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.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Sanada Yukimura
(真田 幸村, 1567 – June 3, 1615), actual name: Sanada Nobushige (真田 信繁), was a Japanese samurai warrior of the Sengoku period. He was especially known as the leading general on the defending side of the Siege of Osaka.
Yukimura was called "A Hero who may appear once in a hundred years", "Crimson Demon of War" and "The Last Sengoku Hero". The famed veteran of the invasion of Korea, Shimazu Tadatsune, called him the "Number one warrior in Japan" (日本一の兵)
Monday, November 28, 2016
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Friday, November 25, 2016
Thursday, November 24, 2016
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
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Thursday, November 17, 2016
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Monday, November 14, 2016
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Fraternity Reigns - Rorty
Our long, hesitant, painful recovery, over the last five decades, from the breakdown of democratic institutions during the Dark Years (2014-2044) has changed our political vocabulary, as well as our sense of the relation between the moral order and the economic order. Just as 20th-century Americans had trouble imagining how their pre-Civil War ancestors could have stomached slavery, so we at the end of the 21st century have trouble imagining how our great-grandparents could have legally permitted a C.E.O. to get 20 times more than her lowest-paid employees. We cannot understand how Americans a hundred years ago could have tolerated the horrific contrast between a childhood spent in the suburbs and one spent in the ghettos. Such inequalities seem to us evident moral abominations, but the vast majority of our ancestors took them to be regrettable necessities.
As long as their political discourse was dominated by the notion of ''rights'' -- whether ''individual'' or ''civil'' -- it was hard for Americans to think of the results of unequal distribution of wealth and income as immoral. Such rights talk, common among late-20th-century liberals, gave conservative opponents of redistributionist policies a tremendous advantage: ''the right to a job'' (or ''to a decent wage'') had none of the resonance of ''the right to sit in the front of the bus'' or ''the right to vote'' or even ''the right to equal pay for equal work.'' Rights in the liberal tradition were, after all, powers and privileges to be wrested from the state, not from the economy.
Of course socialists had, since the mid-19th century, urged that the economy and the state be merged to guarantee economic rights. But it had become clear by the middle of the 20th century that such merging was disastrous. The history of the pre-1989 ''socialist'' countries -- bloody dictatorships that paid only lip service to the fraternity for which the socialist revolutionaries had yearned -- made it plausible for conservatives to argue that extending the notion of rights to the economic order would be a step down the road to serfdom. By the end of the 20th century, even left-leaning American intellectuals agreed that ''socialism, no wave of the future, now looks (at best) like a temporary historical stage through which various nations passed before reaching the great transition to capitalist democracy.''1
The realization by those on the left that a viable economy required free markets did not stop them from insisting that capitalism would be compatible with American ideals of human brotherhood only if the state were able to redistribute wealth. Yet this view was still being criticized as ''un-American'' and ''socialist'' at the beginning of the present century, even as, under the pressures of a globalized world economy, the gap between most Americans' incomes and those of the lucky one-third at the top widened. Looking back, we think how easy it would have been for our great-grandfathers to have forestalled the social collapse that resulted from these economic pressures. They could have insisted that all classes had to confront the new global economy together. In the name of our common citizenship, they could have asked everybody, not just the bottom two-thirds, to tighten their belts and make do with less. They might have brought the country together by bringing back its old pride in fraternal ideals.Continue reading the main story
But as it happened, decades of despair and horror were required to impress Americans with lessons that now seem blindingly obvious.
T he apparent incompatibility of capitalism and democracy is, of course, an old theme in American political and intellectual life. It began to be sounded more than two centuries ago. Historians divide our history into the 100 years before the coming of industrial capitalism and the more than 200 years since. During the first period, the open frontier made it possible for Americans to live in ways that became impossible for their descendants. If you were white in 19th-century America, you always had a second chance: something was always opening up out West.
So the first fault line in American politics was not between the rich and the poor. Instead, it was between those who saw chattel slavery as incompatible with American fraternity and those who did not. (Abolitionist posters showed a kneeling slave asking, ''Am I not a man, and a brother?'') But only 40 years after the Civil War, reformers were already saying that the problem of chattel slavery had been replaced by that of wage slavery.
