Infamous Assassinations - Joseph Stalin - Churchill’s Betrayal of Poland TV -
July 4th 1943 Gibraltar: The passenger carrying B24 Liberator warms up on the airstrip. The pilot guns the engine and it rolls forward ... The plane climbs to about a hundred and fifty feet when the pilot puts it into a shallow dive to gain speed. But instead of pulling out the aircraft continues its dive and plunges into the sea. Only the pilot survives. Among the sixteen dead is a key figure in the alliance to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe. Infamous Assassinations: General Sikorski
Sikorski plays a leading role in the Battle of Warsaw. ibid.
Sikorski has become a focus for resistance not just to the Nazis but to the old enemy Russia. ibid.
Sikorski moves to Britain and starts to build up the Free Police forces again. ibid.
Two mysterious passengers – Mr W H Lock and Mr Pinter – they boarded at the last moment in Cairo. And their background has never been clarified. Plus a last-minute change – a courier. ibid.
How the mailbag got on to the runway is never satisfactorily explained. ibid.
Churchill might have wanted Sikorski dead because he was becoming a threat to Allied unity. Without the Soviet Union remaining as an ally the war could not be won. This theory was first put forward in the 1960s in a controversial German Play Soldiers, by Rolf Hochhuth. His suggestion in the play that the plane’s pilot might deliberately have crashed it was successfully contested in a libel trial. ibid.
Soviet technicians did have free access to the area. Also, the officer in charge of the Iberian section of British intelligence at the time was Kim Philby – he was to be unmasked exactly twenty years later as a long- time KGB agent. ibid.
It was all too convenient. Joseph Stalin
July 4th 1943: the fourth year of the Second World War – a plane carrying the Polish prime minister in exile, Wladyslaw Sikorski, takes off from Gibraltar, and sixteen seconds later plunges into the sea. To this day mystery surrounds the plane crash. Was it an accident? Was it sabotage? Or political assassination? Churchill’s Betrayal of Poland, Military Channel 2012
Stalin himself complained about Sikorski. ibid.
Was it pure coincidence that Mayski and Sikorski were in Gibraltar at the same time? ibid.