Nazis in Canada? The truth behind the demonization of Yaroslav Hunka

I don't know Yaroslav Hunka personally, but I know... or knew... many like him. Most of them are dead, now. I know their stories. And I know where their bodies are buried.

Mr Hunka is a Canadian citizen, who lives near North Bay, Ontario. More specifically, he is a Ukrainian-Canadian, born 98 years ago in what was then a part of Poland known to some as "Galicia", but to its natives as Ukraine.

Last Friday, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was addressing the Canadian Parliament, the Hon. Anthony Rota, Speaker of the House of Commons, introduced Mr Hunka as "a Ukrainian hero, [and] a Canadian hero", prompting MPs and dignitaries in the House to offer a standing ovation.

Today, Mr Rota resigned from his lofty position, saving the already embarrassed Prime Minister McBlackface from having to fire him. Why? Because, the lickspittle Canuck media told a shocked nation over the weekend, Mr Hunka was actually a "Nazi" (add: racist, anti-Semite, monster, yada yada yada) who served in the First Ukrainian Division, also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division a voluntary unit that was under the command of the Nazis. [Don't say "Germans". Ed.]

The 14th Waffen-SS Galicia Division (also known as the 1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army) was formed in 1943/1944, when a determined group of young men and women in Galicia volunteered to serve in a combat division destined for eastern front combat. Their goal: to engage and destroy the Soviet hordes menacing their homeland and to counter Nazi Germany's subjugation of their country. 

Although initially Galicia's Volunteers would serve in a German sponsored military formation, in actuality the volunteers of the Galicia division wanted to engage all hostile ideologies -- from both the East and West -- in order to secure a free independent Ukraine. Source: Logusz, Michael O.: Galicia Division: The Waffen-SS 14th grenadier Division 1943-1945, part of the Schiffer Military History series.

Why would Yaroslav Hunka have joined the Ukrainian National Army, voluntarily or otherwise? Doing so doesn't make him a Nazi or a German, any more than having been born in Poland makes him Polish. 

Consider the times, and the nature of the adversaries. For Ukrainians, the 1930s was the time of the Holodomor (Ukrainian for "death by hunger"), when millions of Ukrainians died of starvation (or, sometimes, execution) as a result of the Soviet Russian state's genocidal assault on the Ukrainian peasantry.

Mr Hunka and his compatriots lived through the Holodomor, only to be caught in the middle when the Russians decided to meet the invading Germans in the same land that is being fought over today. What should they do? Join the Russians who were determined to wipe them out, or with the Germans, who promised to liberate them from Soviet Communist oppression. It was a choice between the devil you know and the devil you don't know. Many, like Mr Hunka, chose the latter. But doing so didn't make him a Nazi!

After the fall of the Third Reich, 1000s of Ukrainians found themselves in Germany, in prison camps or, later, in refugee camps. Members of my own family, who had been taken to Germany as slave labourers, were forced to make another hard choice.

Many Ukrainian prisoners had no choice. They were handed over to the Russians, "repatriated" to the Soviet Union, where large numbers of them were shot for being "contaminated" by their experiences in the West. 

Those who wanted to live, and had the choice, asked to go instead to other countries with established Ukrainian communities, like Argentina, Australia, and (of course) Canada. I say "of course" because Canada had been welcoming "Galicians" since 1905, when the famous "men in sheepskin coats" had flocked to the fertile lands of western Canada as the Austro-Hungarian empire started to disintegrate.

That, I would guess, is why Yaroslav Hunka chose to come to Canada -- "a good place for Ukrainians", then and now. I would guess, too, that Mr Hunka didn't receive any government handouts -- housing, food, medical care or anything else. 

I imagine he got off the boat in Halifax with the clothes he stood up in and perhaps a few dollars in his pocket, and had to make his own way after that. That's how it was with people very near and dear to me. Some of them, like Mr Hunka, may have fought with the Germans against the Russians. Some of their descendants are in Ukraine right now, fighting against the Russians. But that's ot because they were or are Nazis. They were Ukrainians, and are now Ukrainian-Canadians. End of story!

Слава Україні! Героям слава!

Footnote: Shown above is the cenotaph featuring the emblem of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), at Saint Volodymyr's Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

Has the West forgotten the lesson of Pearl Harbor?

Walt has not forgotten about the "situation" in Ukraine. There has been an election, and Poroshenko, the Chocolate King, has become the Chocolate President. The people of the Donbas and other eastern regions of the Ukraine didn't get to vote, since Russian-speaking armed gangs disrupted the polling. Russia denies arming and supporting the separatist thugs, and claims to have pulled its troops back from positions near the border. But it retains control of the Crimea.

The question has already been asked, but let's put it out there again. Where will Russia stop? If the rest of the world accepts the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea, will that be enough to satisfy Putin? Or is this a repeat of the German annexation of the Sudetenland in the run-up to World War II?

There are those -- notably in the United States Department of State -- who believe that it's improbable that Russia would try to occupy any more Ukrainian territory, and in so doing risk war with the West. While admitting that war is possible, they think it highly unlikely. Putin wouldn't be that stupid, they say. He must know that Russia would lose any war with the West, they say. And Russia doesn't want war any more than we do...they say.

