Don Surber Reveals His Inner Moron

All readers will be aware that I have a high opinion of Don Surber’s acumen with regard to US politics. Why he chooses to periodically reveal his mental laziness—and perhaps worse—is anyone’s guess. Regular Surber readers have had to suffer with his ignorant—willfully uninformed—Covid posts. I mean—the information on Covid has been out there on the interwebs for a long time. There’s no excuse for being uninformed. If you choose to remain uninformed … why write about it?

Now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Surber—for reasons known only to him—has decided to go full moron by deriding … Poland’s record in WW2. That’s right. Rather than get informed about Russia and Ukraine and write halfway intelligently about the issues, he has twice negatively compared the Poles to the Finns.

First:

By invading Ukraine, Putin seems to be making the same mistake Stalin did when he invaded Finland in 1939.

Fresh off helping Hitler knock off Poland on opening day of World War II, Stalin decided to pick off the much smaller (by population) Finland.

Second:

Putin thought he was getting Poland 1939. Instead, he is getting Finland 1940.

This is the kind of stuff that anyone can check up on with a quick search of Wikipedia. I have no desire—why should I have?—to impugn the Finns. But why should Surber repeatedly claim that Poland was a cakewalk for the Wehrmacht? Is it some perverse desire to pull a Toobin and reveal himself to the world as a jerkoff?

For the record, the Polish campaign wasn’t over “on opening day”—far from it.

The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939), also known as the September campaign (Polish: Kampania wrześniowa), 1939 defensive war (Polish: Wojna obronna 1939 roku) and Poland campaign (German: Überfall auf Polen, Polenfeldzug), was an attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, and one day after the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union had approved the pact.[13] The Soviets invaded Poland on 17 September. The campaign ended on 6 October with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland under the terms of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty.

The overmatched Poles fought for about 5 weeks, and probably would have lasted longer but for the Soviet stab in the back. So far the overmatched Ukrainians have held out for 8 days, while yielding territory equal to the territory of the UK. That’s not a knock on the Ukrainians—it’s intended as perspective.

German casualties were much greater than Hitler had expected. In fact, the Poles provided a breathing space for the Western allies that was used to prepare for the German onslaught—this was particularly helpful for the RAF:

The German campaign in Poland in 1939 has been regarded by many as little more than a maneuver for the youthful Wehrmacht. However, the casualty figures and losses in matériel for the period of combat show that the campaign was more than an exercise with live ammunition. Rundstedt supported this view on operations in Poland in one of his rare commentaries following World War II.11-1 The bulk of the German armed forces had to be committed to overcome the Poles, and the expenditure in ammunition, gasoline, and matériel was such as to preclude concurrent German operations on a similar scale in the west or elsewhere.

• Nazi Germany:

•        17,269 killed

•        30,300 wounded

•        3,500 missing

•        236 tanks

•        800 vehicles

•        246 aircraft

But the September Campaign doesn’t even begin to cover the total Polish contribution to the Allied war effort.

Follow that link for the full account, but here are some highlights from the beginning summary:

Poles made substantial contributions to the Allied effort throughout the war, fighting on land, sea, and in the air. Particularly well-documented was the service of 145 Polish pilots flying British planes under British Command during the Battle of Britain, 79 in mixed squadrons under the RAF after July 1940, 32 in wholly Polish Squadron 303 after 31 August 1940 and 34 in entirely Polish Squadron 302. ... Polish ground troops were present in the North Africa Campaign (siege of Tobruk); the Italian campaign (including the capture of the monastery hill at the Battle of Monte Cassino); and in battles following the invasion of France (the battle of the Falaise pocket; an airborne-brigade parachute drop during Operation Market Garden; and an armored division in the Western Allied invasion of Germany).

Polish forces in the east, fighting alongside the Red army and under Soviet command, took part in the Soviet offensives across Belarus and Ukraine into Poland and across the Vistula and Oder Rivers to Berlin.

Some Polish contributions were less visible, notably the prewar and wartime decrypting of German Enigma-machine ciphers by cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Różycki. An extensive Polish intelligence network also proved of great value to Allied intelligence.

In total, the Polish armed forces were the 4th largest Allied forces in Europe, after those of the Soviet Union, United States, and Britain.

Note that last bit—Poland’s forces in the Allied military were greater than France’s. In total, not counting the Home Army in Poland, Polish troops under arms in the East and the West numbered close to half a million.

I’d like to expand on the intelligence contribution, since the importance of Ultra to the Allied effort can hardly be exaggerated. It was a key in the Battle of Britain, in winning the Battle of the Atlantic, was used implicitly on every front of the land war—and was shared with the Red Army, as well. What WW2 would have looked like for Britain without Ultra makes one shudder to think.

Polish intelligence supplied valuable intelligence to the Allies; 48% of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in between 1939 and 1945 came from Polish sources. ...

Western Allies had limited intelligence assets in Central and Eastern Europe, and extensive Polish intelligence network in place proved to be a major asset, even described as "the only allied intelligence assets on the Continent" following the French capitulation. According to Marek Ney-Krwawicz, for the Western Allies, the intelligence provided by the Home Army was considered to be the best source of information on the Eastern Front.

During a period of over six and a half years, from late December 1932 to the outbreak of World War II, three mathematician-cryptologists (Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki) at the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in Warsaw had developed a number of techniques and devices— including the "grill" method, Różycki's "clock", Rejewski's "cyclometer" and "card catalog", Zygalski's "perforated sheets", and Rejewski's "cryptologic bomb" (in Polish, "bomba", precursor to the later British "Bombe", named after its Polish predecessor)— to facilitate decryption of messages produced on the German "Enigma" cipher machine. Just five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on July 25, 1939, near Pyry in the Kabaty Woods south of Warsaw, Poland disclosed her achievements to France and the United Kingdom, which had, up to that time, failed in all their own efforts to crack the German military Enigma cipher. Had Poland not shared her Enigma-decryption results at Pyry, the United Kingdom might have been unable to read Enigma ciphers. In the event, intelligence gained from this source, codenamed Ultra, was extremely valuable to the Allied prosecution of the war. While ULTRA's precise influence on its course remains a subject of debate, ULTRA undoubtedly altered the course of the war.

In addition to the mathematical - cryptological research regarding the Enigma wiring that the Poles provided to the British, the Poles also provided the British four Polish Enigma Doubles—machines produced by the Polish Cipher Bureau that replicated the German Enigma rotor cipher machine. This “precious gift” was a key to allowing the British codebreakers to keep up with German changes to the Enigma machine.