As a respite from all those frequently republished photographs from September 1939 of German tanks romping it up over Polish Cavalry units, it would be nice just one time to see some photographs from
Poland taken at the exact opposite end of the war - April 1945.
By this point the Germans were making more, and better, tanks than they had ever done previously - but to what end ?
They were out of tank fuel.
So they demanded Polish farmers cover the tank transporters with hay and hitch them up to their teams of horses and oxen.
Then slowly, very slowly, the panzers would be moved up to the west bank of the Vistula River, to await the final Russian offensive across the river from the east bank and straight into Berlin.
The tanks would be buried, hull down , at the bottom back side of slight hills , their turrets pointed at the most likely crossing points.
The very opposition of Lightning War or Blitzkreig.
Now there was no more fuel dumps, but the Polish horses did pause frequently, for a leisurely
refueling of grass and and equally leisurely dump of ( ooops ! - can't say more - this is a family blog !)
For once, the Germans couldn't simply shoot the Poles, at least not the Polish horses, in an effort to make them move faster.
At long last, war for the Germans Overmen moved at the speed of Nature, not Man.
Now I call that poetic - and I think it is worth a photo.
Funny those German amateur photo snappers, usually so omnipresent at scenes of martial triumph or whenever partisan children are being hung, seem not to have churned up any photos of tanks disguised as hay rides plodding down the road to Gotterdammerung at the speed of ox....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
Does sound like 'poetic justice'.
ReplyDeletePoetic justice yes - but without photographs,this fact will never be POPULARLY known - never seen as photographic justice.
ReplyDeleteOne gruesome photograph from inside Auschwitz's death chamber, smuggled to the West, might have done what thousands of accurate, credible verbal reports could never do during WWII - move hearts to action.