August, seeing service during Operation Totalize. The division twice suffered attacks of friendly fire from U.S. Army Air Force aircraft, yet achieved a brilliant victory against the Wehrmacht in the battles for Mont Ormel, Hill 262 and the town of Chambois. In this series of offensive and defensive operations, which came to be known as the Battle of Falaise, 14 German Wehrmacht and SS divisions were trapped in the huge Chambois pocket and destroyed. Maczek's division had the crucial role of closing the pocket to block the escape route of the German divisions. After this decisive battle, Maczek's Division continued to spearhead the Allied drive across the battlefields of northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands and finally Germany. During its progress it liberated Ypres, Oostnieuwkerke, Roeselare, Tielt, Ruislede and Ghent in Belgium. (Coincidentally, the Polish word maczek means "poppy" in English, the symbol of remembrance associated with the area around Ypres in the First World War.) Thanks to an outflanking manoeuvre, it proved possible to free Breda in the Netherlands after a hard fight but without incurring losses in the town's population. A petition on behalf of 40,000 inhabitants of Breda resulted in Maczek being made an honorary Dutch citizen after the war. The Division's finest hour came when its forces accepted the surrender of the German naval base of Wilhelmshaven, taking captive the entire garrison, together with some 200 vessels of Hitler's Kriegsmarine. Maczek commanded the 1st Armoured Division until the end of European hostilities and was promoted to major-general. After the capitulation of Germany he went on to command the Polish I Corps and became commanding officer of all Polish forces in the United Kingdom until their demobilization in 1947. Exile After the war, Maczek was stripped of Polish citizenship by the Communist government of the Polish People's Republic, and thus had to remain in Britain. He left the army on 9 September 1948 but was for some reason denied a general's pension by the British government. As a result, Maczek worked as a bartender at an Edinburgh hotel until the 1960s. Although living in the United Kingdom, General Stanisław Maczek had a strong connection to the Netherlands. Besides being a regional hero to the areas he liberated in World War II, he was awarded honorary citizenship of the city of Breda. Recently acquired archive documents show that the Polish general secretly received a yearly allowance from the Dutch