Posted on 06/01/2009 1:05:31 PM PDT by lizol
They fought the Nazis on foreign soil while the Russians invaded and took over their OWN country. And FDR and Churchill looked the other way so as not to piss off Stalin. The Poles got screwed royal in the war. It is a TRAVISTY that they were NOT included!!!!
that Poland made a tangible contribution to the liberation of France, recalling the 15, 000-strong Polish division under the command of General Maczek and the participation of some 50, 000 Poles in the French resistance movement... The French side says that it regards the celebrations of battles in what was in the American sector of the war as primarily a "Franco-American affair" and that is why President Obama will be a guest and not heads of state from other nations. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, the Allies landed around 156,000 troops in Normandy. Apart from British and American troops, personnel from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Poland took part in the landings.
The bombing of Dresden was February 13-15, 1945.
The war was NOT over at that point.
Americans were dying daily, in large numbers , in ground combat.
The war would be fought until May 7, 1945.
When you are fighting every day in combat on the enemy’s home turf, three months is a lifetime.
And for many American soldiers, their lifetime ended in those three months.
The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary.
The war was NOT over for Japan at that point.
The US faced a ground invasion of Japan, as the Japanese military did not intend to surrender.
Even the bombing of Hiroshima did not convince the Japanese military to surrender.
And actually, neither did the bombing of Nagasaki.
There were elements of the Japanese military that tried to prevent the Emperor from broadcasting the surrender message to the Japanese people, even after Nagasaki.
About 150,000 people died in the two bombings. But it broke the will of the Emperor and the people to fight, regardless of the entrenched warrior code in the Japanese culture.
Those deaths prevented upwards of nine million Japanese dead and wounded, and one million Allied casualties, dead and wounded, by eliminating the invasion and conquest of Japan by ground and air.
Japan was isolated by August, 1945, but they were not out of the fight.
And for them, the war was not over.
It is easy for us to review the actions of 1945 from the safety and certainty of 2009, but, at the time, no one knew how it would end.
It ended in the most humane way possible.
I know the war ended in may... My point was and is that the war was already finished. Yes many americans died in the last three months. But what is tragic is the extent of terror we put on the german civilians. And yes rightly so they deserved it... But it was still a horror. As was Coventry and Rotterdam. And of course the rest of the horrors the nazis did.. I just think that it was a pressure play by the russians... So they could turn around and say “look what the allies did to your people” when they assumed control over eastern germany..
Poland, because of her conservative Christian values, is a thorn in the back of antichristian European Union.
Poland's refusal to accept so called same-sex marriages, abortion, euthanasia, etc. makes some influential EU leaders and officials (e.g. Zapatero) furious.
It's good to see and hear what EU politicians say about the 20 anniversary of the fall of communism in Europe, where Poland's contribution is almost neglected. Listening to them carefully you can conclude the communism was defeated by Germans who broke down the Berlin Wall. Not a single word of JP2 and his first visit to Poland in 1979, not a single word about Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, not a single word of Polish massive protests of 1988 which actually forced communists to give up the power, etc.
Ruling liberals, who form the EPP party together with Erika Steinbach’s CDU/CSU, don't give a damn for it. They boast about their belonging to the EU greatest party EPP, but when it comes to the crunch they even deny a great Polish war hero, cpt.Pilecki, who was once proposed at the session of the EU parliament to become a shared EU hero for freedom against any totalitarian systems like communism and fascism. Liberals of the Civic Platform denied him because their party comrades of CDU had some objections. None of them even tried to resist.
On the other hand, president Kaczynski, whose party Law and Justice forms the common party with British and Czech Conservatives in the EU parliament, is well aware of the fact that under the Treaty of Lisbon Britain and Czech alone are not enough to form a coalition that could even veto any EU decisions.
With such pro-EU fanatics within Poland and such EU anti-Polonism abroad, Treaty of Lisbon has definitely lost its original meaning and may even, in some circumstances, pose the serious threat to Poland's sovereignty.
Such a patriotic attitude of President Kaczynski is simply unacceptable by Germans and the French. They'd love to have him under their feet. Since they can't obtain it, they try to ignore him. And that's it what this all about is.
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