Memphis 'Walking Buzzards', 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 75-77:

FEBRUARY 1, 1968, was a rainy day, the skies leaden and dull. On Colonial Road in East Memphis, the spindly dogwood branches clawed at the cold air. A loud orange sanitation truck, crammed full with the day’s refuse, grumbled down the street, past the ranch-style houses, past the fake chalets and pseudo Tudors, where the prim yards of dormant grass were marred only by truant magnolia leaves, brown and lusterless, clattering in the wind.

At the wheel of the big truck was a man named Willie Crain, the crew chief. Two workers rode in the back, taking shelter in the maw of its compacting mechanism to escape the pecking rain. They were Robert Walker, twenty-nine, and Echol Cole, thirty-five, two men who were new to sanitation work, toiling at the bottom of the department’s pay scale, still learning the ropes. They made less than a hundred dollars a week, and because the city regarded them as “unclassified laborers,” they had no benefits, no pension, no overtime, no grievance procedure, no insurance, no uniforms, and, especially noteworthy on this day, no raincoats.

The “tub-toters” of the Public Works Department were little better off than sharecroppers in the Delta, which is where they and their families originally hailed from. In some ways they still lived the lives of field hands; in effect, the plantation had moved to the city. They wore threadbare hand-me-downs left on the curbs by well-meaning families. They grew accustomed to home owners who called them “boy.” They mastered a kind of shuffling gait, neither fast nor slow, neither proud nor servile, a gait that drew no attention to itself. All week long, they quietly haunted the neighborhoods of Memphis, faceless and uncomplaining, a caste of untouchables. They called themselves the walking buzzards.

The truck Walker and Cole rode in—a fumy, clanking behemoth known as a wiener barrel—was an antiquated model that the Department of Public Works had introduced ten years earlier. It had an enormous hydraulic ram activated by a button on the outside of the vehicle. Though the city was in the process of phasing it out of the fleet, six wiener barrels still worked the Memphis streets. These trucks were known to be dangerous, even lethal: in 1964, two garbage workers were killed when a defective compactor caused a truck to flip over. The faulty trucks were one of a host of reasons the Memphis sanitation workers had been trying to organize a union and—if necessary—go on strike.

Having completed their rounds, Crain, Walker, and Cole were happy to be heading toward the dump on Shelby Drive—and then, finally, home. They were cold and footsore, as they usually were by day’s end, from lugging heavy tubs across suburban lawns for ten hours straight. The idea of wheeled bins had apparently not occurred to the Memphis Sanitation Department. Nor were home owners in those days expected to meet the collection crews halfway by hauling their own crap to the curb. So, like all walking buzzards across the city, Walker and Cole had to march up the long driveways to back doors and carports, clicking privacy gates and entering backyards—sometimes to the snarl of dogs. There they transferred the people’s garbage to their tubs while also collecting tree cuttings, piles of leaves, dead animals, discarded clothes, busted furniture, or anything else the residents wanted taken away.

Now, as Crain, Cole, and Walker headed for the dump, their clothes were drenched in rain and encrusted with the juice that had dripped from the tubs all day. It was the usual slop of their profession—bacon drippings, clotted milk, chicken blood, souring gravies from the kitchens of East Memphis mingled with the tannic swill from old leaves. Plastic bags were not yet widely in use—no Ziploc or Hefty, no drawstrings or cinch ties to keep the sloshy messes contained. So the ooze accumulated on their clothes like a malodorous rime, and the city provided no showers or laundry for sanitation workers to clean themselves up at the end of the day. The men grew somewhat inured to it, but when they got home, they usually stripped down at the door: their wives couldn’t stand the stench.

Walker and Cole died horrible deaths.

Seeking Hypnosis & Recognition?

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 73-74:

A FEW DAYS later, January 4, 1968, Galt went to see another L.A. hypnotist, the Reverend Xavier von Koss, at his office at 16010 Crenshaw Boulevard. Koss was a practitioner of good reputation in Los Angeles and the president of the International Society of Hypnosis. Galt consulted with Koss for an hour and discussed his desire to undergo treatment. But to Galt’s irritation, Koss pressed him with larger questions. “What are your goals in life?” Koss asked him.

Galt tried to answer him as narrowly as possible. “I’m thinking about taking a course in bartending,” he said.

“But why are you interested in hypnotism?”

Galt said he thought hypnosis would improve his memory and make him more efficient in carrying out mental tasks. “Somewhere,” he said, “I saw where a person under the influence of hypnotism can solve problems in thirty seconds that would take an ordinary person thirty minutes.”

Koss could sense that there was more to Galt’s interest in hypnosis than merely mind fortification. Koss thought he was a lost soul, someone searching for some kind of validation—and a way to fit into society. “All persons, like myself, who work in the profession of mind power can readily discern the main motivational drive of any person,” Koss later said. “Galt belongs to the recognition type. He desires recognition from his group. He yearns to feel that he is somebody. The desire for recognition for him is superior to sex, superior to money, superior to self-preservation.”

Koss advised Galt that in order to reach a better and more meaningful life, he had to see in his mind’s eye what he wanted to achieve—a statement that Galt seemed to agree with vigorously. He recommended three books for Galt to read—Psycho-Cybernetics, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz; Self-hypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living, by Leslie LeCron; and How to Cash In On Your Hidden Memory Power, by William Hersey. Galt was grateful—he jotted down the titles and would later buy every one of them.

Yet books alone would not accomplish much, Koss cautioned. He began to tell Galt about all the hard work that lay before him if he truly wanted to improve his station in life. Koss said, “You must complete your course in bar-tending, you must work hard, you must go to night school, you must construct a settled-down life.”

It was all too much for Galt, and he began to retreat from the conversation. “I lost him,” Koss said. “I could feel a wall rising between us. His mind moved far away from what I was saying to him.”

Still, Galt said he was interested in undergoing hypnosis, and the Reverend Xavier von Koss was willing to oblige. He began a series of tests to ascertain whether Galt would be a good candidate. Quickly, however, he detected “a very strong subconscious resistance” to his procedures. “He could not cooperate,” Koss said. “This is always the case when a person fears that under hypnosis he may reveal something he wishes to conceal.”

Polish zakąski vs. Romanian zacuscă

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes some articles about Polish gastronomy, including Natalia Mętrak-Ruda's 2020 article on Zakąski Culture in Poland: What to Eat with Vodka?

The Spanish have their tapas, the Italians have their aperitivo and in the Middle East they feast on mezze. Small plates, which you most often share with friends and which – at least in countries where it’s generally accepted to consume alcohol – are usually accompanied by a fair share of drinks, are a part of many food cultures worldwide. In Poland, these dishes are known as zakąski and go exceptionally well with vodka.

...

Traditional Polish weddings, especially in rural areas, are occasions where the culture of zakąski still reigns supreme. While we’ve observed a cultural shift in past decades, and people in big cities tend to drink more wine and often prefer a more Mediterranean or French approach to banquet canapés, smalec [animal fat, cf. schmaltz], sausages and other cured meats, meat jellies, pickles, and herring are still among the most popular items included in traditional wedding buffets – sometimes known as wiejski stół, ‘a country table’.

... Yet the king of all zakąski was herring, served with a tomato and onion sauce (the ‘Kashubian’ way), with mayonnaise and peas (curiously named Japanese herring), or simply in oil with some onions.

