Residents of our city, former Home Army soldiers—including Adolf Emiljańczyk, Kazimierz Solkiewicz and many others—were arrested in their homes by the NKVD; each was sentenced to 15 years for serving in the Home Army. Had they joined the ranks of the 1st or 2nd Army, they would have avoided suffering and misery in the Soviet Gulag camps. There were a few who remained in Home Army units and fought the second occupier until death.
Soldiers of the 2nd Army and the 1st Armored Corps were aged 17 to 60. Half of them were September 1939 soldiers, and about 40% had been Home Army soldiers or had supported it in various ways. Because of the Soviet authorities’ treatment of the Home Army, they all concealed the fact that they belonged to it. Many Home Army officers changed their names and concealed their service in the Home Army. It often happened that a father and son, sometimes brothers, or residents of the same commune or county served in one rifle company or battery.
Letters rarely arrived from homes or reached them, as field post operated poorly and censors withheld many letters.
Horrifying news arrived from Volhynia, Podolia and Pokuttya: reports of the raging terror of Ukrainian nationalists and mass murders of the Polish population. General Vatutin, commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, fell victim to an ambush and was replaced by Marshal Konev. General Vatutin was travelling in an armored car, which was left shattered by an artillery shell! Soldiers fled individually or in groups, weapons in hand, to defend their families. Those captured were executed on the spot. Those who remained there joined the Soviet so-called Destruction Battalions, which defended Polish villages. Young women were forcibly transported to armaments factories in Siberia, where they had to work in slave-like conditions. They therefore went into hiding to avoid deportation.
The 2nd Army and the 1st Armored Corps were formed in the areas between the new Polish-Soviet border established in 1944 and the front line, which in the autumn came to a halt along the Narew, Bug-Narew, Vistula and Wisłoka rivers. Individual regiments and divisions were formed in small towns—mostly villages—in dugouts, barns and cowsheds. Accommodation conditions were appalling. A bunk with a handful of straw served as a bed; a thin, unlined coat served as a blanket. A soldier’s elbow was most often his pillow. Soldiers wore summer underwear and a drill uniform. They had never heard of sweaters. Footwraps replaced socks, and their boots let in water. Instead of a backpack, a soldier carried a Russian canvas bag tied with string. A traditional iron cooking pot served in place of a mess tin. Soldiers had no canteens. Instead, they were given glass bottles, which immediately broke. And the frosts of the winter of 1944/45 were exceptionally severe, like all wartime winters. Temperatures fell to minus 30 degrees and remained there for several weeks.
On his cap, a soldier wore a copper-sheet eagle without a crown, with strangely shaped wings. It resembled a hen, so the Russians, not knowing that it was meant to be an eagle, referred to the emblem on the cap as “kuryca.” Apparently, this design was taken from the tomb of one of the Piast dukes in Płock Cathedral. Immediately after the end of the military operations, soldiers replaced the “kuryca” without orders with the September-era eagles. Craftsmen produced them on a mass scale and resold them to soldiers. And so it remained. The authorities tolerated these eagles; only the crown was a thorn in their side. Soldiers were ordered to file them off. They therefore cut them only partially, leaving the lower part of the crown.
Some Soviet officers serving in the Polish Army (more about them in the next chapter) carried pliers and, whenever they noticed a passing soldier wearing an eagle with a crown on his cap, tore it off in order to cut away the crown completely. In this way, the emblem of the Second Polish Republic—a crowned eagle on a shield, but without the crown—became established in the army called the people’s army (as if the army of the Third Republic of Poland had not been a people’s, national army!). Today we have returned to the Eagle in all its glory!
The provisions for the 2nd Army and the 1st Armored Corps during their formation east of the Vistula in the autumn of 1994 were terrible. Moldy rye bread or Russian hardtack. For lunch, a groat soup, traditionally and every day with “słodki”—frozen potatoes. For breakfast and dinner, hardtack and a half-kilogram can (for the entire squad, i.e. 10 men) of excellent American pork tushonka intended for the Soviet army. Without this canned meat and tins of lard, the Soviet army would have starved. The beverage was tea, with sugar distributed by company quartermasters in a small pinch and poured into… the soldiers’ hands, in microscopic quantities. As with the pork tushonka, company quartermasters had to save the sugar for themselves and the officers—or to exchange it for moonshine produced in nearly every village cottage.
Horse-drawn field kitchens had only one cauldron. Either soup was cooked, or hot water for tea...
To be continued