Railway sabotage during World War II
[2][3][4][5][6][7] Partisans and rail workers used sabotage to harass and confuse the invaders, misdirect, destroy, and lose their troops and supplies, and to damage railroad infrastructure, denying the occupiers its use.
[4] Newer Polish works, however, use it more broadly in the context of all partisans operations in occupied Europe directed against the German-controlled railway infrastructure in the period of 1939–1945.
[13] A major incident of railway sabotage in Greece took place in November 1942, when the Greek resistance fighters demolished a chain of three viaducts on the Thessaloniki-Athens line.
[2] Following the end of organized Polish resistance in October 1939, Germans started to rebuild the damaged infrastructure, and then improve it beyond the pre-war level.
[16] In addition to causing simple delays, common acts of sabotage at that time included arson and damage to wagon traction or brakes.
[19] As parts of the Lublin region were occupied by the advancing Soviet forces and the front line stabilized for a few months in the Autumn, further attacks on railway targets occurred in the western Radom District.
[19] In 1993, Marek Ney-Krwawicz [pl] counted approximately 29,000 acts of railway-related sabotage (including smaller incidents) for the period of 1941-1944 (see table).
[17] In 1994, Richard J. Crampton estimated that one eighth of all German transports to the Eastern Front were destroyed or substantially delayed due to Home Army operations.
[21] The approximate number of railway sabotage operations carried out by Polish resistance and/or on the Polish territories in the years 1942-1945 was estimated by Krzysztof Komorowski in 2009 at around 2850 operations (including about 7% of failed attempts), noting that the successful attacks targeted 1825 large and 100 small train complements and resulted in numerous incidents of damage or destruction to tracks (380), bridges (150) and stations (210).
Komorowski also noted that numerous acts of sabotage were carried out by Polish railway workers in repair depots or at stations, but they are hard to quantify.
After initial support to Mihailović's Chetniks tactics used against Axis forces in Serbia, since the closing of Summer 1942, the British started to believe that such actions were not enough.
[27] According to NDH general Slavko Kvaternik, maintaining regular transport incurred "enormous problems, heavy railroad security, [tying down] at least one half of the armed forces, and great destruction and loss of personnel and materiel".
[29] Despite extensive countermeasures, which included construction of watchtowers, bunkers and other fortifications, use of armored trains,[30] forced evacuation of entire settlements, as well as hostage taking,[31] the attacks and interruptions continued, significantly impairing the transport and the economy of the Independent State of Croatia.
[33] Other methods of securing the railway lines included having the trains travel in convoys, attaching security formations to the trains, ranging from police auxiliaries to dedicated anti-insurgency units, construction of fortified posts at vulnerable or key spots, protecting them with fences and patrols, cutting down forests up to several hundred meters along the tracks to deny cover to the partisans, and establishing no-go zones around the tracks, which in extreme cases even led to displacement of entire villages.
