Victory on the Vistula: The 1920 Polish-Soviet War Reenacted

Józef Piłsudski — Father of Polish independence

Polonia Restituta.

"Tanks, Comrade Corps Commander! How can one saber them when they're made of steel? Bayonets are no use; in any case you can never get near them!"

Red Army Komandir poses with a Polish FT-17 Renault tank, recently captured in Grodno during the drive on Warsaw, July 1920

(Photo credit to Kevin Speiden Photography, taken at the 1st Division Museum in Wheaton, Illinois)

"Death of the Commissar" (Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, oil on canvas, 1928)

"THE CAMPAIGN OF 1918: THE TRANSFORMATION FROM IMPERIALIST WAR TO CIVIL WAR"
Interwar map showing the claimed borders of the newly founded Bolshevik RSFSR in red, with shaded red areas indicating Soviet territory under occupation by western interventionist armies. Yellow and Blue areas (Entente and Central Powers respectively) show the battle lines of the still ongoing First World War.

Text box top right reads:
"Civil war had become a fact. That which we had predicted at the beginning of the revolution and even at the beginning of the war, what had once been regarded in significant socialist circles with distrust and even mockery, namely the transformation from an imperialist war into a civil war, became a fact for one of the largest and most backward countries participating in the war on the 7th of November (25th October Julian-style calendar).
Across the whole of Russia, the tide of civil war surged"
-Lenin (Biography Volume XII, Page 314)

1ST SOVIET CAVALRY ARMY DECISIVELY DEFEATED BY POLES AT KOMARÓW— LAST GREAT CAVALRY VERSUS CAVALRY BATTLE OF THE 20TH CENTURY
From the journal of Polish cavalry colonel Juliusz Rómmel, 31st of August, 1920:
"Two dense masses quickly advance towards each other; before me I can see the Cossacks in their fur Kubanka hats, some wearing cherkeska robes and tight red pants. Suddenly this huge mass slows its pace and halts. Shouting can be heard. The 1st Uhlan Regiment charges over the top of a hill to our right and attacks the enemy flanks and rear! Between the front line of the Bolshevik mass and our 8th Uhlan Regiment there is still a gap of some 100 meters.

Our 8th Uhlan Regiment begins to falter and slow down, when suddenly Second Lieutenant Kulik breaks out of the rank of officers with his Ma**er in his hand and fires it several times. Barely a second passes and the officers of our 8th Uhlan Regiment make a decided move forward, taking the squadrons with them. Now our thundering 'Hurrah!' reverberates and the 9th Uhlan Regiment joins the charge. The Bolsheviks cannot withstand the force of this onslaught [...]

[Afterwards] I began to examine the prisoners. Unfortunately, there were only about a dozen or so left – I had not been able to tear them out of the hands of our troops. The cruelty and atrocities committed by Budyonny's troops were still fresh in everyone's minds. The prisoners were very dejected and said that it was all now over.

I could see from all this that the enemy morale was already beaten and it was now up to us to go in immediate pursuit and smash the remainder of this mounted army. Soon the units began their march in accordance with the orders they had been given–it was now eleven o'clock at night. I stood at the side of the road, acknowledging every unit in turn. The night was so light out that you could see every face clearly. The lads seemed intoxicated – their eyes shine with a soldier's pride and confidence. I ask the most weary squadrons: 'Are you exhausted?' – 'No! Colonel Sir!' – they thunder in reply. You can feel so much energy and such a tireless fighting spirit – it's as if they had just left their barracks."

SOVIET WESTERN FRONT COLLAPSES FROM POLISH COUNTEROFFENSIVE— KAVKOR AND KONARMIA FIGHT TO ESCAPE POLISH ENCIRCLEMENT

Facing a complete collapse of his now-flanked and demoralized Western Front, Mikhail Tukhachevsky orders a general Red Army retreat to the east on August 19th, three days too late to undo any of the destruction now set in motion. Having suffered severe casualties and with their radio communications jammed by Polish telegraphists, chaos reigned. In the first three days of the offensive alone, 10,000 Soviets had fallen prisoner to the resurgent Poles. Far more would follow in the coming weeks.

To a 30-year-old Charles de Gaulle serving as a French military observer attached to the Polish Army in summer 1920, the signs of success for Marshal Piłsudski's flanking maneuver were everywhere to be seen. In a journal entry on August 17th, de Gaulle described:

"Ah! What a beautiful piece of action! It was as if our Poles had been given wings to accomplish this task – these same troops, only a week earlier exhausted physically and with flagging morale, now advance at a run, making forty kilometers a day. The roads are full of prisoners-of-war in a very sorry state and a cavalcade of transport vehicles captured from the Bolsheviks."

