Reply To: Poland 1939 – Preparing for 80th Anniversary of World War II

[yavasaParticipant 4740xp 2]

Yep, we are rolling out our super ultra Pz I and Pz II plus some 7TP’s and TKS 😀 with @oriskany it’s going to be hell of a show of I class weapons 😀

@jamesevans140 as @oriskany has already posted the doctrine was being rewritten at that time. Poland as many other states took the Spanish Civil War experiences as a proof that tanks don’t matter as independent formations but should still be used primarily to support infantry units. When we will go back a little bit in time you can find a country reestablished at Versailles after 123 years under occupation/partition by three of it’s former neighbors. (It’s seems democracy was a bad idea for some reason in the XVIII century <whistles>). So you regain independence in 1918 and you have a country that needs to put together three parts that were governed by three different states and have different currency, manpower, level of industrialization, believe it or not level of corruption, technology and so on and so on… To complicate things a bit the Soviets decide that’s a good time to spread the ideas of communism and start a war with you that surprisingly you win. From this victory you come to the conclusions that: your biggest threat lies in the East, in the East there are bad roads so cavalry is the way to go, armored trains were successfully used so let’s use them again, you prepare for war against Russia not Germany. By 1939 the country spends a lot of it’s budget on militarization but it’s still nothing compared to Germany (well suddenly they are the threat) which has a thriving industry, more citizens, more wealth and is basically surrounding you by slowly tearing apart your neighbors in a peaceful manner.

So, as mentioned above the Poles did not believe in independent armored units on a divisional scale plus they had not enough money to equip those. In 1939 around 805 fighting vehicles in the Polish Army from which only 10% was a part of big motorized units and by big I mean brigade level. 30% was a part of cavalry units (8 brigades from which two have been not fully motorized ), 25% in infantry units, 25% was the reserve and 7% were armored trains. In Polish motorized brigade you could find one fighting vehicle per 100 soldiers. In comparison in German Armored Divisions the number was 1 to 30.