Polish Home Army commander who made D-day possible executed 73 yrs ago
Antoni Kocjan, called "a man who won the war" for his Home Army (AK) Intelligence unit's achievements in obtaining and passing crucial information on the German V-1 and V-2 missiles to the Allies during WWII, was executed by the Germans on August 13, 1944.
Kocjan was an outstanding glider constructor and aviator. He broke world flight altitude record twice for planes up to 280 kilogrammes.
Although he never graduated from a technical university, about 700 of a total of about 1,400 gliders built in Poland in the 1930s were his constructions. The gliders broke 40 national and one international record and his motor glider Bak broke two world records.
Kocjan was executed by the Germans in Warsaw's infamous Pawiak prison. His intelligence allowed the Allies to carry out the D-Day landing in Normandy in 1944.
The D-Day landing, which was the biggest seaborne invasion on record, was aimed to open a so-called second front in Europe during WWII. The operation was carried out on Tuesday, June 6, 1944 under the command of US General Dwight Eisenhower, with US, British and Canadian troops making up the core of the invasion forces.
The achievements of the Polish Home Army (see: NOTE 1) Main Headquarters' aerial intelligence unit, headed by Antoni Kocjan, are little known, but they were of crucial importance for the landing, as confirmed by great WWII commanders.
In his memoirs titled "Crusade in Europe", Dwight Eisenhower wrote that if the Germans had managed to improve their V-1 and V-2 missiles six months earlier, the allied invasion would have been very difficult or even impossible.
Since January 1, 1943, Kocjan headed the Aviation Department and started to receive reports on "aerial torpedoes". The Polish Home Army's intelligence was ordered to establish the locations of the factories and test ranges for the new weapons.
The intelligence was sent to Antoni Kocjan. He sent his first report on the missiles to London in late February 1943 and the next in March 1943. These reports spoke of a missile test range in Peenemunde on the Usedom island, close to today's Polish north-western city of Swinoujscie. They also said the Germans were testing rocket-propelled planes.
The British did not know much about Peenemunde until the spring of 1943, and regarded all information on the matter as exaggerated. They changed their minds only on April 20, 1943 when Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Sandys, the son-in-law of British PM Winston Churchill, was appointed expert and coordinator for German long-range missiles.
He ordered aerial photography of Peenemunde to be made, and then in June 1943 prepared a relevant report and presented it to the war cabinet chaired by Churchill.
A decision was made to bomb Peenemunde. The operation was carried out on the night of 17-18 August 1943 and involved 597 British bombers and caused 735 casualties, including 213 prisoners (91 Polish people among them) and 178 Germans from the research and command personnel. The facility's operation was severely crippled.
Antoni Kocjan was promoted to AK second lieutenant and due to having inspired the Allies to carry out the bombing was called "the man who won the war".
Serious damage in Peenemunde delayed the use of V missiles by six months. The contribution of the Home Army's intelligence and Antoni Kocjan had been very important and made it possible for the Allies to start the invasion in Normandy in June 1944.
When the invasion on the coast of France started on June 6, 1944, Germans were unable to use the V missiles. They managed to fire first ten V-1 missiles a few days later, on June 12.
In August 1943, the existing horizontal tunnels in the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen were named Dora and transformed into a subcamp of the Buchenwald Nazi German concentration camp (See: NOTE 5), thus launching the project of an underground V-2 production facility.
In his reports from February and March 1944, Kocjan wrote for the first time about the production of heavy missiles in the underground Dora plant near Nordhausen. From October 28, 1944 Dora became an independent concentration camp with subcamps, some of which were involved in the V-2 production while others conducted construction work. There were 32,000 inmates working at Dora (in all, 60,000 were sent to the camp, 25,000 of whom died).
