Warsaw, August 1947
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My family had many tragic memories of the ruins of Warsaw, for they were bound with the jewish ghetto uprising and the following uprising by the AK (armia krajowa, underround army).
On another note, many cities still show signs of the destructive effect on war on the jewels of our civilizaton: The battle for Berlin also had a great toll on the city and its inhabitants, and the battle for Stalingrad (Wolgograd) had the worst effect on the population of the city: just left a single, half destroyed house and very few survivors were left. But many more civilian deaths and destruction of settlement took place during the war - the fires of Hamburg and Dresden, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Blitz on english cities are well known, but the destruction of smaller settlements and villages are not mentioned that often.
These were terrible days. We should be thankful for the peace we have.
UK death toll: 326,000 military and 62,000 civilian. Russia: 10 million each.
"Absolutely titanic" is about right.
The irony is that for all the warmongering politics of the US, the population are highly sensitive to actually losing soldiers in battle. There were single days in WWI (and the US Civil War) that saw single countries having more combat deaths than the US has seen this century in total. The US public wants wars it can win effortlessly (conscription anyone? rationing perhaps?) but has no stomach for the realities of war.
Hell, every time Australia lost a soldier in Afghanistan, the papers would do a double-page spread with portraits of all the soldiers lost so far. It's not a particularly difficult war if you can fit portraits of all the lost soldiers after 10 years in the field on a newspaper page. We've lost 40 soldiers... and in the same timeframe, we've lost 36 police officers in the normal course of civilian duty.
We really have no idea what it's like to actually be a society at war.
Think about it: an Australian soldier in Afghanistan has made a choice (maybe forced by her economic condition, sure) to risk her life in Afghanistan. Afghan civilians didn't really have that choice.
The estimates for civilian deaths in Iraq are above 100k, around 20k for Afghanistan and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight for this quagmire the US has put themselves in, so I really don't know what you mean by not a particularly difficult war.
Yes we have lost dozens of soldiers, but the US also lost thousands of civilians on 9/11. The UK lost 67 people that day. Even Australia lost 11. There are reasons we are in Aghanistan. Whether you believe those are good reasons is the issue.
To me it's blindingly obvious that I'm talking about the experience of the Western nations in these wars. You seem to be more choosing to be obtuse rather than not actually understanding what I'm saying: that we as citizens of western make effectively zero sacrifices in pursuing these wars.
That's just the best estimate for those killed in and around main areas of conflict. With all the ethnic cleansing, and general privation from the destroyed infrastructure of the Iraq nation, the total death toll is estimated to be 1 million or more.
War is more horrible than most people (who haven't directly experienced it) can imagine. We the voting public should not take any decision to go to war lightly. As we have in the past.
On the subject of Soviet deaths though - my father, who served in the RAF during WW2, always said if I asked who beat the Nazis that it had been "the Soviet people". The suffering that country had to endure in the 20th century is staggering - WW1, the Revolution and Civil War, the famines and purges of the 30s and then WW2...
Let's not forget that MOST of the Japanese cities were actually destroyed, not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki. US army used incendiary bombs on Japanese cities, causing massive fires (and according death tolls in civilian populations, largely exceeding the people who died from atomic bombs) across the country in all large cities. The whole country was effectively destroyed.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudential,_Warsaw
[1]https://maps.google.pl/maps?q=mapa+warszawa&ll=52.235936,21....
[2]http://www.bimarch.pl/cmsArchitectPortfolio/renderShow/id/6
Edit: wording.
Edit2: I just remembered there is a movie showing Warsaw in 1935[3] and another one when city was destroyed in 1939[4]. I encourage you to visit Warsaw Rising Museum if you ever have a chance.
p.s. I grew up really close to it - like a block away. Seeing photos of the streets around my block at the time when you could see horizon and ruins... frisson.
The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.
—SS chief Heinrich Himmler, October 17, SS officers' conference
Warsaw has to be pacified, that is, razed to the ground.
—Adolf Hitler, 1944[2]
I'm not saying what's right and what's wrong but your sentence made me think of the age old quote "history is written by the victors".
The Soviets, on the other hand, had a desire for Polish territory.
