modern war than the story of Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s rout of the Red Army before the gates of Warsaw in the summer of 1920. What made the battle all the more extraordinary was the curious blend of old and new. There were pitched engagements between cavalry units with lance and sabre; the progress of the Red cavalry was marked by a level of violence towards the troops and populations in its path that resembled the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century; but there were primitive tanks, armoured trains and a handful of aircraft to show that this was also a conflict of the twentieth.
Piłsudski was a remarkable individual. Born in 1867 in a Poland divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, he spent thirty years campaigning for Polish independence as a clandestine terrorist. Before the war, he organized a Polish armed force with 20,000 volunteers, known as the Legion. When war broke out that summer, the Austrian army recruited the Legion to fight against Russia and when the war ended, these experienced legionaries formed the core of a new Polish army under Piłsudski’s command. Their job was to build a new Polish state with their commander as its first president. The victorious Allies were willing to recognize Poland’s right at last to independence, but they had no means to help the infant state in case of any threat. Germany was temporarily immobilized by defeat, but revolutionary Russia, struggling under Lenin to defeat its many anti-communist enemies, was an unknown quantity.
The Bolshevik leaders in Moscow had grandiose ambitions. The gradual defeat of the White armies in the Russian Civil War paved the way for a revolutionary crusade into Europe. In February 1920, Lenin ordered a war against Poland as the first stage in the possible ‘liberation’ of the workers and peasants of eastern and central Europe. There was talk of sweeping through to Germany and Italy; world revolution seemed within the grasp of the new Red Army. The Soviet troops were commanded by a spirited commander, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a young Russian soldier who had been a prisoner-of-war for most of the First World War but who was nevertheless trusted by the Red Army commander, Leon Trotsky, to organize and lead whole armies. By chance, both Tukhachevsky and Piłsudski were avid readers of Napoleon; it was the Pole, however, who drew the better lessons.
In April, the new Polish army, a hotch-potch of units from the Great War and volunteer patriots, undertook a pre-emptive strike against the Red Army in Ukraine and Belorussia. It failed to achieve anything decisive, and in May a Russian counter-offensive pushed the Poles back rapidly. Two large army groups were formed: one in the north striking from Belorussia; one in the south made up of cavalry, the Konarmia, under the swashbuckling horseman, Semyon Budionny, which swept like a Tatar horde against the Poles, driving them back towards Lvov, though suffering heavy losses in the process. On 29 May, Budionny’s Cossacks met the Polish 1st Krechowiecki Lancers and an old-fashioned encounter took place between a champion chosen from each side. The two men rode at each other, but the Polish lancer was quicker, slashing his opponent open from the neck to the waist. The Cossacks turned and fled.
In the north, an even more terrifying army of horsemen was formed under Gaia Bzhishkian, nicknamed Gai Khan because of his reputation for exceptional savagery. His army, known as the Konkorpus III, was composed of Circassian cavalry from the Caucasus, more used to sabres than rifles. By July, the Red Army had crossed the River Bug and was bearing down on Warsaw, spearheaded by Gai’s terrifying vanguard. Confidence rose in Moscow. A provisional communist government was formed; Lenin expected Tukhachevsky to enter the Polish capital in early August 1920 and declare a communist Poland.
Polish forces were short of equipment – even boots and uniforms – and spent much of the summer retreating in haste before the apparently unstoppable Red Army, whose reputation for rape, pillage and slaughter preceded them; Polish villagers fled west, while Polish soldiers lost the will to defend themselves. On 8 August, the Russian armies were ordered to seize Warsaw, 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the Russian lines. There were around 68,000 Poles facing two Russian army groups of between 100,000 and 130,000. Both sides were exhausted and short of materiel after the long summer’s fighting, but the Polish position seemed hopeless. Warsaw was filled with a mood of panic. On 5 August, Piłsudski locked himself away in a room in the Belvedere Palace in the capital to think out a way to snatch victory from the jaws of imminent defeat.
His solution was exceptionally daring. He planned to leave weaker forces in front of Warsaw under the overall command of General Józef Haller, while using the armies of the southern Polish wing to swing north to strike the Russian armies an unexpected and annihilating blow in the flank and rear. If it worked, victory was possible; if it failed, Warsaw would be taken anyway. Having organized the defence of Warsaw, Piłsudski headed south where he reviewed all his troops, instilling in them at last a belief in the possibility that the Russian onrush could be halted. This tall, tough, rough-hewn man, with dark bushy brows and a large military moustache, was an inspiration to the dispirited soldiers around him and he posed the chief obstacle between Tukhachevsky and a quick victory.
The Russian armies began the assault on Warsaw on 13 August. There were problems with the Red Army, too. The long supply line back to Belorussia left units short of ammunition and reserves; most soldiers were barefoot, fighting in rags or a jumble of borrowed clothing. They were bullied by political commissars and sustained only by the promise of loot and women. Tukhachevsky had expected to be supported by the Konarmia in the south, but Budionny’s advance had stalled from exhaustion, and the Moscow representative on the southern front, the young Joseph Stalin, refused to release any forces to help against Warsaw. In addition, Gai’s army of horsemen were sent west to bypass Warsaw and reach the German frontier, leaving Russian armies short of cavalry. Gai’s force cut a swathe of terror through the Polish countryside and was at the German frontier within days, but they were not available for the decisive battle. The Poles were, nevertheless, heavily outnumbered. Piłsudski had received poor intelligence on the whereabouts of the main Russian forces and had not realized that so many were deployed in the north. The 5th Polish Army under General Władisław Sikorski fought a bitter three-day battle for the line of the River Wkra, yielding, then counter-attacking against the main Russian force. The Poles found a new heart and their defence against the encirclement and capture of Warsaw made Piłsudski’s plan all the more likely to work.
On 16 August, a day earlier than planned, the Polish armies from the southern wing rolled forwards against the Russian flank. The main Russian weight was in the north, so Piłsudski’s forces made rapid progress. His 53,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry reached the Warsaw battle by 17 August and the following day crashed into the side and rear of the attacking Russian force. The Russian 16th Army disintegrated in panic. Tukhachevsky knew little of what was happening because radio communications had been jammed by the Poles. He ordered a new front to be formed, unaware that his armies were now in full retreat, trying to avoid the trap set by the oncoming Polish army in their rear. By 20 August, he finally realized the situation and ordered a general retreat, but it was too late. The Red Army moved east in complete disorder, intercepted by Polish forces moving at right angles to them every few miles. The Poles reached the German and Lithuanian border, wheeled east and pursued the Red Army past Minsk and almost to Kiev. Gai’s savage horsemen, cut off and harried by the Poles, escaped into East Prussia, where they were disarmed and interned by German troops, who had been warily watching his progress. On 15 October, Lenin’s government was forced to seek an armistice.
The Battle for Warsaw depended for its outcome entirely on the success of Piłsudski’s operational inspiration and bold leadership. An ability to act opportunistically, even in the face of uncertain risks, had strong echoes of Napoleon at his best. Victory did not depend on the modern armoury of aircraft, tanks and radio, but relied a great deal on the simplicity and speed of the Polish counter-strike, and on the patriotic fervour of the embattled Polish divisions; this meant literally a matter of life or death for them and for a new national Poland. Nineteen years later when it was the German turn to attack, the armoury of Blitzkrieg condemned the Poles to the rapid loss of Warsaw and showed what a modern war of manoeuvre could achieve. Piłsudski became Poland’s hero and died in 1935, four years before the new war; Tukhachevsky was eventually arrested and executed on Stalin’s orders in June 1937, a long revenge for the failure at Warsaw.