Armia Krajowa Totally Explained

Everything about Home Army totally explained

The Armia Krajowa (the Home Army, literally translated as the Country's Army), abbreviated "AK", was the dominant Polish resistance movement in World War II German-occupied Poland. It was formed in February 1942 from the Związek Walki Zbrojnej (Union for Armed Struggle) and over the next two years absorbed most other Polish underground forces. It was loyal to the Polish government in exile and constituted the armed wing of what became known as the "Polish Secret State". Estimates of its membership in 1944 range from 200,000 to 600,000, with the most common number being 400,000; that figure would make it not only the largest Polish underground resistance movement but among the two largest in Europe during World War II. It was disbanded on January 20 1945, when Polish territory had largely been cleared of German forces by the advancing Soviet Red Army.
The AK's primary activity was sabotage of German activities, including transports headed for the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. The AK also fought some full-scale battles against the Germans, particularly in 1943 and 1944 during Operation Tempest, thereby tying down a number of German forces, diverting much-needed supplies, while trying to support Soviet military. The most widely known AK operation was the failed Warsaw Uprising of the 1944. The AK also defended Polish civilians against atrocities committed by non-German military organizations such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Lithuanian Security Police. The Armia Krajowa, due to its ties with the Polish government in exile, was viewed by the Soviet Union as an obstacle to its takeover of the country, which lead to increasing conflict between AK and Soviet forces both during and after the war. Armia Krajowa, seen in modern Poland as a heroic resistance, became the subject of controversy and a more critical portrayal in communist Poland as well as outside of Poland.

History and operations

World War II

The AK's origins were in the Służba Zwycięstwu Polski (Service for the Victory of Poland), which had been set up, just as the joint German and Soviet invasion of Poland was nearing completion, on September 27, 1939, by General Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski. While these two organisations were the founders of the AK, intended as the main Polish resistance movement, there were scores of other resistance organizations in Poland. Majority of them would eventually merge with the ZWZ-AK during the years of 1939-1944, significantly contributing to AK's growth. The supreme command defined the main tasks of the AK as partisan warfare against the German occupiers, recreation of armed forces underground and, near the end of the German occupation, general armed revolt until victory.
Until the major revolt began in 1944, the AK concentrated on self-defence (freeing prisoners and hostages, defence against pacification measures) and striking at the German forces. Throughout the period of its existence AK units carried out thousands of armed raids and intelligence operations, sabotaging hundreds of railway shipments and participating in many partisan clashes and battles with German police and Wehrmacht units. The AK also conducted retaliatory operations to assassinate prominent Nazi collaborators and Gestapo officials in response to Nazi terror tactics imposed on the civilian population of Poland (notable individuals assassinated by AK include Igo Sym and Franz Kutschera). Until 1942, most of British intelligence from Germany came from AK reports; until the end of the war AK would remain the main British source for news from Central and Eastern Europe. Among other topics, provided the Allies with information on German concentration camps, and about the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket) (Most III) from Brindisi, Italy, to fly to an abandoned German airfield in Poland to retrieve information prepared by engineer and aircraft designer Antoni Kocjan, as well as of cargo regarding V-2 rocket wreckage from a Peenemünde launch, including Special Report 1/R, no. 242, photographs, a select set of eight parts, and drawings of the wreckage. Sabotage was coordinated by the Union of Retaliation and later Wachlarz and Kedyw units. The largest and best known of the Operation Tempest battles was the Warsaw Uprising - the attempt to liberate Warsaw. It started on August 1 1944; the Polish troops took control of significant portion of the city and resisted the German-led forces until October 2 (63 days in total). With no aid from the approaching Red Army, the Germans eventually defeated the rebels and burned the city, finally quelling the Uprising only on 2 October 1944. (one should however note that estimates of guerilla warfare inflicted casualties often have a wide margin of error). The AK primary activity was sabotage of German rail and road transports to the Eastern Front in Russia. It is estimated that one eighth of all German transports to Eastern Front were destroyed or significantly delayed due to AK's activities. The battles with the Germans, particularly in 1943 and 1944, tied down several German divisions (about 930,000 German soldiers in total). List of confirmed sabotage-diversionary actions of the Union of Armed Combat (ZWZ) and Home Army (AK) from 1 January 1941 to 30 June 1944>

