The Wilmington morning star. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1909-1990, 1945-05-27

WASHINGTON.-It is hard. for
an American to understand the
blood feuds of central Europe.
While we have our own racial
tensions within our country, they
are not fed by the memory of
centuries of conflict, war and pill
lage and conquest unending.
That is the framework of the
present Polish dispute, it seems to
me. To ignore the bloodstained
background, to overlook the long
history of horrors and hatreds, is
to get a wrong perspective on
what is not so much a political
issue as it is another outbreak of
the hatred between Russian and
Pole that has flared up so often
in the past. We can see now at
this moment how it grows and
feeds on itself. It is instructive
to take d single example-the Pole
whom Stain personally denounced
in his outburst of a week ago.
This is General Leopold Oku-
licki, one of the 16 arrested at
Moscow's orders. When I wrote
about General Okulicki some time
ago, I said there was a suspicion
he had elaborated with our COM
mon enemy, the Nazis. That was
an injustice to General Okulicki,
and I am sorry for it.
His record in this war is re-
markedly revealing AS full
colonel, he took part in the Polish
German campaign of 1899, when
the Nazi Blitzkrieg overwhelmed
in a few weeks Poland's pitiful,
romantic 10Th century army. Not
wanting to be taken by the Ger
mans, General Okulicki gave him
self up to the Russians in Lwow
in the fall of 1889.
He was put in GPU prison in
Moscow. Anyone VINO has read
Arthur Koestler's extraordinary
Darkness at Noon will knIV
what this meant. 1t appears that
the Russins wanted Okuicki to
head up Polish units within the
Red army. He refused, and his
refusal did not make his position
any easier.
Released from prison in the
summer of 1941 as result of an
agreement reached between the
Soviet. ambassador in London and
the Polish exile government, Oku-,
licki went to work at once on the
organization of the Polish army
in Russia, although he was in very
poor physical condition. At that
time he became chief of staff to
General Anders.
The following year the Polish
forces were evacuated from Rus
STA and Okulicki went with Anders
to Italy, where the second Polish
army corps played an important
part in the long, costly battle up
the Italian peninsula. Still a col
onel, Okulicki was Anders' right
hand man during most of the Ital-
ian campaign.
Then although he was so years
old, he went through regular para
troop training, and in the summer
of 1914 ne was dropped from an
Allied plane into German-occupied
Poland. At the side of General
Dor, he took part in the Warsaw
uprising. When Dor was arrested
by the Germans, he was made
chief of the Polish under ground
army, with the rank of general.
On August 20, 1914 that army was
officially recognized by Britain and
the United States as full-fledged
combatant force.
AS the Poles see it, the Russian
failure to come to the aid of this
force amounted to betrayal. After
a long~and terrible siege in War
saw, they were left to the mercy
of the Germans.
All the time, of course, the Ger
mans were exploiting these differ
ences to the fullest extent in prop
Uganda beamed to the Poles. With
diabolical persistence and = in.