The urgency of that problem dominates Herbert Croly's progressivist manifesto of 1909, ''The Promise of American Life.'' Croly argued that the Constitution, and a tradition of tolerant individualism, had kept America hopeful and filled with what he called ''genuine good-fellowship'' during its first hundred years. But beginning with the first wave of industrialization in the 1870's and 1880's, things began to change. Wage slavery -- a life of misery and toil, without a sense of participation in the national life, and without any trace of the frontiersman's proud independence -- became the fate of more and more Americans. Alexis de Tocqueville had rejoiced that an opulent merchant and his shoemaker, when they met on the streets of Philadelphia in 1840, would exchange political opinions. ''These two citizens,'' he wrote, ''are concerned with affairs of state, and they do not part without shaking hands.'' Croly feared that this kind of unforced fraternity was becoming impossible.
From Croly to John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger in the 1960's, reformers urged that we needed some form of redistribution to bring back Tocquevillian comity. They battled with conservatives who claimed that redistributive measures would kill economic prosperity. The reformers insisted that what Theodore Roosevelt had called ''the money power'' and Dwight Eisenhower ''the military-industrial complex'' was the true enemy of American ideals. The conservatives rejoined that the only enemy of democracy was the state and that the economy must be shielded from do-gooders.
This debate simmered through the first two decades following the Second World War. During that relatively halcyon period, most Americans could get fairly secure, fairly well-paying jobs and could count on their children having a better life than theirs. White America seemed to be making slow but steady progress toward a classless society. Only the growth of the increasingly miserable black underclass reminded white Americans that the promise of American life was still far from being fulfilled.
The sense that this promise was still alive was made possible, in part, by what the first edition of the ''Companion'' called the ''rights revolution.'' Most of the moral progress that took place in the second half of the 20th century was brought about by the Supreme Court's invocation of constitutional rights, in such decisions as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Romer v. Evans (1996), the first Supreme Court decision favorable to homosexuals. But this progress was confined almost entirely to improvements in the situation of groups identified by race, ethnicity or sexuality. The situation of women and of homosexuals changed radically in this period. Indeed, it is now clear that those changes, which spread from America around the world, were the most lasting and significant moral achievements of the 20th century.
But though such groups could use the rhetoric of rights to good effect, the trade unions, the unemployed and those employed at the ludicrously low minimum wage ($174 an hour, in 2095 dollars, compared with the present minimum of $400) could not. Perhaps no difference between pres-
ent-day American political discourse and that of 100 years ago is greater than our assumption that the first duty of the state is to prevent gross economic and social inequality, as opposed to our ancestors' assumption that the government's only moral duty was to insure equal protection of the laws laws that, in their majestic impartiality, allowed the rich and the poor to receive the same hospital bills.
The Supreme Court, invoking this idea of equal protection, began the great moral revival we know as the Civil Rights Movement. The Brown decision initiated both an explosion of violence and an upsurge of fraternal feeling. Some white Americans burned crosses and black churches. Many more had their eyes opened to the humiliations being inflicted on their fellow citizens: if they did not join civil rights marches, they at least felt relieved of guilt when the Court threw out miscegenation laws and when Congress began to protect black voting rights. For a decade or so there was an uplifting sense of moral improvement. For the first time, white and black Americans started to think of each other as fellow citizens.
By the beginning of the 1980's, however, this sense of fraternity was only a faint memory. A burst of selfishness had produced tax revolts in the 70's, stopping in its tracks the fairly steady progress toward a full-fledged welfare state that had been under way since the New Deal. The focus of racial hate was transferred from the rural South to the big cities, where a criminal culture of unemployed (and, in the second generation, virtually unemployable) black youths grew up --
a culture of near constant violence, made possible by the then-famous American ''right to bear arms.'' All the old racial prejudices were revived by white suburbanites' claims that their tax money was being used to coddle criminals. Politicians gained votes by promising to spend what little money could be squeezed from their constituents on prisons rather than on day care.
