Lawrence W. Reed discusses one of the most historically significant battles of the 20th century:
Initial Soviet advances during the Battle of Warsaw, 12 August, 1920.
Map by Halibutt via Wikimedia Commons.
This month marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most important military engagements of the 20th Century. It will be celebrated in Poland, the country which won it decisively. The country which lost it, Vladimir Lenin’s nightmarish gulag known as the Soviet Union, is thankfully extinct. Free people everywhere should be grateful to the Poles for the victory.
From 1795 until 1918, Poland disappeared as Austria, Prussia, and Russia partitioned it into pieces for themselves. Upon its re-emergence as an independent nation (an outcome of World War I), a reconstituted Poland immediately faced an existential challenge from Moscow. Lenin’s Bolsheviks were still consolidating power at home but their territorial appetites were well known to Poles and their new Chief of State, Józef Piłsudski. The fateful Polish-Soviet War broke out in February 1919.
Making war on Poland was more than a local affair to the Soviets. They made it plain that the Poles were simply in the way of their larger goal: exporting communism to the rest of Western Europe. Germany, gripped by post-war economic and political chaos, seemed ripe for a Marxist revolution if only Soviet troops could move in and assist, but Poland would have to be disposed of first.
Nicknamed “the Red Napoleon,” Soviet commander Mikhail Tukhachevsky ordered, “To the West! Over the corpse of Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration. March upon Vilnius, Minsk, Warsaw and onward to Berlin over the corpse of Poland!” Bolshevik theoretician and Lenin confidant Nikolai Bukharin publicly declared that the campaign would take communist forces “straight to London and Paris.” In a letter to Joseph Stalin, Lenin himself suggested the Red Army should attack Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary for the purpose of provoking a communist revolution in Italy, to which Stalin replied in the affirmative.
Both Tukhachevsky and Bukharin, by the way, were executed during Stalin’s purges in 1938 but they were at Lenin’s side and at the pinnacle of Soviet power in 1920. Lenin died in 1924 and was eventually succeeded by Stalin.
Soviet victories in the summer of 1920 looked unstoppable, as Moscow’s Red Army pushed to within striking distance of the Polish capital. From August 12-25, the Battle of Warsaw raged. Foreign observers expected the imminent collapse of Poland. Then, the tactical brilliance of Pilsudski and his chief of staff Tadeusz Jordan-Rozwadowski plus the legendary courage of Polish fighters combined to produce what Poles call “the Miracle on the Vistula.” Author Michael Peck writes in The National Interest:
Just as all seemed lost, Marshal Pilsudski unleashed his masterstroke, a move worthy of Robert E. Lee or Rommel. While the central Russian armies were fixated on Warsaw, a Polish strike force side-slipped to the south of the city, and then turned north in a left hook into the exposed Russian flank. Surprised, demoralized, and outmaneuvered, the Russian armies disintegrated, with some retreating back to Russia and others fleeing to German territory to be interned. Pilsudski’s counteroffensive was assisted by the breaking of Russian codes, a Polish specialty that they later used to crack the Nazi Enigma machine.
Piłsudski’s attack from the Wieprz river area on August 15, 1920.
Map by Halibutt via Wikimedia Commons.
