The tragedy of Poland, and of the Home Army generation, was that the Republic of Poland, attacked by two totalitarian powers bound by an agreement – Germany and the Soviet Union, which in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact divided its territory and unanimously pursued a policy of extermination of the nation, against which resistance was put up from the first days of occupation, paying for it with millions of victims – did not regain independence after the end of World War II. Stalin, Hitler's previous ally, found himself in the Allied camp. He was accepted into the group of nations fighting for freedom, although he was the head of a totalitarian state, which had on its conscience the deaths of Poles murdered, among others, in Katyn, hundreds of thousands deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. In time, he obtained the consent of the United States and Great Britain for territorial changes and imposing their rule in Central and Eastern Europe. The underground army found itself in this diabolical trap.
How immeasurably painful is the fate of the Home Army soldiers, the bravest of the brave, the most deserving of all the deserving. How terribly absurd and terribly unjust is everything that is happening on Polish soil today. And yet, reason and common sense, logic and calculation, and above all hope and faith tell us that truth will finally prevail and our cause will triumph.
— said General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, the first commander-in-chief of the Union of Armed Struggle. There was very little hope of this, and at the end of the Warsaw Uprising, under pressure from Great Britain, he was dismissed from the position of Commander-in-Chief, after issuing Order No. 19 to the soldiers of the Home Army. In it, he wrote about the “monstrous riddle” that, given the huge advantage of the Allies, was the lack of help for the fighting capital, something that “we Poles cannot decipher”, because “we have not yet lost faith that the world is governed by moral laws”.
Only the world was not governed by moral laws, and Prime Minister Churchill did not want to hear that
For five years the Home Army has been fighting against the Germans, without a break, in terrible conditions, of which the Western world has no idea, of which only in the future will it be able to realize and understand. It does not count its wounds, its victims, its graves. The Home Army is the only military force in Poland that can be counted. The balance of its fights, achievements and victories has the clarity of a crystal.
This balance was opened while Warsaw was still defending itself, in September 1939, when on the eve of the capitulation, the Service for Poland's Victory was established under the mandate of the Commander-in-Chief, a few weeks later transformed into the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej, ZWZ), which in turn was renamed the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) on 14 February 1942. All these structures constituted the conspiratorial Polish Army, and having the aforementioned mandate gave them a state character and legal continuity with the Second Polish Republic. In liaison with the supreme authorities of the Republic of Poland, alongside civil and political-administrative structures, it constituted the military part of the Polish Underground State.
The ZWZ-AK managed to unite most of the independence organizations that had been established since the beginning of the German and Soviet occupation. Every sworn AK soldier had to reckon not only with death in combat, but also, in the event of capture, with torture during interrogation, and then execution or a martyr's death in KL Auschwitz or another German death factory. This meant that, in the face of such risk, only the most noble and courageous individuals took up underground activities. It was a voluntary service that brought together all social classes, from workers, peasants and craftsmen, through the intelligentsia, to industrialists and landowners. The latter gathered in the structures of "Tarcza" and "Uprawa", organizing the underground base. All this created a special ethos of the Home Army, a voluntary, volunteer army that influenced the entire society, including its passive majority.
The underground army, as two AK officers, colonels Ludwik Muzyczka and Krzysztof Pluta-Czachowski, wrote in the Tygodnik Powszechny in the spring of 1957,
grew up right on the fields of defeat, voluntarily, without orders or conscription boards; it settled not in barracks, like the regular army, but in private homes as a military civic movement, with one goal: to fight for independence. This movement manifested itself throughout Poland within the 1939 borders and immediately became universal. It manifested itself in resistance not only military, but also civilian. […] The source and core of the above resistance was the AK. This resistance manifested itself in the form of tens of thousands of deeds requiring the highest sacrifices and offerings.
We will not list them all, but at least these few below constitute the organizational efficiency of the underground army from the Main Command of the ZWZ-AK to the posts in the communes. The communication between them was a challenge in itself, and the courier routes reached London, leading through Budapest, Istanbul, Lisbon. The AK intelligence, investigating the German war industry, reached far into the Reich. Its greatest success was obtaining information about the work on the "V" weapon and passing it on to London. The sabotage activities of the "Cichociemni", "Kedyw", the "Wachlarz" operations in the distant Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, attacks on railway lines, such as in the "Wieniec" action, the assassination attempt on Kutschera, the breaking up of prisons in Pińsk, Lida, Końskie, Jasło and others, the fights of partisan units in the Zamość region, in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains, in the Vilnius region, Nowogródek region, became part of the history of the underground army.
The Home Army fought not only with weapons, which it also produced, an example of which is the engineers' design, the "Błyskawica" (Lightning) submachine gun, but also with the help of an almost mass-produced underground press. The scale of this activity was unique in Europe. Around 1,500 titles were published. The main Home Army organ, "Biuletyn Informacyjny", was published continuously from November 1939 to January 1945. Its circulation at its peak was 50,000 copies, and it was printed by the clandestine concern Tajne Wojskowe Zakłady Wydawnicze (Secret Army Publishing Works). Thousands of people were involved in this activity, and the effect of their work — pursued by the Germans no less fiercely than armed combat and also punishable by death — reached hundreds of thousands of people, supporting their will to resist.
