Word: rydz
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...help him in the task which the mad whims of geography, history and Adolf Hitler thrust upon him last week, Marshal Smigly-Rydz had an able and unpronounceable panel of generals and colonels. Also behind him was Poland's Parliament, 96 businessmen, professors, writers in the Senate, 208 bureaucrats in the Sejm, 304 yes-men chosen from a maze of political parties by a rigged system of electoral committees. This parliamentary front was assembled last week to enact emergency war measures...
...more important, of course, were those 4,000,000 assistants who were the hope and sinew of General Smigly-Rydz's defense: the standing army of 18,000 officers, 37,000 noncoms, 211,000 privates, 27,000 frontier defense corps (Soviet border), 29,000 State police (on a military basis); the 1,500,000 trained reserves, some of whom are poorly equipped; the 2,000,000 untrained, undernourished conscripts; the 6,000 sailors; the 3,950,000 horses; the inadequate 28,000 motor vehicles; the 10,000 pilots, machine gunners, mechanics of the air force...
...enough trucks and planes, with their share of guts but not too many guns, was undertaking last week was not just a bilateral frip-frap over a port called Danzig and a 50-mile wide carpet to the sea. It was, in the eyes of General Smigly-Rydz, a holy war. It was a war to stop the Devil, A. Hitler, before he put horns, cleft feet and an arrowy tail on every good Catholic in Poland. It was a war in which Providence would play a part. "We shall win," declared the Premier, "by the Holy Passion...
...urgent war to keep Poland from falling apart. General Smigly-Rydz's main concern was not whether it was to be a world war or a local war, whether casualties were to be ten or 10,000,000. What was important was that Poland, which had so often divided, should not divide again...
...being fought, as no war had ever been fought before, to keep a country together against the black forces of paganism. And it was up to 4,000,000 men aided by the indirect action of some Allies, to do the job. "The Army," said Edward Smigly-Rydz once, "is the national glue...