Michael Alfred Peszke

After attending school in Scotland and England, Michael Alfred Peszke studied at Trinity College Dublin, 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.^[4][5]

Peszke died at his home in Wakefield, Rhode Island, on 17 May 2015.^[6]

Peszke was

Through his father, a Polish Air Force officer who in 1944 had become head of Air Force planning as part of the Staff of the Polish Commander-in-Chief in London,^[8] Peszke the son had developed an interest in the history of Polish Armed Forces policy and collaboration with the Allies. This led him to combine his psychiatric vocation with a historical avocation. Beginning in 1973, he 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 four books:

• Battle for Warsaw, 1939-1944, Boulder, Colorado, East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1995, 325 pp.,
  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
  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.^[9][10]
• The Armed Forces of Poland in the West, 1939–46: Strategic Concepts, Planning, Limited Success but No Victory!,
  ISBN 978-1908916549.^[11]
• Polskie siły zbrojne na Zachodzie, 1939–1946: Koncepcje strategiczne i realia geopolityki (The Polish Armed Forces in the West, 1939–1946: Strategic Concepts and Geopolitical Realities), translated by Tomasz Fiedorek,
  ISBN 978-83-7818-547-5
  . (This is a Polish-language edition of Peszke's 2013 book.)

Peszke's writings were characterized by a 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.^[12]

Bibliography

• Battle for Warsaw, 1939-1944, Boulder, Colorado, East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1995, 325 pp.,
  ISBN 0-88033-324-3
  .
• Poland's Navy, 1918-1945, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1999, 222 pp.,
  ISBN 0-7818-0672-0
  .
• The Polish Underground Army, the Western Allies, and the Failure of Strategic Unity in World War II, foreword by
  ISBN 0-7864-2009-X
  .
• "The Demise of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, 1945–1947," The Polish Review, vol. LV, no. 2, 2010, pp. 231–39.
• Review of
  ISBN 978-1-60772-004-1, in The Polish Review
  , vol. LV, no. 4, 2010, pp. 467–68.
• Michael Alfred Peszke, "The British-Polish Agreement of August 1940: Its Antecedents, Significance and Consequences,"
  Taylor & Francis Group
  , no. 24, 2011, pp. 648–58.
• The Armed Forces of Poland in the West, 1939–46: Strategic Concepts, Planning, Limited Success but No Victory!, Helion Studies in Military History, no. 13,
  ISBN 978-1-90891-654-9
  .