For "Ghai Khan" and his independent cavalry corps operating deep in Polish territory on the outskirts of Torun, defeat of Tukhachevsky's infantry armies before Warsaw now meant they would be stuck without support upwards of 200 kilometers northwest from where the war was being decided, and worse yet, they were now in danger of being cut off from any retreat home. In a fierce forced-march southeast towards Warsaw, the KavKor made time to terrorize the cities along the way. Reaching Włocławek on August 16th, the KavKor would be driven off in heavy fighting by the 17th, having been repelled by a Polish armored train detachment and civilian volunteers. At Płock on the 18th, they would fight their way halfway into the city center before being repulsed the following day by Polish regular and volunteer forces supported by gunboats of the Vistula River Fleet.

Finally linking up with the remnants of the Soviet 15th Army north of Warsaw on August 20th, following out-of-touch orders from Tukhachevsky to reform and take Warsaw from the west, Ghai-Khan led this combined force on one last abortive assault on the Ciechanów-Mława railway line on the 22nd. Despite the 15th Army quickly melting away from attrition and his own KavKor down to just 5,000 men, Ghai's aggressive tactics still carried the day. An early-morning Soviet artillery barrage successfully knocked out Polish supporting tanks, leaving their infantry alone for the Soviet Cossacks to cut through. Writing in his journal, Polish Artillery Lieutenant Stanisław Dworzak blamed the half-hour debacle on the lack of nerve among the inexperienced volunteer infantry. Again on the 23rd, Ghai and his men would once more catch their Polish pursuers by surprise, mercilessly sabering 400 infantry to death as they tried to surrender. Ghai-Khan was in no position to save the rest of the doomed Warsaw operation, but his ferocity was so far keeping his own beloved cavalry corps intact.

Similarly, far to the south, Budyonny and his KonArmia were performing a fighting retreat and reconsidering their options. Pulling out of their failed siege of Lwów on August 20th, it was by then too late to support Tukhachevsky's Western Front in any meaningful sense. Instead, the KonArmia contented itself a weeks march northwards towards Zamość, reforming and raiding the Polish countryside along the way, ambushing and slaughtering smaller Polish units in an endless cycle of marches and countermarches around Galicia. Isaak Babel, a Soviet war correspondent riding with the KonArmia, described such an incident:

"A roar of hurrahs, the Poles are crushed, we ride onto the battlefield. The prisoners are rounded up, made to undress, a strange scene, they undress terribly quickly, shaking their heads, all this out in the sun, a bit embarrassing. Ahead—horrible things We crossed the railroad at Zadworze. The Poles are fighting their way along the line toward Lwów. An attack in the evening near a farm. A bloody battle. The military commissar and I ride along the line begging the men not to massacre prisoners. Apanasenko washes his hands of it. I couldn't look at their faces, they bayoneted some, shot others, bodies covered by corpses, they strip one man while they're shooting another, groans, screams, death rattles."

16 AUGUST 1920: POLISH COUNTEROFFENSIVE SMASHES INTO TUKHACHEVSKY'S SOUTHERN FLANK

In the early morning hours of the 16th, with the bulk of the Soviet Western Front locked into combat north and east of Warsaw, Marshal Piłsudski launched his masterstroke counteroffensive, setting off from the Wieprz River due north into the exposed Soviet rear. The Polish strike force impromptu cobbled together for this task consisted of five divisions of widely ranging origins, some force-marched all the way from the northern part of the line for this sole task. The 14th Poznanian Division (formerly of Wielkopolska Army fame) would be thrown together with fellow countrymen of the 16th Pomeranian and 21st Highlander Divisions. Regional rivalries aside, they were now all under Piłsudski's direct command for this operation, and presented a formidable force with 27,500 infantry, 950 cavalry, 461 machine guns, and ninety artillery pieces.

Setting of north-east and screening the right flank of the first thrust would be another two divisions, the 1st and 3rd, formed from veterans of Piłsudski's own Polish Legions. Taken together these contributed another 25,000-odd infantry to the strikeforce, as well as a significantly larger detachment of 2,850 cavalry, all under the command of Piłsudski's protégé (and eventual political successor) General Edward Rydz-Śmigły.

The divisions of the strike force was ordered to launch through the lightly-defended gap between Warsaw and Brześć, operating independently as needed and wasting no time worrying about flanks or the rear. This was to be an entirely offensive operation, where speed and shock were to be the most decisive factors. Dreading the operation getting bogged down on at its start by petty skirmishes, Piłsudski instead was puzzled and amused to meet almost no resistance, with the strikeforce advancing between 30 and 50 kilometers throughout the day, finding only the occasional terrified Soviet foraging party.

Was this extreme good luck, or a Soviet trap? Unbeknownst to Piłsudski, luck was completely in his favor, allowing his counteroffensive to glide silently behind Soviet lines, ensuring by mere chance that the Poles would be able to wreak maximum havoc on the Soviet armies already worn thin by the battles around Warsaw. With no intelligence other than rumors circling among the Red Army rank and file to go on, Soviet leadership was well and truly in the dark, and any dream of taking the Polish capital was now past. The balance of power had decisively been shifted.

15 AUGUST 1920: POLES RETAKE RADZYMIN FOR FINAL TIME—SOVIET COMMAND BELATEDLY TRIES TO REINFORCE TUKHACHEVSKY WITH THE KONARMIA

As the Battle of Warsaw drew into its third day, it was becoming clear that Tukhachevsky's offensive was losing the initiative. Early-morning Soviet attacks west of Radzymin were met with fresh troops of the Polish 10th Division supported by two companies of tanks. Determined to stave off the sort of panic that had kept the Poles from retaking and holding Radzymin over the past two days of back and forth fighting, Generals Haller and Rozwadowski ordered armed military police to form a cordon behind the Polish advance to ensure that another rout did not occur. Despite such harsh measures and the loss of many tanks to mechanical breakdown, Radzymin and its ring of defensive trenches were back in Polish hands after a day of bitter hand-to-hand fighting and high losses on both sides.

Meanwhile, to the north of Warsaw, the Soviet 3rd and 15th Armies still presented a significant flanking threat. While head-on attacks by these formations were certainly putting a strain on Polish defenders short on arms and ammunition, breakthrough raids by Polish cavalry and armored cars into the Soviet rear at Ciechanów and Płonsk demonstrated the porousness of the Soviet siege lines and a fragility of Soviet morale, morale that had been sapped by nearly a month of running battles and attrition. The culmination of all of these factors combined with the sudden introduction of a massive Polish counteroffensive the following day would prove lethal to the Soviet Warsaw campaign.

A morale shift was beginning to be noticed on the ground by both sides. Soviet Divisional Commander Vitovt Putna noted the following in his journal:

"As a result of the huge losses of the past few days, the morale of the regiments cooled and the ammunition ran out. The men were at the end of their tether. Now it was not just individuals who lost faith in the success of their victory over the enemy but the vast majority of the troops. The string which had been stretched from the moment we had crossed the Bug River had snapped. The night of 15th to 16th August finally convinced me that we would be forced to retreat...and "we" meant not just our division but the entire army."

Still not completely aware of the doomed situation on the ground near Warsaw, the Soviet-backed Polish Revolutionary Committee arrived in the area on the 15th in preparation for what they assumed would be a triumphant entry into the city for their new Polish government. By the following day they would be bitterly disappointed and return to Białystok with nothing to show for their trouble.

Similarly unaware of impending defeat but suspecting that Tukhachevsky's southern flank was exposed, overall Red Army commander-in-chief Sergei Kamenev twice-ordered the Soviet South-Western Front to reinforce their northern neighbor; first on August 13th, and again on August 15th. South-Western Front Commander Yegorev, in conjunction with Politburo-representative Stalin, conveniently ignored these orders, citing "encryption difficulties," their own ongoing siege for Lwów, as well as conflicting orders from Lenin that they should also send troops to deal with resurgent White Russian forces in the Crimea. For this insubordination, Stalin would be recalled to the Kremlin to explain for himself.

While much has been made of a supposed personal rivalry between Stalin and Tukhachevsky that led to this communication breakdown, it should be noted that by August 15th, the South-Western Front and its exhausted KonArmia were incapable of even taking Lwów, a city sitting right in front of them, much less riding north the 400 kilometers needed to reach a whole other battle going on north of Warsaw. With Piłsudski's southern strike-force forming on the Wieprz River and now less than a day away from its decisive counterattack, it can be posited that the Soviet South-Western Front could not have saved Tukhachevsky, even had they wanted to. Nevertheless, historical debate over Stalin's culpability in the South-Western Front controversy rages to this day.