In the last decade ongoing efforts have been made by some Polish chefs, bartenders and spirit connoisseurs to start looking at vodka from a new perspective. Not just as something to get drunk on, or dissolve in a cocktail, but an interesting local product, which has the potential to become as important to Poland, as whiskey is to Ireland and Scotland, or champagne to France.

To do so, passionate chefs started to think about much more refined zakąski, which would go well with artisan vodkas. Chef Aleksander Baron and food writer Łukasz Klesyk even wrote a book about it entitled Między Wódką a Zakąską (which literally means ‘Between Vodka and an Appetiser’, yet also refers to the idiom wcinać się między wódkę a zakąskę – to meddle or interfere).

The authors claim that the most important rules in creating new zakąski are following the contrasts created by the pairing of the sweetness of vodka with either salt or acid. At the same time, keeping in mind that the appetisers should be rich and complex enough to handle high levels of alcohol. It can be achieved by adding fat but also by enriching the flavours by grilling, roasting, adding herbs, spices or mushrooms.

The Russian equivalent of zakąski is zakuski, singular zakuska, with pretty much the same meaning, but the Romanian zacuscă that we Outliers are very fond of is instead a vegetable concoction of roasted eggplant, red bell pepper, onion, tomato, and spices.

Galt Emigrating to Rhodesia?

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 62-63:

TO THE CORE of his angry soul, Eric Galt identified with Wallace’s rants against big government, his championing of the workingman, his jeremiads on the spread of Communism. He even identified with the governor’s Alabama roots—Galt had lived for a brief time in Birmingham in 1967, and his Mustang still bore Alabama plates, which sported the state nickname, HEART OF DIXIE.

What Galt found most appealing about Wallace, though, was the governor’s stance as an unapologetic segregationist. Wallace’s rhetoric powerfully articulated Galt’s own smoldering prejudices. Although Galt was not politically sophisticated, he was a newspaper reader and something of a radio and television news junkie. His politics were composed of many inchoate gripes and grievances. On most topics he might best be described as a reactionary—he was, for example, drawn to the positions of the John Birch Society, to which he wrote letters, though never formally joined.

By late 1967, Galt had begun to gravitate toward stark positions on racial politics. He became intrigued by Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime in Rhodesia. In Puerto Vallarta he had bought a copy of U.S. News & World Report in which he found an advertisement soliciting immigrants for Rhodesia. The idea appealed to him so much that on December 28, 1967, he wrote to the American–Southern Africa Council in Washington, D.C., to inquire about relocating to Salisbury.

“My reason for writing is that I am considering immigrating to Rhodesia,” Galt said in his letter, noting that representatives from the John Birch Society had referred him to the council. “I would appreciate any information you could give me.” Not only did Galt hope to gain citizenship in Rhodesia; he was such an ardent believer in the cause of white rule and racial apartheid that he planned, as he later put it, to “serve two or three years in one of them mercenary armies” in southern Africa. While living in Los Angeles, he wrote to the president of the California chapter of the Friends of Rhodesia—an organization dedicated to improving relations with the United States—raising still more questions about immigration and inquiring about how he might subscribe to a pro–Ian Smith journal titled Rhodesian Commentary.

Eric Galt at a Clinical Psychologist

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 52-53:

FOR SOME TIME since his arrival in Los Angeles, Eric Galt had been paying visits to a clinical psychologist named Dr. Mark O. Freeman. Their first appointment was on the late afternoon of Monday, November 27, 1967, and Galt, sharply dressed as usual, walked into Freeman’s Beverly Hills office at around five o’clock. Dr. Freeman wrote in his daybook that his new patient hoped to “overcome his shyness, gain social confidence, and learn self-hypnosis so he could relax, sleep and remember things better.”

They began to talk, and Dr. Freeman got a sense of the man. Galt naïvely seemed to believe that hypnosis was a form of communication expressed directly eye to eye, through some mysterious medium of thought rays. “He had the old power idea of hypnotism,” Freeman said. “He actually thought you could go around looking people in the eye and hypnotize them and make them do whatever you wanted them to do.”

Galt placed great value on the touted health benefits of hypnosis—and especially hoped to learn how to put himself under. All told, he met with Dr. Freeman on six occasions, throughout the months of November and December 1967. Dr. Freeman later said that Galt “made a favorable impression” on him. The sessions were productive, he thought, and the two men got along well.

“He was a good pupil,” Freeman said. “This fellow really wanted to improve his mind. He had a bent for reading. He didn’t fight hypnosis. I’d show him how to go under, and pretty soon he’d be lying on the couch on his back and start talking. I taught him eye fixation, bodily relaxation, how to open himself to suggestion. I gave him a lot of positive feelings of competence.” While Freeman said that Galt confessed to no “deep dark secrets,” he did note that in at least one of their sessions together, Galt disclosed a “deep antipathy to negroes.”

Then, for reasons not known, Galt severed his relationship with Freeman, saying only that the psychologist “didn’t know nothing about hypnosis.” He canceled his last appointment with Freeman, telling him that his brother had found a job for him as a merchant seaman in New Orleans. Freeman never heard from Eric S. Galt again.

Polish Realia: Beer Styles

From the illustrated placemat at Browar Pivovaria, in Radom, Poland.
Najlepsze Piwa z Radomia / Warzone na Miejscu
'Best beer from Radom / Brewed on Site'

Pils Pilsner
Nasz Pils to pełne, jasne piwo dolnej fermentacji w stylu niemieckich pilznerów. Posiada barwę złota i wspaniałą białą pianę, a warzone jest ze słodu jasnego jęczmiennego. W smaku czyste, orzeżwiające, z wraźną szlachetną goryczką i zapachem szyszek chmielowych. Polecane do zimnych przekąsek, dań z drobiu i ryb. Alk. 5% obj. [< objętościowo]
Our Pils is a full-bodied, light bottom-fermented beer in the style of German pilsners. It has a golden color and a wonderful white foam, and is brewed from light barley malt. The taste is clean, refreshing, with a slight noble bitterness and the smell of hop flowers. Recommended for cold snacks, poultry and fish dishes. Alc. 5% vol.

Pszeniczne Wheat 
Pszeniczne to orzeźwiające piwo w stylu weizen. Warzone jest ze słodu pszenicznego (60%) i jęczmiennego jasnego. Piwo to charakteryzuje się słomkową barwą i puszystą białą pianką. W smaku wyczuwa się pszenicę jak również aromat bananowo goździkowy. Poleca się szczególnie do dan serwowanych z sosem śmietanowym, delikatnej wieprzowiny i placków ziemniaczanych. Alk. 5,1% obj.
Wheat is a refreshing weizen-style beer. It is brewed from wheat malt (60%) and light barley. This beer is characterized by a straw color and fluffy white foam. The taste is wheat with banana and clove aroma. It is especially recommended for dishes served with sour cream sauce, tender pork and potato pancakes. Alc. 5.1% vol.

Bursztynowe Amber
Bursztynowe to piwo dolnej fermentacji. Produkowane jest z udziałem słodu jasnego jęczmiennego i ciemnych słodówkarmelowych. Barwa jest adekwatna do nazwy, a smak to mieszające się nuty słodowo - karmelowe oraz wyczuwalna goryczka. Poleca się je szczególnie do potraw z grilla i dań ze schabu. Alk. 5,7 obj.
Amber is a bottom-fermented beer. It is produced with light barley malt and dark caramel malts. The color lives up to its name, and the taste is mixed malt and caramel notes and noticeable bitterness. They are especially recommended for grilled dishes and pork loin dishes. Alc. 5.7 vol.

