Michael Alfred Peszke - Definition and Overview

Michael Alfred Peszke (born 1932, Dęblin, Poland) is a Polish-American psychiatrist and historian of the Polish Armed Forces in World War II.

After the outbreak of World War II and the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, Peszke, his mother Eugenia Halina Grębocka Peszke, and his father Alfred Bartłomiej Peszke (1899-1966)—an infantry veteran of the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921) and Air Force veteran of the September 1939 Campaign—evacuated to France and Great Britain, where the father continued serving with the Polish Air Force till his discharge in December 1946 in the rank of lieutenant colonel.

The son, Michael Alfred Peszke, after attending school in Scotland and England, studied at Trinity College, Dublin University, and the Dublin University School of Medicine, where he received his medical degree. From 1956 to 1960 he performed a psychiatric residency in Rhode Island and Connecticut in the United States, and in 1963 obtained his board certification. Until his retirement in 1999, he combined clinical work with research, teaching, and administrative duties, chiefly on the East Coast of the United States.

Through his father, who had served as a Polish liaison officer with Britain's Royal Air Force and in 1944 had become chief of air force planning at the Staff of the Polish Commander in Chief in London, Peszke had developed an interest in the history of Polish Armed Forces policy and collaboration with the other Allies. This led him to combine his psychiatric vocation with a historical avocation. Since 1973 he has published numerous papers and studies in English and Polish on diverse aspects of the Polish Armed Forces, particularly in the west, during World War II. Chief among these are three books:

• Battle for Warsaw, 1939-1944, Boulder, Colorado, East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1995, 325 pp., ISBN 0-88033-324-3. A study of the military and diplomatic efforts of the Polish Government in Exile in France and Britain to restore Poland's sovereignty. The endeavor ended in tragedy when the Polish Home Army launched the Warsaw Uprising (August-October 1944) against the occupying German forces, the Soviet Union denied landing rights on Soviet-controled territory to the Royal Air Force, the U.S. Army Air Corps, and the Polish Air Force headquartered in Britain, and the western Allies—fearing to offend the Soviets—declined to pressure Joseph Stalin to assist the Polish insurgents or at least grant landing rights. The Polish Parachute Brigade, which had been formed expressly to aid a prospective uprising in Poland, was—against Polish government and military objections—highjacked for British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery's disastrous Operation Market Garden of A Bridge Too Far infamy just as the Warsaw Uprising was running its disastrous course.

• Poland's Navy, 1918-1945, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1999, 222 pp., ISBN 0-7818-0672-0. A history, unique in the English language, of the Polish Navy before and during World War II, containing entirely original sections on the Polish feluccas and Polish naval aviation.

• The Polish Underground Army, the Western Allies, and the Failure of Strategic Unity in World War II, foreword by Piotr S. Wandycz, Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company, 2005, 244 pp., ISBN 0-7864-2009-X. A ground-breaking, densely documented study of Polish military staff efforts in World War II, with special reference to Poland's relations with her allies.

Peszke's writings are characterized by an admirable clarity and succinctness that may perhaps owe something to his training in medical diagnostics. In addition to documenting Poland's contributions to the Allied military effort in World War II—one of which, decryption of German Enigma machine ciphers, was acknowledged by Winston Churchill as having been critical to the outcome of the war—Peszke's historical writings show particular strength in regard to the delicate wartime politics and diplomacy of a country tragically trapped between the aggressive imperialisms of western and eastern Europe, a country betrayed by her own wartime European and American allies.

Reference

"Peszke, Alfred Bartłomiej," Polski słownik biograficzny (Polish Biographical Dictionary), vol. XXV, Wrocław, Polska Akademia Nauk (Polish Academy of Sciences), 1980, pp. 660-61.