The Union of Armed Struggle becomes the Home Army

On 14 February 1942 the Commander-in-Chief and Prime Minister, Gen. Władysław Sikorski, issued an order that changed the name of the Polish underground army. The dispatch, addressed to the commander-in-chief of the Union of Armed Struggle, Gen. Stefan Rowecki – who appeared in encrypted correspondence as “Kalina” – read: “Further to my order no. 2926 of 3 September 1941. 1. I abolish the name ZWZ for external use – all soldiers in active military service in the Homeland constitute the ‘Home Army’ subordinate to you, General, as its commander. 2. Your post is to be called Commander of the Home Army.” From that day the military conspiracy in occupied Poland was officially called the Home Army.

The order changed nothing in the organisation’s structure at once: the same commands, districts and people carried on working as they had in the ZWZ. What changed was what the underground was to be in the eyes of its own soldiers, of society, of the government in exile and of the Allies. From a “union” – one of many conspiratorial organisations – it was becoming an army, part of the Polish Armed Forces, on a par with the Polish army in Britain and with the army of Gen. Władysław Anders being formed in the USSR.

From the SZP to the ZWZ

The Polish military conspiracy came into being while Warsaw was still under siege. On the night of 26–27 September 1939, on the eve of the capitulation of the capital, Gen. Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski and a group of senior officers founded the Service for Poland’s Victory. Rowecki, who had commanded the Warsaw Armoured-Motorised Brigade in September, became Tokarzewski’s deputy in early October after returning to Warsaw.

The new government in exile, headed by Sikorski, viewed with distrust an organisation associated with the pre-war Sanation regime. In the autumn of 1939 it was replaced by the Union of Armed Struggle, subordinated directly to the authorities in exile, with Gen. Kazimierz Sosnkowski as commander; the SZP network passed into the new organisation. Even then the government recommended merging the entire underground. A resolution of the Council of Ministers stated: “All related organisations existing in the Homeland must subordinate themselves to the ZWZ commanders appointed by the Commander-in-Chief.” After the fall of France the leadership moved to Poland: from 30 June 1940 the commander-in-chief of the ZWZ and commander of the armed forces in the Homeland was Rowecki, a brigadier general since May that year.

Over the next year and a half the ZWZ built up a network of districts and subdistricts matching the pre-war administrative division – a district for each voivodeship, a subdistrict for each county, an outpost for each commune – in the lands incorporated into the Reich, in the General Government, and also in the east, occupied by the USSR in 1939, where the conspiracy was quickly destroyed by the NKVD. There was the Retaliation Union (PL), the sabotage and diversion branch created in April 1940, the Bureau of Information and Propaganda (PL), which published the weekly “Biuletyn Informacyjny”, and an extensive intelligence service. Paratroopers trained in Britain for conspiratorial warfare began to arrive – the Cichociemni. In the summer of 1941 the sabotage organisation Wachlarz (PL) was set up, to operate on the eastern frontier. On 3 September 1941 Sikorski, in a dispatch to Rowecki and to the Government Delegate, stressed that he regarded the military organisation in the Homeland as the main part of the armed forces under his command.

Why an army

The name change had several reasons, which historians list together. The first was political and concerned the situation in the east. After the German attack on the USSR and the Polish-Soviet agreement of July 1941, a Polish army was being formed in the Soviet Union. Sikorski was in Moscow in December and signed with Stalin a declaration on friendship and mutual assistance, but relations quickly deteriorated: the Soviet side wanted to throw Polish divisions into the front one by one, and when Anders resisted, it accused the Poles of lacking the will to fight the Germans. Piotr Niwiński of the IPN writes that the renaming of the ZWZ was meant to “show emphatically” that the struggle in Poland was continuing all the while and that preparations for a great armed uprising were under way – that Poland had three armies: in the West, in the USSR and in the Homeland, and that the last of these was fighting most intensely.

The second reason was the merging of the underground. Since the end of 1939 hundreds of conspiratorial organisations had arisen in the country, founded by political parties, social circles and by officers themselves. Many of them did not want to subordinate themselves to the ZWZ because they suspected it of continuing the “Sanation policy” blamed for the September defeat. The name “Home Army” was to emphasise that this was not yet another union with a defined political character but a non-party army of the Republic, with a place for everyone who wanted to fight. At the beginning of 1942 the matter was all the more pressing because, for the first time since 1939, the communist side had begun to build a serious rival. On 5 January 1942 in Warsaw, activists brought in from the USSR founded the Polish Workers’ Party, and in the spring its armed wing, the People’s Guard – according to Polish Wikipedia created in March, but backdated to 6 January.

