Władysław Sikorski's death controversy revolves around the death of the commander-in-chief of the Polish Army and ładysłPrime Minister of the Polish government in exile, General Władysław Sikorski, in the 1943 B-24 crash in Gibraltar. Sikorski's Liberator II crashed off Gibraltar almost immediately after takeoff, with the plane's pilot being the only survivor. The catastrophe, while officially classified as an accident, has led to several conspiracy theories that persist to this day, and often propose that the crash was an assassination, which has variously been blamed on the Soviets, the British, and the Nazis. The incident is still described by some historians as mysterious and was investigated by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. They concluded that the injuries sustained were consistent with a plane crash and that there was not enough evidence to support or reject the theory that the plane was deliberately sabotaged.
Air crash
In late May 1943, Sikorski went to inspect Polish forces stationed in the Middle East. He was inspecting the forces and raising morale of the Polish troops there. He was also occupied with political matters; around that time, a conflict was growing between him and general Władysław Anders. The main reason for this was that Sikorski was still open to some normalization of Polish-Soviet relations, to which Anders vehemently objected.
On 4 July 1943, while returning from the Middle East, Sikorski perished, together with his daughter Zofia, his Chief of Staff, Tadeusz Klimecki, and seven others, when his aircraft, a Consolidated Liberator II, serial number AL523, crashed into the sea 16 seconds after takeoff from Gibraltar Airport at 23:07 hours.
Passengers and crew
The only survivor of the accident was the pilot Flight Lieutenant Eduard Prchal, one of six crew on the aircraft. The 11 passengers killed were:
General Władysław Sikorski – commander-in-chief of the Polish Army and Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile Major General Tadeusz Klimecki – Polish Army Chief of General Staff Brigadier John Percival Whiteley OBE – Conservative Party Member of Parliament for Buckingham Colonel Victor Cazalet MC – British liaison officer to the Polish forces Colonel Andrzej Marecki – Polish Army Chief of Operations Jan Gralewski – an Armia Krajowa courier Lieutenant , Polish Navy who was Sikorski's adjutant Warrant Telegraphist Harry Pinder, Royal Navy – Chief of the Royal Navy signals station in Alexandria – Sikorski's adjutant Zofia Leśniowska – Sikorski's daughter and secretary Walter Heathcote Lock – Ministry of Transport representative in the Persian Gulf.
Official investigations
A British Court of Inquiry convened on 7 July that year investigated the crash of Sikorski's Liberator II serial AL 523, but was unable to determine the cause, finding only that it was an accident and "due to jamming of elevator controls", noting that "it has not been possible to determine how the jamming occurred but it has been established that there was no sabotage." The Polish government refused to endorse the report, due to the contradiction about the cause not being determined but sabotage being ruled out, and pursued its own investigation, which suggested that the cause of the accident cannot be easily determined. The political context of the event, coupled with a variety of circumstances, immediately gave rise to much speculation that Sikorski's death had been no accident, and may have been the direct result of a German, Soviet, British, or even Polish conspiracy.
In 2008, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) began an official inquiry into the incident. Sikorski was exhumed and his remains were examined by Polish scientists, who in 2009 concluded that he died due to injuries consistent with an air crash and that there was no evidence that Sikorski was murdered, ruling out theories that he was shot or strangled before the incident; however, they did not rule out the possibility of sabotage. One of the IPN historians, Maciej Korkuć, has stated that "many facts suggest an assassination", although another, Andrzej Chwalba, notes that there is insufficient evidence to support this claim. He also complains that some British and Spanish documents still remain classified, hindering the investigation. The British documents concerning the accident will not be declassified until 2050; until that date, they will remain top secret. The Polish investigation ended in 2013 with the conclusion that deliberate tampering to the aircraft could be neither confirmed nor ruled out.