18-08-1995. If we lost this battle, the world would look different - without Poland.
Chief of State and Commander-in-Chief Józef Pilsudski did not intend to wait. He dreamed of the resurrection of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, of a federation of the peoples of the Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian in 1919, a sober military calculation demanded to push the borders of the main culprit of the partition of Poland as far east as possible.
In the winter of 1919, Polish units took up positions only slightly east of Poland's current borders.
In March, anticipating the Soviet attack, General Sheptytsky's group of troops crossed Nemen, threw back the Bolshevik troops, and occupied Slonim and the suburbs of Lida and Baranovich. To the south, the Polish units crossed the Yaselda River and the Oginsky Canal, occupied Pinsk and dug in far to the east.
In April, a strong group of Polish troops under the personal command of Pilsudski defeated the group of Bolshevik troops and occupied Vilna, Lida, Novogrudek, Baranovichi.
In August 1919, the second Polish offensive began in the northeast. Polish troops took Belarusian Minsk and stopped far to the east, on the line of the Berezina and Dvina rivers. In January 1920, a group of troops of General Rydza-Smigly took Dvinsk on the Latvian border and then handed the city over to the Latvian army.
Pilsudski wanted to finally deal with the Bolsheviks in Ukraine. The defeat in the south of the main forces of the Red Army and the border on the Dnieper were to be given in the east by Pax Polonica, peace on the terms of the Commonwealth. And one more thing - the revival of Ukraine under the protection of a Polish soldier.
The bloody battles of the Polish army with the Ukrainians for Lviv, in Eastern Lesser Poland, in Volhynia died down in mid-1919. Before the decisive offensive, Poland entered into an alliance with the leader of the troops of the Dnieper Ukraine, Ataman Semyon Petliura, who had previously escaped with his troops on the Polish side of the front from the pursuit of the counter-revolutionary army of General Denikin.
This battle was inevitable. If not in August 1920 near Warsaw, then a little earlier - somewhere on the distant eastern cresses. We had to engage in a decisive battle with the Bolsheviks, regardless of whether we would attack them or wait patiently for an attack from the east. We had to fight this great battle, because the independence of Poland after 123 years of slavery could not be settled "over a cup of tea", in the silence of offices, diplomatic negotiations.
At the turn of 1919 and 1920, Moscow and Warsaw negotiated peace. Both sides, however, did not trust each other. And both were right.
Jozef Pilsudski wanted peace, but after the defeat of the main forces of the Red Army, concentrated on the border with Poland.
Moscow wanted peace, but after the establishment of the Polish Soviet Republic on the Vistula.
In war, everyone makes mistakes - the one who makes fewer mistakes wins.
Starting in April 1920, the offensive on Kiev, the Polish military made more mistakes than their adversary. Intelligence erroneously reported that the strongest groupings of the Bolshevik troops were in Ukraine, underestimating, however, the huge concentration of the Red Army in the north, in the Vilna-Bialystok direction. When it was already clear that the Bolsheviks were preparing an offensive in the north, the Commander-in-Chief decided, in spite of everything, to attack Kiev earlier, encircle and defeat the Soviet armies in the south, and then transfer forces to the northern front. This seemed real, however, on condition that the Bolsheviks stubbornly defend Kiev.
But the Bolsheviks did not allow themselves to be trapped. The first Polish strike, although successful, was directed into the void - the cauldron under Malin closed only a day later than it should, and this gave the Bolsheviks a chance to escape. The attack on Kiev was another blow to the void. The Bolsheviks did not defend the city, they retreated to the east. The Russian army, as so many times earlier and later, was saved by the immeasurable space of Russia.
Polish strategists were mistaken in their calculations for the liberation uprising of the Ukrainians. They were not going to join Petliura's army.
- Our ally - this time it was the Poles - turned out to be insincere: he said and signed one thing, but thought something completely different! The most honest of them was Pilsudski, but he also intended, at best, to restore some kind of "autonomous" or "federalized" Ukraine, - wrote then the minister in the government of Petliura, Ivan Feshchenko-Chapivsky. Thus, the Kiev expedition lost all meaning.
The last mistake was that the Polish command did not take seriously the cavalry army of Semyon Budyonny, urgently called to the Ukrainian front. When she began to walk around the Polish rear, it was already too late. A retreat began in the south.
The Kremlin made no mistakes at first. The army was trained diligently. The shortages in weapons were made up for with trophies captured from the Allied and White Guard troops. The size of the Red Army was increased to more than a million soldiers, and discipline was increased. The Bolsheviks inflamed nationalist sentiments in Russia. With the slogan of protecting "Great and Independent Russia", they recruited former tsarist officers into the army. Especially many of them came under the red banners after the address of the outstanding tsarist general Brusilov, who called for forgetting grievances and losses and joining the Bolsheviks.