Sabotage / Diversionary Action Type	Totals
Damaged locomotives	6 930
Delayed repairs to locomotives	803
Derailed transports	732
Transports set on fire	443
Damage to railway wagons	19 058
Blown up railway bridges	38
Disruptions to electricity supplies in the Warsaw grid	638
Army vehicles damaged or destroyed	4 326
Damaged aeroplanes	28
Fuel tanks destroyed	1 167
Fuel destroyed (in tonnes)	4 674
Blocked oil wells	5
Wagons of wood wool destroyed	150
Military stores burned down	130
Disruptions of production in factories	7
Built-in faults in parts for aircraft engines	4 710
Built-in faults into cannon muzzles	203
Built-in faults into artillery missiles	92 000
Built-in faults into air traffic radio stations	107
Built-in faults into condensers	70 000
Built-in faults into (electro-industrial) lathes	1 700
Damage to important factory machinery	2 872
Various acts of sabotage performed	25 145
Planned assassinations of Germans	5 733

Post-war

The AK officially disbanded on 19 January 1945 to avoid armed conflict with the Soviets and civil war. However, many units decided to continue their struggle under new circumstances. Soviet Union and Polish communists it controlled viewed the underground loyal to the Polish government in exile as a force which had to be removed before they could gain complete control over Poland. Future General Secretary of PZPR, Władysław Gomułka, is quoted as saying: "Soldiers of AK are a hostile element which must be removed without mercy". Another prominent Polish communist, Roman Zambrowski, said that AK had to be "exterminated".
   The first AK structure designed primarily to deal with the Soviet threat was NIE, formed in the mid-1943. NIE's goals wasn't to engage the Soviet forces in combat, but rather to observe and conduct espionage while the Polish government in exile decided how to deal with the Soviets; at that time the exiled government still believed that the solution could be found through negotiations. On 7 May 1945 NIE ("NO") was disbanded WiN was however in much need of funds, to pay for false documents and to provide resources for the partisans, many of whom had lost their homes and entire life's savings in the war. Viewed as enemies of the state, starved of resources, and with a vocal faction advocating armed resistance against the Soviets and their Polish proxies, WiN was far from efficient. 380,000, to even "over 600,000".. Most estimates put the highest numbers in summer 1944 between 300,000 and 500,000, with the average of 400,000. The strength estimates vary, due to constantly ongoing integration of other resistance organizations into AK as well as because while the number of members was high and sympathizers even much higher, the number of armed members participating in actions would be smaller(due to insufficient number of weapons).
   AK was intended as a representative of the Polish nation, as its members were recruited from all social parties and classes (the communists sent by Soviets and Soviet created Armia Ludowa (People's Army) being the only notable exception). Growth of the AK was significantly based on integration of scores of smaller resistance organizations into its ranks. As a result, individual AK units varied significantly in their political outlooks (notably in their attitude towards ethic minorities or the Soviets). AK was able to overcome these difficulties to some extent and put tens of thousands of armed soldiers into the field. Nevertheless, the difficult conditions meant that only infantry forces armed with light weapons could be fielded. Any use of artillery, armor or aviation was impossible (except for a few instances during the Warsaw Uprising, like the Kubuś armored car). However, because of inadequate preservation which had to be improvised in the chaos of the September campaign, most of these guns were in poor condition. Of those that were hidden in the ground and dug up in 1944 during preparation for Operation Tempest, only 30% were usable.
   Sometimes arms were purchased on the black market from German soldiers or their allies or stolen from German supply depots or transports. Besides equipment, the planes also parachuted highly qualified instructors (the Cichociemni), of whom 316

