Peasant battalions

Initially, the Peasant Party did not create its own militarized organization, sending its members to the Union of the armed struggle . However, the growing influence of the supporters of sanation and pilotsudchik among the leadership of the ISF , the creation of competing political parties and the strengthening of the national military organization on the ground, as well as the desire to gain a dominant position both during the occupation, and at the time of liberation of the country and the formation of its political model on the principles of agrarianism , caused a change in the position of the Central Leadership of the Peasant Movement in the matter of creating their own militarized organization.

In August 1940, it was decided to create its own military organization called “Khlopska Strazh” ( Polish. “Chłopska Straż” ), the secret cryptonym “Chlostra” ( Polish. “Chłostra” ) ^[1] .

At the end of 1940, the first armed detachments “guards” began to operate in the countryside ^[2] .

The creation of Khlostra, and then the massive transition into it of the supporters of the peasant movement, who were in the ranks of the SSC , was strongly criticized by the SSC command. In the spring of 1941, at the initiative of representatives of the Kelets district, the organization was renamed the Peasant Battalions, although formally the name change was approved by the BH command only in May 1944 .

BH was the armed wing of the Peasant Party - its members, as well as members of the Richey Union of Young People and partly the Central Union of Rural Youth (“Sev.”) Formed the backbone of the organization. The central leadership of the organization was exercised by the Central leadership of the peasant movement, represented by Józef Netzko, and the territorial leadership - by the district, regional, district, commune and communal troika of the Peasant Party “Roch” . The organization was entered mainly by the rural population, in large cities the combat units of the BH were absent. From 8 October 1940 until the end of the war, Franciszek Kaminski was the main commandant of the BH. The initiator of the creation of BH, and then the head of the leadership of the Peasant Party "Roch" was Jozef Netsko "Zgzhebnyak." The headquarters was headed by Kazimierz Banach "Camille". The central organ of BH was the newspaper "Żywią i bronią" (from Polish. - "Feed and protect").

By 1944, about 160 thousand people were in the ranks of the BH, which made it the second largest Polish underground organization.

In May 1943, BH signed a merger agreement with AK, but the de facto merger was not completed until the end of the occupation. In 1944, contrary to the orders, part of the detachments submitted to the Polish Committee for National Liberation and joined the Army Ludowa , or established cooperation with it, and then expanded the ranks of the Civil Police and the Polish People's Army in the liberated territory.

However, much of the organization retained loyalty to the emigration government in London. In March 1945, by order of the command, the peasant battalions were disbanded, and soldiers were advised to join the Polish People's Army , although this decision was not fully supported by the political structures of the Peasant Party that remained underground. The arrest of 16 leaders of the Polish underground made it impossible to fully implement the decision to disband, although as a result of the dismantling of BH, with the consent of the Chief Commandant of BH and the Chairman of the central leadership of the peasant movement, several tens of thousands of BH fighters joined the NVP and the GM, as well as local authorities. The formal dissolution of the BH was completed in September 1945 .

The activity of BH extended to virtually the entire territory of pre-war Poland , with the exception of Pomerania, as well as the Vilno, Novogrodsky and Polesia provinces. The territorial organizational network consisted of districts (voivodship), sub-districts, regions ( districts ), districts (several communes ), communes and communities . By the end of 1943, the following counties existed (in order of creation):

• I - Warsaw
• II - Warsaw Voivodeship
• III - Kielce
• IV - Lublin
• V - Lodz
• VI - Kraków , Rzeszów , Silesian Voivodeship
• VII - Bialystok
• VIII - Volyn
• IX - Lviv , Stanislav and Tarnopol
• X - Poznan

In total, during the occupation, 82 partisan BH detachments were created ^[3] . About 80% of the BH forces were concentrated in the Krakow, Keletsk, Lublin districts and the Warsaw province.

The peasant battalions consisted of tactical units (intended for the future national uprising), divided into sections, squads, platoons and companies, and territorial (leading sabotage activities on their territory). In 1942, on the basis of territorial subdivisions, special subdivisions began to be created, numbering up to several dozen people, and intended for the current struggle: in all about 300 special subdivisions of the military unit were created. Guerrilla detachments of the BH were created on the local initiative, the most active of which was in 1943-1944: during this period, more than 70 such detachments operated, the largest of which numbered up to several hundred fighters.

