Poland fell to a combined German and Soviet invasion in 1939, but its army kept fighting.
The lucky few who escaped abroad fought on, refusing to admit defeat.
Some were recruited into the “Silent Unseen,” an elite group of operators
airdropped far behind enemy lines to train and lead Poland’s underground army.
In this video, we shed light on the unremembered men and women of the Silent Unseen.
After the SS fabricated an incident on the Polish-German border, 2,000 tanks, 900 bombers,
and nearly 1.5 million Axis soldiers advanced into Poland. The Polish government believed the French
and British would come to their aid, so they ordered the large but generally ill-equipped
Polish Army to defend the country’s border instead of retreating to protect the cities.
Spread too thin, they were smashed by concentrated German forces. But the
Poles were encircled rather than annihilated, giving small units an opportunity to escape.
On September 27th, on the largely undefended eastern side of the country,
the Soviet Union invaded. This was the last straw for the Polish government, who, until that point,
had still been holding out for a miraculous British and French offensive to save them from
destruction. The government dissolved, and the army largely disbanded. Hitler had no real issue
with Poles leaving Poland, as that was part of his great resettlement plan for Eastern Europe. The
way was open, and the Polish government as well as many ex-servicemen made their way to France.
The French took advantage of the glut of professional soldiers and incorporated several
Polish units into the French Army. Four divisions of experienced soldiers were formed alongside a
motorised brigade. During the Battle of France, the Polish forces often held out for longer
and under far tougher conditions than the rest of the French Army. Polish officers had also
tried to warn the French about Germany’s Blitzkrieg tactics, but they were ignored.
As France fell, Poles fighting their second losing battle of the war managed to escape over the
Channel to Britain. One of these men was Captain Jan Górski, and he had an interesting idea.
Górski had read reports on the German invasion of Norway and became particularly interested
in paratroop operations. He believed airdropping soldiers into occupied Poland
was the best way to support the underground army and fight the occupying powers.
The Polish Army had no experience with paratroops, so the plan initially got a cold reception.
It was only when General Sikorski took a liking to the idea that it was approved. However,
it had a different name: Section III of the Commander-in-Chief's Staff.
The operatives, however, called themselves the “Silent Unseen.”
Training for these operatives was extremely rigorous, and only 605 of the original
2,413 candidates passed. It was run by Special Operations Executive, the British precursor to
the CIA, and comprised five phases. Phase One was a strenuous physical exercise course designed to
build up the candidates’ stamina and resilience. In Phase Two, they learnt to use every weapon of
the British, German, Italian, Soviet, and Polish Armed forces and to withstand interrogation.
Phase Three was the jump course, where the candidates learnt to parachute in the wilds
of Scotland. In Phase Four, they were taught covert operations, which included combat jujitsu
and clandestine warfare techniques. Lastly, in Phase Five, the candidates were given a false
identity. If they passed these challenges, they were sworn in as members of the Polish
underground “Home Army” and kept their original Polish ranks. However, it was tradition that,
at the moment an operative exited the plane for their first mission, they were promoted one rank.
Between February 15th 1941 and December 27th 1944, 483 airdrop missions were flown from bases
in Britain to occupied Europe. Three hundred and sixteen soldiers and 28 government agents
were successfully parachuted into Poland, along with a few hundred tonnes of material.
Seventeen other operatives were dropped in Albania, Greece, France, and Yugoslavia with
orders to stir up the Polish minorities and focus the efforts of the resistance.
Additionally, 40,000,000 forged Polish złoty, 26,000,000 US dollars in banknotes and gold coins,
17-hundred pounds sterling in gold coins, and three-and-a-half million
Reichsmarks were smuggled with them, so they had a little spending money.
But they didn’t just bring cash and guns. The operatives were also airdropped with
machine parts required to tool up small-scale workshops and blueprints for manufacturing
cheap weapons. The STEN gun was a particular favourite,
as it was cheap to make from stamped metal and had an easily copied design.
As you might have guessed, the vast majority of the Silent Unseen operators
were expecting their missions to be one-way, no return. But this wasn’t the case for them all.
One man, Tadeusz Chciuk-Celt, returned alive from not one but two missions in occupied Poland.
