The Battle of the Rapido River began in Italy when the 36th Infantry Division crossed the river at night. They'd establish a beachhead, but things would not go well. Within a couple of days, the 36th would have to withdraw back across the river.
The attack, widely regarded as producing a disaster, was ordered by Gen. Mark Clark over the objection of the 36th's commanding officer, Gen. Fred Walker, who had experience with a disastrous river crossing in World War One.
Walker, who at 56 years of age was the oldest divisional commander in the Army at the time, was correct in his assessment.
The 36th Infantry Division assigned to the task was a division of the Texas National Guard.
Walker, who complained that Clark and Gen. Keys were ignorant of the difficulties of the assault, was in ill health at the time, but a very good officer. Helping to make up for his physical condition was the fact that two of his sons were on his staff. He was returned to the United States in June, where he went on to command the Infantry School. In spite of ill health, he lived until 1969, dying at age 82.
Winston Churchill met with the Polish Government In Exile to attempt to convince the Poles to accept the Curzon Line for discussion purposes. Churchill promised that he'd resist Soviet efforts, in exchange, to influence the makeup of the post-war government.
By radek.s - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1720759
The Curzon Line had been first proposed as a demarcation between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union following World War One by Lord Curzon and Herbert James Paton, and it was based on demographics. Poles did live to the east of the line, but they became increasingly mixed with other populations in what has been termed, quite appropriate, as "the Bloodlands' in a fantastic book on the post World War One era of the region by Timothy D. Snyder. Like every other imperial domain in Europe, Imperial Russia had regions of strong ethnic uniformity and others of mix ethnicity. The region that became the westernmost region of Poland had a large Polish population, but also had a Belarusian population and a Ukrainian one, as well as many areas of Jewish populations. From 1918 into the early 1920s, every country in the region, to include Lithuania, had fought to establish their borders. Poland had been remarkably successful, throwing back a massive Red Army assault in the Russo Polish War, but even at that the Second Polish Republic did not extend as far to the east as it had originally sought to.
No comments:
Post a Comment