Polish Realia: Beer Types

From the illustrated placemat at Browar Pivovaria, in Radom, Poland.
Najlepsze Piwa z Radomia / Warzone na Miejscu
'Best beer from Radom / Brewed on Site'

Koźlak Bock
Nasz Koźlak jest mocnym, ciemnym piwem o słodkim zapachu przypominającym ciasto z owocami. Wyczuwa się również woń karmelu, fig is suszonych śliwek. Ma rozgrzewający charakter, a na podniebieniu pozostawia pełny słodowy smak z przebijającymi się nutami toffi i wyraźną goryczką. Poleca cię go m.in. [< między innymi 'inter alia' ] do żeberek i delikatnej wołowiny. Alk. 7,5% obj. [< objętościowo]
Our Koźlak is a strong, dark beer with a sweet smell reminiscent of fruit cake. You can also smell caramel, figs and prunes. It has a warming character, and leaves a full malty taste on the palate with pungent [not 'punctual'!] notes of toffee and a distinct bitterness. It is recommended for ribs and tender beef, among others. Alc. 7.5% vol.

APA American Pale Ale
Piwo górnej fermentacji w stylu American Pale Ale. W smaku wyrazista, zbalansowana gorycz z wyczuwalnym aromatem chmieli Amerykańskich. Piwo polecane do pikantnych i słonych dań. Alk. 5,0% obj.
Top fermented beer in the style of American Pale Ale. The taste is distinctive, balanced bitterness with a noticeable aroma of American hops. The beer is recommended for spicy and salty dishes. Alc. 5.0% vol.

Czarny Koń (lub inne piwo sezonowe)
Black Horse (or other seasonal beer)
Mocne, ciemne piwo w stylu ALE. W smaku i aromacie wyczuwalna jest słodowa słodycz z nutami karmelu. Znaczny dodatek słodów ciemnych nadaje piwu również aromat i smak ciemnej czekolady oraz kawy. Piwo długo leżakowane. Piwo poleca się m.in. do golonek i żeberek. Alk. 9.2% obj.
Strong, dark beer in the style of ALE. In the taste and aroma, there is a malty sweetness with notes of caramel. A significant addition of dark malts also gives the beer the aroma and taste of dark chocolate and coffee. Long aged beer. The beer is recommended for pork knuckles and ribs, among others. Alc. 9.2% vol.

Note to Readers by Hampton Sides

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle ed.

I was just a kid when it happened—six years old, living in a rambling brick house on Cherry Road close by the Southern Railway. My father worked for the Memphis law firm that represented King when he came to town on behalf of the garbage workers, and I remember my dad rushing home that night, pouring a screwdriver or three, and talking with alarm about what had happened and what it meant for the city and the nation and the world. I remember the curfew, the wail of sirens, a line of soldiers with fixed bayonets. I remember seeing tanks for the first time. Mainly, I recall the fear in the adult voices coming over the radio and television—the undertow of panic, as it seemed to everyone that our city was ripping apart.

Four days after the assassination, Coretta Scott King arrived in Memphis, wearing her widow’s veil, and led the peaceful march her husband could not lead. For several miles, tens of thousands of mourners threaded through the somber downtown streets to city hall. Enveloped in the beautiful sadness, no one breathed a word. There was no shouting or picketing, not even a song. The only sound was leather on pavement.

All writers sooner or later go back to the place where they came from. With this book, I wanted to go back to the pivotal moment in the place where I came from. In April 1968, a killer rode into a city I know and love. He set himself up with a high-powered rifle a few blocks from the Mississippi River and took aim at history. The shock waves still emanate from room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, and continue to register across the globe. The Lorraine has become an international shrine, visited by the likes of the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela and the boys from U2—a holy place. People come from all over the world to stand on the balcony where King stood, squinting in the humidity, surveying the sight lines of fate. They try to imagine what really happened, and what larger plots might have been stirring in the shadows.

The first writer I ever met, the great Memphis historian Shelby Foote, once said of his Civil War trilogy that he had “employed the novelist’s methods without his license,” and that’s a good rule of thumb for what I’ve attempted here. Though I’ve tried to make the narrative as fluidly readable as possible, this is a work of nonfiction. Every scene is supported by the historical record. Every physical and atmospheric detail arises from factual evidence. And every conversation is reconstructed from documents. I’ve consulted congressional testimony, newspaper accounts, oral histories, memoirs, court proceedings, autopsy reports, archival news footage, crime scene photographs, and official reports filed by the Memphis authorities, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Scotland Yard. Along the way, I’ve conducted scores of personal interviews and traveled tens of thousands of miles—from Puerto Vallarta to London, from St. Louis to Lisbon. Readers who are curious about how I constructed the narrative will find my sources cited in copious detail in the notes and bibliography.

As for King’s assassin, I’ve let his story speak for itself. Whether witlessly, incidentally, or on purpose, he left behind a massive body of evidence. Much of my account of his worldwide travels comes from his own words. The rest comes from the record. Many questions remain about his motives, his sources of money, and how much help he may have had. But the killer left his fingerprints, both literal and figurative, over everything.

HAMPTON SIDES, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

Evolution of Polish Viticulture

My latest compilation of stories from Culture.pl includes an interview about the history of Polish viticulture. Here are some excerpts:

Monika Kucia: Poland isn’t historically a winemaking country, but we do have a short history of winemaking dating back centuries. When were grapes first cultivated on our territories? 

Wojciech Bońkowski: In the Middle Ages, viticulture was quite developed in our country, also because the climate in our part of Europe was warmer back then. Wine was mainly needed for religious purposes, the celebration of mass, so it was grown on a limited, very small scale. Cultivation collapsed due to the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of cooling in the North Atlantic when average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped by about 1°C. Around the 17th century, Poland began importing large quantities of wine from, among other places, Hungary and Ukraine. After World War II, Lubusz Voivodeship, including Zielona Góra ['Grünberg'], was incorporated into Poland. Before 1939, Zielona Góra was the largest wine-producing region in Germany and specialized in sparkling wines. We took over these vineyards, but they, too, were closed down by the 1960s because the Polish communist authorities promoted the production of fruit wines, not grape wines.

MK: What is fruit wine?

WB: Fruit wine is a cheap alcoholic beverage made from widely available fruit, in Poland primarily from apples. Hence the Polish term ‘jabol’ [slang term for low-quality, wine-like alcoholic fruit beverage derived from the word for ‘apple’, jabłko, trans.]. This kind of wine is much cheaper to produce than wine made from the fermentation of grape must. Fruit wine production was possible in Poland on a large scale thanks to the orchard industry. The Polish People’s Republic saw a decline in wine culture, which had been quite developed in interwar Poland, among the elite of course. The common folk, if we may use that term, drank other alcoholic beverages. This is, of course, a result of our geographical location. We have a different social situation today; changes are affecting the whole of society, and wine has definitely become very popular. Studies show that nearly 50% of Poles declare at least occasional wine consumption.

...

MK: How did it all begin?

WB: Winemaking was first revived in the Podkarpackie ['Subcarpathian']  region thanks to the efforts of Roman Myśliwiec ['Hunter'], who founded a nursery where he propagated vines and supported the establishment of small vineyards and the production of wine in a style we affectionately call ‘allotment garden wine’. Some had 1,000, others 2,000 square meters of vineyard. Back then, no one had a hectare. These were amateur production attempts. 

...

MK: Where did the winemakers get their seedlings?

