UK, Ireland /
Polish Thoughts on Britain and the British [273]
My personal opinion from what i have read on this forum is that they seem to have lots of Opinions about everything i.e.....Churchill ''selling out Poland'' etc....Most of the stuff is complete Sh-t!....Communist propaganda is to blame for most of it!
Yes, just like english propganda is to blame for the whole "churchill was fighting for you guys in Potsdam/Yalta", or "we engaged in the war because of you" wchich of course aren't true. And the truth lies as usually somewhere in between. Churchill didn't sold Poland in 1945, just as he didn't do anything to better our position. He simply didn't had the baragain power to do any of this. Add to that that his position at one pont was undermined by Roosvelt, who felt that by laughing of British forces somewhoe he will break the ice between him and stalin and you see how the things were at that time.
Basically during and just after the BOB, in times where Poland was basically the only ally of Britain Churchill made a lot of promises to polish people. We will never forget your deeds; we wont let you behind, etc etc blabla... The situation changed drastically after the German attack on Russia, when it became clear that there is a chance to construct an alliance with Russia. From that point alliance with Poland changed from a blessing to a very troublesome fact. Stalin didn't hide his intentions of keeping Eastern Europe for himself. Poles openly protested about the treatment of polish citizens by the Russians in 1939, about the invasion of that same year and mysterious missing of thousands of polish officers that were captured after the September campaign ( see Katyń,). At this point it would be better for Churchill to break one of those alliances, but in spite of yours and bubbawoos opinion that the polish contribution in WWII was meaningless, Churchill thought differently. Of course Polands military potential couldn’t be compared to these of Russia, but still 4 million people under arms through out the war which placed Poland on the fourth place when it comes to the number of forces in alliance ( that includes outside and inside the occupied country), polish intelligence that was responsible inter alia for sending information’s as well as pieces of V2 to England or for giving the precise location of place of production of the V1 and V2 (later on bombarded by RAF), polish resistance, which BTW was the biggest in Europe, etc… Because of these aspects Churchill decided to continue the relationship with Polish government on Exile and avoid answering any question about the future of Poland, delaying the resolving of this issue to a more suitable time, read after the war where Polish aid won’t be of any interest to Britain. I honestly don’t think that Churchill sold out Poland in 1945 but I do think that Polish government on Exile was being deceived through put the whole war. Basically priority for Churchill was to protect his people and so he did. He was forced to choose between his word and honor and the well being of his countrymen. Personally I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes but if I really had to choose I think that I would do the same as he did.
and the stuff about their so called Great Empire (with Lithuania).......Since we are all talking to each other in English!!....Well....we won't say any more about that!!...
Why not? I would be more than happy to hear your view about the Republic Of Both Nations. You would be probably the first brit that knows actually anything about it, because as you rightly noticed in your post, an average brit doesn't know too much about the history of Eastern Europe.And by writing "not too much" I'm being extremely polite.
It's the first time somebody uses the word Empire in regards to RoBN though. A quite good attempt to ridiculoute it, but still, RoBN was a country of about 20 languages, several if not a dozen or so, religions and beliefs, which had a major impact in this part of the world for over 300 years. In times when people where being persecuted in the west for their beliefs every polish king was forced to sign a document that guaranteed the freedom to believe in what ever God one wanted. In times of absolutism polish king was being democratically elected by the nobles, and was forced to acknowledge that he has responsibilities for his people as well as had to ask the parliament if he wanted to declare war, rise taxes, etc. In it's peak moment it was 990 000 km square big. That's pretty big if you ask me.
Sorry aj, but just because you weren't thought about history of the whole Europe in your school days and just because Discovery still didn’t do a program about RoBN it doesn't mean that it wasn't a successful country.
