Quote:
Originally Posted by nearmiss
I cannot understand why anyone would want a Polish or French addon.
They were both stomped into the dust... in record time. It was like take off and die for the Polish and French pilots.
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That is entirely untrue.
The so called "massively inferior and out of date" state of the Polish armed forces was initially just German propaganda and it then became convenient for the Allies to allow that false impression to continue as it helped allied morale to think that Poland had collapsed because of an "out of date poorly led army". Another myth was the cavalry charges against tanks. It never happened. What the Polish did have was very effective mobile anti tank units with anti tank guns that moved to new positions through rough terrain on horseback.
The myth has been perpetuated by Hollywood who like us to think that everyone in WWII was hopeless and useless except the US.
German Quartermaster General’s reports admitted the loss of 258 planes throughout the Polish Campaign. You can probably add to that another 100 or more damaged so severely as to need virtual rebuilding or not acknowledged directly as lost to enemy action.
A good estimate is around 350 Luftwaffe aircraft were lost all together over 6 weeks or so in Poland. Of those 350 around 120-150 were shot down in air to air combat. The rest were destroyed on the ground or shot down by AAA.
That compares VERY favorably with the 1100 the RAF managed down over the entire battle of Britain.
Note that the Polish airforce was still flying and active from secret airbases right up to the time the Russians invaded and the country surrendered. Up until the Russians invaded the Poles fought on hoping the British and French would grow a brain and realise teh entire German forces were occupied in the East and mount an invasion of Germany . If they had WWII might have been avoided.
02-24-2011, 01:30 AM
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