Similar things were said about Japan in 1941, right up till December 7th and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. War with Japan was not impossible, but improbable...they said. For that reason, it was OK for the United States to let down its guard, and not pay too much attention to the threats, implicit and explicit, coming from the Land of the Rising Sun.

The resultant complacency and lack of preparedness was the chief cause of the disaster of December 7th, "the Day of Infamy". So wrote Professor Gordon W. Prange in several lengthy historical manuscripts published posthumously by his co-workers Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon as Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (McGraw-Hill, 1986), which Walt just finished reading.

Prof. Prange was a Professor of History at the University of Maryland from 1937 to 1980, with a break of nine years (1942–1951) of military service overseas, including a stint in Japan during the US military occupation, when he was the Chief Historian in General Douglas MacArthur's staff. That period coincided roughly with the several investigations into the Pearl Harbor debacle, including that of the Joint Congressional Committee, 15 Nov. 1945 to 15 July 1946. The testimony at and reports of those inquiries are quoted extensively in his books.

Edward F. Morgan was an assistant counsel to that committee, and drafted its final report. He included a list -- quoted in its entirety -- of no fewer than 25 "supervisory, administrative and organizational deficiencies" apparent in the US Army and Navy. Here, with Dr. Prange's comments on relations between the West and Russia, is No. 18.

18. Failure can be avoided in the long run only by preparation for any eventuality.

[Morgan wrote]: The record tends to indicate that appraisal of likely enemy movements was divided into probabilities and possibilities. Everyone has admitted that an attack by Japan on Pear Harbor was regarded as at least a possibility. It was felt, however, that a Japanese movement toward the south was a probability. The over-all result was to look for the probable move and to take little or no effective precautions to guard against the contingency of the possible action.

"Here was the old problem of enemy intentions versus capabilities. U.S. military leaders in 1941 were far too concerned with what Japan might do, not with what it was able to do. Yet history has shown that if an enemy can launch a certain kind of attach, in all probability he will do exactly that. His intentions cannot hurt his opponent; his capabilities can

"Thus, while the United States would infinitely prefer peace with the Soviet Union, if the Russians...are able to overrun Western Europe in a conventional war, the United States and its NATO allies must assume that they will do so under the right set of circumstances. Furthermore, if the Soviets have the capability of knocking out the United States in one huge preemptive nuclear strike, American leaders must assume that that is what they will do if conditions are propitious. Any other attitude on the part of the United States would be irresponsible.

"The ultimate lesson which Pearl Harbor should teach American political and military leaders, as well as every person in the United States, is this: Always be prepared for the worst contingency."

Innocent questions from Walt to Hussein Obama, John Kerry et al. -- not forgetting David Cameron, Steve Harper, Angela Merkel and whoever's running France these days: Are we prepared? Or are we just assuming the improbability of Putin doing something foolish, like moving his armies westward? Just asking...

Military intelligence: the true story of Project X-Ray

Once the United States got (somewhat belatedly) engaged in World War II, it quickly became apparent that some Weapon of Mass Destruction [Did they really use that phrase, then? Ed.] would be needed to vanquish the treacherous Japanese. In 1942 the atomic bomb was barely a notion, so other options were considered.

The specs called for something that would inflict lots of damage on the Japanese home islands without loss of too many American lives. Dr. Lytle Adams, a Pennsylvania dentist, came up with an idea, perhaps while inhaling a bit of laughing gas. Bat bombs! Of course!!!

The experimental weapon consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with numerous compartments, each containing a Mexican Free-tailed Bat. (No, Walt doesn't know why they're called that.) Each bat would have a one-ounce timed incendiary bomb strapped to its wee chest. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats which would then land in the eaves and attics of Japanese buildings.

When the bats tried to fly away, they would chew through the straps so as to lighten their load for takeoff. The incendiaries would thus be ignited, starting fires in inaccessible places in the flimsy wood and paper construction of the Japanese cities. [Are you sure this wasn't actually Dr. Rube Goldberg? Ed.]

No, Walt is not making this up. But wait, it gets better... Dr. Adams happened to be a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who submitted to her husband the President, who approved it personally. So the US military-industrial complex [Did they really use that phrase, then? Ed.] went into action.

After two years spent on research -- not to mention rounding up a couple of million of the critters -- the US Army tested the bat bombs in New Mexico. During the testing, several bats escaped, setting fire to a large aircraft hangar and a fuel tank.

The Army cleverly handed the bat bomb project over to the Navy, which named it Project X-ray and passed the buck -- the bats, actually -- to the Marine Corps. Some military genius decided the trick was to freeze the bats into hibernation before dropping them out of the bombers. In another test run, the frozen bats remained asleep and augured into the desert sands without setting off so much as a spark.

More tests were scheduled for the summer of 1944 but the programme was cancelled by Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King when he was told the bat bomb would likely not be combat ready until mid-1945. By that time it was estimated that $2 million had been spent on Project X-ray, afterwards referred to by Dr. Stanley P. Lovell, director of the Office of Strategic Services as "Die Fledermaus Farce".