Category Archives: war

by | 5 April 2026 · 12:04 am

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Germany, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by | 4 April 2026 · 6:47 am

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under education, Germany, labor, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, religion, slavery, USSR, war

by | 3 April 2026 · 12:59 am

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.)

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Germany, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, war

by | 2 April 2026 · 12:48 am

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under language, France, religion, war, democracy, migration, Russia, nationalism, Germany, Poland, Austria

by | 30 March 2026 · 6:44 am

Polish General Maczek in Scotland

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 22-24:

Younger generations have little notion of the huge number of people that moved in great waves through Scotland during and immediately after the war. Many were military personnel sent to the oddest corners of the country in strategic deployments against the German juggernaut. Tens of thousands of soldiers were bivouacked in normally sparsely populated areas of countryside. The military equivalent of fully fledged townships would spring up in fields virtually overnight, like mushrooms. It meant a tremendous influx of people into rural areas, and the Borders was no exception.

During the war years a large contingent of Polish soldiers lived in camps in nearby Symington and Douglas. They were under the charge of General Stanisław Maczek who was impressed by the warm reception from local communities. But then news of the Poles’ courage and tenacity in battle had reached Scotland long before the men, so the Scots already knew the value of those soldiers as allies.

A legendary commander, respected by friend and foe alike, General Maczek led the only Polish units not to lose a single battle after Poland was invaded by the Germans in 1939. Under blitzkreig attack, his forces made a dogged defence but their efforts were eclipsed when Russia invaded from the rear and they were forced to withdraw. Maczek was loved by his soldiers, who called him Baca, a Galician name for a shepherd, not dissimilar from the Scottish Gaelic word, Buachaille.

When Germany finally capitulated, General Maczek went on to become commanding officer of all Polish forces in the United Kingdom until their demobilisation in 1947. After the war he chose to remain in Scotland, a de Gaulle-like figure who epitomised the struggle for a free Poland. Like many other Polish soldiers, he felt unable to return to Poland under the Soviet regime.

The thousands of Polish servicemen left their mark on the Scottish Borders in many ways. Some stayed and created new lives and new families. One of their most enduring gifts was the open air map of Scotland they built in the grounds of what is now the Barony Castle Hotel in Eddleston, Peebleshire. While fighting in Holland, General Maczek once had been shown an impressive outdoor map of land and water in the Netherlands, demonstrating the working of the waterways which had proved such an obstacle to the Polish forces’ progress in 1944. At Eddleston the general and his fellow exiles decided to replicate the Love at First Sight 19 map; they conceived the Great Polish Map of Scotland as a permanent, open-air, three-dimensional reminder of Scotland’s hospitality to their compatriots. In 1975 the coastline and relief map of Scotland were laid out precisely by Kazimierz Trafas, a young geography student from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków. An infrastructure was built to surround it with a ‘sea’ of water and, at the general’s request, a number of Scotland’s main rivers on the map were even arranged to flow from headwaters pumped into the interiors of its mountains. It was, and still is, an amazing feat of engineering and design.

Sadly, it was allowed to fall into disrepair. After long years of dereliction, the first steps are now being taken towards its restoration. One day soon people will again marvel at General Maczek’s Great Polish Map of Scotland in the grounds of Barony Castle, once the home of the Murrays of Elibank, and later the Black Barony Hotel. In the war years the house and grounds seem to have been in use by Polish forces, and even then an outdoor outline map was one of the features used to help plan the defence of the Scottish coastline which was under threat of invasion after the fall of Norway. Whether this was really the case, I have not been able to ascertain. Returned to commercial use in the late 1940s, years later the hotel came into the possession of a member of the Polish community who had been billeted there in wartime. He was a great friend of the general, and gave him permanent use of a suite in the hotel.

General Maczek never did return to live in his beloved Poland; by the time it achieved genuine freedom, age and infirmity had taken their toll. In his later years he lived in Edinburgh. He died in 1994 at the age of 102, his name still synonymous with the history of World War II.