WB: Partly from Myśliwiec, but of course, seedlings can be easily purchased in wine-producing countries. We have Czechia and Slovakia just across the border. That’s not a problem, just a cost. And these were investors, businessmen who had money they’d made in other industries.

MK: And what about Jutrzenka in the Podkarpackie region?

WB: That was a variety created by Myśliwiec, a typical hybrid. The problem with hybrids was that most of them were of very poor quality. The early ones, such as Bianca and Sibera, were so-called second-generation hybrids that reeked of cabbage and IXI laundry powder; they had no merits.

MK: So why were they cultivated?

WB: Hybrids are developed for two purposes: either to ripen early and be suitable for a cold climate, which was their main function in Poland; or to be more disease resistant. At the time, it seemed that we in Poland couldn’t grow Chardonnay or any other viniferavariety, that the grapes wouldn’t be ripe enough to make wine. This turned out to be untrue. It gets a little warmer every year, which helps. Meanwhile, the discussion about hybrids is currently gaining momentum worldwide. On the one hand, we have the pressure of significantly reducing the use of chemicals in agriculture; after all, winemaking is responsible for a significant portion of soil contamination – in France, for example. There are stories about a winemaker spraying fifteen times, but if he’s planted a hybrid, spraying twice would be enough.

MK: So hybrids aren’t ‘inferior’?

WB: At first, I was skeptical about hybrids. Not from a cultivation perspective, as I don’t know anything about it, or at least I don’t have practical experience, but from the perspective of the market and the quality of these wines. Fourth-generation hybrids, such as Johanniter and Solaris, are varietals that are no longer easy to distinguish in a comparative tasting; they are simply very good. Johanniter and Riesling can be very similar, so the quality argument is no longer relevant.

MK: And can one grow noble red wine varietals in Poland?

WB: In Poland, for example, we have a lot of Pinot Noir; this varietal has recently produced surprisingly good wines in many places around the world, such as Czechia and Canada, which have similar climatic conditions to Poland. It used to be said that this was a difficult grape variety which only performed well in Burgundy, but that’s not true. That’s the great thing about wine – we’re constantly being self-verified. Yesterday, it seemed that only Italian wines were sexy, but today, wines from Greece and Croatia are considered sexy. It’s constantly changing.

Japanese Little League and Yakuza

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 130-132:

There remained one sticking point to this collaboration: Yomiuri’s special interest in Kansai Little League coverage. There were some in the Little League community who wished for Yomiuri to not only continue coverage but increase its involvement. Musashino Little League’s Mitsuyasu in particular lobbied for Yomiuri kingpin Shōriki Tōru to lead Little League Japan, and bemoaned Fuji-Sankei’s involvement. But Mitsui’s long-term plan was to work with Fuji-Sankei, and Fuji-Sankei did not want to get involved in a media struggle for coverage rights in the Kansai. When Fuji-Sankei president Shikauchi insisted on full nationwide rights, Mizukami told Hoshino he should make the trip down to Yomiuri’s Osaka offices to negotiate their withdrawal, allowing Mitsui and Sankei to handle Little League nationwide. Hoshino packed his bag for what he thought would be an overnight trip. He ended up spending almost a week there.

One might think that Hoshino would have to spend most of his time and energy convincing Yomiuri to defer to Fuji Sankei, but that decision was not fully Yomiuri’s to make. Before he even approached Yomiuri, Hoshino first had to engage certain underworld elements. At the height of their influence in the 1960s, Japan’s idiosyncratic yakuza gangster world had its origins in two broad arenas with significant overlap: bakutō (gambling) and tekiya (carnie). The tekiya traditionally made their money by organizing and operating quasi-legal protection rackets for street and carnival sales stalls. One profitable variant in the post–World War II years were corporate-level extortionists known as sōkaiya who specialized in disrupting the annual stockholder meetings unless their demands were met. Japan’s yakuza are known for their haughty profession of right-wing or ultra-nationalist postures. One imagines that making the rounds of corporations on behalf of a youth sports team about to represent Japan in an international competition presented an appealing opportunity for them. Although surely not a major money maker, yakuza had apparently made a racket of skimming a healthy portion of funds solicited from businesses in support of Little League. If Fuji Sankei and Mitsui Bussan were going to take over sponsorship of Little League in the Kansai, their support systems would have to be brought aboveboard and questionable connections with the criminal underworld would have to be severed. But in the murky world of accommodations of convenience and unspoken but implicit understandings, an unexpected departure from the cozy tekiya fundraising arrangement would have ripple effects.

In short, Hoshino knew that Yomiuri could not act pre-emptively without the understanding and consent of its associates. To do otherwise would incur the ire of yakuza and expose their organization to irritating and embarrassing harassment that was the yakuza métier. It would be a question of saving face. One thinks of the lampooning scene in comic filmmaker Itami Jūzō’s 1988 A Taxing Woman’s Return in which a local gangster boss intimidates office staff and citizens at a local tax office, all based on the absurdly reverse assertion that he was himself being harassed.16 If Yomiuri had dropped Little League sponsorship without first consulting and gaining the yakuza padrone’s acquiescence, then their whole organization would have been subjected to the charge of insulting or undercutting the yakuza’s pride.

So, Hoshino went to talk with the tekiya boss first, traveling as instructed to a desolate train station in the less-populated areas in the middle of rice paddies between Osaka and Kyoto. On his retelling, Hoshino joked that he felt like he was being kidnapped when several henchmen sauntered around him and then spirited him away in a four-door coupe to the gangster boss’s home, where he ended up staying as a nervous house guest for three or four days. It was a harrowing week, and he had to approach, as he put it, “many scary people” to extricate Little League from this legally questionable fundraising system. Hoshino’s negotiating strategy was simple: ingratiate himself with the boss and then appeal to his ego by asking for his help to convince Yomiuri to allow Mitsui and Sankei to control national coverage. After three or four days of negotiation, while being a not fully willing house guest, Hoshino succeeded. At that point, the tekiya boss took the lead in visiting the Osaka Yomiuri offices, with Hoshino in tow, to “advise” Yomiuri that Fuji Sankei and Mitsui were, so to speak, taking over the Kansai Little League franchise.

Mitsui Bussan and Fuji Sankei became official sponsors for both the 1970 All-Japan and Far East tournaments held at the Higashi Fuchū grounds, and Sankei gave the tournament good coverage in its media network. Hoshino arranged for the players to be billeted in U.S. military barracks and fed at the commissary at nearby Fuchu Air Station, a communications hub for U.S. military in the Far East. Hoshino himself bunked there during the two weeks prior while making tournament arrangements, and then as chaperone for the players during the tournaments that featured teams from the Marshall Islands and Taiwan.

Taiwan's Little League Fans

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 112-114:

Taiwan’s Chinese Baseball Association, in association with Lions Club International, had also invited Yoshikura to bring a Kansai Renmei team to Taiwan for a series of five exhibition games that August. Both nanshiki [rubber baseball] and hardball baseball were popular pastimes in Taiwan, a legacy of the island’s prewar years as a Japanese colony. In preparation for an event loaded with patriotic interest, Taiwanese leaders arranged for the Hongye and Chuiyang teams, the winner and runner-up in Taiwan’s 20th Annual Provincial Children’s Cup in May, to train for as long as a month at a military base. The Kansai team, rostered from seven of the Kansai Renmei teams, defeated Chuiyang 1–0 in the first matchup. But they lost to the powerhouse Hongye “Maple Leaf” team 7–0 in front of 20,000 in Taipei Stadium and a live television audience. They lost again to a national Taiwanese all-star team the next day, 5–1, and again to Hongye the day after, 5–2. Kansai saved some face by winning the final game against a provincial all-star team from Jiayi.

