Project Pławski: The translation, editing, layout, design and publication in English of the memoirs of the Polish naval hero, Commodore Eugeniusz Józef Stanisław Pławski, Chief of Staff of the Polish Navy during the later years of the Second World War. These memoirs were published in Polish in 2003 as “Fala za Falą . . .“ (“Wave after Wave . . .”), a 450-page illustrated, hard-cover book.
Eugeniusz Pławski started his service career in the Imperial Russian Navy but stoutly maintained his loyalty to his Polish heritage throughout his life. He rose to the command of the Russian destroyer Zorkiy before returning to the newly-reconstituted Poland on the close of the First World War.
When General Józef Haller staged his famous “Wedding to the Sea” at Puck in 1920, it was Pławski who gave the order to raise the flag of an independent Poland. He went on to command the Polish Naval base at Puck, the Polish minesweepers ORP Czajka and ORP Mewa and the gunboat ORP General Haller. From 1928 to 1931 he led the Polish submarine navigation course in France. In 1931 he became commander of the submarine ORP Żbik and then became commander of the entire submarine flotilla. In 1936 he was transferred to the Polish Navy Command. In 1939 he was sent on a mission to France seeking military assistance in case of Germany’s invasion of Poland.
After the outbreak of war and the fall of France, Pławski was sent to England where he assumed command of the OF Ouragan, an old French destroyer that had seized by the Royal Navy while undergoing repairs in Brest and towed to London before being loaned to the Polish Navy. In October 1940, Pławski chose to place himself under the command of an officer his junior in order to take command of ORP Piorun, a brand-new Hunt Class destroyer which had been launched at Clydebank as HMS Nerissa before being handed to the Polish Navy. From late 1941 to 1943, Pławski was appointed by the Polish Government-in-Exile, then based in London, as a military attaché to Sweden. In May 1943, restless to get back to sea, he took command of the cruiser ORP Dragon. In 1944 he was promoted to Chief-of-Staff of the Polish Navy.
After the war and the command of ORP Baltyk, a Polish Resettlement Corps camp in Okehampton, Devon, Eugeniusz Pławski and his surviving family emigrated to Canada where, among other activities, he was recruited by the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) as an interpreter and analyst. He died in Vancouver in 1973.
Commodore Pławski’s life story is the stuff of legend. It spans the First World War, the last days of Imperial Russia, the Red Revolution and all its horrors, the re-constitution of an independent Poland after a hundred-and-thirty-seven years of partition, the conquest of Poland by Nazi Germany, the Second World War and, finally, the scattering of the Polish diaspora of soldiers, sailors and airmen who could not return to a Poland yet again under the heel of a foreign political system and oppression of democracy. In 2004, Eugeniusz Pławski’s ashes were taken to his native Poland and interred, along with those of his, wife in the military cemetery in Gdynia.
The costs of the work on this project is estimated at between £12,000 and £15,000 (including some £6,000 for translation) to bring it to publication. It is a story that deserves to be told and told again.
