Polish-Soviet War (February 1919 – March 1921)
was an armed conflict between Soviet Russia and the Second Polish Republic, two nascent states in post-World War I Europe. The war was the result of conflicting expansionist attempts. Poland, whose statehood had just been re-established following the Partitions of Poland in the late 18th century by the Treaty of Versailles, sought to secure territories which she had lost at the time of partitions; the Soviet's aim was to control those same territories, which had been part of Imperial Russia until the turbulent events of the Great War. Both States claimed victory in the war: the Poles claimed a successful defense of their state, while the Soviets claimed a repulse of the Polish eastward invasion of Ukraine and Belarus, which they viewed as a part of foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War.
:: The frontiers between Poland and Soviet Russia had not been defined in the Treaty of Versailles and post-war events created turmoil: the Russian Revolution of 1917; the crumbling of the Russian, German and Austrian empires; the Russian Civil War; the Central Powers' withdrawal from the eastern front; and the attempts of Ukraine and Belarus to establish their independence. Poland's Chief of State, Józef Piłsudski, felt the time expedient to expand Polish borders as far east as feasible, to be followed by the creation of a Polish-led federation (Międzymorze) of several states in the rest of East-Central Europe as a bulwark against the potential re-emergence of both German and Russian imperialism. Lenin, meanwhile, saw Poland as the bridge that the Red Army would have to cross in order to assist other communist movements and help conduct other European revolutions.
By 1919, the Polish forces had taken control of much of Western Ukraine, with victory in the Polish-Ukrainian War; the West Ukrainian People's Republic had tried unsuccessfully to create a Ukrainian state on territories to which both Poles and the Ukrainians laid claim. At the same time, the Bolsheviks began to gain the upper hand in the Russian Civil War and advance westward towards the disputed territories. By the end of 1919 a clear front had formed. Border skirmishes escalated into open warfare following Piłsudski's major incursion further east into Ukraine in April 1920. He was met by a nearly simultaneous and initially very successful Red Army counterattack. The Soviet operation threw the Polish forces back westward all the way to the Polish capital, Warsaw. Meanwhile, western fears of Soviet troops arriving at the German frontiers increased the interest of Western powers in the war. In midsummer, the fall of Warsaw seemed certain but in mid-August the tide had turned again as the Polish forces achieved an unexpected and decisive victory at the Battle of Warsaw. In the wake of the Polish advance eastward, the Soviets sued for peace and the war ended with a ceasefire in October 1920. A formal peace treaty, the Peace of Riga, was signed on 18 March 1921, dividing the disputed territories between Poland and Soviet Russia. The war largely determined the Soviet-Polish border for the period between the World Wars.
Names and dates
The war is referred to by several names. "Polish-Soviet War" may be the most common, but is potentially confusing since "Soviet" is usually thought of as relating to the Soviet Union, which (by contrast with "Soviet Russia") did not officially come into being until December 1922. Alternative names include "Russo-Polish War [or Polish-Russian War] of 1919–20/21" (to distinguish it from earlier Polish-Russian wars) and "Polish-Bolshevik War". This second term (or just "Bolshevik War" (Polish: Wojna bolszewicka)) is most common in Polish sources. In some Polish sources it is also referred as the "War of 1920" (Polish: Wojna 1920 roku).
:: Other points of contention are the starting and ending dates of the war. For example, Encyclopedia Britannica begins its article with the date (1919-1920), but then says "Although there had been hostilities between the two countries during 1919, the conflict began when the Polish head of state Józef Pilsudski formed an alliance with the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petlyura (April 21, 1920) and their combined forces began to overrun Ukraine, occupying Kiev on May 7." while the Polish Internetowa encyklopedia PWN as well as some historians—like Norman Davies—clearly consider 1919 as the starting year of the war. The ending date is given as either 1920 or 1921; this confusion stems from the fact that while the ceasefire was put in force in fall 1920, the official treaty ending the war was signed months later, in March 1921.
While the events of 1919 can be described as a border conflict and only in early 1920 did both sides realize that they were in fact engaged in an all-out war, the conflicts that took place in 1919 are closely related to the war that began in earnest a year later. In the end, the events of 1920 were only a logical, though unforeseen, consequence of the 1919 prelude.
In the aftermath of World War I, the map of Central and Eastern Europe had drastically changed. Germany's defeat rendered its plans for the creation of Eastern European puppet states (Mitteleuropa) obsolete, and Russia saw its Empire collapse followed by a descent into Revolution and Civil War.[9] Many nations of the region saw a chance for real independence and were not prepared to relinquish the opportunity; Russia viewed these territories as rebellious Russian provinces, vital for Russian security, but was unable to react swiftly.[9]
With the success of the Greater Poland Uprising in 1918, Poland had re-established its statehood for the first time since the 1795 partition and seen the end of a 123 years of rule by three imperial neighbors: Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. The country, reborn as a Second Polish Republic, proceeded to carve out its borders from the territories of its former partitioners.
Poland was not alone in its newfound opportunities and troubles. Virtually all of the newly independent neighbours began fighting over borders: Romania fought with Hungary over Transylvania, Yugoslavia with Italy over Rijeka, Poland with Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn/Těšín, with Germany over Poznań and with Ukrainians over Eastern Galicia. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians fought against themselves and against the Russians, who were just as divided. Spreading communist influences resulted in communist revolutions in Munich, Berlin, Budapest and Prešov. Winston Churchill commented: "The war of giants has ended, the wars of the pygmies begin." All of those engagements – with the sole exception of the Polish-Soviet war – would be shortlived border conflicts.
:: The Polish-Soviet war likely happened more by accident than design, as it is unlikely that anyone in Soviet Russia or in the new Second Republic of Poland would have deliberately planned a major foreign war. Poland, its territory a major frontline of the First World War, was unstable politically; it had just won the difficult conflict with the West Ukrainian National Republic and was already engaged in new conflicts with Germany (the Silesian Uprisings) and with Czechoslovakia. The attention of revolutionary Russia, meanwhile, was predominantly directed at thwarting counter-revolution and intervention by the western powers. While the first clashes between Polish and Soviet forces occurred in February 1919, it would be almost a year before both sides realised that they were engaged in a full war.
In late 1919 the leader of Russia's new communist government, Vladimir Lenin, was inspired by the Red Army's civil-war victories over White Russian anti-communist forces and their western allies, and began to see the future of the revolution with greater optimism. The Bolsheviks proclaimed the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and agitated for a worldwide communist community. Their avowed intent was to link the revolution in Russia with an expected revolution in Germany and to assist other communist movements in Western Europe; Poland was the geographical bridge that the Red Army would have to cross in order to do so. Lenin’s aim was to restore control of the territories ceded by Russia in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was to infiltrate the borderlands, set up soviet governments there as well as in Poland, and reach Germany where he expected a socialist revolution to break out. He believed that Soviet Russia could not survive without the support of a socialist Germany. By the end of summer 1919 the Soviets managed to take over most of Ukraine, driving the Ukrainian government from Kiev. In early 1919, they also set up a Lithuanian-Belorussian Republic (Litbel). This government was very unpopular due to terror and the collection of food and goods for the army. It was not until after the Kiev Offensive had been repelled, however, that some of the Soviet leaders would see the war as the real opportunity to spread the revolution westwards. Indeed, the Bolsheviks stated:
But our enemies and yours deceive you when they say that the Russian Soviet Government wishes to plant communism in Polish soil with the bayonets of Russian Red Army men. A communist order is possible only where the vast majority of the working people are penetrated with the idea of creating it by their own strength. Only then can it be solid; for only then can communist policy strike deep roots in a country. The communists of Russia are at present striving only to defend their own soil, their own constructive work; they are not striving, and cannot strive, to plant communism by force in other countries.”
:: Before the start of the Polish-Soviet War Polish politics were strongly influenced by Chief of State (naczelnik państwa) Józef Piłsudski. Piłsudski wanted to break the Russian Empire and create a Polish-led "Międzymorze Federation" of independent states comprised of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and other Central and East European countries emerging out of crumbling empires after the First World War. This new union was to become a counterweight to any potential imperialist intentions on the part of Russia or Germany. Piłsudski argued that "There can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine", but he may have been more interested in Ukraine being split from Russia than in Ukrainians' welfare. He did not hesitate to use military force to expand the Polish borders to Galicia and Volhynia, crushing a Ukrainian attempt at self-determination in the disputed territories east of the Western Bug river, which contained a significant Polish minority, mainly in cities like Lwów (Lviv), but a Ukrainian majority in the countryside. Speaking of Poland's future frontiers, Piłsudski said: "All that we can gain in the west depends on the Entente—on the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany," while in the east "there are doors that open and close, and it depends on who forces them open and how far." In the chaos to the east the Polish forces set out to expand there as much as it was feasible. On the other hand, Poland had no intention of joining the western intervention in the Russian Civil War or of conquering Russia itself.
:: n 1918 the German Army in the east, under the command of Max Hoffmann, began to retreat westwards. The territories abandoned by the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria) became a field of conflict among local governments created by Germany, other local governments that independently sprang up after the German retreat, and the Bolsheviks, who hoped to incorporate those areas into Soviet Russia. As a result, almost all of Eastern Europe was in chaos.
