The Polish Republic of 1918-39 was not prepared to fight a war, let alone face the combined onslaught of Nazi Germany and

Stalinist Russia. Economically weak and militarily deficient, the country was rent by its foreign minorities and its political factions. It might have expected to fall apart not only as a military power, but as a state. Yet the Poles who fought on every front between 1939 and 1945 were the soldiers of the Polish Republic, loyal to its legitimate government and to the political edifice of prewar Poland. Their discipline and unity of purpose must be put down to its credit. Indeed, it could be said that the vicissitudes of the Polish effort during the war, its glories and its inadequacies, its victories and its defeats, reflect the achievements and failures of the Republic.
The September campaign was a case in point. Hitler gambled everything on the probability that the Allies would not respond immediately, and therefore threw everything he had at Poland in the hope of overrunning it first. On 1 September some 1.8 million German troops invaded from three sides: East Prussia in the north, Germany in the west, and Slovakia in the South. They were supported by 2,600 tanks, of which the Polish army boasted barely 180, and over 2,000 aircraft, which quickly wrested control of the skies from the 420 planes of the Polish Air Force.

The Polish Army had neither the equipment nor the training to stand up to this hurricane of armor. Its 1,500-mile defensive screen was pierced, while the Luftwaffe carried out massive bombing raids on Polish cities. Once the first shock had worn off, Polish commanders reacted with determination, but on 17 September Russian armies invaded from the east, and it was revealed that Rumania had, under German pressure, renounced its military alliance with Poland. The continued defense was impossible, and the campaign was over. Small units continued to fight in various parts of the country until the spring of 1940, when their remnants went underground.
The September campaign is usually portrayed as a courageous fiasco, but it is difficult to understand why. In September 1939 no European army could hope to defeat the Wehrmacht alone, and the Poles did not intend to try. It had been agreed with the British and French staffs that in the event of aggression, Poland was to hold down the German forces for the period of two weeks, which would allow the French time to throw 90 divisions, 2,500 tanks and 1,400 planes across the virtually undefended Rhine. The Poles held on for twice that time (and would certainly have managed to keep going longer had the Russians not invaded), but not a single French soldier moved forward, while the RAF confined itself to dropping leaflets on German cities. For all its inadequacy, the Polish army acquitted itself valiantly, taking a greater toll of German men and equipment than the Franco-British effort of 1940. The German lost over 50,000 men, 697 planes and 993 tanks and armored cars. But their dogged resistance cost the Poles nearly 200,000 in dead and wounded.
In October the country was divided between its captors. The larger Soviet zone was incorporated into the Soviet Union and over the next few month about 1,700,000 of its inhabitants were transported to labor camps in Siberia. The German incorporated Pomerania, Silesia and Posnania into Reich, while the remainder of their conquest was designated as the General-Gouvernement. This was a colony ruled by Hitler's lawyer-friend Hans Frank. The process of extermination began at once. Priest, landowners, teachers, mayors, lawyers and persons of influence were summarily shot or sent to a concentration camp at Auschwitz. Over the next four years 2,700,000 Polish citizens of Jewish origins were also murdered.

