Talk:Włodzimierz Zagórski (general)

Effect of his disappearance
Moved unreferenced para from main article.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 02:18, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

One thing is certain: personal animosity, if not to say hatred, between Józef Piłsudski and general Zagórski resulted in Piłsudski`s distrust towards the Aviation Dept. and a weaker position of the air forces, which would eventually play an important role in the defeat suffered in the September Campaign of 1939 - when Poland was attacked by Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR. After Piłsudski's armed coup in 1926 the Aviation Dept. has been renamed into Aeronautics Dept. It was not only a matter of semantics. Some of the airplanes purchased by Zagórski in France were mocked (Spad in Polish means the state of falling down) and the role of airships and balloons has been accented. The experimental character of aviation has often been underlined by the group of colonels surrounding Piłsudski, who were ruling in Poland at the time. It was only after the death of Józef Piłsudski in 1935, that the officer general Ludomił Rayski commanding the Air Force got some support for his ideas concerning its development. However, the change of the Polish armament policy came too late and on a far too small scale to save the Polish army from a disaster in the 1939 defensive war against Germany and Soviet Russia.