1945-2005 - The 60th Anniversary of the Polish Armed Forces being 'stood down' from active service.

Poland, the first country to put a halt to Germany's 'peaceful expansion' in the years preceding the Second World War was also the one European state to suffer the most.  Arguably no other European nation lost so much as a result of the war despite being the most steadfast of the allies.  Polish soldiers fought from the first day of the war to last on land, sea, and in the air.  When the guns finally fell silent after more than five and a half years of war, it transpired that despite being on the side of the victorious allies, Poland was the main loser.  Handed over by the British and Americans to Stalin on a silver platter, she lost her territory in the east to the USSR and became little more than a vassal state of Moscow, occupied by the Red Army with a puppet government installed by the Soviet leadership.
It was this 'government' which Britain and America went out of their way to recognize so as to appease Moscow at the cost of betraying the legally constitutional government of the Republic of Poland.

Michael Hope's book introduces the process by which the Polish exiled authorities were first betrayed to accomodate the USSR at their own expense, then ignored and lastly sidelined altogether.  It is the story of a faithful ally being betrayed and left high and dry by the western allied powers who not only were under moral by written international obligations to assist  Poland regaining both her territory and sovereignty.
In both counts they failed miserably.  The price of this temerity was the occupation and enslavement not only of Poland but half of the European continent for nearly half a century.