Chciuk-Celt, codenamed “Celt,” made his first combat jump on December 27th 1941
with a small group of other operatives. They were spotted by a German patrol just after landing,
and a firefight broke out. Celt and his team took a few casualties,
but they killed the Germans and proceeded with their mission. His objective was to analyse the
state of the Polish underground government and its military forces and report this back to London.
He spent several months compiling his report alongside senior Polish underground leaders.
But that was the easy part. Getting out of occupied Europe was the real challenge.
Once his report was complete, Celt infiltrated his way onto a Polish train bound for Hungary.
He then stole a priest’s vestments and posed as the Hungarian Catholic Father Andor Varga.
This allowed him to cross into Croatia, then Switzerland, then France. Once he
was over the French border, he swapped his costume for a worn set of overalls and flat
cap—perfect for his next disguise as a French railwayman. Maintaining his cover the whole way,
Celt crossed the entirety of France and Andorra, only to be arrested once he’d crossed into Spain.
He was then held at the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp, but swapped identities
with a dying man and managed to secure his own release. From there, he journeyed to Gibraltar
and caught a flight back to London. Eighteen months after his jump, he presented his report.
Chciuk-Celt was one of the first to return from Europe with first-hand accounts
of Germany’s Final Solution. His outstanding valour won him Poland’s
highest military decoration: the Virtuti Militari. But his odyssey wasn’t over yet.
In April 1944, Celt was dropped over occupied Poland a second time. He had two missions: first,
to inform the underground government of the results of the Tehran Conference, and second,
to protect the 56-year-old Dr Retinger, who was to negotiate a settlement with the Soviets.
Again, Celt was successful, and both men made a dramatic escape to Britain
via a secret plane on July 26th 1944.
Adolf Pilch, codenamed “Gora,” was airdropped into Poland on the night of February 16th 1943. The
Home Army put him in charge of their operations in the Białystok region and the Nowogródek district.
He soon made his presence felt. Gora linked up the disparate groups of Polish partisans
living in the forests and combined them into one large and effective force.
At its peak, Gora’s partisan unit had a fighting strength of 1,000
and was complete with a dedicated cavalry unit, stormtroopers, and heavy weapons. On the
Polish-Byelorussian border, he battled both the Germans and their Byelorussian auxiliary troops.
In December 1943, the communist partisan commanders in Moscow disavowed the Polish
Home Army, and Gora began fighting the Soviets too. He realised that, with the Axis on the run,
the Soviets presented a more substantial threat to Polish nationalism. He entered
a temporary ceasefire with the Germans so his unit could tackle the Soviet threat head-on.
In June 1944, Gora’s partisan unit was running critically low on supplies. It was not receiving
aid from Home Army central command because of the ceasefire, and with Operation Bagration in
full swing, things would only get worse. In return for ending the ceasefire,
Gora was given the supplies he needed, and with them, he annihilated an entire SS battalion.
On the night of September 2nd, Gora’s partisans crept through the darkness of Kampinos forest
toward the village of Truskaw. Stationed there was a battalion of SS-RONA, a unit of Russian
and Byelorussian Nazi volunteers infamous for their war crimes during the Warsaw Uprising.
Gora’s partisans took revenge that night, killing 250 SS soldiers and wounding another 100, for the
loss of only 20 of their own dead and wounded. The Russian SS brigade was scattered, and shortly
afterwards they were withdrawn by SS commanders to Slovakia, where the Poles couldn’t reach them.
Gora continued to fight until the war’s end,
first with the partisans and later as an officer in the Home Army. He was strongly opposed to a
Polish-Soviet satellite state and consequently had to escape to the West in January 1945.
He remained in London and was awarded a silver Virtuti Militari for his service during the war.
He’d fought in over 200 battles, and came out of nearly all of them victorious.
THAT was the incredible story of the Silent Unseen, Poland’s top-secret spec ops force
of World War Two. But what do YOU think? Why do YOU think Hitler allowed so many Poles to
escape to France early on? Could YOU have made a journey across Europe like Celt? Who do YOU
think was the worse enemy for Poland: Germany or the Soviet Union? Let us know in the comments!