Leave a comment

Filed under biography, Britain, Germany, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, war

by | 29 March 2026 · 5:32 pm

King’s Own Scottish Borderers

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 21-22:

In passing, it should be said that all Borderers have an abiding affection for the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Raised in 1689 to defend Edinburgh against the Jacobites, the Kosbies, as the regiment is often called by the general public (but never by the soldiers themselves), has a long and illustrious history. Still traditionally recruiting from Dumfries and Galloway, Lanarkshire and the Borders, it has served in many campaigns including the Napoleonic Wars, both World Wars and the Gulf War. There are six Victoria Crosses among its soldiers. In August 2006, despite a groundswell of protest, the regiment was amalgamated with the Royal Scots to form the Royal Scots Borderers and became the 1st Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland.

In the KOSB my grandfather achieved the rank of colour sergeant and was a strict disciplinarian with his men. When his regiment was back in Scotland and the men were returning to their barracks in Berwick upon Tweed after being out on military manoeuvres, he would first have them run up Halidon Hill and then double-time them across to Winfield Camp at Sunwick to have a brew with Wojtek. It was a social cuppa that both the squaddies and the bear enjoyed greatly. There can’t have been many farms in Scotland where you would come across a man talking over the fence to a bear which appeared to be hanging on his every word. But Sunwick was one of them.

Well before Wojtek’s arrival in Berwickshire, Polish soldiers had arrived in large numbers in many of the towns and villages along the Scottish Borders. In 1942 they came to the pleasant and peaceful town of Duns. Whereas some troops had received a lukewarm welcome when passing through, Duns did the Polish troops proud. The cheers of the townsfolk were tinged with more than a little relief. Earlier, when the Poles’ tanks and heavy artillery were first seen on the horizon, there had been a local scare that Duns was being invaded by enemy forces. When it was discovered the new troops were Poles, the flags on the street came out in earnest. Younger generations have little notion of the huge number of people that moved in great waves through Scotland during and immediately after the war. Many were military personnel sent to the oddest corners of the country in strategic deployments against the German juggernaut. Tens of thousands of soldiers were bivouacked in normally sparsely populated areas of countryside. The military equivalent of fully fledged townships would spring up in fields virtually overnight, like mushrooms. It meant a tremendous influx of people into rural areas, and the Borders was no exception.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, war

by | 15 March 2026 · 7:28 am

Baseball Research in Occupied Japan

Here’s a book that appeared just in time for the latest World Baseball Classic and the latest Asian Studies Association meeting. I’ll have to restrain myself from sharing too many excerpts from it.

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 4-6:

American faith in baseball as constitutive of “all that was good” led the authorities during the U.S. Occupation of Japan immediately after World War II to sponsor its resurgence. Baseball in Japan had come on hard times under wartime austerity partly because it was the enemy’s game, and partly because it was thought to be indulgent, a kind of luxury that was also called the “enemy” in a wartime slogan, zeitaku wa teki (“luxury is the enemy”). The Americans assumed baseball would help democratize postwar Japan because of its intrinsic American-ness. But it wasn’t as if baseball was a foreign pastime. It had been a vibrant part of Japanese life since the late nineteenth century. Japanese went along with the American discourse on baseball and democracy for their own reasons, but mainly so they could play and watch baseball again. In my capacity as president of a small-town league I had already been primed to consider the social impact of youth baseball. As a historian I perceived an opportunity to examine how two distinctive national cultures imbued the game with different values.

An alternative and immediately more obvious research question was, simply, why were the Japanese teams that arrived in Williamsport so consistently among the best? Over the course of my research the American popular press reported what I already knew, that Japanese teams practiced year-round and dawn to dusk on weekends. But surely there was more to it than that. There is a vibrant community of scholars and knowledgeable fans writing on the Japanese high school and professional games, but a literature survey showed no scholarship on Japanese Little League—none in English, and very little in Japanese. The Japanese-language studies focused for the most part on the deleterious effects on young arms throwing hardball, plus a few sociological studies from the 1970s. For a historian, it is exciting to come across a topic that no one has written about. And I felt I had special insight since postwar Japanese history was my specialty and I had a half dozen years’ experience helping to run a Little League in the United States.

A visit to Little League’s Peter J. McGovern Museum suggested reconstructing this history was going to involve much more than the archival work of conventional history research. Apart from some marginally relevant correspondence, a smattering of mentions in Little League newsletters, and the occasional recent testimonial by visiting U.S. veterans who happened to have played some small role in its origins, not much documentation remained from the early years. As archivist Adam Thompson explained, Little League had moved offices every few years as the international program grew, and likely much of the documentation was simply tossed.

