Polish Cavalry

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savagefan said:
and also when clinton was trying to save "face" over monica. History is a funny thing.
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Funny indeed. I was involved in protecting/feeding Kosovar refugees elsewhere at about that time (just prior to the NATO bombing campaign). I never heard talk about Clintons marital problems from that group of frightened and brutalized people.

Maybe they didn't get FOX NEWS in Kosovo so they could learn what the NATO campaign was REALLY about, from the fair and balanced commentators?
 
Grendel said:
Let us not forget what was probably the greatest secret of WW2, the breaking of ENIGMA.
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Oh yeah, that too.... last time i saw it on history channel it was the "allies" who deciphered it...:rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Whatever, I had many arguments in regards to how Poland did not suffer "that bad" during the war.... so I generally don't like to get into discussions with people who have only one side of the story, i.e. north american history class... but I am happy to give you guys the info that some of you might not have known.

Cheers & respect your veterans. Remember what they fought for.

Alex
 
Actually, the Germans who encountered the Polish cavalry had a great deal of respect for it. I found this quote from Colonel Guenther von Blumentritt (chief of operations for Army Group South during the Polish campaign): "In the course of the campaign the Polish cavalry gave several German divisions something serious to think about and distinguished itself by its great bravery." Polish horsemen, Blumentritt said, "continually appeared like phantom hosts to surprise us in the night."
Having said that, I do think the Polish army made a disastrous error by spreading its forces out along the entire Polish-German border (from the Carpathian Mountains in the south up past Silesia to the Polish Corridor and then east to the East Prussian frontier). If I had been in charge, I would have recommended pulling the bulk of Polish forces back to more defensible lines - perhaps as far back as the barrier posed by the Vistula River - and, from there, fighting a purely defensive war while awaiting help from the French (and British).
To be fair, though, one can imagine two problems with my scenario. First, it would have meant giving up Poland's most valuable industrial regions and the symbolic Corridor without a fight. That may have been politically impossible. Second, when one considers how slowly the French Army actually moved in September of 1939, I'm not sure that the Germans ever would have been forced to disengage in the east in order to meet the threat in the west.
 
olek_Z_bc said:
Oh yeah, that too.... last time i saw it on history channel it was the "allies" who deciphered it...:rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Whatever, I had many arguments in regards to how Poland did not suffer "that bad" during the war.

The first enigma machine was stolen by the poles and sent to Britain. While the germans subsequently made changes, the basic machine was a great help.

One also has to remember where the germans placed all those nice vacation camps. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maidenek, Sobibor, Dachau, Bergen Belsen, Birkenau, Chelmno, and many others.
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Howard said:
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Having said that, I do think the Polish army made a disastrous error by spreading its forces out along the entire Polish-German border (from the Carpathian Mountains in the south up past Silesia to the Polish Corridor and then east to the East Prussian frontier). If I had been in charge, I would have recommended pulling the bulk of Polish forces back to more defensible lines - perhaps as far back as the barrier posed by the Vistula River - and, from there, fighting a purely defensive war while awaiting help from the French (and British). ...
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At the time, that strategy would have appeared to have had much to reccommend it. But I will go further than your reservations about the French coming to the rescue in time. I thoroughly believe that strategy would have delayed the end perhaps by quite a bit, but still have failed. I am sure the French and British would have just wasted more time and still failed to get any significant ground campaign going against Germany in time (if ever), and after deliberating a bit about whether to honour his secret agreement with Germany, Stalin would not have been able to resist the opportunity for revenge against Poland (he was a top commissar with one of the principal Soviet groups invading Poland in the early '20s and probably partly responsible for their failure) and he would still have come in and helped the Germans overcome the Poles.
 
John, actually Dachau and Bergen Belsen where both in germany along with many others. Also they were both concentration camps and not 'death' camps. As was Auschwitz in the begining. Birkenau was the 'death camp' portion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Maidenek and Chelmno where both concentration camps and orgionsed murder was 'investigated' and perfected at both these camps. Belzec is the death camp missing from your list and should be inculded along with Treblinka and Sobibor!
 
ringo said:
Apart from Russia, the Poles suffered the greatest casualties of WWII and on a per capita basis did indeed suffer the greatest casualties. You might want to read about the pockets of resistance, ie: the Warsaw ghetto resistance, and the clandestine factories producing high quality copies of the British Sten gun to fight on.
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Actually the country that saw the highest losses as a % of their population, was Yugoslavia. It lost between a quater and a third of it population. This is not to decry what the poles suffered in any way!
 
