I Like To Listen To The Echoes

they hijacked half-tracks, trucks, anything they could. but also tanks.

above: a captured STuG, and what appears to be an armored car.

True hero.

"A German-born admiral spent 6 years in Nazi POW camps and never spoke a single word of German to his captors—not even to his own cousin."

Admiral Józef Unrug was born Joseph von Unruh in Brandenburg, Prussia. He spoke German as his mother tongue, served in the Imperial German Navy during World War I, and commanded submarines for the Kaiser.

But in 1919, everything changed.

When Poland regained independence after 123 years of partition, Józef made a choice that would define the rest of his life. He renounced his German commission, left his homeland, and traveled to Poland—a country that had no navy, no warships, not even a proper port.

He didn't just join Poland's military. He bought a ship with his own money and donated it to become one of Poland's first naval vessels. By 1925, he was Commander of the Fleet, speaking Polish with a thick German accent, building a navy from absolutely nothing.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Admiral Unrug commanded the coastal defenses on the Hel Peninsula. Outnumbered ten to one, he fought for a month while Warsaw fell. Finally, on October 2, 1939, he surrendered with honor and became a prisoner of war.

That's when his real resistance began.

The Germans moved him between camps—Colditz Castle, Murnau, Woldenberg. Former colleagues from his German Navy days visited, appealing to old friendships. They offered him rank, promotions, command positions. Admiral Dönitz himself reportedly tried to recruit him back to the Kriegsmarine.

Then his own cousin came to visit.

Major General Walter von Unruh greeted Józef warmly in German, expecting a conversation in their shared native tongue.

Instead, Unrug replied in French.

Confused, his cousin asked why he was speaking French.

Józef looked at him calmly and said: "On September 1, 1939, I forgot how to speak German. I am a Pole and a Polish officer."

The Germans were stunned. This was a man who had commanded their submarines, who understood every word they said, whose family had served Prussia for generations.

But for six years—through multiple camps, countless recruitment attempts, visits from family members—Admiral Unrug never spoke German again. When Germans addressed him, he demanded translators. When they insisted he must understand, he replied only in Polish or French.

Language became his weapon of resistance.

He refused to give his captors even a syllable of recognition. Always correct, always formal, always cold. His fellow prisoners drew strength from his unbending example. The Germans found him increasingly frustrating—he wouldn't break, wouldn't bend, wouldn't even acknowledge their shared past.

In April 1945, American forces liberated his camp. But the news was devastating: Poland had fallen under Soviet occupation.

Unrug chose exile over compromise. He moved to the United Kingdom, then Morocco where he worked on fishing boats, then France. A rear admiral working manual labor rather than accept a communist government or a pension he felt his men were denied.

His final wish was to be buried in free Poland, among his men. But he set a condition: he would not return until his colleagues murdered during Stalinist terror were properly rehabilitated.

He would not return until Poland was truly free.

Admiral Józef Unrug died in France on February 28, 1973, at age 88. His wife Zofia died in 1980. They were buried together in France, alongside other Polish patriots who died far from home.

Decades passed. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed. Poland regained sovereignty. The murdered officers were finally found and honored.

And Admiral Unrug could come home.

On September 24, 2018—forty-five years after his death—his coffin was carried aboard the Polish Navy frigate ORP Kościuszko. On October 2, 2018—exactly seventy-nine years to the day after his surrender at Hel—a state funeral was held in Gdynia.

Admiral Józef Unrug was laid to rest at Oksywie Naval Cemetery, among his officers and sailors, in the free Poland he had waited his entire life to see.

He had finally come home.

Sometimes the most powerful act of resistance isn't violence or sabotage—it's the quiet, absolute refusal to compromise on who you are. Józef Unrug never raised a weapon in his final war. He simply refused to speak the language of his enemy.

A federal law that will never be enforced because the government is actively pushing a narrative that coins are inconvenient -- most of the rest of the world has $1 and even $2 coins, the US already uses coins way less than everyone else

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

Actually preaches from the Bible

Sin is called what it is

Members love and serve one another

The ongoing "Jason Todd is a cop" debate has reminded me of a brilliant brief image essay by Joey deVilla. So here it is, images first and the full essay text below:

as pretty as the blue light is, its too dark and cant penetrate the water well. its confusing them

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

so you gotta understand that us howlies were basically one big PR stunt. i mean, we were totally competent and effective, but not so exceptionally amazing that we were totally unprecedented. what we were was actually “the face of american soldiers overseas,” and a representation of allied unity. (thanks, dernier and falsworth.) during the war, they made howling commandoes comics, trading cards, posters, radio dramas, toys, jackets, and more, all in the interest of supporting the war effort. most of it we had no idea about. we were pretty busy fighting nazis, and the journalists and PR experts they sent to tag along with us mostly just got in the way. so pretty quickly the ‘news’ coming from the front lines about the howling commandoes was totally fabricated, because we wouldnt cooperate with them. which is how some of the more outlandish captain america stories happened. 

most of this steve and i never knew about, not until we wound up in the future. 

anyway, in the early days they would sometimes send stuff to us. not sure what they wanted us to do with it–we once got a crate full of trading cards with our own faces on them, which we promptly defaced and mocked each other relentlessly over. steve took twenty-six buckys and twenty-six steves and drew card suits on them, and we used them as playing cards. (we also had a pair of dumdum dougans as jokers.) and another time they sent us a box of teddy bears. specifically, cap-and-bucky bears. 

the cap bears were decent. pretty much just a regular bear in a stripey shirt and spangly helmet. but the bucky bears were wearing this silly little domino mask, and none of us had any idea why. we figured somebody must have snapped a picture of me while i had some greasepaint around my eyes.

obviously, the other howlies gave us some crap about this. no matter what steve and i did, teddy bears magically appeared everywhere we went. in our cots at camp, in our footlockers, in our packs–everywhere. i once watched dernier slip a cappy bear into steve’s backpack while they were both taking cover from gunfire. 

the real problem for steve and i, of course, was what to do with the bears. we couldn’t just throw them away, but it was a war zone, so we could hardly keep them all. i gave a bucky bear to peggy just so i could watch stevie awkwardly offer a cap bear to go with it. there were always a few kids around–refugees passing through, often, and we passed off bears to them as quickly as we could. 

steve got it into his head that one of the Star Spangled Showgirls, ruby, would get a kick out of the cap bears, so he mailed her one. she thought it was hilarious, and shortly he got letters from the rest of the Showgirls demanding bears as well. so steve managed to get rid of all the cap bears pretty quick. 

but the bucky bears…those things were everywhere i went, and people kept calling me “Bucky Bear,” which is not a super dignified nickname for a famous, feared sniper to have. it seemed like every lad left from the 107th had a little masked bear head poking out of his pack. the howlies all had them too–dumdum kept one sticking out of a coat pocket for a long time, until it ran afoul of some shrapnel, and then insisted we hold a tiny formal funeral for it. we got an air-drop of supplies in the field once that contained emergency rations, ammo, and a bucky bear. and one time i went to colonel phillips’ field office for a debriefing and he had one on his desk. 

i’d have been more annoyed about it all if they hadn’t been such an effective stupid-decision deterrent. i once saw steve eyeballing a tank like he was gonna go take a swing at it, glance at falsworth’s bucky bear, sigh, and call in artillery fire instead.