II Corps (Poland) - Composition

Composition

In May 1945 the Corps consisted of 55,780 men and approximately 1,500 women from auxiliary services. There was also one bear, named Wojtek. The majority of the forces were composed mostly of Polish citizens who were deported by the NKVD to the Soviet Gulags during the annexation of Eastern Poland (Kresy Wschodnie) in 1939 by the Soviet Union. Following the Operation Barbarossa and the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement many of them were released and allowed to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East being formed in Southern Russia and Kazakhstan. Due to political reasons the Soviet Union soon withdrew support for the creation of a Polish Army on its territory and lowered the supply rate, which forced General Władysław Anders to withdraw his troops to British-held Persia and Iraq. From there the troops were moved to British Mandate of Palestine, where they joined forces with the 3rd Carpathian Division which was composed mostly of Polish soldiers who had managed to escape to French Lebanon through Romania and Hungary after the Polish Defensive War of 1939.

The main bulk of the soldiers were from the eastern voivodeships of pre-war Poland. Although the majority of them were ethnic Poles, there were also members of other nationalities who joined the units of II Corps, most notably Jews, Belarusians and Ukrainians. After being relocated to Palestine, where there was little for the enlisted men to do, many Jewish soldiers of the corps "unofficially" discharged themselves by simply fading into the countryside. Menachem Begin, however, though encouraged to desert by friends of his, refused to remove the uniform until he was officially discharged from the army.

The armament was as follows:

• 248 pieces of artillery
• 288 anti-tank guns
• 234 anti-aircraft guns
• 264 tanks
• 1,241 APCs
• 440 armoured cars
• 12,064 cars, Bren carriers and trucks
• 1 brown bear