Why Some Countries Do Not Rule the World
Polish “Winged” Hussars saving the West at the Battle of Vienna
This piece of news may have been all over the Anglo-Saxon press, but if so we haven’t seen it and are going to waste your time with it anyway.
WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland’s 1,200 troops assigned to NATO forces in Afghanistan will not achieve full combat readiness for up to several weeks due to stolen vehicle keys, the defense ministry said Thursday.
“We had been told a 10 percent theft rate was likely in convoys brought in from Pakistan, but we had not expected the spare car keys to go missing,” defense ministry spokesman Jaroslaw Rybak told news channel TVN24.
“We shall have to send away for spares, so it may take from several days to several weeks for our contingent to become combat ready.”
We cannot of course just lift the Reuters take whole cloth, but it does go on to mention that the vehicles in question – a Polish-built “Hummer” analog – are known as “Honkers”. We feel this is central to the question…
As for the Winged Hussars at the charge in the image above, they are to remind you that while a good joke is a good joke, Polish troops have for centuries been considered perfectly capable of stomping the piss out their enemies.
Between the 16th and 18th centuries Polish heavy cavalry – see (here) – were famous for the huge ‘wings’ worn on their backs or attached to their horses’ saddles. A number of theories have been brought forward to explain the meaning of these. According to some, the wings were originally intended to foil attacks by Tartar lassoos; another theory has it that the vibrating of their feathers during the charge made a strange sound that frightened enemy horses. It has also been suggested they were intended to terrify the enemy with the vision of a death-dealing avenging angel.
However that may be, the Hussars’ primary battle tactic was the charge. They simply carried the attack to, and through, the adversary’s formation, if necessary repeating it several times until the enemy broke. The brutal impact of the charge, backed by the inertia of their heavy armor and horses, made the Hussars nearly unstoppable for two centuries.
Better rifles eventually made frontal cavalry attacks a less desirable technique, but until that happened, when the “heavies” came thundering down, their enemies tended to remember they had better things to do than die on the point of a Polish lance.
Horses of course do not require keys.
30.06.07
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