Polish Civil Defence, Air Raid Shelters and Disaster Relief.
The Cold War Polish people lived in a militarised society. They prepared for a conventional war on their territory, and in the T2K world this preparation will bear fruit.
It has to be remembered that in the People's Republic of Poland everyone had a job to do and if war erupted everyone had a job to do in that. Civilian training in disaster relief was on a level unequalled in the West. The civilians had shelters and were expected to use them. In devastated areas civilians were expect to fall back with the troops and not stay in place. Civilians will be active in the defence of their country and NATO is an invader.
Civilians were incorporated into the war effort under the umbrella of the
Obrona Cywilna PRL (OP).
The OP was the primary civil defence organisation and a large proportion of the civilian population had a role in it. The OP as a civil defence unit is off limits to hostile forces and it is illegal to utilise their equipment. Civilian infrastructure such as school buses and bus shelters were designed to be quickly converted into ambulances and aid stations. This thinking permeated the Polish government and society. Firemen, police and medical staff all wore military uniforms. In fact nearly everyone in this situation wore uniforms, it would be rare to see civilian clothes after a while. Civilians had access to shelters and these were stocked with food, medicine and NBC equipment. Huge amounts of earthmoving gear was available to them to shift rubble and enter damaged buildings. The OP had comprehensive NBC detection and decontamination equipment that included decontaminating every facet of life right down to livestock.
Now, it's very hard for me to tell as I don't speak Polish but there was another organisation that has the acronym ZOS. They were either part of the OP, ran in parallel to them or were superseded by them. ZOS had fire, medical, sanitary, technical, social and specialist shelter staff all organised along military lines. ZOS seems to have worked alongside the MO (police) in rear area operations and go into action to mitigate the effects of the war on the population. Poland had the experience of the Nazi occupation to draw from and had no illusions as to how bad war could be and prepared accordingly.
Air Raid Shelters were short term shelters. They were located in a huge amount of places such as railway stations, hospitals, industrial plants and government buildings. These things were not small. They usually had double thick steel doors, a decontamination room, a generator/air filtration/water systems complex, medical centre, storage area for uniforms, helmets, medical equipment, tools, food, and other stores, a series of actual shelter areas, a commander's room and an array of escape tunnels. Most were buried well below ground with a concrete shield overhead and would have survived anything but a direct hit from a heavy bomb. In the twilight 2000 world these will form the nucleus of survivor enclaves. During the real world many of these shelters existed in structure only but during the drumbeat to war it is unlikely that Poland would have neglected these structures.
Note that Nowa Huta near Kraków had over 250 of these structures.
OP Guardsman