Tensions between the comfortable middle-class suburbs and the rest of the country grew steadily in the closing decades of the 20th century, as the gap between the educated and well paid and the uneducated and ill paid steadily widened. Class division came into existence between those who made ''professional'' salaries and those whose hourly wage kept sinking toward the minimum. But the politicians pretended to be unaware of this steady breakdown of fraternity.
Our nation's leaders, in the last decade of the old century and the first of the new, seemed never to have thought that it might be dangerous to make automatic weapons freely and cheaply available to desperate men and women -- people without hope -- living next to the centers of transportation and communication. Those weapons burst into the streets in 2014, in the revolution that, leaving the cities in ruins and dislocating American economic life, plunged the country into the Second Great Depression.
The insurgency in the ghettos, coming at a time when all but the wealthiest Americans felt desperately insecure, led to the collapse of trust in government. The collapse of the economy produced a war of all against all, as gasoline and food became harder and harder to buy, and as even the suburbanites began to brandish guns at their neighbors. As the generals never stopped saying throughout the Dark Years, only the military saved the country from utter chaos.
H ere, in the late 21st century, as talk of fraternity and unselfishness has replaced talk of rights, American political discourse has come to be dominated by quotations from Scripture and literature, rather than from political theorists or social scientists. Fraternity, like friendship, was not a concept that either philosophers or lawyers knew how to handle. They could formulate principles of justice, equality and liberty, and invoke these principles when weighing hard moral or legal issues. But how to formulate a ''principle of fraternity''? Fraternity is an inclination of the heart, one that produces a sense of shame at having much when others have little. It is not the sort of thing that anybody can have a theory about or that people can be argued into having.
Perhaps the most vivid description of the American concept of fraternity is found in a passage from John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, ''The Grapes of Wrath.'' Steinbeck describes a desperately impoverished family, dispossessed tenant farmers from Oklahoma, camped out at the edge of Highway 66, sharing their food with an even more desperate migrant family. Steinbeck writes: '' 'I have a little food' plus 'I have none.' If from this problem the sum is 'We have a little food,' the movement has direction.'' As long as people in trouble can sacrifice to help people who are in still worse trouble, Steinbeck insisted, there is fraternity, and therefore social hope.
The movement Steinbeck had in mind was the revolutionary socialism that he, like many other leftists of the 1930's, thought would be required to bring the First Great Depression to an end. ''The quality of owning,'' he wrote, ''freezes you forever into the 'I,' and cuts you off forever from the 'we.''' Late-20th-century liberals no longer believed in getting rid of private ownership, but they agreed that the promise of American life could be redeemed only as long as Americans were willing to sacrifice for the sake of fellow Americans -- only as long as they could see the government not as stealing their tax money but as needing it to prevent unnecessary suffering.
The Democratic Vistas Party, the coalition of trade unions and churches that toppled the military dictatorship in 2044, has retained control of Congress by successfully convincing the voters that its opponents constitute ''the parties of selfishness.'' The traditional use of ''brother'' and ''sister'' in union locals and religious congregations is the principal reason why ''fraternity'' (or, among purists, ''siblinghood'') is now the name of our most cherished ideal.
In the first two centuries of American history Jefferson's use of rights had set the tone for political discourse, but now political argument is not about who has the right to what but about what can best prevent the re-emergence of hereditary castes -- either racial or economic. The old union slogan ''An injury to one is an injury to all'' is now the catch phrase of American politics. ''Solidarity Forever'' and ''This Land Is Your Land'' are sung at least as often as ''The Star-Spangled Banner.''
Until the last 50 years, moral instruction in America had inculcated personal responsibility, and most sermons had focused on individual salvation. Today morality is thought of neither as a matter of applying the moral law nor as the acquisition of virtues but as fellow feeling, the ability to sympathize with the plight of others.
In the churches, the ''social gospel'' theology of the early 20th century has been rediscovered. Walter Rauschenbusch's ''Prayer against the servants of Mammon'' (''Behold the servants of Mammon, who defy thee and drain their fellow-men for gain . . . who have made us ashamed of our dear country by their defilements and have turned our holy freedom into a hollow name. . . . '') is familiar to most churchgoers. In the schools, students learn about our country's history from social novels describing our past failures to hang together when we needed to, the novels of Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright and, of course, Russell Banks's samizdat novel, ''Trampling the Vineyards'' (2021).
