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Secret Army. How strong is the Underground Army? The Poles claim 300,000 men, but this is probably an exaggeration. It is an army bivouacked deep in the homeland's pine and birch forests. It uses light arms cached by the old Polish Army, snatched from the Germans or parachuted from abroad. As a rule it has, until recently, avoided open battle with the heavily armed occupation forces.
Last month, the Poles say, a force of 4,000 Germans, equipped with tanks and planes, surprised an underground camp. After a day's fighting and severe losses, the Poles broke out of a German ring, dispersed in the forest, left behind 400 dead and wounded enemies. More typical exploits: setting fire to German tank cars, derailing German troop transports, raiding Gestapo prisons, burning down German colonists' villages in retaliation for Polish Lidices.
Civil War? Most of the story of the Polish underground filters through the London Polish Government which claims but has yet to prove that it controls the bulk of the resistance forces. Certainly opposed to the London Government is Poland's young Partisan underground, led by Polish Communists. The Partisans are probably dominant east of the Curzon Line, in territory claimed by the Russians and among Poland's old White Russian and Ukrainian minorities.
Just how the two undergrounds will react to each other and to the Russian occupation remains to be seen. But the Polish people have not forgotten an old tradition of resistance to foreign masters; their undergrounds have kept a stubborn nation alive for the day of reckoning.