WWII sabotage operation remembered 70 years on

Members of the Directorate for Subversion: image - wikipedia

Operation Wreath, or Corona (Akcja Wieniec), was an October 1942 action that set out to cripple Nazi Germany's supply routes from Warsaw to the Eastern Front, where Hitler was engaged in battle against the Red Army.

The operation was carried out by a crack division of Poland's Home Army (AK), the official underground force that fought under the auspices of the Polish government-in-exile in London.

In 1942, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Prime Minister of the government-in-exile, called upon the underground to launch acts of sabotage that would undermine the German war effort.

In the early hours of 8 October 1942, the division in question, the Union for Retaliation (ZO) (Directorate for Subversion) successfully blew up sections of railway lines at several points around Warsaw.

The operation paved the way for a long-lasting campaign of sabotage, which besides locally trained fighters, involved many special operations paratroopers trained in Great Britain and parachuted into occupied Poland from 1941-1944 - the so-called The Silent and Unheard (Cichociemni).

The Union of Retaliation ultimately merged with a second sabotage unit in January 1943 to form the Directorate for Subversion (Kedyw).

The Directorate's most noted leader, General August Emil Fieldorf (codename Nil), was executed in 1953, following a show trial held by Poland's post-war communist authorities. Fieldorf is one of the prominent resistance leaders that historians hope to identify in the wake of excavations of unmarked graves this August at Warsaw's Powazki cemetery. (nh)