Polish Resistance Fighter In Uniform?

[panzerhan]

Hello, I am making the 1/35 Partizan figures from the old Esci brand. The Polish fighter with the German Mp40 in the right is wearing a somewhat ordinary uniform. Is it possible? Did the allies supply the Polish resistance fighters with uniforms besides the arms and ammunition?

[Halsey]

Yes, it's possible.

For example, have a look at this page about one of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) partisan units (in Polish, but note a photo near bottom):

http://www.podhalewogniu.dobroni.pl/media/grh,grh-podhale,747,467,313.html

These uniforms are mostly Polish pre-war models, but not only. The jacket in the middle looks like a British. Also two jackets on the wall.

Regards - Halsey

[panzerhan]

This is a wonderful photo, just what I'm looking for.

Thank you so much Halsey..

[Dachhase]

Beware of museum reconstructions. They tend to be just that little bit wrong;, in this case, the colour. When the partisans had uniforms at all, they tended to be a bit greener than this. In addition, the red-and-white armband was almost always worn on the upper arm, not at the cuff. I can find no consistencyh as to whether it was on the right or left arm, even within the same unit, but I have not noticed a genuine one with the armband below the elbow. Maybe somebody else has examples.
. Have a look at this. The photos are genuine, but some of them are not of partisans, but of Anders' Second Corps. But not that many had knee boots. Mainly from raiding German stores or stripping bodies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHJtSzwFIZQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TvGGAik ... re=related
Let me know if the links don't work.

[Dachhase]

I have been thinking over the uniforms. Except for the few photos that clearly relate to Anders' Corps, the groups shown are mostly "mountain men" or "forest brothers" (lesny brac). If you want clothing from the Warsaw Uprising, that is quite different. Most went straight from work or home into action in whatever they were wearing. Ordinary civilian clothing, with a red-and-white armband on the upper arm, and - if they could get one - a German helmet with a narrow red-and-white ribbon just above the brim. There are plenty of photos on Internet and, if you want to be realistic, don't forget the women and children.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUk-eIhcuWA
(A lot of the shots are of ruins and barricades, but you can pause at the uniforms. Even the children on the bucket line and the little couriers have their armbands - above the elbow.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YESHeddV ... re=related
(Watch for the lovely little nurse at 3:30 and the couriers at 3:50. Any coloured photo from this period is suspicious, but the girl's armband has been hand-coloured at a later date.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6OgIZzHiIg
(Care; some of these photos are genuine; some are fakes - kids "playing soldiers". Any motion picture allegedly of the Uprising needs to be viewed with suspicion; there were very, very few.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&featu ... se38Oy2D0c
(This is a reconstruction by a theatre group. It is very well done and I watch it often, but there are a few probable anachronisms. The flag at 0:50 is made of a see-through synthetic material unlikely to have been available in 1944. And the camouflage cover on the helmet at 1:30 and in later scenes has an American pattern, also highly unlikely to have been available.)
This should just about be enough for you, but you could chase up more examples from the icons for other posts.

[Piotr Mikołajski]

Beware of museum reconstructions. They tend to be just that little bit wrong;, in this case, the colour.

Most Polish state museums have original uniforms received as gifts, deposits etc. Copies are expensive to buy and state museums have no money for such expenses. Private collections mixes original ones with copies quite often. In both cases armbands, badges etc. can be placed wrongly but sometimes it's good to search.

For example "Grupa Kampinos" had Aviation Company and soldiers of that company had Polish aviation checkerboard on their caps. This is unique and in most cases such uniform would be claimed as incorrect but photos shows it clearly.

More in Polish: http://www.ibprs.pl/ak_obroza_kampinos/43.html
Photos: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ ... inos_Group

There are reports about battledress too. Some containers with ammo and weapons had parts of British uniforms used for securing load. I guess that soldiers of Home Army could wash and use them later.

[Dachhase]

For whatever reason, things in museums are sometimes wrong.
It took me nearly five years to persuade a certain Australian museum that what they had labelled as a Hilfskreuzerabzeichnen was in fact a U-Boot-Abzeichnen. All they needed to do was print a new label, but!
They did, however, remove promptly one small exhibit that was an obvious fake.
My point was not to criticise the museum, but to help the person making the enquiry. I had recently been asking myself the question about uniform colour, and had looked up some clips of "Hubal" on Youtube. Not that many of the younger members of the underground would have had access to pre-war uniforms.
I do not want to go chasing back to the photo mentioned, but my thought on seeing them was that, whatever insignia were on the uniforms, they looked more like uniforms of Anders' Corps, or the Karpacka Brygada. But I am not an expert in this field. They would, of course, have been using British desert warfare uniforms for some time. (Even then, the colour looks a bit bright, but that could be a fault of the photographic process or the lighting.)

[history1]

Beware of museum reconstructions. They tend to be just that little bit wrong;, in this case, the colour. [...]

Did you notice that the link of Haley is leading to an Reenactment group?

You can use this instead:
http://1944.wp.pl/index2.php#9
Choose "Ekspozicja" (at the left) and then "zdjęcia archiwalne" (top right).

[Dachhase]

Member 1: your link fails in its intention to help me, because it assumes that I can read Polish. My knowledge of Polish is very elementary, and not up to reading this. Perhaps you could assist by picking out the bits that might help me reconcile the inconsistencies in two of the uniforms. Remember that the enquirer was asking about uniforms (or other clothing) worn by the resistance fighters, not about any uniform that might have been worn somewhere, at some time, by Polish combatants.
Second from left: khaki (as worn by British and American troops and the Afrika-Korps), Sam Browne belt (British pattern, although it was not exclusive to Britain), tropical helmet with what appears to be an eagle feather, what seems to be an edelweiss badge (as worn by alpine troops) on the right collar, and the AK armband positioned sloppily near the wrist. I would be interested to know how these apparent contradictions can be sorted out. My mind is open to evidence.
Third from right: camouflage outfit, in a jungle camouflage pattern. When were Polish troops fighting in tropical jungles? It is similar to some of the camouflage gear worn by modern Polish units in Afghanistan, and might or might not be the same - although it is too green to provide good camouflage in Afghanistan's desert environment. Again, the Polish text that I cannot read might provide an explanation.
Halsey points out that the battle jacket in the centre appears to be British pattern. I agree. Now, it has been claimed that Britain dropped uniforms to resistance fighters. However, swanning around the Polish forests or the Warsaw barricades in British uniforms would not have been a good survival strategy.
So I think that explanations would be helpful.

[henryk]

See my post for a picture of Home Army fighters in uniform.
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=111&p=1661357#p1661357

[henryk]

Another picture of AK uniforms:
http://www.thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/11466 ... 0-years-on

WWII sabotage operation remembered 70 years on
PR dla Zagranicy Nick Hodge 08.10.2012 18:37

Monday marks the seventieth anniversary of a major sabotage operation launched against the Nazi occupiers by Poland's resistance forces.

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)

[Dachhase]

You can see hundreds of different genuine uniforms by viewing Polish resistance songs on Youtube. No problem.
But a word of warning: if they are in colour, or if they are movies, they are probably reconstructions.
Trial examples:
Warszawskie Dzieci
Po partyzancie dziewczyna placze (Can't find Polish symbols on your list of special characters, but Google does not mind.)
Hymn Srodmiescia
Mala dziewczynka z AK
Maly Jas
These will lead you to other examples.