 It was unveiled on 2 November 1948 by Lord Tedder, Chief of the Air Staff, after a speech by Viscount Portal of Hungerford in which he said that it was a sad blow that many Polish veterans were unable to return home, as their country had been occupied by the Soviet Union.He added that it would be to the mutual advantage of Britons and Poles that the latter were to make their home in Britain.The Polish sculptor Mieczysław Lubelski, who had served in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and been interned in a German concentration camp, designed the monument.