H istorians unite in calling the 20th the ''American'' century. Certainly it was in the 20th century that the United States was richest, most powerful, most influential and most self-confident. Our ancestors 100 years ago still thought of the country as destined to police, inform and inspire the world. Compared with the Americans of 100 years ago, we are citizens of an isolationist, unambitious, middle-grade nation.
Our products are only now becoming competitive again in international markets, and Democratic Vistas politicians continue to urge that our consistently low productivity is a small price to pay for union control of the workplace and worker ownership of the majority of firms. We continue to lag behind the European Community, which was able to withstand the pressures of a globalized labor market by having a full-fledged welfare state already in place, and which (except for Austria and Great Britain) was able to resist the temptation to impoverish the most vulnerable in order to keep its suburbanites affluent. Spared the equivalent of our own Dark Years, Europe still, despite all that China can do, holds the position we lost in 2014: it still dominates both the world's economy and its culture.
For two centuries Americans believed that they were as far ahead of Europe, in both virtue and promise, as Europe was ahead of the rest of the world. But American exceptionalism did not survive the Dark Years: we no longer think of ourselves as singled out by divine favor. We are now, once again, a constitutional democracy, but we have proved as vulnerable as Germany, Russia and India to dictatorial takeovers. We have a sense of fragility, of susceptibility to the vicissitudes of time and chance, which Walt Whitman and John Dewey may never have known.
Perhaps no American writer will ever again begin a book, as Croly did, by saying, ''The faith of Americans in their own country is religious, if not in its intensity, at any rate in its almost absolute and universal authority.'' But our chastened mood, our lately learned humility, may have made us better able to realize that everything depends on keeping our fragile sense of American fraternity intact.
1. From the article ''Socialism,'' by the labor historian Sean Wilentz, in the first edition of ''A Companion to American Thought,'' eds. Richard Fox and James Kloppenberg (London and New York: Blackwell, 1995). That edition appeared exactly 100 years before the current one, which contains the article ''Fraternity'' excerpted here. Whereas the first edition contained no essay on fraternity, the latest edition has neither an essay on socialism nor one on rights. (For the full text of ''Fraternity,'' see pp. 247-298 of ''A Companion to American Thought,'' seventh edition, eds. Cynthia Rodriguez, S.J., and Youzheng Patel (London and New York: Blackwell, 2095).
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Friday, November 11, 2016
Thursday, November 10, 2016
On a Summer Outing with Geishas, Encountering Rain Toward Evening
Late in the day it’s pleasant to set sail
While a light breeze slowly spawns waves
Where bamboos grow thick, guests tarry
Among pure lotuses, finding coolness
Young gentlemen mix icy drinks
Beauties wash strands of lotus roots
A patch of clouds darkens overhead
I think it’s rain, to hasten on my verse
While a light breeze slowly spawns waves
Where bamboos grow thick, guests tarry
Among pure lotuses, finding coolness
Young gentlemen mix icy drinks
Beauties wash strands of lotus roots
A patch of clouds darkens overhead
I think it’s rain, to hasten on my verse
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Monday, November 7, 2016
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Saturday, November 5, 2016
Friday, November 4, 2016
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Giggle and Hoot
what a day it's been what a magic day
shh, can you hear the moon is on its way
it's time for all the stars, that sparkle in your eye
it's time for all the stars, that sparkle in your eye
to fly to the night and light up the sky
what a day it's been laughing with our friends
now that the sun has sunken to its bed
it's time for hoot to go and watch over you at night
fill your head with sweet dreams on the soft moonlight
and soon the smiling sun will rise again
and light the way to a bright new day
see you in the morning, hoot hoot
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Written While Drunk in Lake-View Pavilion on the 27th Day of the Sixth Month - Su Shi
The inky clouds fly in, but do not hide the hills,
As random drops of white rain leap into the boats.
A sudden wind arrives and sweeps across the earth,
Below I see the lake a mirror of the sky.
As random drops of white rain leap into the boats.
A sudden wind arrives and sweeps across the earth,
Below I see the lake a mirror of the sky.
