[annatar1914]

Not to mention their performance at the Siege of Vienna in 1683. Every so often, there is a glorious, shining moment in Polish history when they are fighting on the side of the angels.

@Potemkin :

Indeed. I may always remember the Smutnoye Vremya, but I also remember things like this

[Rich]

A new word, Blitzkrieg, the lightning war, is being used to describe Germany’s invasion of Poland, and the utmost bravery is no proof against lightning, as the Polish Pomorska Cavalry Brigade discovered to its cost.

The story will go that these fine horsemen, full of elan, charged a German tank force with swords and lances. The tanks simply hosed them out of their saddles with machine-gun fire. The truth is that the charge was a tactical success. For the survivors of the Polish


Germans adopt new tactics of warfare

Military analysts studying the German Blitzkrieg tactics conclude that the Poles are fighting with 1918 methods and equipment while the Germans have adopted completely new rules of warfare.

General Guderian’s revolutionary tactics allow his tanks to break through linear defenses and bypass pockets of resistance, ignoring the risk to their open flanks.

If this thread goes to plan we'll all be six years older by the time its done. So I think its worth saying a little about WW1, before we get too far into WW2.

This video does a good job of displaying a number of misconceptions about WW1.

I notice people constantly refer to WW1 as a type of warfare. When people say WWI, they seem to be referring to the Western Front between the Marne and the Kaiserschlacht. In fact there were considerable advances on other fronts during this period. But even this limited part they get wrong. At no point in the war did the guns go silent prior to going over the top. Earlier in the war, the guns would have moved their targets to rear areas, but by 1917, they absolutely were prepared to take friendly fire casualties, with the barrage advancing slowly and the troops keeping very close to the barrage, to avoid giving the enemy time to come out and take up position before the infantry assault reached them. Warfare by 1917 was highly sophisticated.

The above video clearly references the guns going silent on November 11 1918. Even this is only a partial truth. The guns may well have gone silent on the western front, they certainly did not go silent every where. In fact on the Eastern Front the armistice far from being a signal to end the fighting was actually the cue to restart the killing. The new Polish state was to be involved in fighting with the Germans the, Lithuanians, the Ukrainians and the Soviets. And during this time the Poles most certainly did not just rely on cavalry but made considerable use of tanks and armoured vehicles.

[Doug64]

As a result of Kristallnacht many Jews escaped Germany (and probably Poland as well) who would not otherwise have done so.

This might well be true, it would certainly make sense. But my point is that there would have been a Kristallnacht whether or not Grynszpan had acted. If he hadn't, the Nazis would simply have found some other excuse.

I can say a lot against the Poles throughout history. But I will say that whatever the historical circumstances they are Slavs, they are men. They inflicted more damage to the Germans in the defending of Poland than the French and British, Belgians and Dutch did when the Nemetsky turned West.

Proportionally, I have no problem believing that--certainly the Poles put up a stiffer resistance than the French did.

If this thread goes to plan we'll all be six years older by the time its done. So I think its worth saying a little about WW2, before we get too far into WWI.

I notice people constantly refer to WW1 as a type of warfare. When people say WWI, they seem to be referring to the Western Front between the Marne and the Kaiserschlacht. In fact there were considerable advances on other fronts during this period. But even this limited part they get wrong. At no point in the war did the guns go silent prior to going over the top. Earlier in the war, the guns would have moved their targets to rear areas, but by 1917, they absolutely were prepared to take friendly fire casualties, with the barrage advancing slowly and the troops keeping very close to the barrage, to avoid giving the enemy time to come out and take up position before the infantry assault reached them. Warfare by 1917 was highly sophisticated.

True. There was also the attempt to form a three-sided box, so that the enemy couldn't bring in reinforcements on their flanks. When it came to artillery the problem the armies on both sides suffered wasn't creativity, but technical constraints--the way the new range of artillery was made less effective by the lack of forward observers able to report real-time fall of fire, so that the artillery could adjust their fire in a timely fashion.

