II Corps (Poland)

The Polish II Corps (Polish: Drugi Korpus Wojska Polskiego), 1943–1947, was a major tactical and operational unit of the Polish Armed Forces in the West during World War II. It was commanded by Lieutenant General Władysław Anders and fought with distinction in the Italian Campaign, in particular at the Battle of Monte Cassino. By the end of 1945, the corps had grown to well over 100,000 soldiers.

Victims of Soviet deportations from occupied Poland in 1939–40 had been processed by the NKVD and sent to concentration camps, labour camps or penal exile in Siberia. The Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 effectively ended on 22 June 1941 when the German Wehrmacht invaded the USSR. The release of many thousands of Poles from the Soviet Gulags, following the signing of the Polish-Russian Military Agreement on 14 August 1941, allowed for the creation of a Polish Army on Soviet soil. Its first commander, General Michał Tokarzewski, began the task of forming this army in the Soviet town of Totskoye on 17 August. The commander ultimately chosen by Władysław Sikorski to lead the new army, Lieutenant General Władysław Anders, had just been released from the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, on 4 August, and did not issue his first orders or announce his appointment as commander until 22 August.

This army would grow over the following two years and provide the bulk of the units and troops of the Polish II Corps.

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