Although Little League Japan had been founded in 1964, their head office was small and had no archive. What I discovered on my first visit to Tokyo was that no one knew much, and those that knew a little often mis-remembered, usually because of logical but faulty assumptions. The Little League Japan leadership provided a vague explanation that Little League got started on American military bases and from there spread to local Japanese communities, and that at some point the trading company Mitsui Bussan and the media company Fuji Sankei began to support the program, as they still do. But beyond that, memories of dates and names for the early years were as misty as a riverside field on a cool autumn morning. For example, the website for the Kunitachi League, the first Japanese team to play in the World Series, indicated that the Little League got started in that western Tokyo suburb in 1949; but a search of back numbers of the U.S. military’s Pacific Stars and Stripes revealed that Little League did not appear in Japan until 1954, and then only inside the American military dependent community. In 2015, when prominent Chōfu Little League and Little Senior (teenage) League president Hayashi Kazuo was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, it was stated that he started the formal Little League organization in 1964 with Mitsui and Fuji Sankei support. But one of my earliest contacts from Mitsui with firsthand knowledge insisted his company didn’t get involved until 1969. So, I knew if I embarked on this project, the first steps would demand an old-fashioned kind of history. Before considering the big questions, I had to deduce the nitty-gritty developments from as many sources as I could: newspaper clippings, old commemorative pamphlets, municipal histories, contemporary sociological studies, interviews with former players, as well as the various baseball episodes in contemporary literature, film, school readers, and the graphic youth cultures of manga and anime.

Leave a comment

Filed under baseball, economics, education, Japan, military, nationalism, U.S., war

by | 12 March 2026 · 2:14 am

Home Army Monument, Partizan Cemetery, Kielce, Poland

Pamięci Żołnierzy Armii Krajowej [AK]
In memory of the soldiers of the Home Army

Oddziału Partyzanckiego “Wybranieccy”
Branch of Partizans “The Chosen”

Walczącego od Marca 1943 do Lipca 1944 na terenie Gór Świętokrzyskich
Fighting from March 1943 to July 1944 in the area of the Holy Cross Mountains

1 Companii “Wybranieckiej”, 1 Batalionu, 4 Pułku Piechoty, Legionów AK
1st Company of the Chosen, 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, Home Army Legions

Walczącej od Lipca 1944 do Stycznia 1945 w Akcji “Burza” na terenie Kielecczyzny
Fighting from July 1944 to January 1945 in Operation Storm in the Kielce region

Dowódcy “Wybranieckich” Mariana Sołtysiaka “Barabasza” 01.02.1918 – 18.12.1995
Commander of “The Chosen” Marian Sołtysiak aka Barabasz 1 Feb 1918 – 18 Dec 1995

Kawalera Orderu Virtuti Militari i Dwukrotnie Krzyża Walecznych
Knight of the Order of Military Virtue and Twice the Cross of Valor

“Nauczyłeś nas w walce tak kochać Polske aby jej oddać bez reszty wszystko – nawet siebie.”
“You taught us in the fight to love Poland so much that we would give her our all, even ourselves.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Germany, language, military, nationalism, Poland, war

by | 10 March 2026 · 6:24 am

Kapuściński as Catastrophist

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 115-117:

I turned to a reporter friend who writes about the Czech Republic to ask how and where to look, and whether such an account did actually exist. He helped me get in touch with Jaroslav Bouček, son of the late ‘commander’ of the Congolese expedition, and this led me to a radically different story from the one presented in The Soccer War.

It turned out that Bouček Jr had written an essay titled ‘In Deepest Congo’. In it, he compares Kapuściński’s account with his father’s, which he found in the National Archive in Prague, along with his Cairo diary, his letters and dispatches.

Jaroslav Bouček wonders if Kapuściński’s expressive depiction of the dangerous journey to Congo, compared with the ‘civilian’ mood of Bouček’s account, arose from the fact that it was the first time Kapuściński had ever found himself in the dramatic situation of civil war in an African country, and so he took the verbal threats addressed to the ‘suspicious foreigners’ quite literally. As a reporter, Jarda Bouček, on the other hand, was a veteran of several armed conflicts, and ‘verbal threats did not throw him off balance to that extent’.

