Sikorski Memorial The Sikorski Memorial in Gibraltar commemorates the 1943 Gibraltar B - 24 crash of 4 July 1943 which caused the death of General Władysław Sikorski , the commander - in - chief of the Polish Army and Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile . Fifteen other people also died in the crash , with only the pilot Eduard Prchal surviving . The present version of the memorial , unveiled on 4 July 2013 , is the third , replacing two earlier memorials erected in 1945 and 2003 near the scene of the crash . It was designed and constructed by a Polish company , using sandstone from Poland brought across Europe to Gibraltar where it now comprises much of the wide memorial . Earlier versions of the Sikorski Memorial . The memorial originally consisted of a plaque , dedicated in January 1945 , that was placed at the east end of the runway of what was then RAF North Front ( and is now RAF Gibraltar / Gibraltar International Airport ) . The text of the plaque reads : In 2003 , the Royal Air Force donated the plaque to the Government of Gibraltar and a new memorial was erected near the airfield at Sir Herbert Miles Road , consisting of a plinth on which the plaque was mounted along with a propellor recovered from the crashed B - 24 . A second plaque was also installed , reading : However , the location proved unsatisfactory . Although it was a popular destination for Polish visitors to Gibraltar , there was little space around the memorial and neither tour groups nor official delegations had much room to assemble in its vicinity . The Polish authorities lobbied for a number of years to have the memorial moved to a more spacious site elsewhere in Gibraltar . Current memorial ' s location and design . In 2013 the memorial was relocated to Europa Point , the southernmost tip of the Gibraltar peninsula , and was reinstalled with a new design at a site between Europa Point Lighthouse and Harding ' s Battery . Its design was based on a concept by the late Charles Caruana , Bishop of Gibraltar , who had a long - running interest in Gibraltar ' s connection with Poland and in Sikorski ' s history and memory . The new design is a semi - circular structure with a diameter of and a maximum height of . The B - 24 ' s propellor from the previous memorial was remounted on a new , larger plinth weighing more than two tons . A disc of sandstone from Szydłów in Poland is set into the ground in the centre of the memorial , forming the plinth ' s base . In front of the disc , carved into the ground , are the words " General Władysław Sikorski 1881 – 1943 " . Behind the disc is a stone semi - circular wall which rises to a peak on which a carved Polish military eagle stands . The Polish naval pennant and air force emblem are embedded at opposite ends of the wall . Tablets name the other victims , in addition to Sikorski , and explain the events of the crash to visitors . The memorial was constructed by Furmanek Renewal , a company based in Daleszyce in south - central Poland , where it was first assembled to test that it all fitted together before it was driven to Gibraltar to be installed over a period of about two and a half weeks . Dedication of the memorial . The memorial was dedicated in a ceremony held on 4 July 2013 , the 70th anniversary of the crash , in which British , Gibraltarian and Polish government officials participated alongside past and present members of the Polish Armed Forces . Two Polish government ministers , Jan Stanisław Ciechanowski of the Office for War Veterans and Victims of Oppression and Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert from the Council of the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom , led the Polish delegation . Polish and Gibraltarian clergy also attended , and the ceremony was hosted by the Governor of Gibraltar , Vice Admiral Sir Adrian Johns , and the Mayor of Gibraltar , Anthony Lima . The British military was represented by the Commander British Forces Gibraltar and the Commanding Officer of the Royal Gibraltar Regiment . Johns spoke in his address of " a man who lived and died as a fearless soldier and indomitable champion of the Polish cause , " while Bronisław Komorowski , the President of Poland , said in an address read on his behalf at the ceremony that he wished for the memorial to " symbolically point at those highest values which are common to us : brotherhood and freedom . "