In May 1943, BH signed a merger agreement with AK , but the de facto merger was not completed until the end of the occupation. The composition of the Home Army included mainly tactical units - according to the agreement, all tactical units with a total of about 155 thousand people were to be transferred to the AK, but due to internal conflicts, mainly in the section of leading posts, about 51 thousands of soldiers. Some members of the BH joined the State Security Corps ( Polish. Państwowy Korpus Bezpieczeństwa ). In the fall of 1943, the commandant's office of the BH established the People’s Security Guard ( Polish: Ludowa Straż Bezpieczeństwa ), which was not subject to association with the AK. Its membership included mainly special units and partisan detachments.

The main purpose of BH was to protect the Polish rural population from terror and economic exploitation by the occupying authorities of the “General Government”.

Among the largest BH operations are:

• support for the uprising in the Zamoysky region of the Lublin province, which began on November 27, 1942 and lasted until February 1943.

• On December 30, 1942, a battle near Voyd took place, conducted by a detachment of the “Battalions of Khlokh” under the command of Franciszek Bartlomovich together with a detachment of Guard Lyudova (German police forces lost 26 people killed and 19 wounded, partisans - 3 people) ^[4] ;
• On February 1-2, 1943, a battle took place near Zaborechny , conducted by a detachment of the “Battalions of Khlokhs” together with a detachment of Guard Lyudova;

• participation in the liberation of the so-called Pinczu Republic under the command of Jan Przciola ( July 24 - January 12, 1944 ).
• drowning on May 31, 1944 in the Vistula in the Pulav area of ​​the German ship "Tannenberg".
• June 8-15, 1944 - participation in the battle in the Yanovsky forests (“Operation„ Sturmwind I ”").
• June 21-24, 1944 - participation in the battle in Solskaya Pushcha (“Operation Sturmwind II”).

Other notable actions of BH include the release of prisoners from prisons in Krasnystave , Radomsk , Pinczow , Siedlce , the detonation of a train with ammunition under Golomb, etc.

During the Second World War, an ethnopolitical conflict (the so-called “ Volyn Massacre ”) took place on the territory of modern Ukraine, accompanied by the mass destruction of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army-OUN (b) ethnic Polish civilians and, on a smaller scale, civilians of other nationalities, including Ukrainians ^[5] , in the territories of the General District of Volyn-Podolie ( German Generalbezirk Wolhynien-Podolien ), which were under Polish rule until September 1939, started in March 1943 and reached a peak in July of the same year. The response of the Polish side (in which the Craiova Army and the Peasant Battalions took part), begun in the late summer of 1943, led to significant casualties among the Ukrainian civilian population.

After the Volyn Massacre, by the autumn of 1943, the anti-Polish actions of the OUN (b) and UPA were transferred to the territory of the General Governor 's Office - to Kholmshchina and Podlyashye , where a number of UPA detachments from Volyn were deployed to counteract the much stronger Volyn region. As the Polish historian G. Motyk points out, this was done after an inspection trip of Roman Shukhevych to Volyn, who positively assessed the results of the operation and indicated that similar events were held in the south-eastern regions of occupied Poland. ^[6] Since November 1943, these areas became the scene of confrontation between the Polish underground (its component part was the Peasant battalions), which found a common language with the Soviet partisans, and the combined forces of the OUN (“Ukrainian Legion of Self-Defense” (31st SD battalion) and OUN (b) (ONS, UPA) supported by the divisions of the SS division "Galicia" , subordinated to the SD and the German police.

From the beginning of 1944, a large-scale anti-Polish action began in eastern Galicia.

At the same time, the tragic events occurred in the Hrubieszow district , which became an integral part of the Polish-Ukrainian ethno-political conflict, in which the Peasant battalions took part along with the Home Army (see Sakhryn Massacre ) ^[7] . In 1945, there was a bloody ethnic conflict between Poles and Ukrainians in Peremyshl poviet , which resulted in the bloody “pacification” of Ukrainian villages by the formations of the “battalions of the Khlokh” (the detachment of Roman Kissel was particularly distinguished by the pseudonym "Semp", see eg " The Massacre in Skopova " ).

• Army kraiova
• Army people
• National Armed Forces
• Sacrah massacre
• Union of Armed Wrestling

• T. G. Medovarova. Combat Commonwealth of the Khlopovsk Battalions with Guards Ludova in the fight against the Nazi occupiers in 1943-1944 // Questions of German history and historiography. Collection of scientific papers of the Dnepropetrovsk State University named after the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia. Dnipropetrovsk, 1976.