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A paratrooper or military parachutist is a soldier trained to conduct military operations by parachuting directly into an area of operations, usually as part of a large airborne forces unit. Traditionally paratroopers fight only as light infantry armed with small arms and light weapons, although some paratroopers can also function as artillerymen or mechanized infantry by utilizing field guns, infantry fighting vehicles and light tanks that are airdropped together into the combat zone.
The Home Army was the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. The Home Army was formed in February 1942 from the earlier Związek Walki Zbrojnej established in the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasions in September 1939. Over the next two years, the Home Army absorbed most of the other Polish partisans and underground forces. Its allegiance was to the Polish government-in-exile in London, and it constituted the armed wing of what came to be known as the Polish Underground State. Estimates of the Home Army's 1944 strength range between 200,000 and 600,000. The latter number made the Home Army not only Poland's largest underground resistance movement but, along with Soviet and Yugoslav partisans, one of Europe's largest World War II underground movements.
The French Resistance was a collection of groups that fought the Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy régime in France during the Second World War. Resistance cells were small groups of armed men and women who conducted guerrilla warfare and published underground newspapers. They also provided first-hand intelligence information, and escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind Axis lines. The Resistance's men and women came from many parts of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, liberals, anarchists, communists, and some fascists. The proportion of French people who participated in organized resistance has been estimated at from one to three percent of the total population.
The 1st (Polish) Independent Parachute Brigade was a parachute infantry brigade of the Polish Armed Forces in the West under the command of Major General Stanisław Sosabowski, created in September 1941 during the Second World War and based in Scotland.
Operation Tempest was a series of uprisings conducted during World War II against occupying German forces by the Polish Home Army, the dominant force in the Polish resistance.
The French Forces of the Interior were French resistance fighters in the later stages of World War II. Charles de Gaulle used it as a formal name for the resistance fighters. The change in designation of these groups to FFI occurred as France's status changed from that of an occupied nation to one of a nation being liberated by the Allied armies. As regions of France were liberated, the FFI were more formally organized into light infantry units and served as a valuable manpower addition to regular Free French forces. In this role, the FFI units manned less active areas of the front lines, allowing regular French army units to practice economy of force measures and mass their troops in decisive areas of the front. Finally, from October 1944 and with the greater part of France liberated, the FFI units were amalgamated into the French regular forces continuing the fight on the Western Front, thus ending the era of the French irregulars in World War II.
In Poland, the resistance movement during World War II was led by the Home Army. The Polish resistance is notable among others for disrupting German supply lines to the Eastern Front, and providing intelligence reports to the British intelligence agencies. It was a part of the Polish Underground State.
The Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force[a] was a short-lived Lithuanian volunteer military unit created with the active involvement of the anti-Nazi Lithuanian resistance during the German occupation of Lithuania during World War II. The LTDF was disbanded one and a half months after its creation by its commander Povilas Plechavičius when Nazi Germany's occupational authorities threatened the unit's independence. During the subsequent repressions, the German occupiers sent 52 officers to the Salaspils concentration camp, executed 86 LTDF members in Paneriai and deported 1,089 to Stutthof and Oldenburg concentration camps. While some were later forced into Nazi service, all except four of the force's fourteen battalions successfully escaped Nazi persecution. Those who escaped later contributed to the Forest Brothers' armed anti-Soviet resistance.
The 30th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS(1st Belarusian), originally called the 30th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS , was a short-lived German Waffen-SS infantry division formed largely from Belarusian, Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian personnel of the Schutzmannschaft-Brigade Siegling in August 1944 at Warsaw in the General Government.
In mid-August 1943, a Polish unit of the Striking Cadre Battalions (UBK), which was controlled by the resistance organization Confederation of the Nation, launched an armed attack on East Prussian villages in the area of Johannisburg. The attack, ordered by Colonel Stanislaw Karolkiewicz, was launched in revenge for atrocities which the Germans committed against the Polish population of the Bialystok District. The targets of the attack included devout Nazis, NSDAP members and ethnic German inhabitants of the district who were engaging in brutality against the Polish population of the district. According to Polish sources, some 70 Germans were killed and 40 German farms were razed to the ground, while an eyewitness reported that 13 people were killed, including a woman and two children, and two people were wounded. The revenge attack shocked Prussian Germans and it also caused them to rethink the genocidal tactics which they used against the Polish population.
Cécile Cerf was a member of the French Resistance during World War II.
Poles in France form one of the largest Polish diaspora communities in Europe. Between 500,000 and one million people of Polish descent live in France, concentrated in the Nord-Pas de Calais region, in the metropolitan area of Lille, the coal-mining basin around Lens and Valenciennes and in the Ile-de-France.
Edward Pomorski was the last Minister Plenipotentiary of the Polish Government-in-Exile, in Belgium from 11 December 1970 to 31 December 1988. He was Commander of the Polish Resistance P.O.W.N. in Belgium and the Netherlands (1940–1945).
Albert Ouzoulias was a French politician and a Communist leader of the French Resistance during World War II (1939–45) using the name of "Colonel André". He played a major role in the 1944 liberation of Paris.
The Polska Organizacja Walki o Niepodległość, also known as the POWN, was a Polish resistance army during World War II, It was founded in the south of France by Aleksander Kawałkowski in 1941, and conducted intelligence activities and propaganda. It operated at first primarily in France, where it was the major component of the Polish resistance in France during World War II, where it was also known by the code name "Monika" or "Monica" It was called : Monique-bas in the free zone) and Monique-haut in the occupied zone.
Władysław Ważny, also known as Wladyslaw Rozmus and Tiger, was a Polish Army officer and Special Operations Executive agent. He served during World War II. He searched for German V-1 flying bomb and V-2 launchers in occupied France and was an organizer of the French resistance movement.
The liberation of Rennes, along with its surrounding settlements, took place on 4 August 1944 by the joint action of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) and the 8th Infantry Division of the United States Army led by General Georges S. Patton, ending four years of capture of the city by the Nazi Germans as part of the liberation of Brittany.
Albert Eon was a head of the military resistance in Brittany, north-west France in World War II and developer of the Specialized Airborne of France.
Raymond Emmanuel Marie Siméon Chomel was a French General and leader of the resistance during World War Two.
Polish immigration to the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield took place before and especially after the First World War. It took place mainly in the second half of the 1920s, when the mines, drowned in October and November 1918 by the Germans at the end of the war, were once again usable. Half of the Polish immigrants had initially entered Germany as Westphalian miners.