Anders' Army - Background

Background

After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 the Soviets effectively broke off diplomatic relations when they withdrew recognition of the Polish government at the start of the invasion. Up to 1.5 million Polish citizens, including over 200,000 Polish prisoners of war, were deported from Soviet-occupied Poland by the NKVD to the Gulags. Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations were re-established in 1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union forced Joseph Stalin to look for allies. Thus the military agreement from August 14 and subsequent Sikorski-Mayski Agreement from August 17, 1941, resulted in Stalin agreeing to declare all previous pacts he had with Nazi Germany null and void, invalidate the September 1939 Soviet-German partition of Poland and release tens of thousands of Polish prisoners-of-war held in Soviet camps. Pursuant to an agreement between the Polish government-in-exile and Stalin, the Soviets granted "amnesty" to many Polish citizens, from whom a military force was formed. Stalin also agreed that this military force would be subordinate to the Polish government-in-exile. A Polish Army on Soviet soil was born.

On August 4 the Polish military leader, General Władysław Sikorski, nominated General Władysław Anders, who had been just released from the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, as leader of the army. Meanwhile, another commander, General Michał Tokarzewski, had already began the task of forming the army in the Soviet town of Totskoye on August 17. Anders issued his first orders and announced his appointment as commander on August 22.

The formation began to organize in the Buzuluk area, and recruitment began in the NKVD camps for Polish POWs. By the end of 1941 25,000 soldiers (including 1,000 officers) were recruited, forming three infantry divisions: 5th, 6th and 7th. Menachem Begin was among those who joined. In the spring of 1942 the organizing formation was moved to the area of Tashkent, and the 8th was also formed.

The recruitment process met several obstacles, particularly the case of significant numbers of missing Polish officers (a result of the Katyn massacre), the dispute with the Soviets over whether non-ethnic Poles and citizens of the Second Polish Republic (Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians) were eligible for recruitment, the Soviets assigning low priorities to the logistics of this project and their refusal to allow volunteers to leave USSR and join already existing and fighting Polish Armed Forces in the West. Another problem was that some administrators of Soviet labour camps and Gulag officials were not too willing to release the Poles as they required the slave labour to meet their own production quotas.

On March 18, 1942, due to the Soviet authorities inability to provide adequate rations for the growing Polish Army, which was even then sharing its limited food with an also growing group of Polish civilians, Stalin agreed to evacuate part of the Polish formation as a military force to Iran after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran; and the unit was transferred across the Caspian Sea to the port of Pahlavi (known today as Bandar-e Anzali), Iran.