The large numbers viewing this series of games in person or on television illustrated and spurred Taiwanese enthusiasm for the international Little League competition that soon far exceeded interest in Little League baseball at this point in Japan. It also presaged the popular interest in Hongye and Taiwan’s dominance of the Little League World Series for the next twenty years. A staggering two-thirds of the island’s population watched a middle-of-the-night broadcast of the island nation’s Little League championship game in 1971.

The Kansai squad’s 1968 visit became a Taiwanese national phenomenon, symbolic of several interconnected and competing ethnic and national tensions characteristic of the island community, which historians of Taiwan baseball agree was a “defining moment in the history of Taiwan nationalism.” For one thing, the ruling Nationalist KMT/GMD, the former mainland government that had been pushed into exile on the island, had not promoted baseball at all since it had not been played in China. Baseball was, ironically enough from an American perspective, intimately tied to Taiwan’s colonial era as subaltern in Japan’s empire, an inconvenient fact the Nationalist press avoided. Yet a vibrant baseball culture continued, even at the elementary school level. The fact that the Hongye school was from a mountainous Bunun Aborigine district in the southeastern Taitung Province added an ethnic dimension to the story, so the team’s success against the Japanese suggested the possibility of a native Taiwan free of Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT/GMD mainland rule. As elaborated by Andrew Morris, David Harney, and others, the official Republic of China government attempted rather to coopt Hongye’s success in an anti-communist agenda affirming the Nationalist government rule by celebrating a capitalist work ethic in the face of their impoverished background.

The ideological import for the Japanese was rather straightforward in comparison to the situation for their hosts, for whom nationalist and ethnic pride competed in overlapping discourses between mainland Chinese and island Taiwanese identities. The Taiwanese hosts to the Kansai delegation rather celebrated the historic connection. At the official ceremony, for example, one Taiwan parent who had played at Kōshien in the prewar imperial era recited a poem on the “way of baseball” spirit by the recently deceased Kondō Hyōtarō, a fabulously successful baseball coach who took his multi-ethnic Jiayi team to Kōshien four times in the early 1930s. And at least one member of the Kansai delegation reconnected with acquaintances from the prewar colonial years.

As discussed in chapter 4, the 1967 West Tokyo Little League success in the American-sponsored Little League venue affirmed the older Japanese Little League leadership’s nationalist desire for approbation of Japan’s remarkable postwar recovery. The warm reception for the August 1968 Kansai Renmei delegation allowed a measure of nostalgia for Japan’s imperial era, despite the team’s modest performance against the former colony’s teams. In Japanese recollections of the trip, Hongye’s hardscrabble origins are conveyed by images of barefoot players. And it is suggestive that such recollections mention the delegation’s gifting of their hardball equipment as an act of noblesse oblige befitting, viewed from traditional East Asian notions of imperial governance, the beneficence of a former colonial ruler.

Japan's Baseball Crazy Wakayama

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 100-102:

Wakayama is a provincial city 50 miles south of Osaka. Where Nanba, one of Osaka’s main commercial hubs, is the northern terminus of the Nankai main line that follows the eastern shore of Osaka Bay, Wakayama is an hour south at the other end of the line. The region has a rich provincial heritage on the periphery of the main power centers in Japanese history. A city located at the edge of waters between the Osaka Bay and the Pacific Ocean, Wakayama straddles the mouth of the River Kii, a waterway with its source in the mountainous Kii Peninsula. At the beginning of the Ashikaga shogunate in the fourteenth-century “Nambokuchō” era of competing imperial courts (1336–1392), Emperor Godaigo’s southern line ensconced itself near its source in the mountainous Kii Peninsula interior. During the two-and-a-half centuries of the relatively stable Tokugawa era (c. 1600–1868), Wakayama was held by one of the shogunal cadet houses that twice provided heirs to the main shogunal line. And in the sixteenth-century sengoku or “warring states” era of fragmented rule before the Tokugawa era, a major peasant mutual defense league known as the Saika Ikki resisted the great warlord Oda Nobunaga’s consolidation of power. Its headquarters was in a fortress near the present-day castle and today lends its name to a section of the city, an elementary school, and a youth baseball club important to the emergence of Wakayama Little League. Saika is also a common surname in Wakayama.

In the mid-1960s, Wakayama was a growing city that featured a major steel mill, a healthy agricultural and fisheries sector, and as important for our interests, a robust baseball community. Dr. Hotta Eiji, Doshisha University Chancellor and one-time president of the Japan High School Baseball Federation (known as Kōyaren), observed to the author that, although Wakayama City and its eponymous prefecture is not that large in terms of population, its residents have long been known for their fervent enthusiasm for high school baseball, and the prefecture boasts a number of perennially strong high school teams. A 1965 survey by the Wakayama Broadcasting Company found that over 90 percent of respondents considered themselves baseball fans, while only 2.5 percent maintained they had no interest. Wakayama Chū, Wakayama’s prewar prefectural middle school, was one of the inaugural teams to play in the summer Kōshien high school baseball tournament, Japan’s most popular sporting event that began in Osaka’s Toyonaka City in 1915. The school won the tournament in 1921 and 1922 (when it was played in Nishinomiya), after which they hosted the future Showa Emperor at his first baseball game at their newly built concrete stands later that year. Tōin High School, Wakayama Chū’s reincarnation after the postwar education reforms, has produced numerous players and accomplished managers in Tokyo’s premier university baseball league, the “Big Six.” One indicator of Wakayama’s enduring baseball fervor is that a group of 50 former high school players born in and around 1955, the age cohort that would have been Little League age in the late 1960s, meet annually to socialize, reminisce, and just talk baseball.

Wakayama has a vibrant nanshiki [rubber baseball] infrastructure with many elementary school-age teams formed along local social networks—school, shrine or temple, parental work relationships, and so on—that compete in summer tournaments sponsored both by the municipal youth sports promotion association as well as by local companies and volunteer organizations. Judging from common team names, contemporary reports in the local Wakayama newspaper, player recollections, later comments by league officials, and an analysis of Little League roster information with residency data from the city youth sports organization, it is clear that the 1966 and 1967 Little League teams were in fact all-star teams selected from the Wakayama Youth Baseball Association spring and summer nanshiki tournaments. Because the Japanese school year begins in April, what this means is that most of the players selected for the summer Little League tournament rosters were already in seventh grade playing for their junior high school nanshiki teams.

Hirota Hideo and Wakayama’s Youth Baseball Community

The major figure in Wakayama’s youth baseball community in this era was a fabric wholesaler by the name of Hirota Hideo. Like many baseball men in Japan in this era, he had played baseball in the prewar years, at Wakayama’s Ninoshima High School. He was a member of his local PTA, a board member on the Wakayama youth sports association, and a charismatic individual whose business and civic connections ranged far and wide. The Hirotas lived directly opposite the Saika Elementary School that their two daughters attended, and provided conveniently located home care for the infant children of the school’s young female teachers. In 1961, Hirota founded what became the strongest team in the Wakayama Shōnen Yakyū Renmei (Wakayama Youth Baseball Association). He was the manager of the club until 1969.