The third reason was the simplest. The soldiers of the conspiracy had long felt themselves to be soldiers, not members of a “union” or a “service”. Niwiński calls the order of February 1942 “the sanctioning of an existing situation”: the word “army” better expressed what the underground already was.

A secret name, an unchanged structure

The new name did not reach the streets at once. In correspondence and documents from April 1942 to May 1944 the AK used the cryptonym PZP (Polish Insurrectionary Union), and the underground press spoke rather of “Fighting Poland”. The term “Home Army” came into wider use only in 1944, when units revealing themselves during Operation Tempest took the names of divisions and regiments of the Polish Army of 1939.

At the head of the AK stood the commander – the commander-in-chief – subordinate to the Commander-in-Chief in London and, in political matters, dependent on the Government Delegate for Poland. The command body was the Home Army Headquarters, with departments for organisation, intelligence, operations and training, quartermaster services, communications, propaganda (BIP), and finance and control. Below it operated areas comprising several districts and independent districts, then subdistricts, centres and outposts. Communication with London was provided by radio stations and couriers, and on the side of the Commander-in-Chief’s Staff it was handled by Section VI (Special) (PL). Rowecki’s deputy from 1941 was Gen. Tadeusz Komorowski, later “Bór”, who simultaneously headed the Western Area, that is the conspiracy in Greater Poland and Pomerania.

The AK had two tasks. The first was “current struggle”: minor sabotage, diversion on the railways and in industry, intelligence for the Allies, propaganda, and retaliatory actions against the SS, the police and informers. The second was preparing a general uprising (PL), to break out at the moment of Germany’s military collapse. In his plan of March 1942 Rowecki counted on Allied forces transferred to Poland supporting the uprising. The text of the oath was finally settled in December 1942; the soldier swore loyalty to the Republic and obedience to “the President of the Republic of Poland and to the orders of the Commander-in-Chief and the Commander of the Home Army appointed by him”, and the person administering it replied: “I accept you into the ranks of the Polish Army, fighting the enemy in conspiracy for the liberation of the Fatherland.”

How many soldiers

The size of the AK has always been disputed, because no full records were kept in the conspiracy and local commanders tended to inflate numbers. According to a PAP compilation based on historians’ studies, at the beginning of 1942 there were about 100,000 sworn soldiers. Rowecki himself reported in September 1942 about 125,000, and after the merger drive about 380,000. For the summer of 1944 figures range from over 300,000 (Niwiński) to about 400,000 (PAP), including nearly 11,000 officers. The former chief of operations of the Home Army Headquarters, Gen. Stanisław Tatar (PL), told the Americans about 250,000, while German intelligence estimated the AK at 100,000–200,000 people. All these figures refer to sworn soldiers – throughout the war there were weapons for only a small proportion of them.

What the order brought

The most visible effect of the name change was the acceleration of the mergers. According to various compilations, about 200 military organisations joined the AK. In November 1942, after talks conducted by Komorowski, the National Party subordinated its National Military Organisation (PL) to the Headquarters; some of its members refused and co-founded the National Armed Forces (PL), which joined the AK only in part, in 1944. Long and difficult negotiations with the peasant movement led to the incorporation of most of the Peasant Battalions (PL), but – as historians note – the merger drive never covered them entirely. The communist People’s Guard, renamed the People’s Army at the beginning of 1944, remained outside the AK.

In January 1943 the Retaliation Union, Wachlarz and combat groups were combined into the Directorate of Diversion, Kedyw, headed by Col. August Emil Fieldorf “Nil”. In 1943 the AK began to form companies and battalions, and in 1944 regiments and divisions, which in Operation Tempest were to appear as hosts before the advancing Red Army. General Rowecki commanded the Home Army for less than a year and a half, until his arrest by the Gestapo in June 1943. The AK operated until 19 January 1945, when its last commander, Gen. Leopold Okulicki, issued the order for its dissolution. The name adopted in February 1942 nevertheless outlasted the war: after 1945 many independence underground organisations referred to it, and in popular memory the “Home Army” today means the whole Polish underground army – including its predecessors of 1939–1942.