Remarkable, and sad. I used to read up on WWII quite a bit (still do) and (of course) most of the books in Canadian libraries are published in the U.S.
Not trying to bash the U.S. but the info we get here is pretty slanted.
As was mentioned before - Germany easily rolls over a bunch of countries, Poland first, Britain fights valiantly alone (which is the funniest thing constantly referred to) to defend itself and then the U.S. win the war with help from Russia... ridiculously easy and somewhat inaccurate, eh?
Britain doesn't much like to talk about how much help they received from other countries. My grandfather-in-law (who recently passed) was a gunner on the HMCS Swansea which escorted many convoys bringing supplies to Britain.
I have the utmost respect for the Poles. Damn fine people, great cooks, (and very beautiful women!)
One funny thing - I hear many more jokes about France and Italy than I ever hear about Poland. Don't get me started on de Gaulle...
 
Gibbs505 said:
John, actually Dachau and Bergen Belsen where both in germany along with many others. Also they were both concentration camps and not 'death' camps. As was Auschwitz in the begining. Birkenau was the 'death camp' portion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Maidenek and Chelmno where both concentration camps and orgionsed murder was 'investigated' and perfected at both these camps. Belzec is the death camp missing from your list and should be inculded along with Treblinka and Sobibor!
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Rather a technical point. People were shot, beaten to death, starved, and worked to death in all those camps. I will defer to you on the locations, but not the purpose. I do wonder why everyone talks about the 6 million jews who were killed but no one mentions an equal number of others who also died.
 
John Sukey said:
Rather a technical point. People were shot, beaten to death, starved, and worked to death in all those camps. I will defer to you on the locations, but not the purpose. I do wonder why everyone talks about the 6 million jews who were killed but no one mentions an equal number of others who also died.
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I do agree with you. I am sure to those in the camps it ment very little whether they were worked to death or simply slaughted! I also agree, the 6 millions jews murdered is terrible but no less terrible then the other 6 million.

The point I was making is that Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor were set up with the murder of the jews in mind and existed only for less then a year. After enough jews had been murdered, the camps were shut down and all evidence of their existence was to be removed. This was by late 1943 I belive. The remaining carloads of jews where sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.
 
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I know that it's fun to take shots at the French for how quickly they quit in WW2 but keep in mind that they almost lost an entire generation of young men a scant 25 years prior. For the rest of it, keep in mind that Britain was the only free country in western europe for the U.S. to operate from thanx in large part to Canadian merchant-men and the RCN. The long term Nazi plan was to anhiilate the unter munschen world-wide. Britain was the last free european power at the time and the U.S. was just becoming a superpower, in the bigger picture the fates of Jews and smaller nations were less important. FWIW.
 
Although we're getting a little off topic, the Russians suffered the most casualties by far in WWI. I don't know if it was the largest loss per capita, though. I think the highest loss rate per capita was France, but it could have been Britain or Austria-Hungary! The largest loss of civilian life was also by far the Russians, but there is much controversy over how much of this was self-inflicted. Oh, yeah, don't forget the Ottoman's (Turks) - they got hammered, too!
 
No, for a fact the Serbs lost the most per capita in ww1. All of Europe suffered heavily from big egos big weapons and small tactics. But Hey if it wasn't for ww1 my Australian grandad would not have "caught a packet" in Gallipoli and sent to Glasgow to recuperate, meet my grandma and make my dear old dad. Aint war a #####?
 
What's your source for that info? I'm not doubting, it's just that I've checked a number of different sources and the total casualties for various countries varies drastically from source to source. Wikipedia shows 450,000 Serb deaths (military) plus 650,000 civilian, whereas FirstWorldWar.com and several other sites list only 45,000! One must be a typo!
 
I second that, great respect for the Poles & the part
about the women( Casha where are you? Gawd she was hot). They made some fine firearms too.
 
I dont think it matters how many people died, per capita, in any country. They point is that people died, terribly, PERIOD. The point is we are all capable of terrible things, not just Germans. We must take care not to repeat this ever again, and it is important to know history, and know it CORRECTLY, not from state textbooks.
 
f_soldaten04 said:
I dont think it matters how many people died, per capita, in any country. They point is that people died, terribly, PERIOD. The point is we are all capable of terrible things, not just Germans. We must take care not to repeat this ever again, and it is important to know history, and know it CORRECTLY, not from state textbooks.
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I agree completly. However, not all wars are bad. The only worse burden then combat is the chains of a slave!
 
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