Like Dr. Sasa in Tanashi, Hirota was an important agent beyond baseball in creating the civic sports organizations that sprung up in response to the national government’s promotion of youth sports culture in the early to mid-1960s. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 1962, the Japan Sports Association (JASA)—Japan’s equivalent to that era’s Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) in the United States—founded an affiliate Junior association with the aim of promoting youth interest in sports in the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. With offices in the city’s Taiiku Kyōkai Physical Education Association, Wakayama’s Junior Sports Association’s founding charter mandated board representation from every youth sports association in the city as well as from elementary and junior high principals, the local Taiiku Kyōkai Athletic Association itself, and the administrative offices of the city’s Board of Education. In its 20th anniversary publication, the founding director Hisashi Shōzō credited “baseball’s Hirota” as one of two individuals who really helped him get the organization going in 1965, when it listed 20 sports associations as members.

The Nankai Hawks were my favorite baseball team during my high school years in Kobe during the 1960s. Their Japanese Hall-of-Fame pitcher and catcher combination, Tadashi Sugiura and Katsuya Nomura, were hard to beat.

Polish Realia: Blood Donations

 Zaznacz prawidłową odpowiedź: Prawda/Fałsz

Select the correct answer: True/False

1. Przed donacją trzeba znać swoją grupę krwi.
   Before the donation, one must know one’s blood group.
2. Przerwa między oddaniami krwi pełnej nie może być krótsza niż 8 tygodni.
   The interval between whole blood donations may not be shorter than 8 weeks.
3. Do przeszczepienia wątroby często potrzeba aż 20 jednostek krwi.
   For a liver transplant often require as many as 20 units of blood.
4. Jeden Biorca często potrzebuje pomocy kilku Dawców.
   One Recipient often needs the help of several Donors.
5. Dawca może przyjmować witaminy.
   The Donor can take vitamins.
6. Składniki krwi przechowuje się razem.
   Blood components are stored together.
7. Noworodkom podaje się krew tylko od dorosłych, którzy są nimi spokrewnieni.
   Newborns are given blood only from adults who are related to them.
8. Wegetarianie I weganie nie mogą oddawać krwi.
   Vegetarians and vegans may not donate blood.
9. Przeziębienie jest przeciwwskazaniem do oddania krwi lub jej składników.
   A cold is a contraindication to donating blood or its components.
10. Po donacji organizm Dawcy produkuje nadwyżki krwi.
    After donation, the Donor's body produces surplus blood.
11. Osoba leczona krwią nie może nigdy zostać Dawcą.
    A person treated with blood can never become a Donor.
12. Zaostrzona alergia jest przeciwwskazaniem czasowym dla Dawców.
    Exacerbated allergy is a temporary contraindication for Donors.
13. Po donacji organism uzupełnia braki w ciągu 3-4 dni.
    After donation, the body replenishes deficiencies within 3-4 days.

Poprawne odpowiedzi: N T T T T N N N T N N T T
Correct answers: F T T T T F F F T F F T T

Polish Realia: Brewery Operating Steps

On the occasion of Śmigus-Dyngus:
From the illustrated placemat at Browar Pivovaria, in Radom, Poland.
Najlepsze Piwa z Radomia / Warzone na Miejscu
'Best beer from Radom / Brewed on Site'

Słód 'malt'
Mielenie Słodu / śrutownik 'grinding the malt' / 'grinder'
Zacieranie / kadż zaciera + woda 'rubbing / mash tun + water'
Filtracja / kadż filtracyjna 'filtration / filtration vat'
Gotowanie / kocioł warzelny + chmiel 'cooking / boiling kettle + hops'
Schładzanie Brzeczki / wymiennik ciepła 'cooling the wort / heat exchanger'
Fermentacja / tank fermentacyjny + drożdże 'fermentation / fermentation tank + yeast'
Leżakowanie / tank leżakowy 'aging / aging tanks'
Butelka 'bottle' or Keg 'keg'

Polish Exiles Trapped Abroad

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 174-178:

The Polish troops in Scotland, Italy and Normandy, like Poles all over the world, watched in agony as Warsaw fought and died. But there was little they could do. Some long-range aircraft, Polish, British and South African, managed to reach Warsaw from airfields in Italy, but they suffered terrible losses and the supplies and ammunition they dropped often fell into German hands. Predictably, Stalin refused to let the Allies use airfields in Soviet-held territory until it was too late. The British, for their part, refused to let the London Poles fly the Parachute Brigade to Warsaw.

From the military point of view, that would have been suicidal madness. But there was political reluctance too. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew that the Soviet Union was carrying the main burden of a war now approaching its climax. They were determined not to let ‘Polish problems’ disturb their partnership with Stalin.

After the collapse of the rising, the Home Army in the rest of Poland began to disintegrate. A few groups retreated into the forests and carried on a hopeless guerrilla war against the new Communist authorities. Within a few years, anyone who had fought in the Home Army fell under suspicion as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, and thousands were imprisoned. The parachute couriers from Scotland were hunted down by Soviet military intelligence, and some – caught with their radios tuned to the Polish government in London – were tried and shot as ‘imperialist spies’. The true story of the Warsaw Rising, and the main role in the resistance played by the non-Communist Home Army, became forbidden topics.

From trenches in Italy, or from camps in Lowland Scotland, Wojtek’s friends watched this process in deepening despair. Although they did not know it, their country had already been abandoned by Britain and America. At the Teheran summit in late 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that Poland should remain under Soviet occupation when it was liberated and that the new eastern frontier established by the Soviet invasion in 1939, leaving the cities of Lwów and Wilno (Vilnius) in Soviet hands, should become permanent. As compensation, Poland would be given the eastern provinces of Germany. The whole country would be shifted 150 miles to the west.

The Yalta conference in February 1945 did little more than publicly confirm these decisions. Postwar Europe would be divided into ‘spheres of influence’ – with Poland left in the Soviet sphere. Roosevelt and Churchill eagerly accepted Stalin’s assurance that there would be free elections in Poland.

It didn’t escape the soldiers’ notice that Poland was invited to neither of these meetings, nor to the Big Three Potsdam Conference after the Nazi surrender. It was behind closed doors that the ‘Victor Powers’ had dictated Poland’s political future.

General Sikorski had died in a plane crash at Gibraltar in 1943. His successor as prime minister in the London government was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, a peasant politician who tried desperately but vainly to save what he could from the Yalta settlement. But the Communist-led Committee of National Liberation had now become the provisional government of Poland. In July 1945, a few months after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Britain and the United States withdrew recognition from the London government-in-exile and transferred it to the Communist-led regime in Warsaw.

At first, the new regime pretended to be an alliance of ‘progressive forces’ and Mikołajczyk felt able to join a coalition government in Warsaw. But the Communists controlled the security police and within two years the opposition was being crushed by violence and threats. The promised free elections produced crudely faked results. Late in 1947, Mikołajczyk fled Poland, hidden in the back of an American diplomatic car. The Communist monopoly of power soon became complete.

By now, Poland was being ruled by state terror. Veterans of the AK were still being rounded up and imprisoned. The Home Army commanders were kidnapped, taken to Moscow and tried on incredible charges such as ‘collaborating with the Nazis’. Returning soldiers who had served in the Polish armies under British command were treated as suspected traitors and saboteurs.

The Polish troops in the West, by now demobilised and living in temporary camps scattered over England and Scotland, knew what was going on. The postwar British government hoped that they would go back to Poland, but – in a rare act of guilt-driven generosity – promised to care for them if they preferred to stay.

