Establishment of the Union of Armed Struggle

On 13 November 1939 in Paris, the Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, Gen. Władysław Sikorski, established the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ). The new organisation was to be the only clandestine military organisation in the occupied country and to replace the Service for Poland’s Victory, founded in the last hours of the defence of Warsaw by Gen. Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski. Gen. Kazimierz Sosnkowski, who was in Paris, became the ZWZ’s commander-in-chief. In this way the government in exile took the underground army in the country into its own hands. The ZWZ operated under that name for over two years, until February 1942, when it was renamed the Home Army.

The government in Paris and the underground at home

The Polish authorities in exile came into being at the end of September. On 30 September in Paris President Władysław Raczkiewicz took the oath and entrusted Sikorski with the mission of forming a government. The cabinet consisted mainly of politicians of the pre-war opposition, and on 7 November Sikorski took over from Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, interned in Romania, the office of Commander-in-Chief as well.

Occupied Poland was then divided into three parts. The Germans incorporated the western voivodeships into the Reich, on 26 October created the General Government from the central part of the country, and at the beginning of November the USSR formally annexed the eastern lands into the Soviet republics. From the first weeks both occupiers struck at the Polish elites: on 6 November the Germans arrested the professors of the Kraków universities, while the NKVD detained officers, officials and activists in the east. An underground that was to cover the whole country had to operate in two completely different police systems, separated by the demarcation line.

Meanwhile a conspiracy was being built at home. Besides the SZP, whose command had subordinated itself to the new authorities, dozens of other organisations were active, formed by officers, veterans, scouts and political parties, often poorly concealed and quickly broken up by the occupiers. The government wanted to put this mosaic in order, but it also had political reasons not to stop at approving what had already come into being. Sikorski’s people, for the most part opponents of the Sanation, feared that military men associated with the Piłsudskiite camp would gain too much influence over the shape of the domestic conspiracy. Tokarzewski was a Legionnaire and a Piłsudskiite, and derived his powers from an order of Rydz-Śmigły. The prime minister’s circle, above all Stanisław Kot, suspected that the SZP might serve to rebuild the Sanation’s influence. The resentment was fuelled by Tokarzewski’s report on the founding of the organisation, which went first to Rydz-Śmigły and only from him to Sikorski; the prime minister regarded this as a sign of disloyalty. Critical opinions were also brought by emissaries of other circles. Lt. Włodzimierz Ledóchowski of the Military Organisation, who reached France in December, wrote in his report that Tokarzewski was “entirely unsuitable”, and suggested entrusting the leadership to Gen. Władysław Anders, who was, however, in Soviet captivity.

Conceptual work had been under way since October. On 8 November the Council of Ministers established the Ministerial Committee for Home Affairs under Sosnkowski, which was to supervise the underground under the German and Soviet occupations. It was decided to separate the military conspiracy from the civilian one and to base the new organisation on the existing SZP structures. The decision was taken on 13 November.

Sosnkowski – “Józef Godziemba”

The choice of commander-in-chief was a political move. Sosnkowski, years earlier one of the closest associates of Józef Piłsudski, founder of the Union of Active Struggle and chief of staff of the 1st Brigade of the Legions, was at the same time respected by the former opposition. In September 1939 he commanded the Southern Front and fought his way towards Lwów; after the city’s capitulation to the Red Army he made his way in civilian clothes across the Carpathians to Hungary and from there to France. On 11 October he was in Paris, and on 16 October the President designated him his successor. For Sikorski he was the most dangerous rival. Some historians read the entrusting of the underground army to him, with the title of deputy Commander-in-Chief, as a way of neutralising him, others as an attempt to rise above divisions.

Sosnkowski adopted the pseudonym “Józef Godziemba”. He drew up the ZWZ’s ideological principles, regulations, plan of action and system of communication with the country. Formally he commanded from France, but directing from a distance of over a thousand kilometres an organisation with which contact was maintained by couriers crossing occupied Europe proved impossible in practice.

