It took the Soviets 50 years to accept the blame officially for an unspeakable atrocity, but the UK’s wartime record of resisting the truth still lingers today

On 8 May there will be a ceremony at a memorial in the pine forest in Cannock Chase in the West Midlands to remember the 22,000 Polish army officers, civil servants, journalists and judges murdered in May 1940. They died in the forests of Katyn, near Smolensk, many of them with their hands bound and still with their identity papers on them, shot in the back of the head. When mass graves were discovered in Katyn in 1943 by German soldiers, the Nazis blamed the Russians for the killings. The Russians insisted the Nazis had been responsible. So did the UK?government.

In 1939, the Soviet Union had entered into an alliance with Nazi Germany. The Russians invaded Poland from the east; the Germans invaded from the west. Poland was wiped off the map of Europe. The Russians sought to eliminate the country’s military and intellectual leadership; hence the massacres in Katyn at the hands of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. The Soviet government continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings, and the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government. The Poles had not been murdered by the Nazis; they had died on the orders of Joseph Stalin.

Meanwhile, thousands of Polish soldiers, pilots and seamen had come to England to carry on the fight. As Hitler turned on Stalin, Polish soldiers who had been held as prisoners of war in the Soviet Union were sent to join the British army in the Middle East. In the Battle of Britain, in the desert, at Monte Cassino, in Normandy and at Arnhem, Poles fought bravely alongside their British comrades-in-arms: 228,000 Poles finished the war as allied soldiers.