Before the decisive offensive, the command on the northern front was taken over by the best Soviet military leader who defeated General Denikin, Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
The Soviet strike, developed by Tukhachevsky, crushed the left wing of the Polish front. Despite attempts to counterattack, the Poles gave up one defense line after another - both the line of the former German fortifications of the First World War, and the line of the Neman, the Oginsky Canal, Shchary, Yasodla, and finally the Bug and Narevi line.
Tukhachevsky's armies stood in front of Warsaw
Later, after many years, the participants in that war tried to describe and explain their actions. Mikhail Tukhachevsky claimed that he decided to attack Warsaw from the northeast and north, since it was there, in his opinion, that the main Polish forces were located, protecting the approaches to the Gdansk corridor, along which supplies for the Poles from the West went. Polish military leaders and military historians see something different in Tukhachevsky's concept:
“As for me, I compared Tukhachevsky's campaign to the Vistula with the campaign also to the Vistula by General Paskevich in 1830. I even argued that the concept and direction of the operation were taken, apparently, from the archives of the Polish-Russian war of 1830,”wrote Marshal Jozef Piłsudski.
The then command of the Red Army consisted of regular officers of the tsarist army. Tsarist officers in military academies thoroughly studied the history of wars, including the Warsaw maneuver of Field Marshal Paskevich.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky should have known about the storming of Warsaw in 1831 for another reason.
The great-grandfather of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Alexander Tukhachevsky, in 1831 commanded the Olonets regiment in the II Corps of General Kreutz. In the early days of the assault on Warsaw, Tukhachevsky's regiment, at the head of the II Corps column, attacked the southern side of the Ordon Redoubt. When the battalions of Tukhachevsky broke into the ramparts of Reduta, the explosion of the powder store destroyed the fortification and buried, along with the defenders, more than a hundred Russian soldiers and officers. Colonel Alexander Tukhachevsky, seriously wounded, was taken prisoner and died on the same day.
On the southern side of the Ordon Redoubt, another column of the Russian corps stormed, and in its ranks Colonel Liprandi, brother-in-law of Colonel Alexander Tukhachevsky. After the explosion of the Redoubt and the death of the commander of the Russian column, Colonel Liprandi took command and the next day hacked the second line of the Polish defense between the slingshots of Wola and Jerusalem. He was among the first Russians to break into the city.
In 1831, Tsar Nicholas I. Field Marshal Paskevich accepted the Tsar's plan with a heavy heart in 1831, the author of the plan, according to which the Russian army was to walk along the right bank of the Vistula to the very Prussian border, to cross to the left bank, return and storm Warsaw. He knew that, heading down the Vistula, he would open his left flank and risk being defeated by the Polish troops concentrated in the area of the Modlin fortress.
The plan to strike the left flank of the Russians was immediately pondered by the most prominent strategist of the 1831 campaign, General Ignacy Prondzyński. However, the commander-in-chief, General Jan Skshinetsky - as usual, when the chance to win a decisive victory appeared - preferred to hamlet, discuss the intricacies of dinner with a personal chef and pose for painters.
The great-grandson of Colonel Alexander Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, in 1920 threw the main forces, three armies and a cavalry corps to the north, in the footsteps of Field Marshal Paskevich.
But then, fortunately, we had leaders of flesh and blood. Located in the Modlin 5 area, the Army of General Vladislav Sikorsky the next day after the weaker, central group of the Red Army launched a direct attack on Warsaw and took Radzymin, struck north, on the main forces of Tukhachevsky. General Sikorski, a century ago, carried out the plan of General Prondzhinsky superbly. Although the 5th Army had three times fewer soldiers and guns than the Bolshevik armies, General Sikorsky, Napoleonic maneuvering with small forces, took turns breaking enemy groupings and forcing them to retreat.
The 203 Ulansky regiment flew into Tsekhanov for a minute, with true military daring, where panicked Soviet commanders burned down an army radio station. The strongest grouping of Tukhachevsky's troops was torn apart, scattered, deprived of communications and reserves spent in battles. Although she still had significant advantages over the troops of General Sikorsky, at the most important moment of the battle she could no longer threaten Warsaw.
Tukhachevsky first of all wanted to defeat the main Polish forces, which he expected to find north of Warsaw. In a direct attack on the capital, he sent only one army, but it also had a clear advantage in comparison with the Polish forces defending the Warsaw suburbs. On August 13, 1920, the Bolsheviks attacked Radzymin. Thus began the Battle of Warsaw.
Then Radzymin passed from hand to hand. The Russians and Poles threw their last reserves into battle. They fought there the fiercest of all, but the battles were also fought in a wide arc on the outskirts of Warsaw. These were not spectacular clashes of huge masses, but rather a series of local battles. Desperate, bloody. The Bolsheviks were given strength by the news that the roofs of Warsaw were visible from the tower of the newly captured church. The Poles knew there was nowhere to retreat. Demoralized by defeats and retreat, the troops at first did not fight too courageously, they were often panicked. Morale appeared after the first successes, after the troops of volunteers went into battle.