It was a miserable choice that they all faced. Most of them longed to go home and help rebuild their beloved, shattered land. But there they would be rewarded by persecution, by the sadness of life under foreign tyranny. On the other hand, what future could they have in a land whose language they hardly spoke, where they lacked friends, where their skills beyond manual labour and soldiering seemed to count for nothing?

But for the men who lived with Wojtek in the camp at Winfield, the choice was a little easier. Before they came across that bear cub in the Persian hills, they had seen the real face of Soviet Communism and had experienced on their own bodies its brutality, its callous indifference to human suffering, its hunger and its lies. If Poland were to become like that, it would no longer be a country they could live in. These were the men who had travelled the third path, and they knew only too well what they were being offered.

The third path, like the first, began on 17 September 1939, in south-eastern Poland. But this path led eastwards, into the depths of the Soviet Union. A part of the defeated Polish army was able to escape over the border into Romania and Hungary. But some 200,000 others were captured by the Soviet invaders and became prisoners of war. Some 15,000 of them, mostly officers, were moved into three prison camps in Russia and Ukraine: Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków.

All over the regions which had been Poland’s eastern provinces, Poles in responsible jobs – teachers, judges, police chiefs, mayors, editors – were arrested and imprisoned. Under directions from Moscow, the local Communist Parties in what was now Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine filled the posts with their own Belorussian or Ukrainian supporters.

But this turned out to be only the first act in an immense programme designed to obliterate Polish identity for ever in this part of eastern Europe. In February 1940, the Soviet authorities began the first mass expulsion of the Polish civilian population. Troops from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB, as the political security force) herded Polish families to railway stations and crammed them into unheated cattle wagons. From there, the trains set forth on journeys which could last many weeks, and which the old, the youngest children and the sick often did not survive, until the prisoners were dumped in Arctic labour camps, at railheads near Siberian mines or on the empty steppes of Kazakhstan.

More deportations followed in 1940, until by early 1941 something like 1.5 million Poles – Christians and Jews, Communists and Catholics – had been driven into exile. For the gulag empire, the life or death of these slave labourers was a matter of indifference. By the time that they were allowed to leave the camps, in the summer of 1941, between a third and a half of the deported Poles were dead from hunger, exposure, exhaustion and disease.

Poland's Underground State

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 170-173:

The couriers who reached London did not only bring despatches from the resistance. They were themselves direct witnesses to the appalling nature of the Nazi occupation. The messenger Jan Karski laid before British and American statesmen the full news of the Jewish genocide. Jan Nowak (Jeziorański) was sent out of burning Warsaw during the 1944 uprising to plead with the Allies for help. In the West, most people knew that the occupation was brutal, especially in its treatment of the Jews. But the governments of the democracies were slow, even reluctant, to believe the sheer scale and intensity of horror which the Polish messengers and the exile government revealed to them.

In German-occupied Poland, some 5.4 million people died in concentration camps or mass executions, 3 million of them Jews. That figure does not include casualties caused directly by war and, in all, Poland lost roughly a fifth of its pre-war population. Its industry and infrastructure were almost completely destroyed, while much of Poland’s cultural heritage was burned or looted. In 1944, the whole central city of Warsaw was blown up on Hitler’s orders and reduced to rubble.

After the 1939 invasion, the Nazis divided their half of Poland into two regions. The first consisted of territory in the west of the country which was simply absorbed into the Reich, the Polish population being driven out and replaced by German settlers. The second region was the ‘General Government’, a kind of colonial protectorate ruled from Kraków by the tyrannical Hans Frank. It was in the General Government that almost all the extermination camps were constructed for the Jewish Holocaust, the industrial murder of Europe’s Jews by gas. (Auschwitz lay just out[side] the General Government, in the Upper Silesian region absorbed by the Reich.)

In the General Government, the SS began a programme of selective genocide, designed to destroy the Polish elite and to prevent any national revival. Academics, creative intellectuals and the priesthood were targeted. A little later, the German authorities started to round up the first of 3.5 million men and women for slave labour in German war industries or agriculture. Villages which resisted were burned down; their men were shot, the women deported and the children either killed or kidnapped for ‘Germanisation’ in German families.

These conditions brought immense popular support for the resistance. But at first the AK concentrated on building up its strength and acquiring weapons, and it was not until 1942 that widespread attacks on the German occupiers began. The price for resistance, even for disobeying regulations, was usually death. In the cities, the Germans carried out random mass round-ups of ‘hostages’ who were lined up against walls and shot, their bodies left lying on the street as a warning against defiance or disobedience. Ghettos were set up in the towns, as a prelude to the Jewish genocide, and the penalty for hiding an escaped Jew was immediate execution for the rescuer and his or her whole family.

In spite of these risks, the underground state survived and proliferated. This was not a new idea. During and after the January rising of 1863, the insurgents had established a ‘parallel nation’ which preserved Polish identity through illegal publishing, education and even clandestine courts. The AK’s arms and explosives were captured from the Germans, and later parachuted in from the West. But the resistance was able to do little to help the Warsaw Ghetto Rising in April 1943, as Jewish fighters decided to die fighting rather than go passively to the gas chambers of Treblinka.

By the end of 1943, AK partisan units were in control of many districts of rural Poland, especially the forests and hills of the old eastern borderlands which now lay behind German lines. But once again, strategic problems emerged. In 1943, the plan of the government-in-exile and the AK command inside Poland had been to harry the Germans as they retreated and then to join the Soviet armies as they drove the Wehrmacht out of Poland. But early in 1944, as Soviet troops advanced across the pre-war Polish frontiers, it became clear that the Russians had no intention of restoring Polish authority in the regions they had seized in 1939.

Worse still, they treated the AK units which welcomed them as potential enemies. The Polish partisans were offered a choice between arrest and conscription into the Red Army. Places liberated by the Home Army were handed over to the People’s Army, the Communist partisans, and to their Committee for National Liberation (PKWN). This body had been set up in Moscow as the nucleus for a future Communist government of Poland.

Aiding the Polish Resistance

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 169-170:

The second path back to a free Poland lay through resistance within Poland itself. This meant almost exclusively resistance to the German occupation. The massive deportations of the Polish population from the eastern borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union made partisan warfare there almost impossible to organise. In any case, the Nazi invasion in June 1941 transformed the Soviet Union from enemy into ‘gallant ally’.

As the September campaign ended in 1939, Polish units – cavalry as well as infantry – were already taking to the forests and mountains. In cities and towns, centres of patriotic conspiracy sprang up. Poland had been defeated but had not surrendered, and there were to be almost no collaborators with the Nazi occupation. As the historian Norman Davies has put it, ‘there was never any Polish Quisling, for the simple reason that in Poland the Nazis never really tried to recruit one.’ Their long-term plan for the Poles was to enslave and ultimately to exterminate them, not to enlist them as allies. This gave the Poles a simple moral choice: to fight or to be obliterated.

By November 1939, Sikorski in France was in contact with many of these resistance groups, drawing them together into a coherent command structure answering to the government-in-exile. The movement eventually took the name of Armia Krajowa (Home Army) or ‘AK’ for short. After Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, a separate, militant but much smaller Communist resistance appeared, the ‘People’s Guard’ or ‘People’s Army’ (AL). But its relations with the AK were wary, and it took orders from the underground Communist leadership rather than from Sikorski’s government in London.

