What was Operation Tempest?
Operation Tempest (in Polish akcja or operacja "Burza") was the Home Army's plan to attack the retreating Germans in each district shortly before the Red Army arrived, free towns with Polish forces and then meet the Soviets as the hosts of Polish land. General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski ordered it on 20 November 1943, and it ran from January to October 1944, from Volhynia and Wilno to Lwów, Lublin and the Warsaw Uprising. Militarily the Home Army often succeeded, but the Soviets disarmed its units and arrested its commanders, and the political aim was not achieved.11
Tempest was the largest military operation of the Home Army, and its culmination was the Warsaw Uprising. It was fought against Germany but aimed at the Soviet Union as much: its purpose was to show the advancing Red Army that a Polish state, army and administration already existed on prewar Polish territory. The background is told in our guide to the Eastern Front of World War II.12
From a general uprising to Tempest
From the first months of the occupation the Polish underground prepared a general uprising, to be launched when German power collapsed. By 1943 it was clear that the Red Army, not the Western Allies, would reach Poland first. Moscow had broken off relations with the Polish government in London in April 1943, after the Katyn massacre was revealed.13
On 20 November 1943 General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, who had taken command of the Home Army after the Germans arrested General Stefan Rowecki, ordered a different plan. Instead of one national rising, the Home Army would mount an intensified sabotage and combat action, code-named Burza (Tempest), in each district as the front passed through it.14
Home Army units were to strike the German rear guards, take towns where they could, and then come out of hiding together with the civilian officials of the Government Delegation and meet the Soviet commanders as the lawful hosts of the land. Komorowski went beyond the government's instructions by ordering his soldiers to reveal themselves to the Red Army and fight alongside it. The government in exile later endorsed the plan.15
The people who made these decisions did not know that at the Tehran Conference (28 November to 1 December 1943) the Allies had already accepted the Soviet claim to Poland's eastern provinces.16
The course of Tempest at a glance
The Red Army crossed the prewar Polish border in Volhynia on 4 January 1944, and the Volhynia district of the Home Army was the first to carry out the plan. In July, as the Soviet summer offensive drove the Germans west, the districts of Wilno and Nowogródek, Lwów, Lublin and Białystok went into action, followed by Warsaw on 1 August.17
The pattern repeated itself almost everywhere. Home Army units attacked the Germans, often together with Soviet troops, and the underground authorities came into the open. Then the Soviets disarmed the Polish soldiers, arrested their officers and the civilian officials, and often deported them east.18
Volhynia: the 27th Division
In Volhynia the Home Army had been weakened by Soviet and German arrests and by the mass murders of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1943. In mid-January 1944 the district commander ordered the start of Tempest, and the units gathered in the area between Kowel, Włodzimierz Wołyński and the Bug formed the 27th Volhynian Infantry Division of the Home Army.19
The division grew to about 6,500 soldiers by March, by the Home Army Museum's count, and to over 7,000 in early April, according to the historian Damian Markowski. It fought both German units and the UPA, and from March it cooperated with the Red Army in the fighting around Kowel, while stressing that it answered to the Home Army command and the government in London.20
In April German reinforcements with tanks, artillery and aircraft drove the division back. Its commander, Major Jan Wojciech Kiwerski "Oliwa", was killed in April in unclear circumstances, and at the end of the month the division withdrew north into the Szack forests and Polesie.21
A group that tried to cross the Prypeć to the Soviet side came under fire, and the men who reached the other bank were killed or disarmed. The main force crossed the Bug into the Lublin region in June and fought on there until the Red Army arrived and disarmed it near Lubartów on 25 and 26 July 1944.22
Wilno: Operation Ostra Brama
In the northeast the key operation of Tempest was fought for Wilno. Under the code name Ostra Brama (the Gate of Dawn), the combined forces of the Wilno and Nowogródek districts under Lieutenant Colonel Aleksander Krzyżanowski "Wilk" were to take the city before the Red Army entered it.23
The numbers differ. The historian Filip Musiał writes that about 15,000 soldiers were planned for the operation but problems with communications left about 9,000 actually fighting, while the Home Army Museum counts over 12,000 in the operational forces.24
The fighting lasted from 7 to 13 July 1944. The Home Army attacked the German garrison and fought alongside the Red Army, and on 13 July the last German resistance in the city was broken.25
