Name Michael Peszke Role Historian | ||
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Books The Polish underground army - the, The Armed Forces of Poland in, Poland's Navy - 1918‑1945, Longing for a Kiss, Battle for Warsaw - 1939‑1944 | ||
Education Trinity College, Dublin | ||
Michael Alfred Peszke (19 December 1932 – 17 May 2015) was a Polish-American psychiatrist and historian of the Polish Armed Forces in World War II.
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Life
Peszke was born in Dęblin, Poland in 1932. After the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, Peszke, his mother Eugenia Halina Grębocka Peszke, and his father Alfred Bartłomiej Peszke evacuated to France and Britain.
Michael Alfred Peszke, after attending school in Scotland and England, studied at Trinity College, Dublin University, and the Dublin University School of Medicine, where he received his medical degree. From 1956 to 1960 he performed a psychiatric residency in Rhode Island and Connecticut in the United States, and in 1963 obtained his board certification. Until his retirement in 1999, he combined clinical work with research, teaching, and administrative duties, chiefly on the East Coast of the United States.
Peszke died at his home in Wakefield, Rhode Island, on 17 May 2015.
Peszke was professor emeritus of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Member Emeritus of the American College of Psychiatrists, and Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He was a member of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.
History
Through his father, a Polish Air Force officer who in 1944 had become chief of Air Force planning at the Staff of the Polish Commander in Chief in London, Peszke had developed an interest in the history of Polish Armed Forces policy and collaboration with the other Allies. This led him to combine his psychiatric vocation with a historical avocation. Beginning in 1973, he published numerous papers and studies in English and Polish on diverse aspects of the Polish Armed Forces, particularly in the west, during World War II. Chief among these are four books:
Peszke's writings are characterized by an admirable clarity and succinctness that may perhaps owe something to his training in medical diagnostics. In addition to documenting Poland's contributions to the Allied military effort in World War II—one of which, decryption of German Enigma machine ciphers, was acknowledged by Winston Churchill as having been critical to the outcome of the war—Peszke's historical writings show particular strength in regard to the delicate wartime politics and diplomacy of a country tragically trapped between the aggressive imperialisms of western and eastern Europe, a country betrayed by her own wartime European and American allies.