On November 18, 1918, the Soviet Supreme Command issued orders to the Western Army of the Red Army to begin a westward movement that would follow the withdrawing German troops of Oberkommando Ostfront (Ober-Ost). The basic aim was to secure as much territory as possible with the few resources locally available.
At the start of 1919, Polish-Soviet fighting broke out almost by accident and without any orders from the respective governments when self-organized Polish military units in Vilnius (Wilno) clashed with Bolshevik forces of Litbel, each trying to secure the territories for its own incipient government. Eventually the more organized Soviet forces quelled most of the resistance and drove the remaining Polish forces west. On January 5, 1919, the Red Army entered Minsk almost unopposed, thus putting an end to the short-lived Belarusian People's Republic. At the same time, more and more Polish self-defense units sprang up across western Belarus and Lithuania (such as the Lithuanian and Belarusian Self-Defence). and engaged in a series of local skirmishes with pro-Bolshevik groups operating in the area. The newly organized Polish Army began sending the first of their units east to assist the self-defense forces, while the Russians sent their own units west.
In the spring of 1919, Soviet conscription produced a Red Army of 2,300,000. Few of these were sent west that year, as the majority of Red Army forces were engaged against the Russian White movement; the Western Army in February 1919 had just 46,000 men. In February 1919, the entire Polish army numbered 110,000 men, while by September 1919, it had 540,000 men; 230,000 of these were on the Soviet front.
By 14 February, the Poles, who had been advancing eastwards, secured positions along the line of Kobryn, Pruzhany, and the rivers Zalewianka and Neman. Around 14 February, at Mosty, the first organised Polish units made contact with the advance units of the Red Army. Bolshevik units withdrew without a shot. A frontline slowly began to form from Lithuania, through Belarus to Ukraine.
First Polish-Soviet conflicts
The first serious armed conflict of the war took place around February 14 - February 16, near the towns of Maniewicze and Biaroza in Belarus. By late February the Soviet advance had come to a halt. Both Polish and Soviet forces had also been engaging the Ukrainian forces, and unrest was growing in the territories of the Baltic countries (cf. Estonian Liberation War, Latvian War of Independence, Freedom wars of Lithuania).
In early March 1919, Polish units started an offensive, crossing the Neman River, taking Pinsk, and reaching the outskirts of Lida. Both the Russian and Polish advances began around the same time in April (Polish forces started a major offensive on April 16), resulting in increasing numbers of troops arriving in the area. That month the Bolsheviks captured Grodno, but soon were pushed out by a Polish counteroffensive. Unable to accomplish their objectives and facing strengthening offensives from the White forces, the Red Army withdrew from their positions and reorganized. Soon the Polish-Soviet War would begin in earnest.
Polish forces continued a steady eastern advance. They took Lida on April 17 and Nowogródek on April 18, and recaptured Vilnius on April 19, driving the Litbel government from their proclaimed capital. On August 8, Polish forces took Minsk and on the 28th of that month they deployed tanks for the first time. After heavy fighting, the town of Babruysk near the Berezina River was captured. By October 2, Polish forces reached the Daugava river and secured the region from Desna to Daugavpils (Dyneburg).
Polish success continued until early 1920. Sporadic battles erupted between Polish forces and the Red Army, but the latter was preoccupied with the White counter-revolutionary forces and was steadily retreating on the entire western frontline, from Latvia in the north to Ukraine in the south. In early summer 1919, the White movement had gained the initiative, and its forces under the command of Anton Denikin were marching on Moscow. Piłsudski viewed the Bolsheviks as a lesser threat to Poland than their contenders, as the White Russians were not willing to accept Poland's independence, while the Bolsheviks did proclaim the Partitions of Poland null and void. By his refusal to join the attack on Lenin's struggling government, ignoring the strong pressure from the Entente, Piłsudski had likely saved the Bolshevik government in Summer–Fall 1919. He later wrote that in case of a White victory, in the east Poland could only gain the "ethnic border" at best (the Curzon line). At the same time Lenin offered Poles the territories of Minsk, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, in what was described as mini "Brest"; Polish military leader Kazimierz Sosnkowski wrote that the territorial proposals of the Bolsheviks were much better than what the Poles had wanted to achieve.
Diplomatic Front, Part 1: The alliances
In 1919, several unsuccessful attempts at peace negotiations were made by various Polish and Russian factions. In the meantime, Polish-Lithuanian relations worsened as Polish politicians found it hard to accept the Lithuanians' demands for independence and territories, especially on ceding the city of Vilnius (Wilno), Lithuania's historical capital which had a Polish ethnic majority. Polish negotiators made better progress with the Latvian Provisional Government, and in late 1919 and early 1920 Polish and Latvian forces were conducting joint operations against Russia.
The Warsaw Treaty, an agreement with the exiled Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petlura signed on April 21, 1920, was the main Polish diplomatic success. Petlura, who formally represented the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic (by then de facto defeated by Bolsheviks), along with some Ukrainian forces, fled to Poland, where he found asylum. His control extended only to a sliver of land near the Polish border. In such conditions, there was little difficulty convincing Petlura to join an alliance with Poland, despite recent conflict between the two nations that had been settled in favour of Poland. By concluding an agreement with Piłsudski, Petlura accepted the Polish territorial gains in Western Ukraine and the future Polish-Ukrainian border along the Zbruch River. In exchange, he was promised Polish military assistance in reinstalling his government in Kiev. Following the formal restoration of Ukrainian independence, the Ukrainian republic was supposed to subordinate its military and economy to Warsaw through joining the Polish-led "Międzymorze" federation of East-Central European states, as Piłsudski wanted Ukraine to be a buffer between Poland and Russia rather than allowing Russian domination up to the Polish border. A separate provision in the treaty prohibited both sides from concluding any international agreements against each other. Ethnic Poles within the Ukrainian border, and ethnic Ukrainians within the Polish border, were guaranteed the same rights within their states. Unlike their Russian counterparts, whose lands were to be distributed among the peasants, Polish landlords in Ukraine were accorded special treatment.
For Piłsudski, this alliance gave his campaign for the Międzymorze federation the legitimacy of joint international effort, secured part of the Polish eastward border, and laid a foundation for a Polish dominated Ukrainian state between Russia and Poland. For Petlura, this was another chance to preserve the statehood and, at least, the theoretical independence of the Ukrainian heartlands, even while accepting the loss of Western Ukrainian lands to Poland.
Yet both of them were opposed at home. Piłsudski faced stiff opposition from Dmowski's National Democrats who opposed Ukrainian independence. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the highly respected first president of the Ukrainian People's Republic, also condemned the alliance with Poland and Petlura's claim to have acted on the behalf of the UPR. In general, many Ukrainians viewed a union with Poles with great suspicion, especially in the view of historically difficult relationships between the nations, and the alliance received an especially dire reception from Galicia Ukrainians who viewed it as their betrayal; their attempted state, the West Ukrainian People's Republic, had been defeated by July 1919 and was now to be incorporated into Poland. The Western Ukrainian political leader, Yevhen Petrushevych, who expressed fierce opposition to the alliance, left for exile in Vienna. The remainder of the Ukrainian Galician Army, the Western Ukrainian state's defence force, still counted 5,000 able fighters though devastated by a typhoid epidemic, and joined the Reds on 2 February, 1920 as the transformed Red Ukrainian Galician Army. Later, the Galician forces would turn against the Reds and join Petliura's forces when sent against them, resulting in mass arrests and disbandment of the Red Galician Army. The alliance with Petliura resulted in 15,000 allied Ukrainian troops at the beginning of the campaign, increasing to 35,000 through recruitment and desertion from the Soviet side.
1920
Opposing forces
By early 1920, the Soviet forces had been very successful against the White armies. They defeated Denikin and signed peace treaties with Latvia and Estonia. The Polish front became their most important war theater and the majority of Soviet resources and forces were diverted to it. In January 1920, the Red Army began concentrating a 700,000-strong force near the Berezina River and on Belarus. In the course of 1920, almost 800,000 Red Army personnel were sent to fight in the Polish war, of whom 402,000 went to the Western front and 355,000 to the armies of the South-West front in Galicia. The Soviets had many military depots at their disposal, left by withdrawing German armies in 1918-19, and modern French armaments captured in great numbers from the White Russians and the Allied expeditionary forces in the Russian Civil War. Still, they suffered a shortage of arms; both the Red Army and the Polish forces were grossly underequipped by Western standards.
Bolshevik commanders in the Red Army's coming offensive would include Mikhail Tukhachevsky (new commander of the Western Front), Leon Trotsky, the future Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin, and the future founder of the Cheka secret police, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky.
The Polish Army was made up of soldiers who had formerly served in the various partitioning empires, supported by some international volunteers, such as the Kościuszko Squadron. Boris Savinkov was at the head of an army of 20,000 to 30,000 largely Russian POWs, and was accompanied by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius. The Polish forces grew from approximately 100,000 in 1918 to over 500,000 in early 1920.
Logistics were very bad, supported by whatever equipment was left over from World War I or could be captured. The Polish Army employed guns made in five countries, and rifles manufactured in six, each using different ammunition.
