On 4 January 1944 Soviet troops crossed the pre-war Polish-Soviet border in Volhynia, in what is now north-western Ukraine. For the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) this was the signal it had been preparing for. Under a plan code-named Tempest (Burza in Polish), Home Army units were to come out of hiding and attack the retreating Germans just ahead of the Red Army, so that the Soviets would meet Polish soldiers and Polish authorities already in place. The date marks the start of the plan rather than a battle: the first Home Army units in Volhynia were mobilized later in January.
The plan
By late 1943 the Home Army, the underground army loyal to the Polish government in exile in London, expected the German front in the east to collapse. In November 1943 its commander, General Tadeusz Komorowski (code name Bór), ordered Operation Tempest. The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) dates that order to 20 November 1943.1
The plan was military and political at once. Militarily, Home Army units were to fight the Germans in the rear of their front and cooperate with the advancing Soviet forces. Politically, the aim was to show the Soviet Union that Poles loyal to the government in London were the hosts of the lands that had been Polish before 1939, and to win Soviet recognition of that government and of Poland's pre-war eastern border.2
4 January 1944: the border is crossed
The Polish sources agree on the date. An article by Damian Markowski in the IPN's Biuletyn places the crossing in the night of 3 to 4 January 1944 near the town of Rokitno in Volhynia, a short distance east of Sarny. The IPN and the regional portal Kresowianie.info also give 4 January. Markowski names the troops as units of the 1st Ukrainian Front and gives Ivan Konev as their commander. The front was in fact then commanded by General Nikolai Vatutin: Stalin's order of the day of 5 February 1944, on the capture of Lutsk and Rovno, is addressed to him, and he kept the command until he was mortally wounded and replaced by Georgy Zhukov in March 1944.3
On 12 January 1944 Komorowski issued a further order telling his units to strike at the German rear and to support the Red Army as far as Polish strength and Polish state interests allowed. On 15 January the commander of the Home Army's Volhynia District, Kazimierz Bąbiński (code name Luboń), ordered the mobilization of his forces. That is the date on which, according to the IPN, Tempest actually began on the ground in Volhynia.4
The 27th Volhynian Infantry Division
On 28 January 1944, at a briefing of officers at Suszybaba, the mobilized units were formed into the 27th Volhynian Infantry Division of the Home Army. The IPN calls it the largest Polish partisan unit of the Second World War. Its strength is given differently: the history portal dzieje.pl puts it at about 6,000 soldiers, the regional portal Kresowianie.info at about 6,500, including 700 officers, and Markowski writes that it had passed 7,000 by early April 1944.5
Jan Wojciech Kiwerski (code name Oliwa) took command in February 1944. On 20 March the division captured Turzysk, and in the spring it fought German forces around Kowel, at times alongside Soviet troops. In April it was encircled, and Kiwerski was killed on 18 April 1944. The division broke out, crossed the Bug River and continued fighting in the Lublin region in July. On 25 July 1944, at Skrobów, the Soviet side demanded that the Poles lay down their arms, and the division was disbanded by force. Some of its soldiers were shot or sent to Soviet labor camps.6
What followed
The pattern seen in Volhynia was repeated further west and north. In Vilnius, Home Army units fought the Germans from 7 to 13 July 1944 alongside the Red Army, after which their commanders were arrested. In the Lwów (now Lviv) area the Home Army fought alongside Soviet troops in July 1944, and its officers were imprisoned after the city fell. These events weighed on the decision to fight for Warsaw itself, where the Warsaw Uprising began on 1 August 1944.7
Polish sources estimate that more than 100,000 Home Army soldiers took part in Tempest, and that about 50,000 were later imprisoned, mostly for refusing to join the Polish army formed under Soviet control. Tempest was called off in late October 1944. Its political aim was not achieved: the Soviet authorities refused to deal with the Home Army as the army of an independent Polish state.8
