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NATION UNDER ARMS Jan Kesik Copyright © 2007 Jan Kesik & Electronic Museum Canada |
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Jan Kesik - professor; Head of the Material Culture History Section in the
Department of History at Wroclaw University; research interests - history of Poland and history of the XIX
and XX century, history of Silesia post 1945, ethnic minorities of the Central and Eastern Europe in the
XX century, ethnic relations in the Second Polish Republic, military history, history of physical culture,
history of architecture and technology. |
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[the contents of any particular reference in the text of this article may be accessed by 'clicking' on the number of that reference provided in square brackets] The experiences of the 1914-1918 conflict can be viewed as a direct cause of the significant increase in the Polish military authorities' interest in the physical condition and the morale of the Polish general population. The period of the Great War brought on a real revolution of the hitherto existing military doctrines. It pertained not only to the changes in the areas of armament, the techniques of conducting military operations, but also soldier's training methods. The very first months of that conflict showed how obsolete the present-day wartime doctrines were. The wide reach of the struggle, its duration, the incomparable extent of engagement on war and home fronts by countries, which took part in the conflict, indicated the necessity of the fundamental re-evaluation in the military strategists' opinions. A rapid increase of fire power, combined with still relatively small mobility of the armies, made the conflict become prolonged and extremely exhausting positional warfare. The military struggles also showed the overall importance of psycho-physical fitness in soldier's training. The views of many Polish military theorists also reflect the understanding of these new tendencies in the art of war. While analyzing the course of 1914-1918 struggles, they were drawing attention to the fact that:
It became apparent that the army by itself, even the most modern and the largest, is not enough to defend a country. The ultimate success became dependent, to an incomparable degree than ever before, on such elements as country's economy and its ability to adapt to the war-time conditions, the efficiency of the entire state apparatus which must work under extreme circumstances, as well as the morale and physical fitness of the general population. The emphasis was on the fact that:
Military analysts acknowledged the need to modify the hitherto existing State's preparedness systems for war - the prewar systems, according to them, left the general population powerless to face such a colossal war effort. They saw the lack of understanding of the character of the present day military conflict and the lack of preparedness for it as the gauge of the level of war's inconvenience. Based on such experience and analysis, a view was being formulated, that a modern war requires the involvement of the whole Nation and the State:
In most European countries' military policies - Poland included - the relationship between the army and the general population has changed after World War I. Gone are the days (so clearly visible in the previous century) of the caste system in the army - already in the first year of the war, fought on such a large scale and with the employment of so many new means of technology, the trunk of old regular armies has virtually crumbled away. The length of soldier's training time was maximally shortened - even to just a few weeks. In the same move, the distance between the army and the general population became somewhat less as well. The analysis of the course of the Great War led the military theoreticians to yet another, seemingly paradoxical conclusion. According to them, the final victory was decided equally by the moral factor (patriotism and the whole nation's will to fight) as well as the army's technical condition. In the opinion of Lt.-Col. Waclaw Stachiewicz of the Polish Army General Staff:
It is very likely that Lt.-Col. Anatol Minkowski described this issue most vividly by writing:
Therefore, the defence capability - the way Polish military authorities understood them - was to be decided not only by the state of the standing army, whose development in the case of the Second Republic never fulfilled all the needs in this respect. Equally important became the morale of the population, which could translate into the will to defend the independence in time of peril. Looking at the entire inter-war period, one should notice, that the shaping of national patriotism was always - regardless the political system - one of the most basic goals of the Polish military policy, and to some extent determined its specificity. All the more because it was drawn from the experiences of the world war, but also from the Polish-Ukrainian struggles over Lvov, or the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. All these undoubtedly brought to light - maybe even too much so, due to the totality of war experience from the first decades of the XX century - the importance of the factor of patriotism. In an account for the statute's draft, prepared by the General Staff on the Physical Education (PE) and Military Preparation (MP), it is noted that:
Project in Progress... Translation: Agnieszka K. Marszalek |
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