At the end of the war Churchill did ask the military to come up with a plan to free Poland from Soviet control by force - but that was never going to be a realistic option, even with US assistance:
Same thing happened to the French - the German army moved so fast through the low countries that the French couldn't move fast enough to block them. The last time everyone fought, months would go by with only a few miles of land exchanged. This time round, a few miles of land only took an hour to obtain.
In any case, the UK deserves some credit for hastily allying with the Polish in an attempt to dissuade Germany from invading in the first place. And after the war, the Soviets were ascendent in Europe, with the rest of the Allies afraid that they would continue their march through the rest of the continent. They had a plan to take on the Soviets, but they didn't have the power to realistically defeat them.
Yeah, that's a great excuse. That should be written in the anglo-polish military alliance:
"in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power... Unless of course the germans use tanks and move very quickly. In that case, sorry".
The UK did not ally itself with Poland to help them from being taken over. It was a way of saying to Hitler, that he can't just do what he wants in Europe (like anecting Czechoslovakia) without the Germans and French approving it. The war was immenent, and everybody seemd to know that except for Chamberlain. This was only an act of self interest on behalf of the UK, and hey, who could blame them for that?
What you can't reasonably argue though, is that they tried to really help Poland in the beginning of WW2, and that they didn't betray them at the end in Yalta. And the occupation by the Soviets really wasn't much better than by the Nazis.
There was no real plan to take the Soviets on, because the Allies had no real stake in it.
The UK allied with Poland in an attempt to contain Germany, as I've already said. It's normal for countries to make such big gestures in their own interest. Should the UK have just allied with Poland out of a sense of charity? What in particular had Poland done for the UK before this time, to demand the UK's unquestioning selfless military intervention? What became Poland was, after all, part of the central powers that opposed the UK in WWI.
And, like I said, no-one knew how rapidly Poland would fall under Blitzkreig; the mobility of the German armies was still not countered by the time they invaded France months later.
The war was immenent, and everybody seemd to know that except for Chamberlain.
Chamberlain was buying time to rearm the UK. I've always found it amusing that people take the position that the UK is responsible for 'letting Germany annex Czechoslovakia'. Apparently the other powers in the region didn't have a moral responsibility to protect an unrelated central European country, only the UK.
One wonders, if it's all about morals rather than capabilities, why Poland didn't step in and prevent Germany from annexing Czechoslovakia?
There was no real plan to take the Soviets on, because the Allies had no real stake in it.
The rest of the Allies had a huge stake in preventing the Soviets from dominating Europe. They just had no way to feasibly follow it through.
She offered words of consolation: 'Well, but that really was a long time ago.' - 'Maybe, but all those people are still dead.'
I refuse to find closure with that part of my countries' history. The least I can do is be eternally sad about what my country has done to the world.
Thank you to the OP and thank you for sharing those links. They have reminded me once again to stay deeply disturbed and humbled.
Born and raised in Warsaw I sometimes feel I'm literally walking on history. There are hundreds of commemorative plaques/stones everywhere you go in the downtown and neighbouring districts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_children_by_Nazi_...
Article and trailer: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/28/simulation-wars...
In the summer of 1947 a group of American designers visited England, Czechoslovakia and Poland, in order to assess the post-war reconstruction progress. The photos are from their visit in August in Warsaw. The Group extended their visit to Warsaw by a few days to meet with the architects from the Capital Office of Reconstruction and reported that their work commands respect.
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/02/spotlight-on-hist...
I also understand there is always a horrific, or at least sad, story behind each one.
Yes we broke the U-Boat codes, but without US ships and aircraft covering the western Atlantic, we wouldn't have been able to use that information to mount an effective anti U-Boat campaign.
The Enigma encoding was actually cracked by Polish mathematicians and handed to the UK during the summer of 1939. In exchange, Poles expected the UK to join them, were they to be attacked by Germans. Unfortunately, that part of the bargain never materialised.
In WWII if you weren't victorious, you didn't survive. The governments of Hitler? Mussolini? Antonescu? Even Tiso? Japan did keep it's emperor, but he was always a figurehead and Japan's governance was heavily reformed.
Look what it took to bring Germany and its allies down down - the immense manpower and resources of the Soviets, the industrial might of the US, and the naval power and combined might of the UK and the Commonwealth. And good old General Winter working for the Soviets. And this was only 20 years after WWI's peace treaty where the factories of Germany were stripped of heavy machinery. The UK was certainly fighting for survival. When you get bankers training to use catapults seriously intending to use them (however comical the Home Guard was at times), you really are in the grip of total war, fighting for your survival.