The Soviet High Command planned a new offensive in late April/May. Since March 1919, Polish intelligence was aware that the Soviets had prepared for a new offensive and the Polish High Command decided to launch their own offensive before their opponents. The plan for Operation Kiev was to beat the Red Army on Poland's southern flank and install a Polish-friendly Petlura government in Ukraine.
The tide turns: Operation Kiev
Until April, the Polish forces had been slowly but steadily advancing eastward. The new Latvian government requested and obtained Polish help in capturing Daugavpils. The city fell after heavy fighting in January and was handed over to the Latvians, who viewed the Poles as liberators. By March, Polish forces had driven a wedge between Soviet forces to the north (Byelorussia) and south (Ukraine).
On April 24, Poland began its main offensive, Operation Kiev. Its goal was the creation of independent Ukraine that would become part of Piłsudski's project of a "Międzymorze" Federation.
On April 26, in his "Call to the People of Ukraine", Piłsudski assured that "the Polish army would only stay as long as necessary until a legal Ukrainian government took control over its own territory". Despite this, many Ukrainians were just as anti-Polish as anti-Bolshevik, and resented the Polish advance, which many viewed as just a new variety of occupation considering previous defeat in the Polish-Ukrainian War. Thus, Ukrainians also actively fought the Polish invasion in Ukrainian formations of the Red Army. Some scholars stress the effects of Soviet propaganda in encouraging negative Ukrainian sentiment towards the Polish operation and Polish-Ukrainian history in general.
The Polish 3rd Army easily won border clashes with the Red Army in Ukraine but the Reds withdrew with minimal losses. The combined Polish-Ukrainian forces entered an abandoned Kiev on May 7, encountering only token resistance.
The Polish military thrust was met with Red Army counterattacks on 29 May. Polish forces in the area, preparing for an offensive towards Žlobin, managed to push the Soviets back, but were unable to start their own planned offensive. In the north, Polish forces had fared much worse. The Polish 1st Army was defeated and forced to retreat, pursued by the Russian 15th Army which recaptured territories between the Western Dvina and Berezina rivers. Polish forces attempted to take advantage of the exposed flanks of the attackers but the enveloping forces failed to stop the Soviet advance. At the end of May, the front had stabilised near the small river Auta, and Soviet forces began preparing for the next push.
On May 24 1920, the Polish forces in the south were engaged for the first time by Semyon Budionny's famous 1st Cavalry Army (Konarmia). Repeated attacks by Budionny's Cossack cavalry broke the Polish-Ukrainian front on June 5. The Soviets then deployed mobile cavalry units to disrupt the Polish rearguard, targeting communications and logistics. By June 10, Polish armies were in retreat along the entire front. On June 13, the Polish army, along with the Petlura's Ukrainian troops, abandoned Kiev to the Red Army.
String of Soviet victories
The commander of the Polish 3rd Army in Ukraine, General Edward Rydz-Śmigły, decided to break through the Soviet line toward the northwest. Polish forces in Ukraine managed to withdraw relatively unscathed, but were unable to support the northern front and reinforce the defenses at the Auta River for the decisive battle that was soon to take place there.
Due to insufficient forces, Poland's 200-mile-long front was manned by a thin line of 120,000 troops backed by some 460 artillery pieces with no strategic reserves. This approach to holding ground harked back to Great War practice of "establishing a fortified line of defense". It had shown some merit on a Western Front saturated with troops, machine guns, and artillery. Poland's eastern front, however, was weakly manned, supported with inadequate artillery, and had almost no fortifications.
Against the Polish line the Red Army gathered their Northwest Front led by the young General Mikhail Tukhachevski. Their numbers exceeded 108,000 infantry and 11,000 cavalry, supported by 722 artillery pieces and 2,913 machine guns. The Russians at some crucial places outnumbered the Poles four-to-one.
Tukhachevski launched his offensive on July 4, along the Smolensk-Brest-Litovsk axis, crossing the Auta and Berezina rivers. The northern 3rd Cavalry Corps, led by Gayk Bzhishkyan (Gay Dmitrievich Gay, Gaj-Chan), were to envelope Polish forces from the north, moving near the Lithuanian and Prussian border (both of these belonging to nations hostile to Poland). The 4th, 15th, and 3rd Armies were to push decisively west, supported from the south by the 16th Army and Grupa Mozyrska. For three days the outcome of the battle hung in the balance, but the Russians' numerical superiority proved decisive and by July 7 Polish forces were in full retreat along the entire front. However, due to the stubborn defense by Polish units, Tukhachevsky's plan to break through the front and push the defenders southwest into the Pinsk Marshes failed.
Polish resistance was offered again on a line of "German trenches", a heavily fortified line of World War I field fortifications that presented a unique opportunity to stem the Russian offensive. However, the Polish troops were insufficient in number. Soviet forces selected a weakly defended part of the front and broke through. Gej-Chan and Lithuanian forces captured Wilno on 14 July, forcing the Poles to retreat again. In Galicia to the south, General Semyon Budyonny's cavalry advanced far into the Polish rear, capturing Brodno and approaching Lwów and Zamość. In early July, it became clear to the Poles that the Russians' objectives were not limited to pushing their borders westwards. Poland's very independence was at stake.
Russian forces moved forward at the remarkable rate of 20 miles a day. Grodno in Belarus fell on 19 July; Brest-Litovsk fell on 1 August. The Polish attempted to defend the Bug River line with 4th Army and Grupa Poleska units, but were able to stop the Red Army advance for only one week. After crossing the Narew River on 2 August, the Russian Northwest Front was only 60 miles from Warsaw. The Brest-Litovsk fortress which was to be the headquarters of the planned Polish counteroffensive fell to the 16th Army in the first attack. Stalin in charge of the Russian Southwest Front, and was pushing the Polish forces out of Ukraine and then disobeyed orders and closed on Zamość and Lwów, the largest city in southeastern Poland and an important industrial center, defended by the Polish 6th Army. Polish Galicia's Lviv (Lwów) was soon besieged. So opening up a hole in the Russian lines as at the same time the way to the Polish capital lay open and five Russian armies approached Warsaw. Polish politicians tried to secure peace with Moscow on any conditions but the Bolsheviks refused.
Polish forces in Galicia near Lviv launched a successful counteroffensive to slow the Soviets down which stopped the retreat of Polish forces on the southern front. However, the worsening situation near the Polish capital of Warsaw prevented the Poles from continuing that southern counteroffensive and pushing east. After the Soviets captured Brest, the Polish offensive in the south was halted and all available forces moved north to take part in the coming battle for Warsaw.
Diplomatic Front, Part 2: The political games
With the tide turning against Poland, Piłsudski's political power weakened, while his opponents', including Roman Dmowski's, rose. Piłsudski did manage to regain his influence, especially over the military, almost at the last possible moment—as the Soviet forces were approaching Warsaw. The Polish political scene had begun to unravel in panic, with the government of Leopold Skulski resigning in early June.
Meawhile, the Soviet leadership's confidence soared. It would be the Soviet Union's first penetration into Europe proper—the first attempt to export the Bolshevik Revolution by force. In a telegram, Lenin exclaimed: "We must direct all our attention to preparing and strengthening the Western Front. A new slogan must be announced: 'Prepare for war against Poland'." Soviet communist theorist Nikolay Bukharin, writer for the newspaper Pravda, wished for the resources to carry the campaign beyond Warsaw "right up to London and Paris". General's Tukhachevsky order of the day, 2 July, 1920 read: "To the West! Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to world-wide conflagration. March on Vilno, Minsk, Warsaw!" and "onward to Berlin over the corpse of Poland!"
By order of the Soviet Communist Party, a Polish puppet government, the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (Polish: Tymczasowy Komitet Rewolucyjny Polski, TKRP), had been formed on 28 July in Białystok to organise administration of the Polish territories captured by the Red Army. The TKRP had very little support from the Polish population and recruited its supporters mostly from the ranks of Jews. In addition, political intrigues between Soviet commanders grew in the face of their increasingly certain victory. Eventually the lack of cooperation between the top commanders would cost them dearly in the decisive battle of Warsaw.
Western public opinion was strongly pro-Soviet. Britain's Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, who wanted to negotiate a favourable trade agreement with the Bolsheviks pressed Poland to make peace on Soviet terms and refused any assistance to Poland which would alienate the Whites in the Russian Civil War. In July 1920, Britain announced it would send huge quantities of World War I surplus military supplies to Poland, but a threatened general strike by the Trades Union Congress, who objected to British support of "White Poland", ensured that none of the weapons destined for Poland left British ports. David Lloyd George had never been enthusiastic about supporting the Poles, and had been pressured by his more right-wing Cabinet members such as Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill into offering the supplies. On the 11 July, 1920, the government of Great Britain issued a de facto ultimatum to the Soviets. The Soviets were ordered to stop hostilities against Poland and the Russian Army (the White Army in Southern Russia lead by Baron Wrangel), and to accept what later was called the "Curzon line" as a temporary border with Poland, until a permanent border could be established in negotiations. In case of Soviet refusal, the British threatened to assist Poland with all the means available, which, in reality, were limited by the internal political situation in the United Kingdom. On the 17 July, the Bolsheviks refused and made a counter-offer to negotiate a peace treaty directly with Poland. The British responded by threatening to cut off the on-going trade negotiations if the Soviets conducted further offensives against Poland. These threats were ignored.