“Priests joined the ranks of the soldiers as chaplains and orderlies. Many of them returned decorated with decorations. The gentry went, medium and small, almost all on their own horses. From my family came four Kakovsky, two Ossovsky, two Vilmanov, Yanovsky, almost everyone who was able to hold a weapon. All the intelligentsia, students and gymnasium students, starting from the 6th grade, went. Factory workers went en masse,”wrote Cardinal Alexander Kakovsky.
80 thousand volunteers took part in the defense of Warsaw
The death of priest Skorupka became the symbol of the battle for Warsaw. After the battle, they wrote that he died, leading the soldiers into the attack, holding the cross in front of him like a bayonet. This is how Kossak portrayed him.
It was different. Young priest Stanislav Skorupka volunteered and became chaplain of the 1st Battalion of the 236th Infantry Regiment of the 1863 Veterans Volunteer Army. He did not want to leave the underage volunteers alone under the bullets. The commander, second lieutenant Slovikovsky, begged to be allowed to launch a counterattack among the soldiers. When the priest died from a shot in the head, the cross was on his chest, under his uniform.
The "miracle", as contemporaries wanted, happened on the Vistula, but it could have happened earlier, far to the east, on the Oginsky Canal, on the Neman or Bug and Narevi. Immediately after the start of Tukhachevsky's offensive, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski intended to do in the east what he finally did on the Vistula: to concentrate the shock army on the left flank of the Bolsheviks, under the protection of a well-defended city and to crush the left flank of the enemy with a surprise attack, cutting off his path. to retreat.
Twice the marshal did not succeed, because the Polish troops were giving up the planned lines of resistance. God loves the Trinity - a blow from the Vepsh (the Vepsh River is the right tributary of the Vistula, approx. Transl.) Turned Tukhachevsky's campaign on the Vistula into a complete defeat.
The fact that Marshal Piłsudski had thought about the attack on the open left flank of the Red Army long before that completely refutes the slander that the author of the concept of the attack from Vepsch was a French adviser, General Weygand, or one of the Polish, undoubtedly, remarkable staff officers.
However, it is impossible not to notice that the spirit of General Pilsudski was hovering over Pilsudski's maneuver (this was also noticed by German historians). It was the same idea, only carried over to a much larger battlefield.
General Sikorski and Marshal Pilsudski took a historical revenge for the November defeat of a century ago (November Uprising of 1830 - approx. Transl.). With their battles, they honored the memory of General Prdzyński in the most beautiful way possible.
The problem with Miracle on the Vistula is that there was no miracle
Bolshevik strategists, approaching the Vistula, began to make fatal mistakes, but this was not the result of the intervention of Providence, but, rather, more human revolutionary head-spinning from successes. Tukhachevsky, convinced that the Polish army was already completely demoralized, scattered his forces and rushed to the west in unconsciousness, not caring about supplies and the reserves left behind the Neman.
Warsaw and Poland were undoubtedly saved by a change in the plans of Alexander Yegorov, the commander of the Bolshevik troops in Ukraine and Volhynia. According to the plans of the winter of 1920, he was supposed to bypass the Polesie swamps and, after a distant transition, strike from the southeast to Warsaw. On the way, he would then have touched the Polish group on Vepsha. If there had not been a counterattack by Pilsudski, Warsaw, taken in pincers, would have fallen - the superiority in the strength of the united Soviet fronts would have been too great. But the Bolsheviks, immediately before the battle of Warsaw, turned the Ukrainian-Volyn front of their troops to Lvov, to Galicia. In a sense, out of fear of Romania. But above all, in their fantasies, they already saw Warsaw, captured by the troops of Tukhachevsky, and Egorov - marching through Hungary to Yugoslavia.
On the Vistula, the Polish soldier fought heroically, the generals led with talent and efficiency. This has rarely happened in our modern history, but still it is not a miracle.
Also, the strike from Vepsha itself was not a miracle. Yes, it was a masterpiece of military thought. From the chaos of defeat and retreat, Pilsudski pulled out the best units, armed them and concentrated on the far flank so wisely that, despite the general superiority of Tukhachevsky's forces, the Poles were five times stronger in the direction of the strike from Vepsh.
And, finally, the concentration of undisguised troops on Vepsha did not mean that everything was put on one card.
The young mathematician Stefan Mazurkiewicz, later rector of the Józef Pilsudski University in Warsaw and chairman of the Polish Mathematical Society, deciphered the Soviet radio code. During the Battle of Warsaw, Polish intelligence knew the intentions of the Soviet command and the position of large units of the Red Army.