The above video clearly references the guns going silent on November 11 1918. Even this is only a partial truth. The guns may well have gone silent on the western front, they certainly did not go silent every where. In fact on the Eastern Front the armistice far from being a signal to end the fighting was actually the cue to restart the killing. The new Polish state was to be involved in fighting with the Germans the, Lithuanians, the Ukrainians and the Soviets. And during this time the Poles most certainly did not just rely on cavalry but made considerable use of tanks and armoured vehicles.

Also true. World War I is seen much more favorably in parts of Eastern Europe than it is in the West, as a war of national liberation. And some of those wars of national liberation took some time after 11-11-1918 to finally end. And of course, there were some national animosities that took awhile to work themselves out.

[Doug64]

September 17, Sunday

Russia sends Red Army across the border

Stalin stabs the Poles in the back. Just before dawn this morning the Red Army invades Poland along the 800-mile (1300-kilometer) length of the border. The Polish High Command, desperately engaged with Hitler’s Panzers, has been taken by surprise and the Russians brush aside the border guards. The Red Army advances virtually unopposed and this must surely signal the end of Polish resistance. The government, harried from the air, flees towards the safety of the Romanian border. The Russians set the scene for their attack with complaints that Polish aircraft had violated the Soviet frontier, and two days ago Pravda attributed what it called Poland’s “military debacle” to its “brutal treatment” of national minorities, especially the Polish Ukrainians and White Russians.

“The ruling circles of Poland,” said the newspaper, “boasting their love of freedom, have done everything possible to transform the Western Ukraine and Western White Russia into colonies deprived of rights and delivered up to looting by Polish colonists.” Now, in a move carefully coordinated with the Germans, Stalin sends in his army, claiming that the aim of Germany and Russia is to “restore peace and order in Poland, which has been destroyed by the disintegration of the Polish state.” His proclamation pledges that Russia and Germany will help the “Polish people establish new conditions for its political life.” The Poles, with long experience of Russian rule, know better.

U-boat sinks British aircraft carrier

HMS Courageous, one of the British navy’s oldest aircraft carriers, is torpedoed by a U-boat west of Hebrides today. It is the navy’s first serious loss of the war. Courageous is leading a submarine hunt when U-29, which has sunk three British tankers, scores two direct hits.

Although the Courageous sinks in fifteen minutes, just over half of the 1,000-strong crew are rescued. Marine M. Reidy, a printer in civilian life, will say, “The only boat they could get out was the cutter, and directly they got down to the water, she sank.” The survivors jump overboard, and many were in the water for over an hour, keeping up their spirits by singing “Roll out the Barrel” and “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” Another survivor will say the sea “was so thick with oil we might have been swimming in treacle.” Three days ago U-39 got near enough to fire several torpedoes at Ark Royal, the navy’s most modern carrier. She was not hit, and her destroyers sank U-39. Today, although destroyers escorting the sinking Courageous drop depth charges, U-29 gets away.

[Doug64]

September 20, Wednesday

Help for Poland is too little, too late, say British MPs

The British government is denounced by the Labour opposition in Parliament this afternoon for failing to help Poland enough against the German and Russian invaders. The strong criticism comes after the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, has given one of his periodic reviews of the war. Arthur Greenwood, the deputy opposition leader, tells MPs, “It is a matter of very deep regret that once an understanding was reached with Poland she was not provided far more generously with sorely needed assistance.” He warns that the nation’s now active allies might become mere passive friends unless Poland gets more help.

Tory, Labour and Liberal MPs all reject what they deem a spurious peace offer by Hitler in a recent speech in which the German leader said that he harbors no ill-will towards Britain and France. Parliament’s view is that Britain must not be deflected.

