Greetings Comrades in Japan

Great Power Conference

For this reason, a delegation had to be sent to represent the invited country with dignity. There were fierce discussions in Japan whether to send a destroyer as a representative or perhaps a coast guard ship. It was a matter of presentation, they did not want to frighten the natives. In the end, the choice fell on the destroyer, especially since Poland decided to send a destroyer. It was decided then that Japan could not be worse than Poland.

Especially since the Poles decided to pretend before the rest of the superpowers about their real naval power. Namely, the ship that went on that long voyage with a diplomatic crew was leased under an agreement signed a year ago between America and Poland.

It was an Arleight Burke-class destroyer named USS McCampell, and along with a batch of the first four destroyers leased from the US Navy, it was incorporated into the ranks of the Polish fleet. In exchange for this ship, Poland, of course, had to send no small amount of supplies to America.

Tons of clothes, shoes, building materials and the like were sent to the area that is being colonized by the Americans on the eastern continent of Sarmatia. Of course, along with Polish workers who helped with the settlement.

The destroyers themselves were given new names for obvious reasons, although rather against the Polish tradition of naming destroyers either after inhabitants of particular regions and places or after weather phenomena. For propaganda reasons as well as to allude to the fact that they were from the US Navy, each ship was given a name associated with Poland and America.

The first two names should rather be obvious to anyone, ORP Generał Tadeusz Kościuszko (ex-USS Lassen) and ORP Generał Kazimierz Pułaski (ex-USS Curtis Wilbur). It would be hard to find more obvious figures associated with both countries. Nonetheless, two more are likely to cause confusion and, among the more communist officialdom in Poland, anger.

Why? Well because two more destroyers were named after American aviators serving in the Polish Air Force during the Polish-Bolshevik War. A war that was demonized and silenced under communism by presenting only the Soviet point of view.

ORP Pułkownik Merian Cooper, named after the creator of King Kong who flew as a contract officer in the Polish Air Force bombing the Bolshevik plots, and ORP Podpułkownik Cedrik Fauntleroy (ex-USS Stethem) in honor of the commander of the 7th Squadron in which the Americans flew and who did the same as Cooper because the Bolsheviks in that war had no air force!

Of course, this obvious anti-communist affront could not go unchallenged in the power camp. While many accused the navy of treason, the navy rejected these accusations, saying that it was first and foremost a POLISH Navy and named after people who had rendered service to POLAND.

Which was the case here, both rendered service to Poland during both the Polish-Bolshevik War and World War II interacting with the Polish American community during peace and war and the Polish authorities. Moreover, both were decorated with Polish military orders for meritorious service.

And the fact that they were both anti-Communists of which Cooper was a fierce anti-Communist. (Hardly surprising, he became a captive of the Bolsheviks but managed to escape and get out of the horrors of the Communist Revolution in Russia to Latvia.) That's another matter. In the end, the one to whom he bowed out of the affair surprisingly was Jaruzelski himself and, even more surprisingly, Wladyslaw Gomulka.

With the latter the case was even more strange because he was an acrimonious communist. Of course, Gomulka can be accused of a lot, for example, his communism, but not that he wasn't patriotic and pro-Polish in his own way. He effectively played on both Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's nerves, making the People's Republic a fairly independent country without being afraid to threaten the Soviets with Mao's China.