A SECOND World War Polish Army veteran has been speaking on BBC Radio about his experiences fighting in Italy and the Middle East.

Walerian Jaworski, 90, of Melksham, was interviewed by the BBC for a radio documentary which was broadcast on the BBC World Service on Sunday.

Mr Jaworski, who will be 91 on Christmas Eve, fought with the Polish II Corps under the command of Lt Gen Wladyslaw Anders.

Dubbed the ‘Polish Moses’, Lt-General Anders led Polish people who had been deported to the gulag camps in the Soviet Union and formed them into an army that fought alongside Allied forces in the Middle East and Italy.

The Corps operated from 1943–1947 as a major tactical and operational unit of the Polish Armed Forces in the West during World War II.

Mr Jaworski said: “I was only just 17 in January 1944 when I joined the Corps, although I had been a Polish Army Cadet for a year prior to that. We were taught gunnery, how to use telegraph equipment, and how to drive.

“The Regiment insisted on us learning all the trades so that if anyone was killed or wounded, we could cover for each other.”

In February 1944, the 50,000-strong Polish II Corps was transferred from Egypt to Italy.

The , where it became an independent part of the British Eighth Army.During 1944–45, the Corps fought with distinction in the Italian Campaign, most notably during the fourth and final Battle of Monte Cassino, in May 1944, where it suffered heavy losses.

“It was not a happy time when they sent us to Monte Cassino. We had heard about the disasters there when we were in Egypt,” Mr Jaworski said.

“There had been three previous attempts by British, Indian and New Zealand forces to get the Germans out and each one had failed with a terrible loss of life.”

In the final stage of the Battle of Monte Cassino, even the Polish support units were mobilised and used in combat, such was the ferocity of the fight.

“We lost 28 men trying to get the Germans out of the hills above the monastery. Virtually everyone who was still alive had suffered shrapnel wounds,” he said. I had a piece of shrapnel in my helmet.“When we finally got the Germans out, they had lost of lot of men, dead and wounded, and we took about 30 prisoners.”Mr Jaworski later went on to fight in the Battle of Ancona during Operation Olive, the fighting on the Gothic Line inSeptember 1944, and in the Battle of Bologna during the final offensive in Italy in March 1945.During the Italian Campaign, the Polish II Corps lost 11,379 men. Among them were 2,301 killed in action, 8,543 wounded in action and 535 missing in action.

After the war, the divisions of the Corps were used as an occupation force in Italy until 1946, when they were transported to Britain and demobilised in Britain .Mr Jaworski was among those who chose to stay here, and eventually moved to Melksham. didn’t want to back home to eastern Poland, then part of a new Communist state.

He stayed on to work in Grimsby, before going to Bath to work for a demolition company, and then to Melksham, where he helped to build pre-fabricated houses and lay water pipes between Warminster and Westbury.

He met his wife, Glynice, and the couple now live at when he was 21 and she only sixteen and a half. “Her father didn’t even want us to see each other, let alone marry, and said it would only last six months. We’ve been married now for 63 years.”Walerian and Glynice, now 87, live at Townsend Farm, Melksham, and have two sons, Mark and Christopher, as well as five grandchildren and one great-grandchild with another on the way.

The interview can be heard on BBC iPlayer: search for The Documentary The Odyssey of General Anders’ Army.

Mr Jaworski added: “I was lucky in that I was young and able to adapt to things that were going on around me. I think I’ve had a lucky life. The devil looks after his own.

“The war in Italy was horrible for the civilian population. It was terrible for us too, because we were losing friends.

“Most of the time, it was very sad. The only time we laughed and sang was when we had a few glasses of wine.

“I really feel for the men who have been sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not a happy situation for them or their families.”