Volume 7 1941~1945


Doc No.
Date
Subject

No. 545  NAI DFA 2006/39

Extract from a confidential report from John W. Dulanty to
Joseph P. Walshe (Dublin)
(No. 6)

LONDON, 16 February 1945

M. Mikolajozyk1 lunched with me yesterday. He was extremely depressed at the decisions announced at the close of the Yalta Conference. As he had said to me before, he greatly feared that Stalin had contrived to bring Churchill and Roosevelt to a point in policy the outcome of which, on a long view, they had not visualised. But he did not share the view of some members of the Polish Government in London who were disposed to 'wait and see' in the hope that later developments might prove to be more favourable to Poland. He was against that view because he said that the offer on which he had been sounded about three months ago was distinctly better than the present proposal. Although the Polish Prime Minister in London has stated publicly that he will go neither to Warsaw nor to Moscow, M. Mikolajozyk is emphatic in his view that some Polish representative must go to Moscow. He will certainly try to do this himself though he said he was pretty sure that in the event of his Mission not succeeding, he would never get back alive.

The absence of any statement of the Allies' intentions about the North and Western frontiers of Poland was very disappointing. This omission might be due to:

  1. the fact that a statement about these frontiers would help the Nazi leaders to increase the war effort of the Germans, or
  2. that the Big Three had not yet reached agreement amongst themselves.

He thought (b) the more likely of the two probabilities.

[matter omitted]

1 Stanislaw Mikolajczyk (1901-66), Prime Minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London.