10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade (Poland)
Polish Armed Forces combat formation
The Polish 10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade (Polish: 10 Brygada Kawalerii Pancernej) was an armoured formation of the Polish Armed Forces in the West. It was organized in France during World War II as part of the Polish Army in France, mostly by veterans of the 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade who managed to escape from German and Soviet occupied Poland. Led by General Stanisław Maczek, it took part in the Battle of France in May 1940. It was later reformed in Great Britain as a part of the 1st Armoured Division.
1939-40
Under the terms of the Franco-Polish Military Alliance, France and Poland were allies in the lead-up to World War II. After Poland was defeated by Germany in September 1939, many Polish soldiers made their way to France where a new Polish Army in France was created to continue the fight against the Germans. These forces were commanded by General Władysław Sikorski, who was also Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile. French generals were not, however, interested in Polish information about the German tactics of Blitzkrieg displayed in the campaign in Poland. There was a general belief among the French High Command that the Polish armed forces had been incompetent, as well as a continuing belief in the impregnability of the Maginot Line. When General Maczek and his veterans tried to create a Polish mechanized division, they were not able to procure the equipment necessary for rapid training, so the new unit developed very slowly.
This state of affairs changed when Germany invaded the Low Countries in 1940, out-flanking the French fortifications.
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This entry incorporates text from “10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade (Poland)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.