[Potemkin]

September 20, Wednesday

Help for Poland is too little, too late, say British MPs

The British government is denounced by the Labour opposition in Parliament this afternoon for failing to help Poland enough against the German and Russian invaders. The strong criticism comes after the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, has given one of his periodic reviews of the war. Arthur Greenwood, the deputy opposition leader, tells MPs, “It is a matter of very deep regret that once an understanding was reached with Poland she was not provided far more generously with sorely needed assistance.” He warns that the nation’s now active allies might become mere passive friends unless Poland gets more help.

Tory, Labour and Liberal MPs all reject what they deem a spurious peace offer by Hitler in a recent speech in which the German leader said that he harbors no ill-will towards Britain and France. Parliament’s view is that Britain must not be deflected.

That (rather vague) ‘peace offer’ may not have been spurious at all. Hitler’s heart just wasn’t in the fight in the West - it was the lands to the East that he was itching to attack. Most especially the Soviet Union, for ideological, racial and material reasons.

[Politics_Observer]

@Potemkin

I will never understand why Hitler saw the Slavs as "subhuman." Blows my mind

[Rancid]

I will never understand why Hitler saw the Slavs as "subhuman." Blows my mind

Why is that hard to understand? He saw jews, blacks, etc. as subhuman.

[Politics_Observer]

@Rancid

I just don't understand Hitler's mentality. I really mean that. But people out there like him exist. How is it so easy for you to understand?

[Rancid]

@Rancid

I just don't understand Hitler's mentality. I really mean that. But people out there like him exist. How is it so easy for you to understand?

It's easy to understand people are assholes and will blame whatever the flipping fuck they want to justify their shit behavior.

[Politics_Observer]

@Rancid

I guess that's one way to look at it. I was watching a documentary where it talked about Hitler getting gassed during World War I and historians and psychologists think that is when he turned fucked up and an asshole. It was a big intense battle that happened all the sudden and surprisingly where he got shook up pretty bad and gassed on top of it.

[Politics_Observer]

@Rancid

According to what I have read and watched on documentaries of Hitler, psychologists recovered some of his medical records from World War I where he was temporarily blinded by a gas attack. During his time in World War I he did not show any leadership qualities nor any antisemitism. Antisemitism, according to what have I read was not present in his unit either. I suspect his psychology may have been transformed by getting lucky and surviving a surprise firefight and surviving his wounds from the gas attack he suffered. I don't know if those events really changed his psychology though as I am not expert in these matters. The German veterans who served with him during World War I met up frequently and would express surprise at his rise as a political leader. Hitler and the Nazis also worked hard to hide Hitler's past later on closer to World War II.

[Rancid]

@Rancid

According to what I have read and watched on documentaries of Hitler, psychologists recovered some of his medical records from World War I where he was temporarily blinded by a gas attack. During his time in World War I he did not show any leadership qualities nor any antisemitism. Antisemitism, according to what have I read was not present in his unit either. I suspect his psychology may have been transformed by getting lucky and surviving a surprise firefight and surviving his wounds from the gas attack he suffered. I don't know if those events really changed his psychology though as I am not expert in these matters. The German veterans who served with him during World War I met up frequently and would express surprise at his rise as a political leader. Hitler and the Nazis also worked hard to hide Hitler's past later on closer to World War II.

It would have been nice if he had just got accepted into art school.

Also, his dad was abusive IIRC.

[Doug64]

That (rather vague) ‘peace offer’ may not have been spurious at all. Hitler’s heart just wasn’t in the fight in the West - it was the lands to the East that he was itching to attack. Most especially the Soviet Union, for ideological, racial and material reasons.

It was spurious, I think, in the sense that there was no chance that he would do what France and Great Britain would have demanded for peace--get out of Poland and pay indemnity for the damage he inflicted with the invasion. But you are right that the West wasn't his primary target, that was always the USSR. As I understand it, he didn't really expect France and Great Britain to be as solidly in opposition as they were--either to decide not to go to war, or to accept the new status quo once he'd conquered Poland and negotiate a peace. He didn't realize just how badly his occupation of Czechoslovakia had poisoned the well.

