorial took its place among a growing constellation of monuments: the Armed Forces Memorial nearby, the Shot at Dawn Memorial at the far edge of the grounds, hundreds of regimental and unit memorials threaded through the maturing trees. For Polish families in Britain - the descendants of the airmen, the soldiers, the sailors, and the couriers who could not go home - the Staffordshire memorial provided what had been missing for sixty-four years: a single place where the whole story is told. The four bronze figures will stand under the eagle's wings for as long as the alloy holds, a kitchen-table argument finally cast in metal and answered in plain view.