Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr.

Nationality

U.S.A.

Date of Birth

1879

Date of Death

1961

Political
Preference

Democratic

Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr. was an American diplomat and ambassador. He served in the United States Army during World War I and was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Norway in 1935. In 1937, he was promoted Ambassador to Poland.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Biddle followed the Polish government in a ‘race against death’ to Rumania, before eventually ending up in Paris, where he joined the new Polish government headed by Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski. When France was invaded by German troops in June 1940, Biddle returned to the United States in order to help Roosevelt with his re-election campaign. He used his ties to the Polish community to his advantage and campaigned for Roosevelt throughout the Midwest, where there were many Polish-American communities.

Following Roosevelt’s growing commitment to the British war effort, Biddle returned to London in March 1941, where he became the ambassador to the European governments in exile. In this capacity he was ambassador to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway and Yugoslavia. In London, Biddle became part of the European network of exiled governments, who saw his appointment as a source of recognition for their dire positions. Biddle’s main job was to gather intelligence from the circles of the exiles – mostly from the Poles – about troop movements in Europe, but also about the European resistance groups.

In 1942, Biddle played an important role in discouraging an effort by Sikorski and Joseph Retinger to try and create a post-war federation of Central and Eastern European states. The U.S. (as well as the British) feared that this would be forcefully opposed by Russia – and as such would reflect on the unity of the Grand Alliance that was created to win the war against Germany.

By 1943, when the outlook for Poland in the post-war became rather grim, Biddle became worried that this might fall back on him (after all, he had personal ambitions to one day become the governor of Pennsylvania, for which he depended on support from the American-Polish communities). He thus inquired with Roosevelt if he could be transferred to the staff of Dwight D. Eisenhower – where he thought he could have a share in winning the war. This would obviously reflect better on his personal wartime legacy. During the remainder of the war, he remained on Eisenhower’s staff.