OK, I have Howson's
Arms for Spain now. Here is what he says about Poland (pp. 105-113);
"With an increasingly unreliable France as their only ally, the Poles had decided that their best hope of defence was to build up their armed strength. The difficulty was paying for it. After the fighting for independence had come to an end with the driving back of the Russian Bolsheviks in 1920, the Polish army had found itself in possession of a dismaying variety of French, Russian, German, Austrian, Italian, British and American armaments which it had captured, bought or been given. Since 1930 it had made efforts to standardize by replacing old weapons with new from the state arsenals at Radom and Warsaw and by importing new, or old but refurbished, material from Belgium, Germany and Czechoslovakia...
"The Poles had expected to meet at least some of the cost of rearmament by selling off the 'old stocks' of arms and munitions, but, apart from Saudi Arabia and a few Chinese warlords, there had been no customers"--until the Spanish Civil War came along. (The only area where Poland not only successfully designed but exported up-to-date weapons in the early 1930's was aviation, thanks to the great designer Zygmunt Pulawski.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygmunt_Puławski)
"[As of 1936] Colonel Beck, the foreign minister, was trying to construct an intricate arrangement of pacts and treaties in the hope of placating the Germans and Russians without alarming Britain and France, and, when the civil war broke out in Spain, the Polish government had been the first in the world to declare, on 23 July, an arms embargo against both sides. Nevertheless, the colonels sympathized wholly with General Franco, and saw to it that nothing critical of the Nationalists or favourable to the Republicans was published in the press or broadcast on the radio. Their arms sales to the Republicans would therefore have to be kept a dark secret indeed and to this end Beck insisted that negotiations with Spaniards must never be conducted directly but only indirectly through a chain of foreign intermediaries, preferably those with whom SEPEWE [Syndicat Exporti Przemyski Wejennego or "Export Syndicate of War Industries," a nominally private but actually government-owned and controlled company involved in arms dealing] already had good relations. He also reserved the right to stop any transaction that might spoil his foreign policy. However, once it was decided that bulk of the sales must be to the Spanish Republicans [1] things moved quickly and preparations for delivery were already under way when the Polish government signed the Non-Intervention agreement on 26 August. The shipping side of the traffic was handled through the naval counterpart SEPEWE, the Polska Agencja Morska (PAM)...
"It is extraordinary to relate that on 6 September 1936 Leon Blum advanced a loan of 2,000 million Ffr. (c. £59 million, or $95 million), to be paid over four years, precisely to help the Poles finance their rearmament. He hoped thereby to stem the Polish drift towards Germany, which increasingly worried the French since the non-aggression pact signed by Hitler and Beck in 1934. One would have thought that this huge infusion of money might have caused the Poles to reconsider the dangers of their policy on Spain, but obviously it did not...
"It seems that the prices recorded in the SEPEWE account-books and preserved in the archives are those of the original standing price list, before Ostrowski had increased them, and that the prices paid by Republicans were between 30% and 40% higher. The undeclared surplus would then be 'laundered' abroad; indeed, one of the deponents refers to the payment of such a sum into a bank account in Finland.
"The list in Appendix II shows that armaments to the value of about $24 million (£4,800,000) were sold to Spain by the end of September 1937, of which only about 2%, or about $518,000, represented sales to the Nationalists. According to Sokolowski [who headed SWPEWE] sales stopped in March 1938, though it seems that a few deliveries were made during the summer, presumably of material that had been held up in Poland. It became a practice of the Polish authorities at Gdynia, Danzig not being used after January 1937, to hold goods in the warehouses on one pretext or another in order to charge the Republicans higher storage fees, some amounting to tens of thousands of pounds.
"A great deal of money was consumed as well by the intermediaries the form of commissions and various other charges...
"Another deponent, Wladyslaw Cmela, writes that 'when Colonel Beck and lgnaci Moscicki [the Polish president] approved the export of arms, they did not do so without an interest' and goes on to say that during the course of the Spanish war both 'received large provisions from SEPEWE.' Cmela names as his authority for this allegation Andrjez Dowkant, the vice-director of the state arms factories, whom he describes as 'an honourable man' who had become indignant at the turn events were taking. It was one thing to sell off old and useless material, even to the Spanish Republicans, but quite another to sell brand new weapons during a programme of urgent rearmament, when the state factories were as yet unable to meet the requirements of the Polish army itself. No less baffling, therefore, is the offer by the Polish government to build a series of fifty P.Z.L.P.37 bombers for the Republicans. The P.37 Los was one of the most advanced aircraft of its time and its very existence was still top secret when the offer was made in July 1937...
"Although many details remain obscure, it is clear that the regime of the colonels' group in Poland, which called itself 'Moral Renewal' (and was ideologically close to Franco), became the second largest supplier of arms to the Spanish Republic after the Soviet Union. The colonels wanted the money to pay for rearmament, in addition to the huge French loan...The shifts to which they had to resort to ensure secrecy, however, presented innumerable opportunities for corruption and, as the dangers gathered round Poland on all sides and the more perceptive foresaw the inevitable catastrophe, the temptations to some to cream off money to provide means of refuge abroad must have been irresistible. During the Second World War, those involved sent their testimonies to the committee set up by the Sikorski government in exile to inquire into the causes of the Polish defeat in September 1939 and either blamed one another or justified the selling of worthless material at high cost to the Spanish Republicans as an act of patriotism. As Stefan Katelbach, the Polish arms trader who became Daniel Wolf's principal agent, boasted in his deposition, 'by selling junk to the Spaniards at fantastic prices, we were able to restore the Polish bank to solvency.'"
[1] "Economic imperatives dominated the decision-making. The Spanish White government had no money and was in any case being supported by the government politically allied to it. The Red government, on the other hand, had plenty of money but lacked sufficient reserves of war material and, in view of the difficulties in procuring arms, would have to pay high prices for them in hard currency. So far as I remember, political considerations were not important"--Wladyslaw Sokolowski, director of SEPEWE