“The first casualty of war is truth”

The phrase, attributed in various forms to Samuel Johnson, Hiram Johnson, and Arthur Ponsonby, finds its fullest embodiment in the fate of Poland during and after the Second World War. From the first days of September 1939, when German tanks rolled in from the west and Soviet forces struck from the east, the story of Poland was wrapped in lies, lies to justify aggression, lies to cover atrocities, lies to excuse betrayal, and lies that, for decades, shaped how the world remembered the war.

The Germans unleashed a campaign of unprecedented brutality upon Poland, yet in the early months of the war much of the West did not fully comprehend the scale of the terror. Poland was not simply invaded; it was dismembered with the intent of extinguishing its identity and reducing its people to slaves. German propaganda portrayed Poles as “Untermenschen,” fit only for servitude, and this poisonous image seeped into international narratives. Few outside of occupied Europe grasped that Polish villages were being burned, intellectuals executed, priests arrested, and entire communities erased with ruthless precision. The blitzkrieg was not merely a military campaign, it was a calculated effort to annihilate a culture, and yet this truth was muffled beneath German lies and Western indifference.

The Soviets, too, cloaked their crimes in deception. In April 1940, when thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals were taken into the forests of Katyn, Kharkiv, and Mednoye, shot in the back of the head, and buried in mass graves, Stalin’s regime constructed an elaborate falsehood that endured for decades. When the Germans later uncovered the graves in 1943, it was easy for the West, locked in alliance with Moscow, to accept the Soviet version of events, blaming the Germans. Even when Polish voices cried out for recognition of the truth, they were silenced, marginalized, or accused of undermining the unity of the Allied cause. The massacre at Katyn was not only a crime of murder but a crime against truth itself, for the world was made to swallow a lie as history.

Poland’s tragedy did not end with the war. At Yalta in 1945, promises of free elections and independence were made to the Polish government-in-exile, whose soldiers had fought with distinction on every front of the Allied war effort. These promises, however, were empty words, diplomatic illusions crafted to soothe conscience while conceding Poland to Soviet domination. Once again, truth was the casualty: the truth of Allied commitments, the truth of Polish sacrifice, the truth of self-determination so loudly proclaimed by Roosevelt and Churchill in earlier declarations.

Even Poland’s achievements in the fight against Germany were obscured or denied. The work of the brilliant Polish mathematicians who first broke the Enigma code in the 1930s, handing their discoveries to the Allies before the war, was long overlooked, their essential contribution minimized in Western narratives that preferred to celebrate Bletchley Park alone. Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain, Polish soldiers at Monte Cassino, Polish troops who liberated towns and villages across Europe, all too often their sacrifices were footnotes, forgotten or erased in the larger story told by victors who found it more convenient to sideline them.

Thus Poland lived, for decades, not only in the shadow of war but in the shadow of falsehoods. Its suffering at the hands of Germany was underestimated, its betrayal at the hands of the Soviets was denied, and its contributions to victory were diminished or silenced. The Polish nation had been torn apart by armies, but its story was also torn apart by narratives that served others’ interests and here lies the bitter truth of that old saying: when war comes, it is not only lives that are destroyed, it is truth itself.

Edward Reid   Facebook