Borusewicz I.3

It looked as if an unprepared Solidarity was being attacked by an equally unprepared opponent. The campaign that the authorities presented as organized and super-efficient was, in reality, a chaotic struggle. The lists of those to be detained had, it is true, been drawn up in advance, but perhaps too far in advance, because they contained the names of many people who had died or who had long been abroad. In Gdansk there were cases where two students on the list shared a room, and a police unit came for one of them at two in the morning and another unit for the second one at six—of course, he'd long since made his escape. They didn't arrest anyone from the Port of Gdansk, and afterward, during the strike, it was one of the toughest centers of resistance .

If people hadn't been so surprised by raids in the middle of the night that they opened their doors immediately, the ZOMO (who didn't always turn up in large groups) would have had to spend another ten minutes breaking doors down with crowbars; everyone else in the apartment building would have been woken up, and the ZOMO would have fulfilled perhaps only eighty percent of their plan. Even though they caught nearly everyone, the small percentage who escaped was enough. But what would have happened if, say, out of ten thousand people to be arrested, two thousand had got away?

This operation, which was the most important of all from the authorities' point of view, was carried out inefficiently; it was effective only because our side made even more mistakes. In this respect they were competing with each other. For example, every few kilometers or so along the road stood tanks that had broken down on the way from the barracks into town. If the armies of the Warsaw Pact are dependent on such dilapidated equipment, how are we ever going to beat the Americans? Nevertheless, Bujak, who has spent some time behind the wheel of these things, declares that if they really have to get somewhere they usually manage it, so I guess they broke down because the troops weren't too enthusiastic about the battle. Apparently neither the rank and file nor their officers would have taken the risk of

openly defying an order. If only, though, they'd used the army in the front line . . .

The authorities didn't attempt to overplay their hand and the army was essentially kept in reserve. The successive waves of hardware that rolled through the streets were mostly for decoration. The attack on the Gdansk Shipyard was carried out with the aid of two tanks. Only two! One of them broke down the gate. Its crew must have been fairly determined (particularly their commander, who was driving it himself), but despite this, and although it didn't look as though people were going to stand in its path, the tank came to a halt before the first collision, giving the shipyard workers time to scatter. Bogdan Borusewicz talked to the crew of the second tank, which dragged off a truck that was blocking the road leading to the neighboring Northern Shipyard. He clearly saw that the tank crew (who must have been specially selected from their unit) had tears in their eyes, even though nothing had really happened so far and they hadn't yet had to shoot at anyone .

Attacks on the factories were carried out mainly by specially selected ZOMO forces (actually, Special Battalions). When the "regular" ZOMO learned that they were going to the Gdansk Shipyard, many of them suddenly started complaining, "I don't have any gas," "Maybe someone else could go?" Security guys were assigned to these units, but in the end they too got lost somewhere or went off to hide.