Posted on 07/20/2018 5:16:51 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Matthew Luxmoore’s article (Poles apart: the bitter conflict over a nation’s history, The long read, 13 July) contains a gross error likely to lead readers to misunderstand the Soviet Union’s true intentions during the second world war.
There were 1.5 million Poles deported to Siberia, not “hundreds of thousands” as the article states, with no mention of their fate. They were forcibly taken from their homes in eastern Poland to gulags. Most died of starvation and disease under forced labour. To misrepresent this suffering, which took place on a colossal scale, is a crime akin to Holocaust denial.
My grandfather was one of the few who survived. To him and his contemporaries, the hostile Soviet invaders’ motivation was not liberation but conquest. Any such conquest is more successful if it has collaborators, which explains the motivations of the highly selective sample of people cited in the article.
It should be clearly stated that the Soviets and Nazis had agreed to jointly invade and carve up Poland. When Hitler went back on the deal, they fought each other for control of Poland. The Soviets won, and history was rewritten by the winners. They did this with decades of deceit propagated through the Polish school system, denying not just the Katyn massacre but also the bravery of those who, like my grandfather, fought at Monte Cassino, the 1st Armoured Polish Division, which won critical battles in the D-Day landings, and the 303 Squadron pilots who made all the difference in the Battle of Britain. These were disgracefully branded “traitors” by the puppet government of postwar Poland, installed by Stalin in a brazen breach of the agreement reached at Yalta.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
The Red Army in 1945 was a shell of its former self, staffed with many Far Eastern minorities and females because so many “white” Russians were dead. Their strategy towards the end verifies this; they simply moved behind a rolling artillery barrage.
They did take a heavy toll on the European Axis forces, but paid a horrific price for it. Also, unlike the European Axis forces, the USSR only had to fight on one front; they observed a truce with Japan until the last months of the war, when they violated it to seize territory in Asia (planting the seeds for the Red victory in the Chinese Civil War, as well as both the Korean and Vietnam wars). While Americans fought and died pushing back the Japs, the USSR made nice with them (even sending their Far East troops to defend Moscow).
Of course; the Katyn Forest massacre occurred at that time. Here in NJ there is a battle going on about a 30’+ statue in Jersey City commemorating that event; it is being moved from Exchange Place to a less conspicuous place, where Poles suspect it will be permanently removed when maintenance eventually needs to be done in the area.
The US did keep the USSR in the war by supplying them; without our aid they were doomed from the start.
Dear LR
you post opinions
and raise hypotheticals
Exactly. The Russian worshippers will not be happy with. The can’t handle the truth.
Not a dimes worth of difference.
They lost 100,000 alone just taking Berlin.
I say we could have taken Berlin at a fraction of the cost, but Stalin didn’t care about how many soldiers he lost. He figured the bigger the sacrifice, the more concessions he could get from the Western Allies.
He already had the concessions; that was worked out in advance. The resistance was just much more fierce on the Eastern Front because the Germans knew what the Red Army would do (and what they themselves had done in Russia).
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