The threatened general strike was a convenient excuse for Lloyd George to back out of his commitments. On August 6, 1920, the British Labour Party published a pamphlet stating that British workers would never take part in the war as Poland's allies, and labour unions blocked supplies to the British expeditionary force assisting Russian Whites in Arkhangelsk. French Socialists, in their newspaper L'Humanité, declared: "Not a man, not a sou, not a shell for reactionary and capitalist Poland. Long live the Russian Revolution! Long live the Workmen's International!" Poland also suffered setbacks due to sabotage and delays in deliveries of war supplies, when workers in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany refused to transit such materials to Poland.
Lithuania's stance was mostly anti-Polish and the country had joined the Soviet side in July 1919. The decision was dictated by a desire to incorporate the city of Wilno (in Lithuanian, Vilnius) and nearby areas into Lithuania and, to a lesser extent, Soviet diplomatic pressure, backed by the threat of the Red Army stationed on Lithuania's borders.
Polish allies were few. France, continuing her policy of countering Bolshevism now that the Whites in Russia proper had been almost completely defeated, sent a 400-strong advisory group to Poland's aid in 1919. It was mostly comprised of French officers, although it also included a few British advisers led by Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton De Wiart. The French officers included a future President of France, Charles de Gaulle; during the war he won Poland's highest military decoration, the Virtuti Militari. In addition to the Allied advisors, France also facilitated the transit to Poland from France of the "Blue Army" in 1919: troops mostly of Polish origin, plus some international volunteers, formerly under French command in World War I. The army was commanded by the Polish general, Józef Haller. Hungary offered to send a 30,000 cavalry corps to Poland's aid, but the Czechoslovakian government refused to allow them through; some trains with weapon supplies from Hungary did, however, arrive in Poland.
In mid-1920, the Allied Mission was expanded by some advisers (becoming the Interallied Mission to Poland). They included: French diplomat, Jean Jules Jusserand; Maxime Weygand, chief of staff to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of the victorious Entente; and British diplomat, Lord Edgar Vincent D'Abernon. The newest members of the mission achieved little; indeed, the crucial Battle of Warsaw was fought and won by the Poles before the mission could return and make its report. Nonetheless for many years, a myth persisted that it was the timely arrival of Allied forces that had saved Poland, a myth in which Weygand occupied the central role. Nonetheless Polish-French cooperation would continue. Eventually, on the 21 February, 1921, France and Poland entered into a formal military alliance, which became an important factor during the subsequent Soviet-Polish negotiations.
The tide turns: Miracle at the Vistula
On August 10, 1920, Russian Cossack units under the command of Gay Dimitrievich Gay crossed the Vistula river, planning to take Warsaw from the west while the main attack came from the east. On August 13, an initial Russian attack was repulsed. The Polish 1st Army resisted a direct assault on Warsaw as well as stopping the assault at Radzymin.
The Soviet commander-in-chief, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, felt certain that all was going according to his plan. However, Polish military intelligence had decrypted the Red Army's radio messages, and Tukhachevsky was actually falling into a trap set by Piłsudski and his Chief of Staff, Tadeusz Rozwadowski. The Russian advance across the Vistula River in the north was moving into an operational vacuum, as there were no sizable Polish forces in the area. On the other hand, south of Warsaw, where the fate of the war was about to be decided, Tukhachevski had left only token forces to guard the vital link between the Russian northwest and southwest fronts. Another factor that influenced the outcome of the war was the effective neutralization of Budionny's 1st Cavalry Army, much feared by Piłsudski and other Polish commanders, in the battles around Lwów. The Soviet High Command, at Tukhachevski's insistence, had ordered the 1st Cavalry Army to march north toward Warsaw and Lublin, but Budionny disobeyed the order due to a grudge between Tukhachevski and Yegorov, commander of the southwest front. Additionally, the political games of Joseph Stalin, chief political commissar of the Southwest Front, decisively influenced the disobedience of Yegorov and Budionny. Stalin, seeking a personal triumph, was focused on capturing Lwów—far to the southeast of Warsaw—which was besieged by Bolshevik forces but still resisted their assaults.
The Polish 5th Army under General Władysław Sikorski counterattacked on August 14 from the area of the Modlin fortress, crossing the Wkra River. It faced the combined forces of the numerically and materially superior Soviet 3rd and 15th Armies. In one day the Soviet advance toward Warsaw and Modlin had been halted and soon turned into retreat. Sikorski's 5th Army pushed the exhausted Soviet formations away from Warsaw in a lightning operation. Polish forces advanced at a speed of thirty kilometers a day, soon destroying any Soviet hopes for completing their enveloping manoeuvre in the north. By August 16, the Polish counteroffensive had been fully joined by Marshal Piłsudski's "Reserve Army." Precisely executing his plan, the Polish force, advancing from the south, found a huge gap between the Russian fronts and exploited the weakness of the Soviet "Mozyr Group" that was supposed to protect the weak link between the Soviet fronts. The Poles continued their northward offensive with two armies following and destroying the surprised enemy. They reached the rear of Tukhachevski's forces, the majority of which were encircled by August 18. Only that same day did Tukhachevski, at his Minsk headquarters 300 miles east of Warsaw, become fully aware of the proportions of the Soviet defeat and ordered the remnants of his forces to retreat and regroup. He hoped to straighten his front line, halt the Polish attack, and regain the initiative, but the orders either arrived too late or failed to arrive at all.
The Soviet armies in the center of the front fell into chaos. Tukhachevski ordered a general retreat toward the Bug River, but by then he had lost contact with most of his forces near Warsaw, and all the Bolshevik plans had been thrown into disarray by communication failures.
The Bolshevik armies retreated in a disorganised fashion; entire divisions panicking and disintegrating. The Red Army's defeat was so great and unexpected that, at the instigation of Piłsudski's detractors, the Battle of Warsaw is often referred to in Poland as the "Miracle at the Vistula". Current investigation in Poland concluded that the "Miracle at the Vistula" was caused by a net of Polish spies within the Red Army. Piłsudski knew about all the moves by the Red Army while the Soviets were left in the dark.
The advance of Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army toward Lwów was halted, first at the battle of Brody (July 29-August 2), and then on August 17 at the Battle of Zadwórze, where a small Polish force sacrificed itself to prevent Soviet cavalry from seizing Lwów and stopping vital Polish reinforcements from moving toward Warsaw. Moving through weakly defended areas, Budyonny's cavalry reached the city of Zamość on 29 August and attempted to take it in the battle of Zamość; however, he soon faced an increasing number of Polish units diverted from the successful Warsaw counteroffensive. On August 31, Budyonny's cavalry finally broke off its siege of Lwów and attempted to come to the aid of Russian forces retreating from Warsaw. The Russian forces were intercepted and defeated by Polish cavalry at the Battle of Komarów near Zamość, the greatest cavalry battle since 1813 and one of the last cavalry battles in history. Although Budionny's Army managed to avoid encirclement, it suffered heavy losses and it's morale plummeted. The remains of Budionny's 1st Cavalry Army retreated towards Volodymyr-Volynskyi on 6 September and was defeated shortly thereafter at the Battle of Hrubieszów.
Tukhachevski managed to reorganize the eastward-retreating forces and in September established a new defensive line running from the Polish-Lithuanian border to the north to the area of Polesie, with the central point in the city of Grodno in Belarus. In order to break this line, the Polish Army had to fight the Battle of the Niemen River. Polish forces crossed the Niemen River and outflanked the Bolshevik forces, which were forced to retreat again. Polish forces continued to advance east on all fronts, repeating their successes from the previous year. After the early October Battle of the Szczara River, the Polish Army had reached the Ternopil-Dubno-Minsk-Drisa line.
In the south, Petliura's Ukrainian forces defeated the Bolshevik 14th Army and on September 18th took control of the left bank of the Zbruch river. During the next month they moved east to the line Yaruha on the Dniester-Sharharod-Bar-Lityn.
Conclusion
Soon after the Battle of Warsaw the Bolsheviks sued for peace. The Poles, exhausted, constantly pressured by the Western governments and the League of Nations, and with its army controlling the majority of the disputed territories, were willing to negotiate. The Soviets made two offers: one on 21 September and the other on 28 September. The Polish delegation made a counteroffer on 2 October. On the 5th, the Soviets offered amendments to the Polish offer which Poland accepted. The armistice between Poland on one side and Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia on the other was signed on 12 October and went into effect on 18 October. Long negotiations of the peace treaty ensued.
Meanwhile, Petliura's Ukrainian forces, which now numbered 23,000 soldiers, planned an offensive into Ukraine for November 11 but were attacked by the Bolsheviks on November 10. By November 21, after several battles, they were driven into Polish-controlled territory.
Aftermath
According to the British historian A.J.P. Taylor, the Polish-Soviet War "largely determined the course of European history for the next twenty years or more. […] Unavowedly and almost unconsciously, Soviet leaders abandoned the cause of international revolution." It would be twenty years before the Bolsheviks would send their armies abroad to 'make revolution'. According to American sociologist Alexander Gella "the Polish victory had gained twenty years of independence not only for Poland, but at least for an entire central part of Europe.
