Poland's Amateur Defenders

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Playing war-games in the woods has become an ever-more popular pastime in Poland as thousands of young people join paramilitary groups to defend their country against possible invasion. Others – so-called “preppers” - are building bunkers and storing food supplies so their families can survive any disaster. Now the government plans to recruit such enthusiasts into a state-run volunteer defence force – to counter a possible Russian threat. But are the authorities stoking fear – and creating an amateur force that’s no use in 21st Century warfare? Tim Whewell reports from the forests of north-eastern Poland, close to the Russian border.

Producer: Estelle Doyle

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a BBC podcast.
0:02.4	You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use
0:04.9	at BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:11.0	Welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Hewell, deep in a Polish
0:18.3	forest very late at night. What's happening?
0:23.0	There is some contact, but we don't know who.
0:26.0	When you say contact, that's the first firing we've heard.
0:30.0	Yeah, that's the first firing we've heard.
0:32.0	I'm goingching in a kind of a sand pit in the middle of the night in a Polish forest.
0:42.0	Spooky silhouettes of pine trees all around and the equally spooky
0:46.8	silhouettes of the people I'm with, heavily armed men and one woman in camouflage fatigues. They're fighting in an epic battle between the Republic of the East,
0:57.0	otherwise known as the Reds, that's us, and the Coalition of the West. Of course, it's just a pretend battle, even though I'm finding it
1:06.1	rather scary between war games enthusiasts, it's all just for fun. Or is it? I'm in Poland to find out why more and more young people are taking
1:16.4	part in war games like this and why the government here is warning that they might have to
1:20.9	defend Poland for real.
1:27.4	Mickey's a boyishly friendly English teacher with a pointy blonde beard and very blue eyes.
1:30.8	You are really tired, you're all sweaty etc. This is really better than running or
1:37.8	cycling. This is really great. I really love it. I really love wearing this heavy kilograms of vests and magazines and ammunition, water,
1:50.0	etc. This is an exact simulation of war. You get to know what you're willing to do for your friends, for yourself, for your country.
1:58.0	This game called Combat Alert is being played on a big scale. There are nearly a thousand participants
2:06.1	battling from night for one day to night for the next across 40 square kilometers of
2:12.1	forests fields, lakes and rivers.
	...

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