I was watching a show on The History Channel the other day which dealt with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Apparently, the Poles sent their cavalry against the Wehrmacht’s Panzers. I couldn’t help but giggle and wonder if this was the origin of the steretype of their stupidity. Is this the case?
This has come up before on the SDMB. Claims of pOlish stupidity predate WWII. The real reason, I’m convinced, is that the reputation arose in America, based on peoples’ experience with recent Polish immigrants, and for the same reason that every new immigrant group gets a bad rep. You have generally young, inexperienced people coming to a land where they are grossly unfamiliar with the culture and language, so they are going to be slow in the uptake and unfamiliar with everything they do. Naturally the locals thought them stupid and mentally deficient – heck, they don’t even know how to talk! It probably didn’t help that a lot of immigrants were farm folk and rural folk and were often dumped in the cities – then you get the city slicker vs. rube business on top of it all.
This isn’t conjecture – all four of my grandparents came over from Poland. One grandmother got a job cleaning at the old Waldorf-Astoria – the one that used to be where the Empire State Building now is. They gave her a bucket of cleaning solution to wash floors with. She plunged her hands into it to wet the scrubbing brushes – and peeled the skin from her hand. Nobody told her that it had to be diluted. Or else she didn’t understand them. Imagine what the head janitor had to say about that.
It probably didn’t help, either, that the new Polish immigrants spoke a Slavic tongue with no obvious relationship to the Romance languages that the Americans might have recognized. Not only did they speak a foreign language, it wasn’t even a respectable one like French! It was probably inevitable that the Poles were seen as slow, stupid, and dirty.
As for the Polish Cavalry, I don’t know about the circumstances, so I can’t comment. I do know that some officers felt that the Polish Cavalry would be far more able to negotiate mountainous and broken terrain than even the Panzers, although this doesn’t seem to have helped them. (See the quote in Christopher Cerf’s The Experts Speak). If they did attack tanks, it may have been a gesture of defiance and a last resort – attack instead of surrender. Certainly the Polish pilots weren’t spoken of as ignorant or stupid (see, for example, Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape. In the film, Charles Bronson as Danny is pretty clearlt meant to be one of the Polish pilots.)
The term poleock means “young eligible male” in Polish.
Pollack is a kind of fish.
Pole-axe is some kind of axe on a pole, I suspect.
I’d heard this too. Stories of brave Polish horsemen charging the tanks, trying to ram their lances down the cannon barrels. I’d also heard that Polish command told the soldiers that the German tanks were fake, which was why they attacked them so vigilantly.
A quick websearch seems to indicate it isn’t true, though. While everyone agrees that Poland did use cavalry during the Second World War, they also say that the horses were used for transportation, not to carry soldiers into battle. When Poland was conquered, Goebbels (allegedly) staged some horse-mounted attacks against the tanks in front of cameras, creating the myth.
Two of the sources (not the most reliable in the world, I know):
http://www.achtungpanzer.com/polcamp.htm
http://www.gamerz.net/archives/weirdwars@gamerz.net/200106/msg00380.html
A couple of previous threads on the same subject:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=90169
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=36844
You should take anything you see on the History Channel with a grain of salt. In 1939 the Poles knew full well what modern armor could do. The “silly Poles, launching cavalry charges against German tanks” story was Nazi propaganda designed to make their enemies look foolish.
The story grew out of a real engagement where a Polish cavalry regiment on a sabotage mission unexpectedly came across a German infantry battalion on the march. They charged the infantry, who, caught unawares, were cut down. Unfortunately however for the Poles, German armor appeared before they could withdraw and they were decimated in the counterattack. Italian journalists viewing the carnage afterwards were told that it was the result of a Polish cavalry charge against the tanks and the the myth spread from there.
Well thanks for debunking that myth. So much for the credibility of the fricking History Channel. More like Misstory Channel. And sorry bibliophage about not searching first - I was specifically interested if it had any origin in the cavalry/panzer myth.
No it doesn’t.
“Polak” (which is how it is spelled in Polish) simply means a Polish person, by default male. The corresponding word for a female Polish person is “Polka” (just like the dot or the song).
It certainly does not mean young or eligible. It just means, well, Polack.
-mok (nie jestem polakiem, ale moja zona jest)
Dobre po³udnie mok. Dumny byæ jêzyk polski tak¿e.
¯a³uj¹cy z³y grammer.