After the peace negotiations Poland did not maintain all the territories it had controlled at the end of hostilities. Due to their losses in and after the Battle of Warsaw, the Soviets offered the Polish peace delegation substantial territorial concessions in the contested borderland areas, closely resembling the border between the Russian Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before the first partition of 1772. Polish resources were exhausted, however, and Polish public opinion was opposed to a prolongation of the war. The Polish government was also pressured by the League of Nations, and the negotiations were controlled by Dmowski's National Democrats: Piłsudski might have controlled the military, but parliament (Sejm) was controlled by Dmowski, and the peace negotiations were of a political nature. National Democrats, like Stanisław Grabski, who earlier had resigned his post to protest the Polish–Ukrainian alliance and now wielded much influence over the Polish negotiators, cared little for Piłsudski's Międzymorze; this post-war situation proved a death blow to Piłsudski's dream of reviving the multicultural Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the form of the Międzymorze.
The National Democrats in charge of the state also had few concerns about the fate of Ukrainians, and cared little that their political opponent, Piłsudski, felt honor-bound by his treaty obligations; his opponents did not hesitate to scrap the treaty. National Democrats wanted only the territory that they viewed as 'ethnically or historically Polish' or possible to polonize. Despite the Red Army's crushing defeat at Warsaw and the willingness of Russian chief negotiator Adolf Joffe to concede almost all disputed territory, National Democrats ideology allowed the Soviets to regain certain territories. The Peace of Riga was signed on March 18, 1921, splitting the disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between Poland and Russia. The treaty, which Piłsudski called an act of cowardice, and for which he apologized to the Ukrainians, actually violated the terms of Poland's military alliance with Ukraine, which had explicitly prohibited a separate peace; Ukrainian allies of Poland suddenly found themselves interned by the Polish authorities. The internment worsened relations between Poland and its Ukrainian minority: those who supported Petliura felt that Ukraine had been betrayed by its Polish ally, a feeling that grew stronger due to the assimilationist policies of nationalist inter-war Poland towards its minorities. To a large degree, this inspired the growing tensions and eventual violence against Poles in the 1930s and 1940s.
The war and its aftermath also resulted in other controversies, such as situation of prisoners of war, treatment of the civilian population and behaviour of some commanders like Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz or Vadim Yakovlev. The Polish military successes in the autumn of 1920 allowed Poland to capture the Wilno (Vilnius) region, where a Polish-dominated Governance Committee of Central Lithuania (Komisja Rządząca Litwy Środkowej) was formed. A plebiscite was conducted, and the Wilno Sejm voted on February 20, 1922, for incorporation into Poland. This worsened Polish-Lithuanian relations for decades to come.[9] Another controversy concerned the pogroms of Jews, which has caused the United States to send a commission lead by Henry Morgenthau, Sr. to investigage the matter.
Military strategy in the Polish-Soviet War influenced Charles de Gaulle, then an instructor with the Polish Army who fought in several of the battles. He and Władysław Sikorski were the only military officers who, based on their experiences of this war, correctly predicted how the next one would be fought. Although they failed in the interbellum to convince their respective militaries to heed those lessons, early in World War II they rose to command of their armed forces in exile. The Polish-Soviet War also influenced Polish military doctrine, which for the next 20 years would place emphasis on the mobility of elite cavalry units.
Until 1989, while communists held power in a People's Republic of Poland, the Polish-Soviet War was omitted or minimized in Polish and other Soviet bloc countries' history books, or was presented as foreign intervention during the Russian Civil War to fit in with communist ideology.
List of battles
List of battles of the Polish-Soviet War by chronology:
Soviet "Target Vistula" offensive (January-February 1919)
Battle of Bereza Kartuska (February 9, 1919: the first battle of the conflict)
Operation Wilno: Polish offensive to Wilno (April 1919)
First Battle of Lida (April 1919)
Operation Minsk: Polish offensive to Minsk (July-August 1919)
Battles of Chorupań and Dubno (July 19, 1919)
Battle of Daugavpils: joint Polish-Latvian operation (January 3, 1920)
Kiev Offensive (May-June 1920)
Battle of Wołodarka (May 29, 1920)
Battle of Brody (29 July – 2 August 1920)
Battle of Lwów (July-September 1920)
Battle of Tarnopol (July 31-August 6, 1920)
Battle of Warsaw (August 15 1920)
Battle of Raszyn, Battle of Nasielsk, Battle of Radzymin (August 14-August 15, 1920)
Battle of Zadwórze: the "Polish Thermopyla" (August 17, 1920)
Battle of Sarnowa Góra (August 21-August 22, 1920)
battle of Zamość (August 29, 1920) - Budyonny's attempt to take Zamość
Battle of Komarów: great cavalry battle, ending in Budyonny's defeat (August 31, 1920)
Battle of Hrubieszów (September 1, 1920)
Battle of Kobryń (1920) (September 14-September 15, 1920)
Battle of Dytiatyn (September 16, 1920)
Battle of Brzostowica (September 20, 1920)
Battle of the Niemen River (September 26-28 1920)
Battles of Obuchowe and Krwawy Bór (September 27-September 28, 1920)
Battle of Zboiska
Battle of Minsk (October 18, 1920)
Polish-Soviet War: Battle of Warsaw
Commanding 160,000 troops, Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky was said to be the Red Army's most brilliant general. If the newly resurrected Polish nation was to survive, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski would have to be even smarter.
By Robert Szymczak
One of the most easily overlooked, yet momentous short wars of the 20th century was the swift-moving clash between the post-World War I Polish Republic and Russia's brand-new Bolshevik regime of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Reaching a climax during the summer of 1920, the Russo-Polish War is often regarded as the final episode of the Russian Civil War. In fact, it was much more -- at once a reflection of the age-old enmity between two Slavic neighbors and a Marxist crusade bent on varying the torch of revolution into the heart of Europe. The campaign featured a remarkable cast of characters on both sides and mixed ferocious cavalry charges with early blitzkrieg tactics in quest of exceptional objectives.
The roots of the war ran deep. For a century and a quarter, the once-formidable Polish nation was a political nonentity, having been dismembered by Prussia, Austria and Russia in the infamous partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795. Three national insurrections had failed to dislodge the occupying powers; severe Germanization and Russification efforts, aimed at the destruction of the Polish language and culture, were imposed upon the population during the 19th century. Although such campaigns had little effect, by the turn of the century only the most optimistic Polish patriots could still dream of independence.
Yet World War I provided exactly the right set of circumstances for the Poles. On November 6, 1916, Austria-Hungary and Germany, in a desperate bid to ensure the loyalty of their Polish populations, jointly agreed to the formation of a semi-autonomous "Kingdom of Poland." In Paris, France, Polish spokesmen beat the ears of Allied statesmen on behalf of an independent Poland, but none of the Western powers cared to antagonize their imperial Russian ally, which was opposed to such a move. In 1917, however, Russia had dropped into a violent vortex of chaos and revolution. Partly in consequence to that development, the Fourteen Points for peace drafted by United States President Woodrow Wilson included the creation of an independent Poland and its recognition as "an allied belligerent nation" as of June 3, 1918. On October 7, 1918, with the Central Powers clearly on the brink of defeat, the Regency Council in Warsaw declared Polish independence. After the guns of war fell silent on November 11, the three torn pieces of the Polish nation were triumphantly reunited.
The representatives of France, Great Britain, Italy and the united States met in the mirrored halls of Versailles in 1919 to dismember the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and set the world right. Russia, the erstwhile ally that in November 1917 had established the world's first Communist government, was shunned by the Western Allies; Lenin's decision to make a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in the spring of 1918 would not be forgiven just then. Moscow's absence form the Versailles conference later proved to be a costly blunder. While the Allies were able to produce a tentative settlement for Poland's western frontiers, they had no means of establishing any agree-upon border between the new Polish state and the Russian colossus.
The resurgent Poles, meanwhile, quickly established a Western-style parliamentary government and chose a 51-year-old romantic, a conspiratorial and avidly Russophobic military hero named Jozef Klemens Pilsudski as chief of state. Pilsudski, a longtime member of the Polish Socialist Party's right wing, had always placed the achievement of Polish independence ahead of the social reforms advocated by some of his more ideological colleagues. As a young man he had felt the brutality of tsarist justice, spending five years in Siberian exile for revolutionary activity. During World War I, he organized and commanded a Polish legion under Austrian auspices on the Eastern Front, convinced that Russia was the chief enemy of his country's independence. He soon became disillusioned with vague Austrian promises in favor of Polish independence, however, and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Central Powers. Arrested and imprisoned in Magdeburg for two years, he was released on November 10, 1918, and returned home to be acclaimed as a national hero.
Pilsudski possessed an iron will and a quick mind. He clearly regarded the new Polish army as his special province, and himself as the guarantor of independence. The republic's forces, still motley and ill-equipped, would soon be put to the test as the commander in chief turned his attention eastward.
The re-establishment of Poland's pre-partition 1772 frontiers, which included substantial parts of the Ukraine and Belorussia ("White Russia," now Belarus), was a matter of top priority for Pilsudski. To accomplish that goal, the veteran revolutionary resurrected the old Polish idea of federalism, first championed in the Middle Ages by the kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty. Put simply, the plan called for an East European federation consisting of the independent republics of the Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania, bound together with Poland. The latter nation would, according to the Pilsudski scheme, play the leading role.