Yet not for a moment did there cease to be a Polish Government in exile and a Polish Army; by June 1940 it numbered 84,500 infantrymen, 9,000 air force men and a navy of 1,400. By 1945 there were 220,000 men in the Polish Army under British command. The Polish Air Force accounted for 12 per cent of all German aircraft destroyed in the Battle of Britain. The struggle went on in Poland with similar continuity. By 1944 the AK (underground Home Army) numbered nearly 400,000 men and women, which made it the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe.
The government located in London, controlled everything in Poland from underground law-courts to the flying universities and clandestine schools. The life of the nation was lived in hiding. For a period of six years, education at every level was carried on secretly in indescribable conditions. Bombs were made, plays were staged and books were published under the nose of the German in spite of torture, concentration camp and death awaited anyone on whom German suspicion fell, and many thousands paid the price.
The only organizations which the government and the AK did not control were the Jewish resistance movement and the small extreme right and left organizations. The Nazis quickly set about sealing off the Jewish community from the rest. Faced with the death penalty for assisting or sheltering a Jew, some Poles did risk their live to hide Jews and provide them with false papers, and in 1942 the AK set up a special commission of assistance which was responsible for saving the lives of 10,000 Jews. It also supplied the Jewish resistance with a quantity of arms before and during the fighting in the Warsaw ghetto.
The Polish Communist Party had never been a significant force on the political scene. In the mid-1030s its leadership was imprisoned, and the bulk of the activists sought refuge in Russia, where in 1938 Stalin liquidated the majority of them. The only senior communists to avoid this fate were those, who were safe inside Polish jails. After the war started they founded the People's Army as an equivalent to AK. Moscow was building its own structures as an alternative to those of the Polish legitimate government. This uneasy situation reflected the anomalous position of Poland in the Allied camp. In 1940 the Allies were at war with Nazi Germany, but Poland was technically at war with Soviet Union, which had invaded as an ally of Germany. But on 22 June 1941 Hitler launched operation Barbarossa, and on 30 July an agreement was signed whereby Poland and the Soviet Union became allies. In 1943 the mass graves of Polish officers had been discovered in the forest of Katyn by the Germans. The Russians accused the Germans of the massacre. The Polish government demanded an investigation by the International Red Cross, whereupon Russia accused the Government of bad faith and broke off diplomatic relations. There is no doubt that the executions had been carried out by the Russians in the spring of 1940.
After the Russian victory at Stalingrad in 1942, Stalin's position in the Allied camp became unassailable. He now began to denounce the Polish Government as a phony clique with no following in the country, and he started recruiting his own Polish army in Russia, out of those Poles he had failed to release two years previously. As Stalin's position grew stronger, that of the Polish Government grew weaker. Stalin insisted that the Polish frontier of 1939 was unsatisfactory, and he adroitly seized on the 'Curzon Line',
a cease-fire line pulled out of a hat by British diplomats in 1918. Fearful lest Stalin turn round and make peace with Hitler if crossed, Roosevelt and Churchill tried to persuade the Polish Government to accede to the Russian demands. In January 1944 the Red Army crossed the 1939 Polish-Russian frontier in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht. Soon Stalin would have his divisions in Poland, while those of the Polish Army were in Britain and Italy so the AK command had been preparing a full-scale rising to coincide with Allied plans. But the Soviet armies advanced faster than those of the Allies. The AK therefore had to face the fact that it would be liberated by Russians who did not recognize it or its government. Their plan, code-named 'Tempest', was to conduct operations in the German rear in support of the advancing Soviet troops. It was an attempt to bridge on the battlefield the chasm which had opened in the political world. The Red Army and AK units cooperated with cordiality, but soon all the AK officers were arrested or shot, and their men pressed into communist Polish Army. In this situation the commander of the AK gave the order to start the uprising in Warsaw. The initial aim was to clear the enemy from the city and seize enough arms to equip the reserves, but in the face of German coming reinforcements, the not sufficiently armed AK units failed to take a number of their primary objectives. They extended the area under their control, but failed to take the airport, the main station or any of the Vistula bridges. They had fought to a standstill and could only defend themselves. This they did for a total of 63 days. The Allied tried to help with arms drops, but the price paid was enormous. The planes flew a round trip of 2,500 km from northern Italy, and nearly half of the crews never made it back to base. Churchill suggested a shuttle operation and requested landing facilities on Soviet airfields for the RAF, but Stalin refused and Moscow radio denounced the uprising as a conspiracy against the Soviet Union. During the fighting in Warsaw the Red Army stood idle. For Stalin, the AK represented the element of leadership which believed that Poland should control its own future as a sovereign state. This was not among his intentions, and sooner or later this leadership would have to be eliminated. But this would not be easy with a fully mobilized AK standing behind its leadership. It was therefore something of a godsend to him that the Germans were doing the dirty work for him and to him it would have been madness to interfere. After 63 days of the fierce fighting, the AK commander in chief signed the capitulation. Churchill and Roosevelt had stressed that the soldiers of the AK were regular Allied troops, and the Germans treated them accordingly. The civilian population were herded into cattle trucks and sent to concentration camps or forced labor in Germany. They left behind 250,000 dead and the ruins of Europe's eighth largest city.
The Polish Government and the AK were outmaneuvered politically by the Soviets, and the events of 1944 were only the first in a long process, in the course of which the entire Polish leadership was gradually elbowed aside and replaced with men picket by Stalin. On 17 January 1945 the Red Army marched into ruins of Warsaw and within a couple of months the whole of Poland was in Soviet hands. Stalin was master of the situation and proceeded to state his case with force at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. The resulting compromise was an interim government with majority of Stalin's men. The Allies formally recognized this and withdrew recognition from the Polish legitimate Government. The bargaining over the composition of the interim government was, in fact academic. Behind the Red Army came Stalin's secret police, the NKVD. They were not concerned with the discussions going on at ice, the NKVD. They were not concerned with the discussions going on at Yalta on the nature of elections to be held in Poland, merely with rooting out of Polish society every element which could be deemed unsympathetic to the Soviet Union. Followed a minor guerrilla war which cost the lives of some 30,000 Poles and 1,000 Soviet soldiers.

The Poles are the nation who really lost the Second World War. They fought continuously from the first day to the bitter end and beyond. They put more effort into struggle than any other society; they lost over half a million fighting men and women , and six million civilians; they were left with one million war-orphans and over million invalids. The country had lost 38% of its national assets, the vast tracts of the territory and two great cultural centers of Wilno and Lwow. Although they were faithful members of the victorious alliance, the Poles were treated as a vanquished enemy: they were robbed of much of their territory and of their freedom. Even worse than the physical wrongs done to them were the humiliations to which they were subjected. Men and women who had risked their lives for six years fighting against the German order in unspeakable conditions were tortured and dragged into jail by their Soviet masters. In the West, their efforts and sacrifices were belittled and ignored.
The war was a turning point in Poland's history, and its consequences are indelible. It was the last stage in the transformation of the multi-ethnic Commonwealth into a homogeneous nation-state. Polish frontier was moved westward and the country is physically closer to the heart of Europe, and Poland is now full of Poles and the experiences of war put the whole society through a leveling experience.



Excerpts from the book "The Polish Way" by Adam Zamojski
(John Murray-Publishers Ltd. London 1987)