Quote:
Originally Posted by Zedi
Free Poland will sail in convoys and Poland in the normal coasta traffic. But as far as I know, there were no polish ships in the convoys. But I found a lot of ships from Greece, Norway, Panama, Sweden. So I will need a "free" entry for these ones too. Im using Hague records for documentation over the ww2 convoys. |
According to the info that I was able collect from the net, Polish never surrendered formally to German (neither to Russian, for this matter) invaders. Hence, Germany could not issue any puppet government there and they ruled directly on the occupied Poland. As a consequence, I think that around Polish ports shipping traffic was made mostly of German (and other Axis nations's) ships, but it is reasonable that some ships kept sailing around Polish coastal waters under their national flag, just as you're suggesting.
As for "Free Poland" traffic, please read carefully this short article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_...ld_War_II#Navy
seems that most of Polish Navy was made up of ships provided by British after the beginning of the war. Polish were heavily invoved alongside Allied Navies both in convoys escorting and in task forces operations mostly in Atlantic Ocean, Baltic, North and Mediterranean Sea (notably they partecipated to the operation agaist German Carrier Bismarck!).
Besides this, according to the same article, Polish Merchant Fleet had an important role in the history of the conflict. Though, in wich convoys Polish merchants were found it is something out of my (limited) knowledge. I'll try to do so extra research on it if you're interested