From Bouček’s account it emerges that the journalists certainly did not have to leave Stanleyville for fear of losing their lives because of impetuous mob law imposed by Africans on whites. The Czechoslovak reporter’s son writes:

Before leaving for Congo, Bouček wrote to his editors that he would be able to stay in Stanleyville for about a month, and then he would have to come back to buy medicine, which in view of some chronic ailments he could not do without. His exit visa from Congo was signed by Louis Lumumba, brother of the murdered prime minister; before his departure, Bouček had arranged a return visa, as he foresaw that he would go back to Congo again.

According to Bouček’s account, the reporters left Congo because their money had run out, they weren’t sure if their dispatches were getting through, and an opportunity had presented itself in the form of a UN plane flying to Burundi. Bouček challenges Kapuściński’s account of the UN staff ’s alleged reluctance to help their group; unlike Kapuściński, he claims they knew from the start that they were flying to Usumbura. Bouček Jr again:

Writing further about how the Belgians were determined to kill them all, [Kapuściński] probably let himself be excessively frightened by the bravado-filled utterances of some young Belgian officers who cast swaggering remarks in their direction, such as, ‘Best shoot these journalists right away!’

In no instance did Bouček feel fear that the Belgians were planning to kill them. Usumbura was a civilian airport; in addition to the soldiers, the civilian airport staff was there too, as well as some customs officers, pilots and stewardesses from Sabena airlines, and passengers who would have involuntarily been witnesses to such a crime.

But above all – what sense would it have made for the Belgians to put to death five journalists who were officially accredited by the UN?

The younger Bouček sums up the situation by saying that ‘the expedition to Congo did not shake’ his father ‘in the least’.

Many of Kapuściński’s friends and acquaintances think he was a catastrophist, in the sense that he could blow up small incidents to unimaginable proportions and present ordinary fears as the end of the world.

‘I divided everything he said by at least two,’ says Adam Daniel Rotfeld, smiling.

The words of one of his friends come back to me – Kapuściński created his own courage in literature; he knew he was different.

Part of the legend of Kapuściński the reporter is based on the several times he avoided execution by firing squad. We know about all those incidents from him alone. In Bolivia, as he tells us, he was saved by a chauffeur who managed to intoxicate the officer who apparently wanted to shoot Kapuściński as a communist spy. In another of his accounts, after a coup in Ghana they wanted to shoot him as a spy working for Kwame Nkrumah, who had just been deposed.

He was also reportedly sentenced to be shot dead in Usumbura at the end of the Congolese expedition, after being locked up in a barred room at the airport along with the Czechoslovak and Soviet journalists. In a 1978 interview with Wojciech Giełżyński, he refers to ‘when I was in prison in Usumbura sentenced to be shot’. ‘I had a death sentence, I escaped shooting by a miracle,’ he says of this incident in another interview, also from the 1970s.

Leave a comment

Filed under Belgium, Congo, Czechia, Ghana, military, nationalism, publishing, U.N., war

by | 9 March 2026 · 9:49 pm

Zygmunt Kwas, Kielce Boy Scout

Adapted from Muzeum Historii Kielc biography:

Zygmunt Kwas (aka Kościelny) was born in Kielce on 18 February 1926. From 1937 to 1939, he belonged to the 12th Kielce Scout Troop, along with Wojtek Szczepaniak; he joined the clandestine Scouting movement in November 1939. Together with Stanisław Wdowicz (aka Borzęcki), whom he met while working as a messenger at the Ludwików Steelworks, he published the Scout magazine Powstaniec [Insurgent]. Along with his friend Zygmunt Pietrzak (aka Bekas), he joined the [anticommunist] Nie organization in 1945. In May of that year, he freed the wounded Pietrzak, arrested by the Security Office, from the prison hospital by disarming a prison guard.

In 1946, Kwas was arrested and imprisoned in Kielce prison. He was subjected to a brutal interrogation. On 13 September, under unclear circumstances, he was shot in his cell by a guard and died shortly thereafter. The funeral was attended not only by Scouts from the Kielce “Gray Ranks” but also by numerous Scouts from all units, as well as schoolchildren, acquaintances, and friends. He was buried at the Old Cemetery in Kielce.

Since 1993, the street running along the Old Cemetery, near his grave, formerly that of [Soviet General] Ivan Konev, has been named after him.

Much more here.

Leave a comment

Filed under war, biography, nationalism, USSR, Germany, Poland