Michael Alfred Peszke
Michael Alfred Peszke (December 19, 1932 – May 17, 2015) was a Polish‑American psychiatrist and a historian who studied the Polish Armed Forces in World War II. He was born in Dęblin, Poland, and after Poland was attacked in 1939, he and his parents evacuated to France and then Britain. He studied in Scotland and England and earned his medical degree at Trinity College Dublin. From 1956 to 1960, he completed a psychiatric residency in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and he became board certified in 1963. Until his retirement in 1999, he worked as a clinician while also doing research, teaching, and administrative work on the East Coast of the United States. He died in Wakefield, Rhode Island, in 2015.
Peszke was professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, a longtime member of the American College of Psychiatrists, and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He also belonged to the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.
Inspired by his father, a Polish Air Force officer who helped plan operations in London in 1944, Peszke developed a deep interest in Poland’s wartime military history and its cooperation with the Allies. Beginning in 1973, he wrote many papers in English and Polish on various aspects of the Polish Armed Forces, especially those serving with the Allies in World War II. He published four books on these topics. His writing is clear and concise, a trait some say comes from his medical training.
Among his studies, Peszke highlighted Poland’s contributions to the Allied war effort, including the breaking of the German Enigma cipher, a contribution Churchill credited as important to the war’s outcome. He also explored the difficult wartime politics and diplomacy of a country squeezed between Western and Eastern Europe and often betrayed by its wartime allies.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 06:09 (CET).