Under the terms of the Anglo-Polish intelligence agreement of September 1940, the Poles agreed to pass all all information they received to the British unless it concerned purely internal Polish affairs. The Poles were in a unique position since their presence as forced labourers os as underground fighters throughout occupied Europe enabled them to gather information to a degree unequalled by any other power. This contribution was quantified in a British report in 1945: it claimed that of the 45,770 intelligence reports from occupied Europe processed by the Allies during the war, 22,047, or 48 per cent, emanated from Polish sources. Wilfred Dunderdale, the report's author, paid tribute to the Poles: “It will thus be seen that Polish agents worked unceasingly and well in Europe during the last five years, and that they provided, often at great danger to themselves and to their relatives, a vast amount of materials of all kinds on a wide variety of subjects.”
The book also dispels many myths, for instance about the insufficient support from the Home Army (AK) to the Jewish resistance movement. ‘[R]ecent research has suggested that in the spring of 1943 each ŻOB fighter was in fact far better armed than an average AK soldier would be during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.’ Two opinions are worth bringing up from the numerous claims about the Polish help for Jews: ‘Adolf Berman, a Jew who liaised between the Polish and Jewish undergrounds, wrote that too much had been written about the threats to the Jews in hiding and too little about the Poles who risked their lives to save them: "The flotsam and jetsam on the surface of a turbulent river is more visible than the pure stream running deep underneath, but that stream existed." On the other hand, according to “Władysław Bartoszewski, a "Righteous Among Nations": 'From the moral point of view it must be stated clearly that not enough was done either in Poland or anywhere else in occupied Europe. 'Enough' was done only by those who died while giving aid.’
Nonetheless, in order to avoid turning The Eagle Unbowed into a simple book of wishes and complaints that Poles directed at their Western allies, the author does not forget about Poland's internal conflicts. All kinds of soldiers, both members of domestic conspiracy and those fighting abroad, eager to fight for their motherland, surprisingly often lacked support from responsible leaders. This is one of the reasons why Halik Kochanski's book should be an obligatory position – especially for the current exponents of political life in Poland.
In April 1944, Bór-Komorowski informed London that the reality was that the AK ’was a conglomeration of commanders and detachments, whose attitudes to one another are frequently undisguisedly hostile, and who are held together in a badly frayed thread of formal discipline that may snap at the start of operations.’
The ideological disputes of the Polish emigre community – including the questioning of the moral motivations of highly placed nationals who represented different political views – crushed various plans that would be profitable for Poland, which the Allied leaders interpreted as arrogance, ingratitude, and lack of discipline.
Margaret McNeill, who worked at a camp for displaced persons, made a statement in Frankenburg:
The more we got to know the Poles, the more they baffled us … They respected their Church and counted honour something to be defended to the death, yet they earned for themselves a reputation for drunkenness, dishonesty and cruelty. They were often hopelessly lazy and unreliable as far as steady routine work went, but in a crisis they would, at the eleventh hour, rally and work with unparalleled speed and determination.
Lastly, a correction is in place. The corpse of Marshal Józef Piłsudski was indeed buried in St. Leonard's Crypt in Wawel Cathedral. Eventually, however, following discussions between the clerical and secular authorities, the Marshal's coffin was moved to the Crypt under the Silver Bells on 22nd June, 1937, as requested by Adam Stefan Sapieha, the Archbishop of Kraków.