[2] When the Iron Guard was repressed by the regime of King Carol II, Gyr was arrested and imprisoned at Tismana.
In January 1941, after the Legionnaires' rebellion was put down by the Ion Antonescu regime, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, for inciting the crowd.
After spending time at Aiud Prison, Gyr was sent to fight on the Eastern Front (a form of punishment which was reserved for former Legionnaires) and was gravely wounded at the battle of Vinogradov.
The poem called — in the style of a rally to war — the 'Romanian nation', symbolized by generic Romanian Christian names, to revolt.
(From Romanian Poetry from its Origins to the Present, Daniel Ioniță, Australian-Romanian Academy Publishing, Sydney, 2020) His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but he served only six years, two of which (at Aiud Prison) with chains at his feet.
Although severely ill (hepatitis, tuberculosis, haemophilia, gangrened rectal prolapse), he was refused any medical assistance, was starved and tortured.
Persuaded to use their perceived expertise in ethnocracy, Radu Gyr and Nichifor Crainic wrote propaganda articles for Glasul Patriei ('The Voice of the Fatherland') – later called Tribuna României – a newspaper published by the Securitate targeting exiled Romanians abroad.