A non-partisan underground army

The ZWZ was conceived as a military organisation, not a military-political one, as the SZP had wanted to be. It was to be a component of the Polish Armed Forces, an organisation “national, non-partisan and above class”. Its task was to be “gathering in conspiratorial unions the most carefully selected individuals”. Sosnkowski’s instructions for the first time clearly defined its aim: to prepare an armed uprising in the rear of the occupying armies, to break out when regular Polish forces entered the country. Political conspiracy was henceforth to operate separately; the instruction no longer provided for civilian commissioners attached to commands.

The country was divided into areas: No. 1 Warsaw, No. 2 Białystok, No. 3 Lwów, No. 4 Kraków–Silesia, No. 5 Poznań and No. 6 Toruń, which as early as 1940 was incorporated as a district into the Poznań area. Areas were divided into districts (usually voivodeships), these into sub-districts (counties), and sub-districts into outposts (communes). The basic unit was at first a section of a few people, later a platoon. Bases abroad – in Hungary, Romania and Lithuania – served for communication with the country.

Orders on the way

The decision from Paris reached the country slowly. The first instruction reached Lwów on 9 December. It was addressed to Gen. Marian Januszajtis-Żegota, whom the NKVD had, however, already arrested on 27 October. The instruction of 4 December, often regarded as the ZWZ’s founding act, reached Warsaw at the turn of December 1939 and January 1940; it was brought by the emissary Jerzy Michalewski. According to the historian Waldemar Grabowski, the delay resulted partly from the first emissary’s reluctance to have contacts with the SZP, regarded by some politicians, especially in the People’s Party, as a “Sanation army”.

Tokarzewski did not yet know these decisions when on 7 December he wrote to Sikorski about the organisations multiplying in the country on the model of the old POW, arguing that only one could represent the government. The new orders put him in a difficult position. With Instruction No. 2, issued in January 1940, Sosnkowski divided the country into two parts: the German occupation with a command in Warsaw under Col. Stefan Rowecki and the Soviet occupation with a command in Lwów under Tokarzewski. Tokarzewski’s former deputy took over the more important Warsaw centre, while the founder of the SZP was to go to Lwów, where – as the historian Paweł Wieczorkiewicz noted – he was too well known to hide effectively. In March 1940, while trying to cross the demarcation line on the San, Tokarzewski was arrested by the NKVD. The idea of two equal commands did not work: the Lwów conspiracy was deeply infiltrated by the NKVD, and Leopold Okulicki, sent there in 1940, ended up in a Soviet prison as early as January 1941.

From the ZWZ to the Home Army

The model of directing the underground from France did not survive the spring of 1940. After the fall of France, by a telegram of 18 June Sikorski appointed Rowecki deputy commander-in-chief with the right to take urgent decisions independently, and on 30 June commander-in-chief, with the Chief Command in the country. Power over the underground army passed into the hands of officers operating in occupied Poland and best acquainted with its realities. Sosnkowski, who as early as February 1940 had wanted to resign his post, was deprived of supervision over the ZWZ in July 1941, after his resignation from the government in protest against the agreement with the USSR.

Under Rowecki’s command the ZWZ expanded the Chief Command with intelligence, communications and propaganda divisions, created the Retaliation Union for day-to-day struggle, and gradually absorbed other organisations. Alongside it a civilian branch of the underground state was coming into being. It was Rowecki who in 1940 proposed to Sikorski the creation of the office of Government Delegate, and in December of that year the Government Delegation for Poland began operating, from which grew an underground administration with its own departments, police and courts. The separation of the army and politics, begun by the decision of 13 November, thus became the principle of the whole structure of the underground state. In September 1941 the ZWZ was formally recognised as part of the Polish Armed Forces, and on 14 February 1942 it was renamed the Home Army. When Operation Tempest began in the spring of 1944, the AK numbered, according to IPN estimates, around 360,000 sworn soldiers – one of the largest underground armies of occupied Europe, grown from an organisation established in Paris in the autumn of 1939.