[Rich]

There's a lot of fanboi-ism around Germany's World War II military. Germany's armed forces, and even more their war economy had serious deficiency. However the instincts of the fanbois are not totally misplaced. What Nazi Germany was achieving militarily in September 1939 was remarkable, considering Germany was still Versailles restricted a mere 6 and a half years earlier. Both Poland and Czechoslovakia had built significant militaries after WW2. The fact that they both ended up occupied in less than 12 months, just 6 and a half years after Hitler came to power is a staggering diplomatic and military failure on their part and a staggering military achievement for Hitler.

Hitler the National Socialist was so successful because he stood on the shoulders of giants. In particular I would like to highlight two of the giants of National Socialism Jean-Baptiste Jourdan and Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell. Hitler didn't invent national socialism. Modern national socialism begins with the French Revolution.

The key to understanding Nazi Germany is to understand that's its success and the depth and breadth of its atrocities, the depth and breadth of its cruelties were linked. From our modern peaceful, prosperous individualistic lives we may be shocked by the cruelties of Auschwitz, but I would contend this extreme continental spanning predilection to genocide had nothing to do with some fault in the German character but was an accident waiting to happen, from the birth of modern national socialism in late eighteenth century France.

Conscription is not like slavery it is slavery. But, but, but pleads the Liberal our citizen soldiers were glorified and dignified. To serve in the armed forces elevated one's social standing, the opposite of the denigration of a plantation slave. True enough, but it is still slavery and it is still socialism. There is nothing more socialist than asking, nay demanding, that a young man, lay down his life for his fellow man, before that life has really begun. And if you enslave young men in the cause of the nation, it is inevitable that most of them will have little compassion for people, who lie outside the nation or for anyone seen as a traitor to the nation. We saw this with Lieutenant Calley and his comrades at My Lai.

[Doug64]

September 21, Thursday

Roosevelt wants to end arms embargo

President Roosevelt today faces a joint session of Congress in person and urges the repeal of the Neutrality Act’s embargo on arms sales to belligerent countries. “Our acts must be guided by one single hard-headed thought — keeping America out of this war,” the president says. Allowing arms to be sold on a cash-and-carry basis would be “better calculated than any other means to keep us out of war.”

The coming war in Europe has weakened isolationist sentiment, and the president asked to speak to Congress because he thought that the battle over the arms embargo could be won.

[Doug64]

September 22, Friday

Secret meeting for Allied war leaders

Members of the Allied Supreme War Council, including the British and French premiers, meet today at a secret rendezvous in Hove, Sussex. Chamberlain, with Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, and Lord Chatfield, the minister for coordination of defense, traveled to the meeting by train. M. Daladier, with General Gamelin, the C-in-C on the Western Front, Admiral Darlan, the Chief of the French Naval Staff, and M. Dautry, arrived by air.

A communique afterwards says that the Allied leaders discussed supplies of munitions and reached “complete agreement” on plans for the future conduct of the war. Though the meeting is supposed to be secret a large crowd gathers outside the building and when Mr. Chamberlain leaves he is loudly cheered. A woman breaks through the police cordon and throws a bunch of flowers at him.

Blackout blamed for road carnage and crime wave—but sweethearts benefit

Road accidents after dark have tripled in the three weeks since the blackout began, according to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Figures are not being issued, but there have been many fatalities and injuries because of the total lack of street lighting and the extinguishing of car headlights. Coroners have commented that motorists who hug the white lines in the middle of the roads are bound to have accidents and have called for curbs to be painted white. “Only cross the street where there are traffic lights,” the Birmingham city coroner advises today.

Magistrates’ courts have been packed with cases of blackout infringement by flashing flashlights and striking matches. Small fines are usual, but some offenders have turned aggressive when ordered to “put that light out!” A London chambermaid who attacked a policeman with a poker, saying “Who are you ordering about?” got six months’ hard labor from Clerkenwell court. A girl who flashed her flashlight in policemen’s faces, saying, “It’s better than bumping into people” was given a month by Wisbech magistrates. Pedestrians are injuring themselves by walking into lampposts and other obstructions; several have fallen into canals and drowned. They are now to be allowed to carry flashlights provided they are obscured by two thicknesses of tissue paper and pointed downwards. Posters urge them to “wear something white.”