This incredibly ambitious designed was destined to disintegrate almost immediately. The Lithuanians, former partners in the old Polish kingdom, were intensely nationalistic, after their own long submergence in the Russian empire, and they zealously sought to protect their own newly proclaimed independence in the wake of the tsar's fall. They wanted no part of Pilsudski's federalist notions. The Ukrainians, while keenly desiring independence, were naturally suspicious of the Polish leader's motives, realizing how much of the Ukraine was intended for incorporation within the Polish state. The Belorussians, for centuries caught in the crossroads of Roman Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia, had no outstanding national consciousness yet and were frankly interested in neither in independence nor in Pilsudski's proposals of union. The Polish argument that none of those three nations could stand next to Russia alone fell on deaf ears. To all three of the potential federal members, it appeared that they might be exchanging the former Russian yoke for a Polish one.
The Western Allies, too, were decidedly against Pilsudski's plans. Both Britain and France accused the Polish chief of state of imperialism at Russia's expense, and they urged Poland to limit its eastern frontiers to the farthest extent of clear-cut Polish ethnicity. As for Russian Bolshevism, London and Paris saw that not as a threat, but a temporary disease, soon to be destroyed by the anti-Communist White forces, which the Allies supported in the ten-raging Russian Civil War.
The new Bolshevik government, besieged by a multitude of armies commanded by a politically diverse collection of generals ranging from tsarist aristocrats to disillusioned socialists to provincial warlords, had its hands full at the time. The White forces of Generals Anton Denikin, Nikolai Yudenich and Piotr Wrangel, and Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, supported by Western and Japanese armies and funds, had to be stopped. The Reds had little time in 1918 to worry about Polish schemes to expand on Russia's western periphery.
Lenin's dynamic associate Leon Trotsky organized the Red Army to meet the White threat. By using powerful idealism awakened in the revolution, and invovling fears that the landowning aristocrats might return to power, Trotsky built a formidable force of workers, peasants and ex-soldiers of the old imperial army, complete with a tough cavalry corps, to protect the Bolshevik regime. Throughout 1918and 1919, the Reds turned the tables on their foes, one by one.
At that moment of chaos and civil war in Russia, the Poles struck. In February 1919, Pilsudski sent his troops northeast, occupying as much territory as possible for the purpose of presenting a fait accompli to the Allied Supreme Council. That body would then be forced to recognize Poland's expanded eastern boundaries.
The Polish forces encountered little resistance and advanced rapidly, soon capturing Wilno (Vilius), a historically Polish city, from the Lithuanians, who had proclaimed it the capital of their new republic. By the autumn of 1919, the Polish red-and-white banner was flying over large sections of Belorussia and the western Galician part of the Ukraine was well.
Pilsudski ordered a halt at that point, his intelligence service having informed him that the Whites under General Denikin were pressuring Moscow from the south and could possibly capture the seat of the Bolshevik regime. The Poles surmised that a White government bent on the reconstruction of the old empire would prove more recalcitrant than the hard-pressed Bolsheviks. Denikin was willing to allow Poland to exist up to the borders of Privislanski Kaj, a former Russian province carved from Poland, in exchange for Polish participation in an anti-Communist crusade, but since those terms would deprive Poland of half the territory Pilsudski wanted, the Polish commander in chief rejected that and other White offers. Although Pilsudski secretly negotiated with the Reds for an acceptable eastern frontier, he was by no means convinced of Lenin's sincerity.
In December, the British foreign minister, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, proposed a frontier that roughly corresponded to the ethnic limits of Poland but failed to include the two predominantly Polish cities of Lwow and Wilno. Ironically, the "Curzon Line," as it was later dubbed, was to become the eastern border of post-World War II Poland. The border proposed by the British, although never meant to be a final frontier, was rejected by the Poles, for they had already pushed beyond it.
When it became evident to Pilsudski that the Bolsheviks had turned the tide in the civil war and the Whites appeared doomed, Polish-Soviet negotiations were broken off and the Poles prepared for another thrust into Belorussia and the Ukraine. Such an action, the Poles knew, would be tantamount to a full-blown anti-Soviet war.
Before pressing forward,d Pilsudski shopped around for an ally and found one in the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian Ataman Semyon Pelyura, whose bedraggled troops had fought both Denikin's Whites and Trotsky's Reds for possession of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Nothing loess than complete Ukrainian independence was Petlyura's goal, but he concluded the Poles were decidedly the lesser evil compared to either the White or Red Russians. Overcoming severe objections of several of his nationalist associates, the Ukrainian leader came to Poland to ask Pilsudski's help and, on December 2, 1919, signed a treaty granting eastern Galicia and western Volhynia to Poland in return for Polish support of Petlyura's efforts to recapture Kiev and extend the Ukraine's borders to the western bank of the Dnieper River.
Immediately after the collapse of the Polish-Soviet negotiations, Pilsudski ordered several Polish divisions to move north and assist Latvian troops in dislodging the Bolsheviks from the banks of the Dvina River. The campaign resulted in the capture of the crucial fortress of Dvinski on January 3, 1920, and frightened the Soviets into resuming negotiations with the Poles.
Pilsudski rejected Lenin's offer of a frontier settlement that corresponded somewhat to the existing front line; he deliberately dragged his feet, convinced that the Red offer was insincere, a ploy masking Moscow's real intentions -- a transfer of troops from the crumbling White fronts to the Polish line. As a gesture of good faith, Pilsudski insisted that the peace talks should be conducted at Borissov, a small Belorussian town near the front. The Soviets' insistent rejection of that demand apparently convinced the Polish leader that an attack on his position was imminent.
While playing the Bolshevik negotiating game throughout the winter months, Pilsudski prepared for battle. Determined to strike first, he managed to station 100,000 Polish troops on the front, but they were spread out a line more than 600 miles long. Meanwhile, Warsaw's intelligence service kept Pilsudski informed of every detail of Soviet troops movements toward the front while the talks continued.
By that time, London and Paris were greatly alarmed at the reports they were getting of the Polish war preparations. Foreign Secretary Curzon fired a sharply worded telegram to Pilsudski on February 9, warning him that Poland should expect "neither help nor support" from Great Britain. The Allied Supreme Council followed suit two weeks later with a stern admonition. Pilsudski ignored both messages.
Polish spies reported to Warsaw that more Red troops, fresh from victory over the Whites, were transferring west to the front every day. By spring, Pilsudski could wait no longer. On April 21, the Polish chief of state signed a military agreement with Peltyura and his Ukrainian National Council for a pre-emptive expedition against the Bolsheviks. Should the campaign prove successful, the Ukrainians were pledged to enter a federal union with Poland. Four days after the pact was signed, Pilsudski launched a daring offensive deep into the Ukraine.
The Western Allies were as dumbfounded as the Reds by the Polish commander's audacity. How could a newly restored Poland, whose population had suffered terribly during World War I and whose economy was virtually nonexistent, even contemplate -- let alone mount -- a full-scale attack on Russia? Undeterred by the protestations of the Western Allies, Pilsudski pushed his forces all the way to the Dnieper in less than a fortnight. On the tips of their lances, the Polish cavalrymen carried a proclamation written by their chief of state that promised "all inhabitants of Ukraine, without distinction of class, race or religion" the brotherly protection of Poland; it exhorted the Ukraine to drive out the Bolshevik intruders "to win freedom for itself with the help of the Polish Republic."
By May 7, Kiev had fallen to the Poles without resistance. For the fourth time since 1918, the Ukrainian Soviet government under Christian Rakovsky was forced to flee its capital; once again, the anti-Bolshevik regime of Petlyura ensconced itself in the city and announced the end of Russian domination of the Ukraine. The capture of Kiev boosted Pilsudski's popularity at home. Even his political enemies, the National Democrats, changed their minds about the "Ukrainian adventure" and ceased their verbal attacks. The Polish government passed a resolution of praise for Pilsudski on May 18, and a Te Deum Mass was sung in his honor in every Polish church. Portraits of the bushy-browed, heavily mustachioed old revolutionary were hung in all public buildings. Hardly an honor remained unbestowed on him, for he had already been promoted to the rank of marshal in March.
The celebrations would be short-lived. Red Army Commissar Trotsky, no longer concerned about the White threat, was able to muster a sizeable and battle-tested force for action against the Poles. Pilsudski's swift drive to Kiev had severely overextended his supply lines, and his troops found little comfort in the Ukraine, whose population, though anti-Russian, was also historically anti-Polish.
The initial Bolshevik response came in late May, with the appearance of the most famous unit of the civil war, the First Red Cavalry Army, or Konarmiya. Consisting of 16,000 saber-swinging horse soldiers backed up by five armored trains, it was commanded by 37-year-old General Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny, described by a British military historian as a "hard-riding, spectacular savage of great personal courage." On June 5, the Red Cavalry crashed through the rear of the Polish lines south of Kiev, pausing to burn down a Polish military hospital filled with hundreds of wounded men. The thinly stretched Polish forces could not contain the Soviet counterattack and immediately retreated westward toward Volhynia and Podolia.