I only speak with my dad and grand parents rarely write it.
Oh no the accent codes didn’t translate onto the boards…
sorry, here goes again…
Dobre poludnie mok. Dumny byc jezyk polski takze.
Zalujacy zly grammer
that’s what i thought that you meant.
While we generally think of WWII as a fully mechanized war, I believe that most of the armies in Europe still extensively used horses and mules in some areas. Even the Germans.
Perhaps some old footage of a mounted Polish unit was juxtaposed against Panzer Blitzkrieg units to create this impression, but the Germans used horses too, as they were often short of fuel.
http://www.eisenhowerinstitute.org/programs/livinghistory/SovietExperienceww2.htm
(One little known aspect of the massive effort to perform what today might be called ethnic cleansing, concerned Wehrmacht (German Army) horses. The typical infantry division table of organization included 12,352 officers and men and 4,656 horses.v The vast majority of German artillery and supplies were horse drawn. Although much has been made of the notion of Blitzkrieg (lightening war) the fact of the war was that no German army could move faster than its horses could pull its equipment behind it. Depending on the weather and distance traveled, each division needed up to 55 tons of feed per day.vi During the invasion of the nations of northwest Europe, feed for the horses was generally carried with the army or taken to it by supply trains from Germany. The Wehrmacht made few such plans for its invasion of the USSR. There were more than 750,000 horses in the attacking force in June of 1941 and they required 16,350 tons of feed per day, much of which was to be confiscated from the Russians. As the towns and villages experienced murder and the torch, their granaries were emptied and their horses stolen for replacements. The mass starvation of peasants in the coming winter was attributable, in fair measure, to the empty grain bins between the Volga and Moscow. Like everything else about the Great Patriotic War, the scale is difficult to conceive. The German army causality losses during the 1941-45 period exceeded 6,700,000 horses (26,000 of which were eaten by starving German soldiers during the battle of Stalingrad vii ) and no one can calculate the number of Russian lives lost because the horses consumed the grain that could have supported human life. )
The swedish word for polish is (as somone mentioned the polish word was) Polack. Imagine my entertainment at an international conference when the swedish coordinator says “Ok, Polacks over here”. The english speakers were all rather shocked…
I have read somewhere (heaven knows where) that the Poles themselves tell “stupid Pole” jokes, with a foil named Kowolski. I hesitate to tell any of them. I usually change Kowolski to “my brother in law.” It’s a rare ethnic joke that can’t be just as funny without the ethnic part.
Arghh… I’d have to make a fuckup in a stupid Polack thread. (My name ends in a ski.)
What I meant to add is that the term Polack has a long and venerable history in English as meaning a Polish person. See Hamlet for examples.
To the Nicholas Copernicus and Marie Curie references made earlier, I’d add the point that Vienna would have fallen to the Turks 500 years ago, resulting in much of southeastern Europe being Moslem, were it not for the Polish cavalry slandered by the Nazi propaganda mentioned earlier.
Dzien dobry, Phlosphr
My wife and all her siblings, although born here in the US, are bilingual Polish/English (completely fluent native speakers of both) since their father spoke English and mother spoke Polish in the home. Since their father passed, the only language spoken in the mother’s home (mother, aunt, etc.) is Polish. Her mother speaks a little English, and her aunt none at all. They’ve both been in this country about 40 years, but in their community English is not required – there are many places near Detroit where Polish is widely spoken.
So, long story short, I learned Polish (in an academic setting, so I did learn to read and write it as well) so that I wouldn’t have a lifelong communication gap with my wife’s family. At least, not a language gap…there’s still the “mother-in-law” gap, but that’s universal… 
So, I’m not a Polack, but my children are
Yeah, Polacks tell Polack jokes among themselves. I never heard about always calling the foil “Kowalski” (tthe correct spelling). Of course, we Polacks get annoyed if anyone else tells these jokes, or uses the term “Polack”.
Actually, I lie. A lot of people are sensitive to this, but I’m not. Probably comes from not hearing these jokes used derisively (a lot of my friends, growing up, were Polish, too).
Just to further muddy the waters, “Polack” sounds a whole lot like “poloch,” which is a german word which means “the hole in your backside.” A literal translation would be “asshole,” except that the german word isn’t as harsh. The harsh version is “arschloch.”
My two cents. Maybe german immigrants to the US thought it funny to call polish people assholes. Shrug