Italy recognises the Polish National Committee

On 30 October 1917 the Italian government recognised Roman Dmowski’s Polish National Committee as the official Polish organisation. Italy was the third Entente great power to do so, after France and Britain. The decision was taken by the foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino. The date of 30 October is given by Polish historians, and the activity of the Committee’s mission in Rome is also counted from that day. The news took several days to reach the Allies: on 5 November the French embassy in Washington informed the State Department that the Italian government had “just recognised” the Committee. Some works therefore speak more generally of the turn of October and November.

The Italian move had been foreshadowed. On 11 October the British informed the Americans that the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, would invite Italy to recognise the Committee as soon as he learned Washington’s position. When Rome took the decision, Italy was going through the gravest crisis of the war. The disaster at Caporetto had been unfolding for a week, the army was retreating in disorder to the Tagliamento, and the day before Vittorio Emanuele Orlando had formed a new government. Sonnino kept in it the foreign affairs portfolio he had held since 1914, and it was he who handled the Polish question.

The Committee’s representative to the Italian government was Konstanty Skirmunt, a landowner from Polesie and before the war a member of the Russian State Council. For Italy the Polish question had a practical dimension. Prisoner-of-war camps across the Italian peninsula held thousands of Poles captured in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army. Skirmunt’s mission worked to gather them in separate camps, cut off from Austrian and German influence, and to place them under Polish care. According to Polish works, in November 1917 about 5,000 Polish prisoners were assembled near Caserta.

Recognition did not yet mean consent to a Polish army in Italy. Rome held back on this for a long time. Sonnino agreed to the formation of Polish units from prisoners only in September 1918. More than 30,000 soldiers of the Polish Army (PL) later came out of the camps in Italy, most of them sent to France, to General Haller’s army. In the autumn of 1917, however, the Committee gained a third European partner and a third capital in which it could speak on behalf of the Poles.