Chaplains in T2K

[Higgipedia]

Originally Posted by chico20854

An awful lot of Chaplain Assistants I ran into had a Rambo complex. I'm not sure if it was out of a sense that they had a responsibility to defend an unarmed chaplain, or trying to compensate for their reputation as the "softest" MOS in the Army!

HA. We had a Chaplain's Assistant who pissed hot for cocaine on a battalion-wide drug test. When they confronted her about it, she said it must have been what she THOUGHT was powdered sugar her boyfriend put on her pancakes.

[Raellus]

I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that Poland was alone amongst the Warsaw Pact armed forces in having a military chaplain service (due to Poland's strong Catholic tradition), but I have so far not been able to confirm or bely this hazy memory.

Does anyone know one way or the other?

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[kato13]

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/13/w...in-poland.html

NYT confirms as of 1988

Poland's are the only armed forces in the Warsaw Pact to have chaplains.

[Ursus Maior]

The Polish did things differently to an extant that often breaks the idea of a monolithic Kremlin controlled Eastern bloc asunder. They also used different small unit structures than the rest, e. g. they didn't switch away from GPMGs to LMGs and had tripods assigned to their third squads in platoons for fire support. They also built their own wheeled APCs and amphibious APCs together with the Czechoslovakians, instead of buying BTR-60s or BTR-50s (although some of the latter were initially purchased).

Also, they allegedly were focussing more on individual initiative than was taught in general Soviet doctrine. They didn't quite switch towards "mission-type tactics" (German: "Auftragstaktik"), but freedom of decisions was greater with NCOs and subaltern officers than in the Soviet Army.