Edit: And to more directly address a couple of those points, many countries had starvation, with vast numbers of deaths in both civilian and military populations. Britain didn't as far as I know. Children fought in many battles and the elderly and infirm too (as much as possible). These things also didn't occur in Britain, with the exception of children who lied to get into the armed forces, which at times may have been officials turning a blind eye. Perhaps it was total war in Britain, but it was certainly an easier and cheaper war than others experienced. A low grade total war?
Today, Polish nazi do destroy the monument of the soviet solders, who liberated them, http://ru-facts.com/news/view/31587.html
They do it on the formerly Deutsch land, that was generously gifted to the polish people by "the bloody dictator, Stailn", after Polish nationalists have siezed the western part of Soviet Union in 1920 and collaborated with Hitler to start WWII attacking the Checkoslovakia USSR allies in 1938.
The burgeose-democratic Poland does not deserve being an independent country. Independent, it turns immediately into a nazi regime. Nazi hate Russians, hate communism. The modern Poland is a nazi country, as usually (american, capitalist puppet. Capitalists do raise the nazi to defend the capitalism from communists, not only in Poland but everywhere in the Europe and the Latin America also).
You mean the Soviet soldiers that invaded Poland in 1939, killed 20,000 of its politicians, lawyers, doctors, scientists, artists, clergy, etc, then rolled through again 4 years later only to stay as a way to prop up the communist regime for the next 45 years?
I assure you, "Polish nazis" are not the only ones who have a problem with what Soviet soldiers and officers did, nor do we care for the hundreds of such monuments spread all over Poland.
> killed 20,000 of its politicians, lawyers, doctors, scientists, artists, clergy, etc,
I do not know what you are talking about. It seems to be the nazi nonsense, similar to your first sentence.
Are you so brainwashed that you cannot even read? How there cannot be doubt after http://katynmassakern.blogspot.com/2010/07/katyn-ilyukhins-v... and me talking "the fact that burgeose Russian governemnt manufactures documents to support this Goebbels lie cannot deny the evidence". Do you think that I will believe that those documents happened to be stored in the Yeltsin's personal safe, when he organized the trial against the Communist Party, http://katynmassakern.blogspot.com/2011/01/katyn-mysterious-...? Do you mean that there was nothing more to store in the "closed package no. 1" (google it) in the whole 1000-year Russian history than the "Katyn affair"? What do you think I mean by "burgeose Russian governemnt manufactures documents"? Do you think I mean that _there is no doubt_? Are you crazy?
It would be interesting to investigate what happened in the Western Ukrane in 1941. But, instead of investigation, you demand the russians to be balmed guilty and hide the reason why the Polish intelligence appeared on the Soviet territory in the first place.
Search for Katyn massacre.
Looking at your tone, you are either very indoctrinated and full of complexes OR it's just a provocation/joke.
I prefer to think it's a second one.
It says about "landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests". The same cleanup was done in the Soviet Union 10 years earlier. It is class struggle. There is nothing national in this question. 40 years later, in the 199x, this class of "intelligent people" killed much more workers in their capitalism restoration. You cannot justify your fascism/nacism by the class war conducted.
Sorry for giving you space for a reply ;)
This territory was agreed upon in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, so how could the SU move to save territory after the Polish government fell, if it had already agreed to split it up before it fell?
Also, if you say that it's the Soviet Union's territory, why was a large part of it returned after WWII?
Particularly, the border between USSR and Poland was demarked not by Hitler but by _European democracies (google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curzon_Line)_. The Molotov-Ribbentrop was innocent, it reclaimed the lands siezed by fascist Poland earlier. In fact SU reclamed that even after the Polish government ceased to exist, to minimize the boold. Only criminals can say that restoring the justice with minimal viktims is a terrible crime act. You is a fascist criminal. Stallin was the last European leader to pack with Hitler. You have forced Stalin to sign the piece treaty with your ally, Hitler.
Communists are the primary enemy of fascism. Fascists were invented in 20-st century to counteract the communism. You felt better with Hitler than with Russian comrades. That is why you askribe your crimes to the others. All what you say is a manipulating hypocracy.