As German repression and deportations for forced labour grew more intense, the AK was joined by ‘peasant battalions’ raised from the countryside. By 1943, it had become the biggest resistance movement in the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe, eventually numbering over 400,000 men and women. But the AK itself was only the military wing of a complete underground state, equipped with a Delegatura representing the exile government, with ‘councils’ drawn from the main political parties, and with most of the apparatus of a normal country down to a chain of clandestine universities and a vigorous illegal press.

For the London government-in-exile, keeping in touch with the AK and its affiliates was difficult; dangerous but crucial. In Scotland, at training centres at Polmont and Largo or at the Polish ‘spy school’ in Glasgow, agents were trained as parachutists and radio operators and dropped back into Poland from long-range aircraft. Many were lost, but gradually regular and reliable radio communication between the Delegatura, the AK command and the London government was established. Even riskier was the return journey of couriers from Poland, sometimes smuggled on neutral ships through Scandinavia, sometimes – later in the war – picked up by Allied light aircraft from secret airstrips. (In July 1944, the AK used one of these flights to deliver to the British the working parts and guidance system of a prototype V-2 rocket, stolen from a Nazi missile range.)

Era of Polish Partitions & Rebellions

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 155-157:

But after the Second Partition, Poland’s last king – Stanisław August – and his advisers suddenly launched a dazzling programme of political and social reform, based on the principles of the American Revolution and the European Enlightenment. Poland set up the first ministry of education in Europe, and in 1791 adopted the Constitution of the Third of May, modernising the whole state structure and introducing a limited version of civil rights.

It was far too late. The Constitution enraged Catherine II, the Russian empress; she saw it as a deliberate provocation which would bring the democratic principles of the French Revolution up to her own borders. The armies tramped forward again, and the Third Partition of 1795 finally wiped what was left of Poland off the map. The eastern regions, later including Warsaw, went to Russia. The Prussian kings took what remained of western Poland, while the Habsburg Empire held southern Poland and the province of Galicia, including the city of Kraków.

There followed 123 years in which Poland did not officially exist. The three partitioning powers agreed that the very name should never be used again. Especially in the Russian area, there was a sustained effort to abolish Polish identity by suppressing the language, discriminating against the Catholic faith and criminalising those who tried to celebrate Poland’s rich culture or tell the truth about its history.

This policy was an almost total failure. Polish national identity retreated into a continuous national conspiracy against the foreign occupants, which preserved culture and tradition and often erupted into armed insurrections. The first of these took place in 1795, as the Third Partition closed over the country. Led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Wallace-like popular hero, peasant armies won early victories until they were overwhelmed by Russian numbers. A few years later, in 1812, Napoleon promised to restore Polish independence as he invaded Russia. Tens of thousands of Poles joined his armies, fighting not only in Russia but in Austria, Italy, Spain and even in Haiti. They shed their blood in vain, but the memory of Napoleonic reforms to Poland’s legal and administrative system was preserved, and revived when Poland regained its independence a century later.

In 1830, another insurrection – the November Uprising – broke out in Warsaw and rapidly spread. It took the Russians a year of hard fighting to defeat the rebels. Fierce repression followed, and almost the whole intellectual elite of Poland, most of whom had fought in or helped to organise the rising, went into exile in western Europe. The Great Emigration in effect made Paris the political capital of Poland for the next 80 years. And for the rest of the century Poland’s literary and musical culture – now reaching its dazzling zenith in the work of the poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and the composer Frédéric Chopin – was almost entirely created in France.

There were other, lesser, insurrections and a network of Polish patriotic conspiracies spread over Europe. But the next full-scale rebellion – the January Uprising – did not take place until 1863. Once again, the Poles fought in their streets and in their forests, and held out for over a year. Once again, the collapse of the rising was followed by hangings and police terror, and by the familiar sight of columns of chained men and women being marched away across the snow to Siberian captivity.

But the disaster of the January Uprising led to a change of mood in Poland. There was a feeling that the time for ‘romantic’, sacrificial rebellions was over. Instead, Poland should concentrate on patient, ‘positivist’ campaigns to build up the nation’s economic strength and modernise its social structures. In the Prussian partition, which after 1871 became part of a united German Empire, Polish farmers fought a long and successful struggle by legal and peaceful means to defend their land against Bismarck’s policy of German colonisation.

When Scots Profited in Poland

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 152-154:

But Poland was not always a victim nation. In the early Middle Ages, the Christian kingdom of Poland united with the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the ‘Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’, and for several centuries the Commonwealth dominated east-central Europe. It was a strange, ramshackle structure, in many ways archaic but in other ways curiously appealing to the political ideals of our own democracy. The Commonwealth, ruled by an elected king, was multi-ethnic and in general tolerant of differences. Ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Tatars, Ruthenians, Germans, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Armenians and Jews managed to live together, culturally distinct but united in loyalty to the Polish Crown. The diversity of faiths – Catholic Christian, Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Calvinist, Islamic and Judaic – caused no serious problems until the Counter-Reformation began to impose a dominant Catholic identity upon Poland.

And Poland became rich. From the fifteenth century on, the demand for Polish wheat to feed the rapidly-growing populations of the Netherlands, northern France and England began to make profits for Polish landowners. It was now that the Polish connection with Scotland began. From the early sixteenth century, carefully recruited groups of Scottish settlers sailed across the North Sea and the Baltic to Danzig (Gdańsk) and fanned out across the basin of the Vistula river. Along its tributaries, they founded small, tightly structured colonies which organised and financed the transport of grain down to the Baltic. Their numbers are disputed, but the Scots who joined these colonies over their two centuries of peak prosperity, most of them from the east and north-east coast of Scotland, must have been counted in the tens of thousands.

It was Scotland’s first planned stride into the outside world. And yet this episode was until recently almost completely forgotten by Scottish historians – although well remembered by the Poles. Scots enjoying the Crown’s protection became generals, bankers and even potentates – Alexander Chalmers from Dyce, near Aberdeen, was several times mayor of Warsaw. The traveller William Lithgow, from Lanark, who walked through Poland in the early seventeenth century, wrote that ‘for auspiciousness, I may rather tearme [Poland] to be a Mother or Nurse, for the youth and younglings of Scotland who are yearly sent hither in great numbers . . . And certainely Polland may be tearmed in this kind to be the mother of our Commons and the first commencement of all our best Merchants’ wealth, or at least most part of them.’

But by the early eighteenth century, the Commonwealth was growing weaker. On either flank of Poland, new and hostile states were emerging. The duchy of Muscovy expanded to become Russia of the Tsars, consolidating central power over what is now European Russia and pushing eastwards to grasp the infinite wealth of Siberia. To the west, small and backward German princedoms along the Baltic coast now merged under the new and formidable kingdom of Prussia.

The Polish Commonwealth was really a ‘pre-modern’ state. Central authority was weak, regional diversity was wide and political influence lay in the hands of the nobility. The new Russia and Prussia, by contrast, represented a very different and ‘modern’ model of power. These were grimly centralised and authoritarian states, intolerant of ethnic or religious diversity and – above all – obsessed with the training and equipping of large professional armies.

Culturally, the Polish Commonwealth considered itself more civilised than its big neighbours, whom Poles regarded as primitive. In return, the despots of Prussia and Russia loathed the relative freedom of Polish society, regarding it as a threat to their own strictly controlled systems of government. In addition, both had historical reasons to resent Poland. On the Prussian side, the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in the fifteenth century, frustrating their drive to conquer the whole Baltic region. The Russians had suffered repeated Polish invasions and political interference in earlier centuries, in the times of Muscovy’s weakness, and saw Poland as a deadly rival for control over Ukraine and Russia’s western borderlands.