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   Notre Dame de Lorette

  As founder chairman of the Somme Association, and now Vice-President, I travelled every year to the Battlefields of France and Flanders. Noel Kane, my friend and colleague in the Association brought us regularly to Notre Dame de Lorette, also known as Ablain St.-Nazaire French Military Cemetery, the world’s largest French military cemetery. It is the name of a ridge, basilica, and French national cemetery northwest of Arras at the village of Ablain-Saint-Nazaire. The high point of the hump-backed ridge stands 165 metres high and – with Vimy Ridge – utterly dominates the otherwise flat Douai plain and the town of Arras. The area was strategically important during the First World War and was bitterly contested in a series of long and bloody engagements between the opposing French and German armies. It was the focal point of three battles:

  • First Battle of Artois (27 September–10 October 1914) – an encounter battle during the Race to the Sea.
  • Second Battle of Artois (9 May–15 May 1915) – French attack towards Vimy Ridge.
  • Third Battle of Artois (25 September–15 October 1915) – also known as the Artois-Loos Offensive.

  The Battles of Artois were as costly in French lives as the better-known Battle of Verdun. As with numerous other sites across France, Notre Dame de Lorette became a national necropolis, sacred ground containing the graves of French and Colonial fallen, as well as an ossuary, containing the bones of those whose names were not marked. But the basilica of Notre Dame de Lorette also contains the beautiful War Memorial for the Polish soldiers who fought on the Allied side during the Great War.

  After the Second World War Aunt Mary Zavackas from Bolton, Lancs, married a refugee from Poland who had suffered under Hitler’s Germany. Uncle Cliff Green, a dispatch rider with the Royal Engineers, had gone to France on D-Day and was present at the liberation of the Auchwitz-Birchenau extermination camps, which I have visited on two occasions.

  The Second World War Polish War Memorial is a memorial erected in England to remember the contribution of airmen from Poland who helped the Allied cause during the Second World War. It is situated beside the A40/A4180 roundabout junction near RAF Northolt in South Ruislip in the London Borough of Hillingdon. The Polish War Memorial is often used by locals as a landmark when giving directions and in broadcasts of traffic reports, as it is prominently situated by a major road junction on one of the main routes into London.

The Polish Air Forces in France and the United Kingdom supported the Allied powers during the Second World War. A group of Polish officers who remained in Britain after the war formed the Polish Air Force Association and decided to erect a memorial. A committee, led by Air Vice Marshal Izycki, raised the necessary funds mostly from British people, and the memorial was unveiled on 2 November 1948 by Lord Teder, Chief of the Air Staff, after a speech by Viscount Portal of Hungerford in which he said that it was a sad blow that many Polish veterans were unable to return home, as their country had been occupied by the Soviet Union. He added that it would be to the mutual advantage of Britons and Poles that the latter were to make their home in Britain.

The memorial was designed by Mieczysław Lubelski, who had been interned in a Nazi German concentration camp during the war. The memorial is made from Portland stone and Polish granite, with bronze lettering and a bronze eagle – the symbol of the Polish Air Force. The names of 1,243 Poles who died during the war were inscribed on the memorial, and a further 659 names added between 1994 and 1996, when the memorial was refurbished and rededicated.

Polish presidents Lech Wałęsa and Aleksander Kwaśniewski have both visited the war memorial to lay a wreath, in 1991 and 2004 respectively.

Memorial after 2010 refurbishment

The memorial was refurbished in 2010 in time for the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. In September 2012, a replica of the Polish wartime standard, the Wilno Standard, was paraded at the memorial as part of a memorial ceremony.