Living Torpedoes

Living torpedoes (Polish: Żywe torpedy; also Straceńcy — “Desperates” or "the Lost") was a social and military phenomenon which began in the Second Polish Republic in mid-1939, when the threat from Nazi Germany became real. The idea for creating the human torpedo unit was very similar to the famous Japanese kamikaze pilots — males and females willing to sacrifice their lives to defend their homeland. It is a matter of debate among military historians whether there were any real plans for the creation of such suicidal units, or whether it was purely a matter of propaganda.

It all started on May 5, 1939, when Adolf Hitler officially demanded the Free City of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. A day after Hitler’s speech, the Polish daily Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny from Kraków published a letter written by a man from Warsaw named Władysław Bożyczko and also signed by his relatives, the brothers Edward and Leon Lutostański. Bożyczko together with the Lutostański brothers appealed to the Poles, asking them to sacrifice their lives. Also, as early as spring 1937 a man from Katowice, Stanisław Chojecki, had written a letter to Edward Rydz-Śmigły, offering a similar ultimate sacrifice.

The appeal quickly spread all over the country, trumpeted by other newspapers and radio. Copies of several papers which published it have been preserved to this day; in some of them there are names and photographs of some of those who applied. The search for volunteers turned into a popular patriotic movement which lasted until the first day of World War II — September 1, 1939, the day the German invasion of Poland began. It is now difficult to estimate how many people volunteered; most probably there were as many as 4700 men and some 150 women (3000 names are documented, as the Polish Navy issued special IDs for volunteers, signed by Commodore Eugeniusz Poplawski). The first people took their oaths on June 29, 1939.

It is not exactly known what the Polish Army was going to use these people for. Presumably, they were supposed to man underwater human torpedoes, aimed at the destruction of German warships. Most probably, the Polish Army did not have the necessary equipment, but reportedly in the summer of 1939 in Gdynia, 83 selected volunteers were shown a special short movie about torpedoes manned by humans. An officer of the Navy who was present stated that Poland had 16 such torpedoes; they were eight meters long and weighed 420 kilograms. However, none of the volunteers ever saw these torpedoes. Some other volunteers were trained as glider pilots and parachute jumpers.

Also, at that time the Polish Navy created a Bureau of Living Torpedoes, which suggests that the idea was treated seriously. According to one of the volunteers, Marian Kamiński from Poznań, who saw the movie, Navy officers told him to return to Gdynia on October 12, 1939, for a two-month training course. The course never started — as Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939 — but some of the volunteers had by then been drafted into another special ops unit for sabotage and operations behind enemy lines.