Normal life became impossible. Schools were closed down, as were theatres, the press and other amenities, and all institutions that could not be made to serve the German war effort were abolished. Conditions under which people lived defy concise description. The occupation was not only unspeakably harsh, it was also unsettlingly haphazard, as a number of different German military, police and civilian agencies operated independently of each other, creating a climate of confusion and uncertainty that kept people in a state of permanent fear. This had a corrosive effect on society, and while there was no collaboration as such, the Germans could always find people ready to spy or denounce. Yet the overwhelming majority of the nation continued to resist, actively and passively, as though the defeat had only been a setback.
In the last days of September 1939 President Mościcki, who was interned after he crossed the Romanian frontier with what was left of his government, appointed Władysław Raczkiewicz, former President of the Senate, as his successor. On 30 September Raczkiewicz formed a government in Paris under the premiership of General Władysław Sikorski, who also became commander-inchief of the Polish armed forces. A National Council consisting of senior representatives of all the major parties was convened under the symbolic presidency of Ignacy Paderewski and the chairmanship of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, leader of the People’s Party. This government was recognised by the Allies and proceeded to re-form the Polish armed forces with escapees filtering through from eastern Europe and émigré Polish volunteers from France and the United States.
By June 1940 these numbered 84,500 men in four infantry divisions and two brigades, an armoured brigade, an air force consisting of 9,000 men, and a navy of 1,400. A Polish brigade took part in the ill-fated battle for Narvik; two divisions, two brigades and 150 pilots fought in the French campaign of June 1940. Three-quarters of the land forces were lost in the fall of France, but the remnants followed the government to Britain, where they began to organise anew.
They were joined there by other forces that had survived the Polish campaign, such as the three destroyers and two submarines that had slipped out of the Baltic to join the Royal Navy, and by thousands of men and women who made their way there by various routes. By 1945 there would be 220,000 men in the Polish armed forces serving alongside the British. The Polish air force, which accounted for 7.5 per cent of all German aircraft destroyed in the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, grew to ten fighter and four bomber squadrons which, until the arrival of the USAAF, represented 25 per cent of the Allied bomber force. The Polish Air Force flew a total of 102,486 sorties, lost 1,973 men, and shot down 745 German planes and 190 V-1 rockets. The Polish naval ensign flew on some sixty vessels, including two cruisers, nine destroyers and five submarines, which were involved in 665 actions at sea. The land forces took part in the defence of Britain, the campaigns in North Africa and Italy, the Arnhem operation, the invasion of France and the liberation of Holland.
Perhaps the greatest Polish contributions to the Allied war effort were less easily quantifiable. One was the huge volume of intelligence provided by agents scattered all over Europe by the fortunes of war, deportations and slave labour schemes, which placed them in vital positions throughout Germany. The other was the work done by the Polish army throughout the 1930s on monitoring the use by the Germans of the ‘Enigma’ encrypting machine and their construction of the ‘bombe’ that could be used to decipher the encrypted orders, which, when handed over to the British and developed at Bletchley Park, allowed the Allies to intercept and read all orders issuing from the German high command by the beginning of 1940.
The struggle also went on inside Poland. The day before the fall of Warsaw on 28 September, a group of senior officers established a resistance command which assumed authority over units operating throughout the country and built up its own under the name Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ). It was some time before this subsumed the 150-odd resistance groups that had sprung up spontaneously all over the country. The ZWZ was then transformed into the Home Army, Armia Krajowa (AK), directly subordinated to the commander-in-chief in London. By 1944 the AK numbered well over 300,000 men and women, which made it the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe, and the most active, losing 100,000 killed in action over the next four years.