[ExI] two years in the slammer for blammisphy?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Tue, 11 May 2010, John Grigg wrote:

> Spike wrote:
> Vienna was saved by the attitude of its people.
> That tells what kind of people the Poles are.
> >>>
> But as I recall, Poland has many times been crushed and partitioned by it's
> stronger neighbors (so much for the theory of tough Poles, but then being
> bullied long enough will make just about anyone get mean).  They did appear
> to have a golden age, at least until the Swedes and Cossacks (I guess much
> tougher foes than the Ottomans...) came along and burned down & looted the
> country. 

I (hopefully) will be able to say a bit on this later.

> And Germany at one time seemed to have an itch every few
> generations to invade poor Poland!

Actually, for most of the time, I believe we were on quite good terms with 
Germans. However, not good enough to convert ourselves into them. 
Sometimes, they were accepting this, sometimes, they were not - their bad.

Surprising number of Germans settled in Poland and became Poles. There 
sure had to be an opposite movement, too.

The whole conflict thing seems to be absurd.

> But the Poles now seem to have a successful handle on their economy and are
> will known for their scientific and literary contributions to the world.

Yes we do. Thanks for noticing. :-)

> But militarily, they generally have not done so well.  There is a famous
> picture of Polish mounted cavalry lancers (could have been straight out the
> 17th century) fighting Nazi panzer tanks.  What were they thinking? lol

This picture is biased and I don't believe it ever happened. How do you 
imagine a commander giving such a stupid order? Knowing for sure what will 
happen? How do you imagine a lower level officer accepting such an order 
rather than refusing to do it?

>From what I have heard about this, it was a nazi propaganda. It has 
a surprisingly long life. A good number of people is no longer able to 
say who the nazi were but still, they may say those nonsense things about 
us.

I can only agree with this: sometimes in a battlefield, one has to do 
something crazy to save lifes. Like breaking through the line of attacking 
tanks. Especially when one cannot pull back, because one is surrounded. 
But I wouldn't call this an attack.

About our "17th century old" cavalry: guess what, we had the best (at the 
time) anti tank rifle, that could kill actually every tank being in use 
then. And it had been used a lot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wz._35_anti-tank_rifle

We did not have many tanks (however, some of them were good enough for 
Germans, who captured them and either used or sold them to their allies).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-TP

We did not have enough planes, however they were good enough for France to 
consider buying their primary fighters from us in the beginning of 1930s. 
Alas, this did not happened. But we sold them to a number of other 
countries, even if not in big quantities.

We also had some achievements in the field of pairing up scientists, 
technicians/engineers and military experts. This seems to be perfected in 
US later on. Ok, we had just started doing this, maybe we were pioneers 
(or maybe Germans were, or maybe...). One such achievement was breaking 
of German Enigma cipher (including building electromechanical devices to 
help the task). Later during the war, Germans improved their Enigma and 
our methods were no longer suitable for it. British cryptologists took the 
lead (and did a hell of good work, AFAIK).

With regard to building more tanks, well, we had to develop them from the 
grounds up (almost) (we had a really big trouble with building a good 
engine to drive the beasts), and build us a modern industry as the country 
emerged from nonexistence after WWI. We had only 20 years for this and we 
did a remarkable job. Considering we had to fight "Soviet revolution going 
west" and live through Big Depression. Also, during WWI, practically the 
whole "what was to become Poland" had been a battlefield. Also, after 
partitions, we had three Polands that had to be unified (sounds easy, eh, 
but try it with different laws and economies). Unfortunately, we were not 
good enough to fight off Germans and Soviets singlehandedly in 1939 (we 
were singled because of cowardish tactics of our lazy alies, who 
probably lured us into opposing Germans). But if you can name anybody, who 
would have managed to do better, I am willing to hear it. Be verbose, if 
you please (I mean, don't forget to explain).

Of course you can point out that Soviets managed to build an army, however 
please consider what were their living conditions thanks to this. Also, 
their army at the time was a pitiful band of underexperienced novices 
(thanks to stalinist purges). And three months later they were unable to 
conquer Finland, which had about 5 milion population (ok, they almost did 
it, but with such costs that "almost" is hardly acceptable). They were 
able to go inside Poland because we chose to not fight them as they 
stabbed us in the back.

(To Russians reading this: I use the term "Soviets" consciously).

As of Germans, they also managed to do a lot (I am a silent admirer of 
their technical expertise), but at the same time they brought their 
country on the verge of economic catastrophe. They had to go to war, kind 
of. And from what I have heard, they stole not only from museums but 
actually whatever they could, including typewriters and bed furniture (I 
am not even going to mention cattle and horses). So they were in real 
need, it seems.

On the other hand, all we wanted was to have a good life in our own 
country. Not fighting our neighbours (unless they asked for it). So we 
were doing, in modern terms, a sustainable development, rather than 
agressive militarization. IMHO, we were doing all right. Among other 
things, we were planning permament TV broadcasting for 1940. Or maybe it 
was first half of 1940s, I'm not sure.

> I once came across a film (while perusing in a a video store) where the plot
> had German young people breaking into a WW2 museum, putting on old military
> uniforms, taking out for rides German tanks & half-tracks from the war, and
> crossing the border into Poland.  The poor Polish countryfolk they encounter
> think they are being invaded again!  I never actually saw the movie but
> wonder how successful it was as a comedy.

The youngsters have been very lucky. Just as one could expect from a 
comedy. The usual tactics of "folk" is treating tanks with Molotov 
cocktails. If they were stupid enough to display hakenkreuz, they deserved 
it anyway.

> John
> 

Regards
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **