Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe. Adam Zamoyski
War; others had volunteered to fight, usually under their own flag, either in Pilsudski’s Legion or in semi-autonomous Polish formations on the Allied side. But wherever they fought, they clung to the conviction that they were ultimately fighting for their country.
When Pilsudski declared the rebirth of the Polish state in November 1918, the only troops on hand were three regiments of Polnische Wehrmacht, a couple of squadrons of cavalry and a pool of cadets, 9,000 men in all. They were soon joined by units, such as the 1st Imperial and Royal Lancers of the Austro-Hungarian army, which were composed entirely of Poles. Within days men from the disbanded Legion and demobilized troops from the Austrian and German armies began to report for duty.
Inevitably, the various units of the nascent army took on the characteristics imposed by the origin of the volunteers. The former legionaries were reconstituted as the first three infantry divisions of the new Polish army, and retained their own ethos. A different kind of force evolved in the formerly German province of Poznan, out of the armed struggle that had broken out between the Poles and the German settlers as both groups returned home after demobilization. By the time the Germans had been ousted from the area, the Polish forces in the province had grown to three divisions. The men, who had all received their training in the German army, had a businesslike approach to soldiering.
The same could not be said of the large numbers of soldiers inherited from the disintegrated Russian and Austrian armies, or the volunteers coming forward from very diverse backgrounds. As well as Poles who had always lived in Poland, there were Poles whose families had lived in exile, sometimes for generations, in all corners of the world. There were also people of many other ethnicities, some polonized, others hardly speaking the language. There were Lithuanians, Tatars, Cossacks, Jews, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and even many Russians. There were hardened professional soldiers, idealistic students, peasants, aristocrats and socialists. The fact that many were volunteers was a mixed blessing, for while it ensured a high degree of motivation, it also entrenched an element of individualism.
The range was further broadened by the arrival of other existing formations from distant parts. One such was the Siberian Brigade, formed by the Allies out of Poles, mostly prisoners of war, who had found themselves stranded in White-occupied Siberia, which would reach Poland via Japan in 1920. Another was General Zeligowski’s division, which had similar origins in the Kuban region of southern Russia, and had, at the insistence of the Entente, briefly fought for Denikin. Another, the most valuable single contribution to the Polish army, was the ‘Blue Army’. This had been formed in France in 1917 from Austrian and German prisoners of war of Polish nationality and Americans of Polish origin, recruited in the United States and Canada. It was well trained and equipped, smartly uniformed in French pale blue, and even supported by its own regiment of seventy tanks.
A French military mission of fifteen hundred officers under General Paul Henrys arrived in Poland in the spring of 1919 to train the nascent army on a uniform French pattern.‘Literally everything needs to be rebuilt, from the bottom to the top,’ one of them, a young major by the name of Charles De Gaulle, wrote to his mother. A few months later he was forced to admit that the mission was having an insignificant impact. A concurrent British military mission had no real role beyond observation and moral support. Its commander, General Adrian Carton de Wiart, a war hero of Belgian-Irish ancestry who resembled a stage pirate, having lost an eye and an arm, and won a Victoria Cross, in the Great War, was therefore free to indulge to the full his taste for game and wildfowl shooting and his capacity for adventure.3
A good example of the state of the Polish army as a whole is provided by a description of the six regiments making up the 1st Cavalry Division, written by an artillery officer attached to it. ‘The 8th Lancers were entirely Austrian in character,’ he writes.‘Discipline was good, and the regiment’s external appearance singled it out from the rest. In no other were the saddles so smartly packed and the stirrups and bits so well polished. The next regiment, the 9th Lancers, was the product of the fusion of the 3rd Lancers of the Austrian Landwehr with the 2nd Lancers of the Legion. The fact that most of the officers were legionaries was evident from the external appearance of the regiment. There was less of the lordliness of the 8th and more of a sense of the citizen-soldier; less elegance, but more dash; less training, but more enthusiasm.’ The next regiment, the 14th Lancers, was nothing like the other two: the scruffily uniformed men who rode thoroughbred horses on short stirrups and carried lances, sabres and whips tucked into their boots struck the observer as ‘a pack of killers of the highest calibre’. Nothing in their bearing or that of their boyish twenty-eight-year-old commander, whom they addressed by his Christian name, betrayed that he was a full colonel and that during the Great War they had all served in the best regiments of the Imperial Russian Cavalry. The 1st Lancers had also served on the Russian side, as an all-Polish regiment. Like the 14th, they carried their lances with the nonchalance of familiarity. They looked down on the 2nd Light Horse, which had legionary origins, and the two regiments disliked each other. The last regiment of the division was the 16th Lancers, recruited in Poznan. ‘Its equipment, armament and tack were German. Everything was smart, new and solid. The men all wore tall four-cornered shakos with a triple silver tassel and a red rosette. They also wore Prussian-style uhlan jackets and tall German cavalry boots. Nearly all of them had served in the German army, and it followed that order and discipline were exemplary. They rode huge, bony, heavy horses overloaded with kit. They had everything: sabres and lances, bayonets and spades, gas-masks and canteens. Mounting up was a major performance on account of all this, and when they marched past at a trot, they rattled and clanked like a company of knights.’ To the observer, the six regiments were ‘like so many children born of the same mother, but conceived by different fathers’.4
In the course of the war, cavalry regiments in particular acquired volunteers, either under-age patriots from the minor nobility who had run away from home, or defecting Russians or Cossacks, and these were allowed to serve alongside the regulars. There were also, fighting alongside the Polish army, a number of more or less independent irregular formations. There was a Ukrainian National Army. There was the army of Byelorussia, commanded by General Stanislaw Bulak-Balachowicz, whose own mixed Polish-Lithuanian-Tatar ancestry was reflected in its make-up. There were also a number of smaller units, of Cossacks and anti-Bolshevik Russians.
This pattern of diversity and improvisation was replicated in the Polish officer corps, inherited from various sources. Their training was either Russian, Austrian, German, French or ‘legionary’. The obvious differences of language, education and style concealed more fundamental rifts. Each of the various officer schools of the day favoured its own strategic theories, tactical methods and approach to a given situation. As a result, an officer trained in the old German army spoke a different military language to one who had been formed by the Russian Imperial Army, let alone a self-taught legionary officer. That they had all fought on different sides in the Great War did not help. The Poles did have one great asset in the shape of Pilsudski. As head of state and commander-in-chief he could dispense with discussion and follow his own instinct. And while many senior officers found it difficult to defer to an amateur, junior officers and the rank-and-file loved and trusted him. But the lack of a trial period which could have produced greater coherence placed the Polish army at a disadvantage.
While the former Tsarist officers who overwhelmingly led the Red Army may have been ideologically ill-suited, they did all share the same training and background. By the beginning of 1920 most of those intending to desert to the Whites had done so, and the less competent had been weeded out. Those who had come through the trials of the Civil War had proved their loyalty and their ability. The high rate of attrition had also given youth a chance: fronts and army groups were commanded by men in their thirties. The twenty-year-old Vassili Chuikov and the young Georgii Zhukov, both to become marshals in the Second World War, had already been given regiments to command. Semion Timoshenko, another future marshal, was commanding a division at twenty-four.
A similar pattern was discernible when it came to armament. As Poland was unable to produce arms at the time, she could equip her army only with inherited, captured or imported weapons. The Polish infantry were issued with rifles from half a dozen different countries. The Austrian Mannlicher, an accurate but delicate weapon vulnerable to difficult conditions and poor maintenance, was supplemented by German Mausers, British Lee-Enfields, low-quality