Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Central and Eastern Europe; The Soviet Union, Volume IV

Secretary’s Memoranda: Lot 53 D 444: Memoranda for the President¹

Memorandum by the Acting Secretary of State to the President ²

[Washington,] September 22, 1950.

Subject: Visit of General Anders to the United States

I am informed that General Anders, who you will recall was the distinguished Commander of the Polish Corps in Italy during the last war, after completing a visit in Canada where he has been invited by the Governor General, Viscount Alexander, will arrive in Washington on September 24 and remain in the United States until the middle of October. He will participate in observances of Pulaski Day in New York on October 1 and will deliver a lecture on the Battle of Monte Cassino at Georgetown University in this city on October 13. It is understood that he will visit here a number of friends and officers of the United States Armed Forces with whom he was associated in the last war and that he may appear before Polish-American groups in other cities.³

General Anders is connected with a group of Polish exiles with headquarters in London known as the “London Government”. This is one of three rival political organizations of the Polish refugee leaders.

It is possible that a request may be made that you receive General Anders during his stay in the United States. It is believed undesirable from a foreign policy standpoint, in spite of his outstanding contribution to the Allied campaign in Italy, that you receive him in view of his well known and outspoken predilection for a preventive war and the complications such a visit might cause with respect to rival groups of Polish émigrés.

James E. Webb

1. Lot 53 D 444 is a comprehensive chronological collection of the Secretary of State’s memoranda and memoranda of conversation for the years 1947–1953, as maintained by the Executive Secretariat of the Department of State.
2. A copy of this memorandum was also sent to Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall. The memorandum was drafted by Harold C. Vedeler, Officer in Charge of Polish, Baltic, and Czechoslovak Affairs, Office of Eastern European Affairs.
3. A Central Intelligence Agency report of September 15 to the Secretary of State, not printed, indicated that Gen. Wladyslaw Anders intended to visit Canada and the United States in order to strengthen the prestige of the Polish Government in Exile in London and to make the following proposition to American authorities: If the United States Government would look upon the London Polish Government in Exile as the legal Polish Government in case diplomatic relations were severed with the Warsaw regime in the future or in the event of war, the London Government (i.e., General Anders) would arrange to furnish about five divisions of troops from among the former Polish soldiers currently in Great Britain (748.00/9–1550).