On May 20, 1944, Home Army soldiers found and managed to hide a V-2 missile which landed near the village of Siemiatycze on the Bug River. It was transported to Warsaw nearly at the time when Kocjan was arrested on June 1, 1944, after a Home Army printing house of underground publications had been found in a burnt-down pre-war glider workshop near the Mokotowskie Field in Warsaw, owned by Kocjan.
Kocjan was executed by the Germans in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw on August 13, 1944.
at/jd
NOTE 1: Founded in 1942, the Home Army was the largest underground resistance force in German-occupied Europe, with up to half a million soldiers fighting in its ranks. In his book 'God's Playground. A History of Poland', historian Norman Davies said that "the Home Army could fairly claim to be the largest of European resistance [organisations]".
Along with various combat activities, the AK was also widely involved in rescuing fellow citizens of Jewish descent, among others through the famous 1942-founded Council to Aid Jews (Rada Pomocy Zydom) codenamed 'Zegota' - the only organisation in Europe and the world established to defend and provide help to Jewish people in ghettos and outside.
After the war many Home Army soldiers refused to lay down their arms and continued fighting against Poland's Soviet-imposed communist regime, winning the name "Enduring Soldiers". They are also sometimes called the "Cursed Soldiers" for being treated as outlaws and forced into oblivion by the communist state. Jozef Franczak, known as the last Enduring Soldier, was killed in an ambush as late as 1963.
However, on June 13, 2017, in the village Poplawy-Rogale in southeast Poland's Lublin province, the teams from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) unearthed remains believed to belong to Antoni Dolega, a member of the post-World War II anticommunist resistance said to have remained in hiding until his death in 1982.
In 2011, the Polish parliament established March 1 as Enduring Soldiers National Remembrance Day upon a motion by the late President Lech Kaczynski.
NOTE 2: The 1958 British film drama 'Battle of the V1', the story of the wartime Polish resistance's aid in gathering intelligence on the Nazi-German V2 flying bomb, is based on the novel They Saved London (1955) by Bernard Newman.
It became a hit and was advertised on posters as "the Epic Film Tribute to the RAF and Polish Resistance".
The film tells the real story of a wartime Polish Home Army (AK) special unit resistance movement, which in 1943 gathers intel on the manufacture of the German 'Wunderwaffe' V-2 flying bomb (the film's title erroneously refers to the V-2's predecessor, the V-1, as the story mostly concerns the former) at Peenemunde.
Intelligence gathered by the AK, mainly from Polish forced labourers in the Peenemunde plant, enabled allied bombers to destroy the factory's (V-1 and) V-2 production lines.
It is not the last time AK's intel on German production sites proves fundamental in warranting British bombing raids.
NOTE 3: "Battle of the V1" depicted also another factual AK-linked 'Wunderwaffe' thread, namely Polish AK fighters stealing with the help from local peasants a V-2 rocket that landed in a field during tests near the village Blizna in Poland. Polish intelligence arranged for V-2 transport to Britain on board Dakota plane in what became known as Operation Most (bridge) III (July 25/26, 1944). Along with the parts of the weapon on board of the plane smuggled out of Poland were also Polish special agents.
NOTE 4: Home Army managed to alert the British to the dangers posed by the V-2 missiles, which resulted in their raised attention to the production of bombs and launching sites, thus helping to lessen their destructive impact. Britain's Operation Hydra bombing raid on Peenemunde, carried out on the basis of the AK's intelligence, delayed the V-2 by six to eight weeks (July 25/26, 1944).
Another AK operation, codenamed Synteza (synthesis), enabled the location of a German fuel factory in Police (German Hydrierwerke Politz), which manufactured synthetic fuel for the V-1 and V-2 rockets (as well as U-boats - PAP), and the depots in which it was stored. In effect the Allies successfully bombed the installations. Working with the French resistance movement, AK teams also helped locate 162 V-1 launching installation in France.
NOTE 5: Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps established within the old German borders of 1937. SS authorities opened Buchenwald for male prisoners in July 1937. Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald. The number of victims is estimated at 56,000. (PAP)
