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Poland World War II
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and
the
Soviet Union realized Poland's worst fear. In September
1939,
within one month of the signing of the treaty, Poland's
two
neighbors again attacked and divided the country. In the
twenty
years following World War I, Poland had been unable to
modernize
its armed forces or devise strategic and operational plans
for
defense against a Soviet or German attack. Hence in 1939
Poland
was strategically isolated, unable to mobilize its troops,
and
technologically inferior. Although the Franco-Polish
Alliance and
Military Convention of 1921 required that a German attack
on
Poland trigger a French offensive against Germany in the
West
(terms that had been confirmed as recently as May 1939),
the
French did not come to Poland's aid when Adolf Hitler
staged a
border incident that brought Nazi forces storming onto
Polish
territory.
The large but underequipped Polish Army soon
capitulated, and
most of the force spent the war in prisoner-of-war camps.
Underground resistance against German occupation began
almost
immediately, however, and resistance activity continued on
Polish
soil throughout the war. At its peak, the so-called Home
Army
(Armia Krajowa), directed by the London
government-in-exile,
included as many as 400,000 resistance fighters. Polish
forces
also fought under British and Soviet commands on the
western and
eastern fronts respectively. Poles fought with distinction
with
the Allies in Africa and Italy; the number of Polish
soldiers on
the Western Front reached 200,000 by the end of the war.
A separate Polish army, recruited by order of Joseph V.
Stalin from among Polish prisoners of war on Soviet soil
in 1943,
initially lacked officers and expertise. As a result, by
the
war's end about 40 percent of the officers in that force
had come
directly from the Red Army. In July 1944, on the strength
of
occupation by this Soviet-Polish army, a Soviet-backed
provisional government was established at Lublin in
eastern
Poland. At the same time, the Eastern Front force,
augmented by
Soviet conscription in liberated territory, reformed as
the
Polish First Army under command of General Zygmunt
Berling, who
had been a Polish officer before the war. The Polish First
Army
later joined the Lublin-based communist resistance command
to
form the Polish Armed Forces (Wojska Polskie). In late
1944, two
additional armies were added to this umbrella command; all
the
Polish Eastern Front armies, which ultimately totaled
about
400,000 troops, fought with distinction as the Soviet
forces
drove westward toward Germany in 1944-45
(see World War II
, ch.
1).
The Polish armies on the eastern and western fronts
remained
under separate commands throughout the war, reflecting the
political split that would substantively alter Poland's
military
doctrine after the war. The Soviet officer corps of the
Eastern
Front armies wielded a heavy political influence on their
troops.
Before the end of hostilities, an estimated 5,000 to 6,000
political officers were charged with indoctrinating
military
personnel in the philosophy of the new communist political
order
that the Soviets planned for postwar Poland. By mid-1945,
the
Polish Army had adopted Red Army equipment, organization,
regulations, and strategy, as well as the Soviet-type
political
apparatus that would become standard for all the armies of
postwar Eastern Europe.
Data as of October 1992
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