Kiev was abandoned on June 11, and the hapless Petlyura and his Ukrainian National Council fled the city for the last time. The fierce Soviet counterattack was part of a two-pronged strategy. While Budyonny's horsemen of the Southern Front pushed the Poles out of the Ukraine, a northern attempt at evicting the Poles from Lithuanian and Belorussian territory was underway. Five Red armies, estimated at 160,000 troops. opened a massive campaign at the beginning of July.
The commander of this Northern Front, General Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, was a 27-year-old former tsarist lieutenant who had joined Lenin's cause shortly after the Bolshevik triumph in 1917. Considered something of a military genius, Tukhachevsky had rendered invaluable to the Reds throughout the civil war; it was he who brutally suppressed the Kronstadt sailors' rebellion in St. Petersburg. Now the so-called "Demon of the Civil War" would turn his considerable talents against the Poles. On July 5, Tukhachevsky opened his campaign in the north, his right flank led by another remarkable character, the Armenian cavalry general Chaia Dmitreyevich Ghai, whose hard-riding Caucasian III Cavalry Corps consistently outflanked the Poles and drove them toward Warsaw.
Undersupplied, outgunned, outnumbered and outmaneuvered, the Poles fought hard but could not stop the Urssians' northern drive. On July 12, Minsk, the Belorussian capital, fell to the Red,s followed by Wilno on the 14th and Grodno on the 19th. In his order of the day for July 20, Tukhachevsky sounded an ominous note: "The fate of the world revolution is being decided in the west; the way leads over the corpse of Poland to a universal conflagration...To Warsaw!"
Western military observers were as surprised by the Bolshevik onslaught as they had been by Pilsudski's before it. The flames of World War I had been extinguished not two years, and memories of the long months of preparation necessary to advance a few yards at a time from the trenches were still keen. Yet here was a conflict of swift movement spearheaded by cavalry, a branch that had long been pronounced useless. The question was, where and when would the Bolsheviks stop their advance?
The Soviet government at first had met the serious Polish challenge by appealing to the Russian people, not for the sake of Bolshevism, but for nationalist reasons. Even the old aristocratic old tsarist General Aleksei Brusilov, the last Imperial Army commander, responded to this approach and joined in an anti-Polish campaign; many other patriotic ex-tsarist officers followed his example. But now that the Poles had been evicted from Belorussia and the Ukraine, ideology overwhelmed nationalism. The intoxicating success of Budyonny and Tukhachevsky revived in Lenin's mind an old Bolshevik dream: the Red Army breaking through Poland to Germany, where it would assist the strong and well-organized German Communist Party in establishing a socialist republic in the homeland of Karl Marx.
Several key members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, including Trotsky and Josef Stalin, strenuously objected to Lenin's plans to reach Germany. Karol Radek, the Soviet expert on foreign policy, opined that the Polish and German people were not prepared to accept communism. Why not make peace with the Poles on the basis of the British-proposed Curzon line of 1919? In the heated arguments that followed, Lenin vehemently and repeatedly insisted that the time was right to spread the revolution westward. Supported by Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, the Bolshevik leader's point of view held sway; Stalin and several others changed their minds when the crucial vote was taken, giving Lenin the victory.
The Soviet plans became readily apparent when Tukhachevsky's troops reached ethnically Polish territory. In the city of Bialystok, the Russians installed a "Polish Revolutionary Committee,: headed by Felix Dzerzhinski, Julian Marchlevski and Felix Kon, longtime Communists known for their opposition to Polish independence. On August 3, the committee issued a "Manifesto to the Polish Working People of Town and Country," proclaiming a revolutionary socialist government.
To Lenin's great surprise, the promulgations of this Moscow-organized regime fell on deaf ears. None of the committee's members had the remotest link to the Polish working class; indeed, one of the Bialystok group's most important members, Dzezhinski, was Lenin's close associate and the head of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. The mere mention of the "Polish Revolutionary Committee" was enough to send thousands of Polish workers flocking to the national colors to defend their capital. Still, the uncharacteristically impatient Lenin disregarded those ominous signs and insisted on the immediate capture of Warsaw. The Bolshevik leader's political advisers warned him not to count on a proletarian insurrection anywhere in Poland. Bitter, centuries-long memories of Polish oppression could not be raised by raising the revolutionary red flag in Warsaw. Trotsky, who seconded that gloomy appraisal, also warned Lenin that the speedy capture of the Polish capital could only be achieved by stretching the Red Army's supply lines to precariously thin limits. Again, Lenin rejected the opinions of the doubters in his midst.
Meanwhile, the rapid Soviet advance on Warsaw caused a serious political crisis that resulted in the collapse of the Polish cabinet. After 15 days of haggling, Prime Minister Wladislaw Grabski finally managed to form a crisis government. He then appeared, hat in hand, before the Allied Supreme Council at Spa, Belgium to appeal for help in defending the Polish capital, only to be subjected to bitter criticism of Pilsudski's eastern policy. If the Poles expected the Supreme Council to help arrange a truce with the angered Bolsheviks, the price would be high. On July 10, Grabski, having little choice, signed the Protocol of Spa, in which Poland agreed to accept the council's recommendations on the disputed Polish-Czechoslovakian and Polish-Lithuanian frontiers; to return Wilno to Lithuanian control; to respect the Allies' solution for the Polish use of the port of Danizg; to abide by any future decision on the status of Ukrainian-inhabited eastern Galicia; and finally, to pull all Polish troops behind the Curzon Line until an armistice could be arranged.
The severity of those terms masked the actual alarm felt by the Allies as Tukhachevsky's forces crossed the Bug River and headed for Warsaw. Frantic appeals from the Polish capital for arms and ammunition underscored the urgency of the situation. Torn between saying "You made your bed, now sleep in it," and providing the requested assistance, the Western Allies decided they had no alternative but to render aid to the beleaguered Poles, lest the Red Army thrust its way into the heart of Europe.
Accordingly, the French and British sent high-powered civilian and military missions to Warsaw. The combined Allied mission reached the city on July 25. The French contingent featured the prominent General Maxime Weygand, Marshal Ferdinand Foch's chief of staff during World War I. The celebrated Frenchman brought along his aide-de-camp, a trim and proper junior officer names Charles de Gaulle. The British were represented by Viscount Edgar Vincent d'Abernon and Maj. Gen. Percy de B. Radcliffe, an old-time cavalryman with a reputation for logical thinking.
The Western military experts swiftly proceeded to show the battered Poles how the Red Army could be stopped. Fed information on the existing situation by French officers attached as advisers to the Polish army, the Allied mission came to believe that Marshal Pilsudski had seriously underestimated the gravity of the Soviet threat. The British felt it necessary under these circumstances to force the Poles to accept Weygand as de facto commander of the Polish forces. The Poles steadfastly refused, although they feigned deference to the great French general's advice rather than jeopardize their source of supplies. In reality, Weygand was excluded form the decision making whenever possible.
By July 22, the day Tukhachevsky's troops crossed the Bug into indisputably Polish territory, the defenders' resistance had stiffened considerably. Pilsudski was reported to have been quite surprised that the Soviets had dared traverse the Curzon Line, the truce frontier suggested by the British. By August 1, the Polish leader realized that the Bolsheviks intended destination was Warsaw. On that day, the fortress town of Brest-Litovsk fell to the invaders; the capital lay only 130 miles west.
Pilsudski knew that a dramatic counteroffensive was the only possible way to save Warsaw, but where, he wondered, could he muster the forces necessary for such a move? The entire Polish army was committed to the defense of the country. Despite the more pressing threat posed by Tukhachevsky in the north, the Poles were reluctant to pull out their troops facing Budyonny on the Southern Front -- the Galician region that had never been under Russian control, not even temporarily. They preferred to build their military strength by conscription and volunteers.
Time was obviously of the essence. Pilsudski finally decided that the war would be decided in the north. But for effective resistance, the Poles were in desperate need of Allied war supplies, which became increasingly difficult to obtain. The problem came from pro-Bolshevik German and Czech railroad workers, and even some British dockworkers, who refused to load the Polish-bound equipment in their countries. Some of the materiel could reach Poland only through the Baltic port of Danzig, the Free City under League of Nations administration. There too, German dockworkers -- convinced by Bolshevik and German propaganda that a Soviet victory would unite Danzig with Germany -- obstructed delivery. French marine infantry had to be sent to Danzig to expedite the unloading of munitions.
On Aguust 8, Tukhacehvsky, confident the Poles were on the verge of collapse, issued his orders for the capture of Warsaw. He intended to bypass the city's northern defenses, move on to the lower Vistula River and attack from the northwest. The Red Sixteenth Army was to proceed from the east, while its flank was to be protected only by the 8,000-man Mozyr Group. Although Moscow had detached Budyonny's cavalry from General Aleksandr Yegorov's Southern Front and assigned the horsemen to Tukhachevsky, the latter appears not to have planned to use those additional forces for the protection of his flank. The Bolshevik commander apparently believed that the Poles posed no danger to his exposed periphery. Additionally, Lenin wanted Warsaw delivered as soon as possible.