Interaction with other forces

Interaction with Jewish resistance

In February 1942, the Operational Command of the AK Information and Propaganda Office set up the Section for Jewish Affairs, directed by Henryk Woliński. This section collected data about the situation of the Jewish population, drafted reports and sent information to London. It also centralized contacts between Polish and Jewish military organizations. The AK also supported the Relief Council for Jews in Poland (codenamed Żegota) as well as the formation of Jewish resistance organizations in Poland. One member of the AK, Witold Pilecki, was the only person to volunteer for imprisonment in Auschwitz. The information he gathered proved crucial in convincing Western Allies about the fate of Jewish population. During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, AK units tried twice to blow up the ghetto wall, carried out holding actions outside the ghetto walls, and together with GL forces sporadically attacked German sentry units near the ghetto walls. Security Cadre (Kadra Bezpieczeństwa or KB), one of the organizations subordinate to the AK, under the command of Henryk Iwański took a direct part in fights inside the ghetto together with Jewish fighters from ŻZW and ŻOB. During the Warsaw Uprising a year later, Batalion Zośka, one of the most notable units of the Uprising, liberated hundreds of Jews from the Warsaw Concentration Camp. there are criticism that AK was reluctant to accept Jews into its ranks, as well as accusations of the complicity of single AK members or groups in anti-Jewish violence. and while the bulk of anti-semitic behavior can be ascribed to only a small minority of AK members, the fact that AK failed to protect the Jews from the extremists in their ranks (often affiliated with the far-right endecja spectrum of the Polish political scene, whose National Armed Forces organization was only partially incorporated into AK) has reflected negatively on the image of Armia Krajowa in Jewish historiography, leading some sources to generalizations characterizing the entire army as anti-Semitic. The issue remains a controversial one and is subject to a difficult debate.

Interaction with Lithuanian resistance and collaborators

Although Lithuanian and Polish resistance movements had in principle the same enemies – Nazi Germany and Soviet Union – they started cooperating only in 1944-1945, after the Soviet re-occupation, when they both fought against the Soviet occupiers. The main obstacle in forming an earlier alliance was a territorial dispute centering on Vilnius (see Żeligowski's Mutiny for background).
Some Lithuanians, encouraged by Germany's vague promises of autonomy, cooperated with the Nazis in their actions against Poles during the German occupation. In autumn 1943, Armia Krajowa started retaliation operations against the Lithuanian Nazi supporters, primarily the Lithuanian Secret Police, and killed hundreds of mostly Lithuanian policemen and other collaborators during the first half of 1944. In response, Lithuanian police, who had already murdered hundreds of Polish civilians since 1941 (most infamously in the Ponary massacre), intensified their operations against the Poles. In May 1944 in the battle of Murowana Oszmianka AK dealt a significant blow to the Lithuanian Nazi auxiliaries of the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force. What resulted was a low-level civil war between Poles and Lithuanians, encouraged by the German authorities,

Interaction with the Red Army

Armia Krajowa relations with the Red Army became increasingly bad as the war went on. Not only did the Soviet Union invade Poland following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but even after Germans invaded Soviet Union the Soviet Union saw Polish partisans loyal to the government in exile as more of an enemy to their plans to take control of post-war Poland, than as a potential ally. On orders from Stavka sent on June 22 1943, Soviet partisans engaged Polish partisans in combat, and it has been claimed that they attacked the Poles more often than they did the Germans.
Soviet forces continued to engage the elements of AK long after the war.

Interaction with Ukrainian resistance and collaborators

Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist force and the political arm of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), fighting against the Germans, the Soviets and the Poles – all three seen as occupiers of Ukraine – decided in 1943 to direct most of their attacks against the Poles. Bandera and his followers came to the conclusion that the war would end with the exhaustion of both Germany and the Soviet Union, and thus the Poles, which also laid claims to the territories of East Galicia (seen by Ukrainians as Western Ukraine, and Poles as Eastern Poland), had to be weakened before the Polish state could rise again. The collaboration of some Ukrainian groups with Nazi Germany (although declining in 1943) had discredited Ukrainian partisans as potential Polish allies; Polish pretensions to restore the borders of pre-war Poland were opposed by the Ukrainians. In massacres of Poles in Volhynia in summer 1943 at least 40,000 Poles were killed; the death toll would rise in the following year although by that time Polish resistance would stiffen. By winter 1943 and spring 1944 AK was preparing for Operation Tempest; one of the goals of the operation was to reinforce Polish position in Volhynia. Most notably, in January 1944 the 27th Infantry Division of Armia Krajowa, numbering 7,000, was formed, and tasked with defense of Polish civilians, engaging OUN and the German troops. By mid-1944 the region was occupied by the Soviet Red Army; Polish partisans were disbanded or went underground, as did most of the Ukrainians; both would however increasingly concentrate on Soviets as their primary enemy – and both would ultimately be unsuccessful.Further Information

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