Through his father, a Polish Air Force officer who in 1944 had become head of Air Force planning as part of the Staff of the Polish Commander-in-Chief in London, Peszke the son had developed an interest in the history of Polish Armed Forces policy and collaboration with the Allies. This led him to combine his psychiatric vocation with a historical avocation. Beginning in 1973, he published numerous papers and studies in English and Polish on diverse aspects of the Polish Armed Forces, particularly in the west, during World War II. Chief among these, are four books:
Battle for Warsaw, 1939-1944, Boulder, Colorado, East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1995, 325 pp.,. A study of the military and diplomatic efforts of the Polish Government in Exile in France and Britain to restore Poland's sovereignty. The endeavor ended in tragedy when the Polish Home Army launched the Warsaw Uprising against the occupying German forces, the Soviet Union denied landing rights on Soviet-controlled territory to the Royal Air Force, the U.S. Army Air Corps, and the Polish Air Force headquartered in Britain, and the western Allies—fearing to offend the Soviets—declined to pressure Joseph Stalin to assist the Polish insurgents or at least grant landing rights. The Polish Parachute Brigade, which had been formed expressly to aid a prospective uprising in Poland, was—against Polish government and military objections—highjacked for British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery's disastrous Operation Market Garden of A Bridge Too Far infamy just as the Warsaw Uprising was running its disastrous course.
Poland's Navy, 1918-1945, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1999, 222 pp.,. A history, unique in the English language, of the Polish Navy before and during World War II, containing entirely original sections on the Polish feluccas and Polish naval aviation.
The Polish Underground Army, the Western Allies, and the Failure of Strategic Unity in World War II, foreword by Piotr S. Wandycz, Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company, 2005, 244 pp.,. A ground-breaking, densely documented study of Polish military staff efforts in World War II, with special reference to Poland's relations with her allies.
Polskie siły zbrojne na Zachodzie, 1939–1946: Koncepcje strategiczne i realia geopolityki, translated by Tomasz Fiedorek, Poznań, Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2014,.
Peszke's writings were characterized by a clarity and succinctness that may perhaps owe something to his training in medical diagnostics. In addition to documenting Poland's contributions to the Allied military effort in World War II—one of which, decryption of German Enigma machine ciphers, was acknowledged by Winston Churchill as having been critical to the outcome of the war—Peszke's historical writings show particular strength in regard to the delicate wartime politics and diplomacy of a country tragically trapped between the aggressive imperialisms of western and eastern Europe, a country betrayed by her own wartime European and American allies.
