[Raellus]

But those wartime NATO-free years of Soviet occupation also give the Soviets plenty of time to alienate their hosts. The Soviets weren't the best of guests during peacetime, and their track record in Eastern Europe from '39-45 was pretty terrible- it wasn't just the Germans that suffered as the Red Tide pushed west to Berlin.

With most of the nation reduced to rubble, I think that Polish attitudes towards foreign troops would include a lot of local variation. If the nearby Soviet garrison was well-behaved and helpful, the local Poles would likely be very pro-Soviet. If the Polish [coummunist] government garrison one town over was callous and predatory, the locals may lean more towards NATO. If NATO troops looted and raped on their last trip through... and so on and so forth. The list goes on.

I'm sure that by 2000 a lot of Poles would just be sick and tired of every foreigner trespassing on Polish soil.

I haven't had a chance yet to address local Polish civilian attitudes towards either side for my Elblag campaign- at least not IG. In the backstory I was working on, there was some established bad blood between the Elblag Poles and the Soviets because of the way Polish refugees were treated by the people of Kaliningrad earlier in the war. Also, NATO troops passing through the region were generally much better behaved than their Red Army counterparts. And lastly, the Red Army tended not to be very careful on where they placed their considerable artillery assets. All of this combined to make the Elblag civilians a little more sympathetic towards NATO.