Days later the Soviets invited Krzyżanowski and his officers to talks, then arrested them. At the same time their troops began disarming the Home Army. About 6,000 to 7,000 soldiers fell into Soviet hands. Those who refused to join the Polish army formed under Soviet command were taken to Kaluga, southwest of Moscow, and put into labor battalions, and the arrested officers were sent to the camps.26
Lwów, July 1944
In Lwów the Home Army had about 11,000 sworn soldiers in the district, about 5,000 of them in the city, but weapons for only a fraction of them. The historian Paweł Naleźniak notes that its commanders already knew how Ostra Brama had ended, and went ahead because, in the words of the historian Grzegorz Mazur that he quotes, giving up Tempest in Lwów was unthinkable.27
The executive order for Tempest in Lwów was issued on 15 July. Home Army platoons joined the Soviet tank units attacking the city, and by 27 to 28 July the Germans had been driven out. The sources date the start differently: Naleźniak to the first Soviet assault on 22 July, the Home Army Museum to 18 July, when the Germans began to withdraw, and the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) map to 23 July, with the main fighting ending on 27 July.28
By the count of the district command about 30 Home Army soldiers were killed and 160 wounded in the fighting. Naleźniak adds that the real death toll was higher.29
On 28 July the Soviet command demanded that the Home Army lay down its arms. Colonel Władysław Filipkowski, the area commander, dissolved his units and told his soldiers that they could join the Polish army under Soviet command. On 31 July Filipkowski and his senior officers went to Zhytomyr for talks with that army's command and were arrested. The same day Home Army officers summoned to a briefing in Lwów were detained, about 25 by the Home Army Museum's count and several dozen by Naleźniak's.30
The Lublin region and the other districts
The fighting in the Lublin region began after 20 July 1944, when the Red Army crossed the Bug. Home Army units, the Peasant Battalions and the 27th Division attacked the retreating Germans and took towns such as Kock, some on their own and some together with Soviet troops, and the underground administration came into the open in Lublin.31
The Home Army fought some 150 actions and skirmishes in the region. The historian Ireneusz Caban estimated German losses in the region at about 1,000 killed and about 1,200 captured.32
The Soviets soon repeated what they had done in Wilno and Lwów. On 26 July the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), the communist authority installed by Moscow, signed an agreement that placed the front zone under the jurisdiction of the Soviet commander-in-chief, which opened the way to arrests and deportations. Home Army units were disarmed, some soldiers were forced into the communist-led Polish army, and the district commander, General Kazimierz Tumidajski "Marcin", was arrested.33
Tempest was also carried out in the Białystok district and in the General Government, from the Rzeszów region to Kraków. The IPN historian Dawid Golik argues that in Lesser Poland (Małopolska) what mattered most was the Home Army's open presence in the field, not German losses, which wartime reports and later memoirs often exaggerated.34
Warsaw: the uprising as part of Tempest
The plan at first left out Warsaw and the other large cities. In July 1944, with the Red Army approaching and the PKWN proclaimed as a rival, Soviet-backed authority, the command changed course: holding the capital before the Soviets entered it was meant to prove that the Underground State was the lawful host.35
The Warsaw Uprising began on 1 August 1944 and ended on 2 October. About 25,000 Home Army soldiers went into battle on the first day, by the Warsaw Rising Museum's count, while the USHMM gives about 45,000. About 16,000 insurgents (Warsaw Rising Museum) to over 18,000 (IPN) were killed or went missing, and some 130,000 to 150,000 civilians died. The full story is told in our article on the Warsaw Uprising.36
Disarmament, arrests and the end of Tempest
On 26 October 1944 General Leopold Okulicki "Niedźwiadek", the last commander of the Home Army, ordered Tempest halted.37
By then the Soviet repression was in full swing. Home Army soldiers were disarmed, interned, forced into the communist-led army or deported to camps deep in the Soviet Union, and the officials of the Government Delegation were arrested.38
No agreed total exists. The IPN historian Dariusz Rogut estimates that Soviet arrests, internment and deportation from January 1944 to the end of the 1940s affected about 100,000 Poles and Polish citizens.39
In March 1945 the Soviets arrested sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground State in Pruszków near Warsaw. In June 1945 they were put on show trial in Moscow, the Trial of the Sixteen.40
Tempest was an attempt to secure Polish independence by Polish arms, and in Wilno and Lwów the Home Army had a real share in driving the Germans out. Its political aim was not achieved, because the Soviet Union held overwhelming power and the Western Allies did not stand in Stalin's way: at Tehran they had already conceded Poland's eastern provinces, and they barely reacted to the Soviet arrests. For the wider story of the war in Poland see our military history of Poland.41
