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To: nickcarraway

Poland grabbed a bit of Czechoslovakia after Germany invaded in 1938. Churchill called them “jackals”.

Their military weakness does not make them saints.


17 posted on 09/26/2015 9:03:00 PM PDT by sunrise_sunset
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To: sunrise_sunset

Check that, Churchill called Poland the “Greedy Hyena of Europe” after they piggy backed on the Nazi takeover of Sudetenland in 1938.


18 posted on 09/26/2015 9:06:28 PM PDT by sunrise_sunset
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To: sunrise_sunset; nickcarraway
"Poland grabbed a bit of Czechoslovakia after Germany invaded in 1938"

Like everything, one should not oversimplify

That bit of Czechia was Cieszyn

For centuries, this was a mix of Czechs and Poles (both are West Slavs and their languages are somewhat mutually intelligible - kind of like the French and the Franco-Swiss

Anyway, at the end of WWI, the German, Austrian and Russian empires collapsed and everywhere was a free-for-all

Cieszyn was a mix of Poles and Czechs -- it is also one of the only 3 areas where an army can easily march across the Carpathian range, so very important strategically (it's also the largest such pass and the easiest) and yet the local administrators of Cieszyn came to a good agreement of how to split this -- they did so amicably. But this was not satisfactory to the politicians in Prague or Warsaw -- Cieszyn was and is rich in mining items. And the Western nations arbitrarily divided the land, giving the majority of the land to the Czechs even the places which were 90% Polish

The Poles and Czechs had skirmishes over this but to no avail until 1938.

The Poles wanted to deny the Germans the Cieszyn pass and they took itwhen the Germans took most of the Czech Republics mountain area

Was it right to do this? Morally ambiguous (it was polish majority yet this was participating in the slicing up of another country) but strategically good (though it didn't help them in the end

29 posted on 09/27/2015 5:56:47 AM PDT by Cronos (ObamaÂ’s dislike of Assad is not based on AssadÂ’s brutality but that he isn't a jihadi Moslem)
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To: sunrise_sunset; nickcarraway

The Poles were militarily weaker than the Germans yes, but their strategies were to fall back to the mountain areas in the south and east (most of Poland is flat and after WWI, there was NO natural land barrier between Poland and Germany (no river, no mountain) — neither on the west nor on the north-east


30 posted on 09/27/2015 6:00:03 AM PDT by Cronos (ObamaÂ’s dislike of Assad is not based on AssadÂ’s brutality but that he isn't a jihadi Moslem)
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To: sunrise_sunset

The same part that the Czechs stole from Poland in 1920, while Poland was busy saving Europe from Bolshevism.


33 posted on 09/27/2015 1:04:09 PM PDT by dfwgator
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