“Pinpoint” street lighting is to be introduced at road junctions, and masks for car headlights with louvered slits are being designed. Railway carriages, hitherto pitch black, are being fitted with dim blue bulbs. The only beneficiaries of the blackout have been burglars and courting couples.

Romanian Prime Minister shot down

Armand Calinescu, the Prime Minister of Romania, was assassinated yesterday by members of the pro-Nazi Iron Guard who blocked the path of his car with a wooden cart and then pumped pistol shots into him and his bodyguards.

The assassins then shot their way into the radio station where they broadcast a proclamation claiming that “the death sentence on Calinescu has been executed.”

They were then overpowered and last night taken to the spot where they had killed the Prime Minister. There, watched by a great crowd, they were shot. Their bodies will lie there for 24 hours.

German general dies mysteriously

Mystery surrounds the death of Baron Werner von Fritsch, the former army commander sacked by Hitler in 1938 after being framed by the Gestapo. An official statement says von Fritsch died today after being hit by machine-gun fire near Warsaw, while visiting the regiment of which he was honorary colonel. But there are no other reports of serious fighting on that front.

Von Fritsch, who created the modern German army, fell out with Hitler when the Fuhrer revealed plans for war. Himmler then said he was a homosexual. He was exonerated, but never reinstated.

[Doug64]

Conscription is not like slavery it is slavery.

While I agree with a great deal of your post, I fundamentally disagree with this. While you would be correct for dictatorships of whatever variety, for democratic nations military service at need is one of the fundamental duties of citizens. It was that way for ancient Athens and the Roman Republic, and it stands for modern Israel. It was also one of the controls on military adventurism of democratic nations--it's what sank us in the Vietnam War, after all.

[Potemkin]

While I agree with a great deal of your post, I fundamentally disagree with this. While you would be correct for dictatorships of whatever variety, for democratic nations military service at need is one of the fundamental duties of citizens. It was that way for ancient Athens and the Roman Republic, and it stands for modern Israel. It was also one of the controls on military adventurism of democratic nations--it's what sank us in the Vietnam War, after all.

I agree with this. It’s no accident that as soon as democracy and (formal) equality was introduced with the French Revolution, universal conscription was immediately introduced too. Traditional regimes relied on mercenaries because they knew the average Joe or Juan or Ivan wasn’t going to fight and die for them. Why should they? It is only in a free republic, in a democratic nation-state, that universal conscription becomes even possible. This, of course, is one of the reasons why democracy eventually won out in the end over the aristocratic and feudal ancien regime - the other European powers saw how it seemed to give superpowers to revolutionary France. They wanted to be bitten by the same radioactive spider. Lol.

[Doug64]

September 23, Saturday

Cruel jackboot stamps on Poland

The Nazi jackboot is crushing Poland with a brutality which is even drawing protests from German army officers, horrified at the conduct of the SS and Gestapo in the occupied territories.

A catalogue of horror is being built up of the German treatment of the Jewish community. It tells of rabbis being burned with their holy books, of families being herded into synagogues and burned alive, of a girl trying to say goodbye to her doomed father but herself being shot for her “impudence.”

At the village of Pilica all the Jewish men were rounded up and taken to the marketplace where they were forced to shout in German: “We are traitors of the people.” They were then shot.

While especially degrading treatment is being meted out to the Jews, all Poles are feeling the weight of German oppression. Any display of dissent brings instant, cruel retaliation from the conquerors.

The Gestapo operates at night, and in the morning posters give the names of those executed for carrying arms, for having insulted the Fuhrer or speaking ill of the Reich. This is the other side of the Blitzkrieg. It is called Schrecklichkeit, meaning frightfulness.