In turn, the opposite goal – undermining the morale of the occupier – was the purpose of Action "N" – publishing publications in German, among others, suggesting the existence of strong resistance among Germans directed against the Nazis. Department "R" of the Office of Information and Propaganda of the Home Army Headquarters was engaged in publishing publications and brochures countering communist propaganda, which was becoming more and more intensive as the Soviet army approached Polish lands.
The main goal of the Home Army was to prepare a general uprising against the Germans. This concept proved impossible to implement when it became certain that the Soviets would be the first to enter Poland from the east. In such a situation, the Home Army began Operation "Burza", i.e. attacks on retreating German units and acting as hosts towards the entering Soviet units. The Home Army units adopted the names of regular Polish Army units from before September 1, 1939, thus proving continuity with the army of the Second Polish Republic. This was the case, among others, in Volhynia, where the 27th Volhynian Infantry Division of the Home Army was formed, in Vilnius, where Operation "Ostra Brama" was carried out, in Lviv, in the Lublin region and further inland.
The Soviets, wanting to take over Poland, had to crush the AK and PPP. Arrests and deportations into the depths of the Soviet Union were taking place everywhere. The outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising – the largest battle of the AK – was to be the last attempt to liberate the capital and draw the world's attention to the issue of Polish independence. However, Stalin drowned the uprising in blood with German hands, physically and materially eliminating the main center of resistance together with its patriotic youth. The time after the defeat of the uprising was a period of disintegration of the underground army, the last act of which was the Soviet offensive launched in January 1945. In such a situation, the commander of the AK, General Leopold Okulicki, decided to dissolve the Home Army and in his last order ordered further activities to be carried out "in the spirit of regaining full independence". The most heroic act was taken by those who continued to remain in the conspiracy, co-founding, among others, "Nie", the Armed Forces Delegation, the "Freedom and Independence" Association.
For the communist authorities, "the AK was a filthy dwarf of reaction." The success of the Sovietization of Poland depended on its destruction. Around 50,000 AK members were sent deep into the Soviet Union, and thousands more were imprisoned, often being tried under the decree "on the punishment of fascist-Hitlerite criminals." Many of them were released from prison only after the announcement of an amnesty in 1956. The political thaw of that time enabled the rehabilitation of some of the accused, the publication of books, and articles in the press.
This resistance of the nation, which symbolized itself to the world by AK, is the reason for the pride and love that the nation associates with these two letters. No attack or slander has been able to destroy this charm so far and will not be able to destroy them in the future.
— wrote Muzyczka and Pluta-Czachowski. The Home Army fought with weapons in hand for several years, but for several dozen years it had to struggle in its last and ultimately victorious battle for memory.
Each of the PRL (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, Polish People's Republic's) political breakthroughs expanded the scope of freedom, and thus the possibilities of publishing, organizing veteran initiatives. The Catholic Church provided a limited space of freedom, but only the establishment of "Solidarity" brought a significant change. Then, thanks to social pressure, the bridge over the Vistula in Warsaw, which was to bear Lenin's name, was named after General Stefan Rowecki, and thousands of people participated in the ceremony. After martial law was introduced soon after, a dozen or so former AK soldiers were interned. They were still a threat to the communist system, and the secret service spied on the activities of independent veteran circles until the end of the PRL. At its end, in June 1988, a three-day return-burial of the ashes of the legendary Major Jan Piwnik "Ponury" took place, who had fallen in the Grodno region and was returning to his native Świętokrzyskie region. The celebrations, attended by tens of thousands of people, became a great patriotic manifestation, a meeting of the Home Army with "Solidarity", during which Home Army veterans passed on their tradition to the younger generation of scouts.
Monument to the Home Army and the Polish Underground State in Warsaw, Wiejska St., corner of Matejki, completed in 2009. (Source: Wikipedia)
Telling the whole truth about the fate of the Home Army became possible only after 1989. At that time, the Home Army soldiers were involved in many initiatives, and also founded their World Association of Home Army Soldiers. The activities of that time gave rise to the Home Army Museum in Kraków, which was named after the legendary commander of Kedyw, victim of the communists' judicial murder, General Emil Fieldorf "Nil". Monuments were erected in many cities, led by the one in Warsaw on Wiejska Street. At that time, by decision of hundreds of local governments, with a strong mandate from their communities, streets began to be named after the Home Army. They can be found in almost every second Polish city and are the most numerous among the historical names associated with World War II. If we add to them the commanders, names of units, the Warsaw Uprising, this number increases significantly. Schools, units of the Polish Army, Territorial Defense Forces, special forces refer to this tradition. They all carry the Home Army banner today.
The establishment of a national holiday, the National Remembrance Day of the Home Army Soldiers (14 February), which was a unanimous decision of the parliament, is like a seal on our common memory, which closes the "holiday" triptych of resistance and struggle stretched between the Day of the Polish Underground State and the National Remembrance Day of the Cursed Soldiers, from the establishment of the Service for Poland's Victory to the death of the leaders of the "Freedom and Independence" Association.
