Qualla: Polish Forces War Memorial

Polish Forces War Memorial: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthew Rogers, CC BY-SA 3.0. Andrzej Meeson-Kielanowski sat at his kitchen table with four small toy soldiers, a two-pence piece, and a tube of glue. He stood the soldiers back-to-back on the coin and painted the whole assembly bronze. What he was making was not a sculpture but an argument: that the Polish contribution to the Second World War had been carried by four kinds of fighter - the airman, the sailor, the soldier, and the resistance courier - and that any monument to them should put all four together. The result of that kitchen-table prototype now stands in the Staffordshire countryside at the National Memorial Arboretum, cast in bronze on a far grander scale, dedicated in September 2009 to mark the seventieth anniversary of the German invasion of Poland.

Image: Matthew Rogers | CC BY-SA 3.0

Polish Forces War Memorial: Why It Had to Be Built

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Hogg, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

Image: Graham Hogg | CC BY-SA 2.0

Polish Forces War Memorial: Four Soldiers, One Eagle

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bs0u10e01, CC BY 3.0. 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...

Image: Bs0u10e01 | CC BY 3.0

Polish Forces War Memorial: The Woman in Civilian Clothes

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit R. Sobociński (statue)/ S. Mucha (photo), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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, of...

Image: R. Sobociński (statue)/ S. Mucha (photo) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Polish Forces War Memorial: An 18-Metre Circle

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charlesdrakew, Public domain. 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,...

Image: Charlesdrakew | Public domain

Polish Forces War Memorial: Why Staffordshire, Why Now

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NMAguide, CC BY 3.0. 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 ...

Image: NMAguide | CC BY 3.0