As Tukhachevsky planned his strategy, the Polish forces had grown much stronger than his 150,000 men. Pilsudski's army had grown to 185,000 by August 12, and in two more weeks the Poles could count 370,000 hastily trained, poorly equipped soldiers on their rolls, including almost 30,000 cavalry. Included in this force was General Jozef Haller's army of Polish-Americans, which had seen Western Front service in World War I, and the 7th Eskadra "Kosciuszko," a squadron of daring young American volunteer pilots. The capital's defense was augmented by a motley but enthusiastic force of 80,000 workers and peasants. The crisis government of Prime Minister Wincenty Witos, which had replaced the Grabski cabinet on July 24, had done its job well.
In spite of the progress of the Polish defense plans, the situation remained grave. Marshal Pilsudski, having little time left, issued his orders for a bold and imaginative counterattack on August 6, several days before he learned of Tukhachevsky's plans to encircle Warsaw. The Polish commander had finally brought several key units up from the south. A 20,000-man strike force, commanded by General Edward Smigly-Rydz, was to smash through Tukhachevsky's Mozyr Group and begin a sweeping, encircling movement to cut off the Soviet northern forces. The Polish Fifth Army under the able General Wladislaw Sikorski was to hold the crucial Wkra River line north of the capital. The city itself was defended by a 46,000-man garrison aided by the worker-peasant volunteer brigades, while the Third and Fourth armies were to support the strike force.
By August 12, it was apparent to the Allied military mission in Warsaw that Tukhachevsky intended to attack the city from the northwest. Weygand expressed grave reservations about the Poles' ability to defend the Wkra River line, where they were severely outnumbered. The Allied commission even recommended that a more effective Polish defense might be mounted west of the Vistula, though that would mean abandoning Warsaw. The next morning, Bolshevik infantry units broke through Polish lines and captured Radzymin, only 15 miles form the capital. Bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued until the arrival of reinforcements enabled the Poles to recapture the town on the 15th.
Meanwhile, General Sikorski's Fifth Army attacked the Red Fourth Army northwest of Warsaw and broke through, seriously exposing the Polish flank in the process. The Russian failure to capitalize on such an opportunity was the result of a lack of communications -- disrupted by the Poles -- and a lack of cooperation among the Bolshevik commanders. In addition to a poor coordination among Tukhachevsky's army commanders around Warsaw, the headstrong Budyonny (possibly on Stalin's advice) had ignored Tukhachevsky's call to join him, instead remaining in the Lwow area to the southeast.
Sikorski, quick to take advantage of the chaos among the Reds, continued his advance, raiding the Red Fourth Army headquarters at Ciechanow and capturing its plans and ciphers. Using tanks, trucks, armored cars and mobile columns, the Polish general has been credited with employing the first blitzkrieg tactics of the 20th century. Instead of attacking Sikorski's vulnerable left flank, the Red cavalry commander Ghai, who refused to support the Fourth Army, busied himself cutting Polish railway lines some 40 miles west.
In those desperate days of mid-August, more Allied supplies finally arrived. At Warsaw's Mokotow Airfield, Polish mechanics labored day and night assembling former Royal Air force figher planes in order to deny the Soviets any aerial reconnaissance. On the 16th, when Budyonny's Cossacks finally crossed the Bug River and began their advance on the city of Lwow, aircraft of the III Dyon (air division), comprised of the 5th, 6th, 7th and 15th Eskasdri, began three days of bombing and strafing in an effort to stem the onslaught. Flying a total of 190 sorties, dropping nine tons of bombs, Polish and American airmen managed to slow Budyonny's advance to only a few miles a day, buying precious time for Polish land forces to move to counter the Soviet threat.
On August 16, too, Marshal Pilsidski ordered his strike force into action. Covering toughly 70 miles in three days, the Polish northward movement encountered almost no resistance. Breaking through the gap in the Bolshevik ranks, the Polish Fourth Army, supported by 12 French-built Renault M-17FT light tanks, reached Brest-Litovsk and in the process cut off and trapped the Red Sixteenth Army. While Sikorski's troops kept the Bolsheviks in a state of confusion, Pilsidski, who traveled in the back of a truck with his forward units, pushed his forces farther north.
The Allies, meanwhile, had arranged for another round of Polish-Soviet peace negotiations, apparently believing that only a truce could save Warsaw now. On August 17, delegates from both sides met in Mink, where Moscow presented its conditions for a cease-fire: the Polish army was to be dismantled and the Allied military commission was to be sent packing. The Curzon Line was the only acceptable frontier, declared the Soviet delegates, with some small alterations in favor of the Poles.
News from the front, where Pilsidski's success astonished everyone, including the marshal himself, made the Bolshevik peace terms sound ludicrous. By August 18, Tukhachevsky realized that he had been completely outflanked and ordered what amounted to a general retreat -- it was, in reality, a rout. Those Red units in a position to do so immediately bolted for the East Prussian border before the Poles could close the ring. Some groups, such as Ghai's cavalry and the Red Fourth Army, were locked in battle with Sikorski's troops and were trapped. Although badly mauled by ferocious encounters with pursuing Polish units, Ghai's battered horsemen managed to reach East Prussia, where they were immediately interned by the German authorities. The Fourth Army could not escape and was forced to surrender in Poland.
By August 24, it was virtually over. Tukhachevsky's forces had left behind more than 200 artillery pieces, more than 1,000 machine guns, 10,000 vehicles of every kind and nearly 66,000 prisoners of war. Total Soviet casualties were in the vicinity of 100,000; the Polish victory had cost 238 officers and 4,124 enlisted men killed, as well as 562 officers and 21,189 soldiers wounded.
There remained only the threat of Budyonny, whose cavalry had committed atrocities the Poles would not soon forget. Placing General Sikorski in command of the Third Army on August 27, Pilsudski then ordered h8im to oust Budyonny's force from the Southern Front. On August 29, Sikorski's vanguard Operation Group, consisting of the 13th Infantry Division and 1st Cavalry Division under the overall command of General Stanislaw Haller, confronted Budyonny's Cossacks at Zamarsc. In an unusual battle by 20th century standards, Polish lancers rode at full gallop into the Red cavalry and tore the Russians to pieces. After a second engagement with Sikorsky's forces that evening at Komarow, Budyonny quickly ordered a rearguard action and fled homeward, barely avoiding the complete annihilation of his army.
While Sikorski gave chase to Budyonny in the south, Pilsudski pursued Tukhachevsky's battered legions into Belorussia. Catching up with the Reds on the Niemen River on September 26, the Poles smashed the Soviet defensive lines and inflicted another humiliating defeat on them, destroying their Third Army in the process. Pilsudski's troops entered Grodno on the same day. Following up on September 27, the Poles pummeled Tukhachevsky's beaten and de moralized troops yet again on the Szczara River, sending them scurrying back to Minsk. In the Battle of the Niemen River, the Russians lost another 50,000 prisoners and 160 cannons.
The rout now complete, Poland rejoiced in her hour of victory; Marshal Pilsudski's prestige soared and the Allies breathed a sigh of relief. The Red Army had suffered its most disastrous defeat of the entire Russian Civil War period. An armistice was officially declared on October 12, followed by a protracted series of negotiations to formally end hostilities and settle the Polish-Soviet border question.
The result was the treaty of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921, in the Latvian capital. Poland received a significant portion of her pre-partition frontiers, including the city of Lwow, and took possession of territories inhabited by about 12 million Lithuanians, White Russians and Ukrainians.
Little remembered in the West, the Battle of Warsaw was in fact one of the most significant land engagements of the 20th century. Strategically, it reversed an ideological onslaught that might otherwise have carried Soviet Communism into Western Europe in 1920 -- and eventuality the consequences of which can only be imagined by posterity. Militarily, the sudden counterattack by which Pilsudski and his lieutenants split and routed the Bolshevik forces -- themselves led by one of the enemy's most brilliant generals -- deserves a place among the tactical masterpieces of history.
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This article was written by Robert Szymczak and originally published in the February 1995 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!
Cooper was a bomber pilot during World War I. He was shot down and captured by the Germans, serving out the remainder of the war in a POW camp.
[edit] Polish Independence
American volunteers, Merian C. Cooper (left) and Cedric Fauntleroy, fighting in the Kosciuszko Squadron of the Polish Air Force.From late 1919 until the 1921 Treaty of Riga he was a member of a volunteer American flight squadron, the Kościuszko Squadron, which supported the Polish Army in the Polish-Soviet War. On July 26, 1920, his plane was shot down, and he spent nearly 9 months in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. He escaped just before the war was over and made it to Latvia. For valor he was decorated by Polish commander-in-chief Józef Piłsudski with the highest Polish military decoration, the Virtuti Militari.
During his time as a POW, Cooper wrote an autobiography: Things Men Die For by "C". He turned the manuscript over to Dagmar Matson to type for publisher submission. It was submitted to G. P. Putnam's Sons in New York (the Knickerbocker Press) in 1927 and published that same year. Just after the book's release, he change his mind about releasing the personal details about "Nina" and asked Dagmar to buy up every copy she could find. She managed to acquire most of the 5,000 copies that had been released. Cooper kept a copy and Dagmar kept a copy, while the rest were eventually destroyed. Dagmar sent Nina money every month, on behalf of Cooper, until his death.