Our victory was not at all inevitable. Tukhachevsky's armies near Warsaw were one third more in number. It was enough for their command to avoid any of their mistakes. It was enough that in one of the three directions of the Warsaw battle, happiness betrayed the Polish soldier.
Foreign observers of the Warsaw battle got the impression that a Polish soldier saved Western Europe from the Bolshevik invasion. They thought the same in Poland.
In August 1920, the Bolsheviks, however, had no intention of helping the German revolution, since it had long since been suppressed. On the border of East Prussia on September 1, 1920, on the Soviet initiative, two commissars met: the German police and the Red Army. Soviet Commissar Ivanitsky told his interlocutor that after the victory over Poland, Moscow would disavow the Treaty of Versailles and return the 1914 border between Germany and Russia.
In Warsaw, the enemies of Marshal Pilsudski accused him of being. that in the Warsaw Cathedral he has a secret telephone, with the help of which he connects with Trotsky in the Kremlin every evening and gives him military secrets. Trotsky had a telephone, but he connected to Germany. On August 20, 1920, the Russians extended a special telephone line from Moscow through the captured Polish territories to East Prussia.
There the Germans connected it to the Krulevets-Berlin line, which runs along the seabed. So the Soviet-Weimar alliance was created, the purpose of which was the fourth partition of Poland.
The line was turned off five days after the lost battle in Warsaw.
Western Europe was safe in 1920. But in the event of the defeat of Poland, the Baltic republics and the Balkan states, not excluding Yugoslavia, had no chances.
Near Warsaw, we saved their independence, elite, and future.
But above all, we saved ourselves.
From the perspective of the past fifty years, it seems that at worst, slavery would only last 20 years longer. But this would not have been the moderate terror of the 40s and 50s. The massacres in Bialystok and Radzymin showed what the new order would have been. Soviet Poland in the 30s most likely faced the fate of Soviet Ukraine. There, a new order was built on the graves of millions of victims.
However, after the Bolshevik army had conquered Central Europe, the political history of our continent would certainly have gone completely differently. It is tragic for us.
The bills for the 1920 victory had to be paid later
From the battles on the eastern front, the Polish generals drew conclusions that were very dangerous for the future.
The clash with the Soviet cavalry confirmed the staff in the belief that the cavalry was the most effective fast force. During the Warsaw battle, the Polish units had an advantage in tanks, but the command was not able to use them properly, and later they underestimated the tank troops. In September 1939 we had many lancers and few tanks.
In 1920, we had an advantage in the air, thanks in part to the American volunteers. The effectiveness of Polish aviation was appreciated and even overestimated by Tukhachevsky and Budyonny. Babel in "Cavalry" described helplessness in front of Polish aircraft.
The Polish military leaders were not able to make effective use of aviation, nor did they realize how important aviation would be in the future. They became convinced of this after nineteen years.
From the first day of the Warsaw battle, the Grodno Regiment of the Lithuanian-Belarusian Division under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Bronislav Bohaterovich participated in the battles for Radzymin. After three days of incessant fighting, Radzymin was repulsed. Among the units that entered the city was the battalion of the regiment of Lieutenant Colonel Bohaterovich.
In 1943, the body of General Bohaterovich was dug up in the Katyn Forest. He was one of two Polish generals killed there.
In the war of 1920, Joseph Stalin was the commissar of the Ukrainian group of the Red Army. During the battles, he exposed himself to ridicule for his incompetence. His arbitrariness led to the fact that during the Battle of Warsaw, part of the Bolshevik troops from the south of Poland did not move to Warsaw, which, for sure, would have ended tragically for us. Subsequently, he eliminated the Soviet military leaders, witnesses of his mediocrity. The question of whether the memory of the year 1920 influenced Stalin's decision to kill Polish officers in 1940, it seems, will never be answered.
What does a dying soldier want?
Two things for sure.
So that he does not die in vain. To be remembered.
Sixteen and seventeen-year-old students, volunteers from near Ossovo, we thanked remarkably. Their small cemetery with a chapel in a forest clearing in Ossowo seems to be the most beautiful resting place of a Polish soldier I have ever seen.
The harsh soldier's graves and the chapel in the cemetery in Radzymin are well-groomed.
But, in general, little is left of that battle.
Several modest monuments in villages and towns.
Many important places are not marked or described in any way. There is not even a folklore covering historical sites. Bar "Under the Bolshevik" in Radzymin has recently been renamed "Bar-Restaurant". Radzymin is not Waterloo, living exclusively with memories of the Napoleonic battle, full of panoramas, exhibitions, souvenirs, guides. But Radzymin is not Waterloo also because the result of that battle could not turn the course of history - in 1815 Napoleon would have lost in any case.
And three quarters of a century ago, near Warsaw, Poland was saved, half of Europe, maybe the world.
That's all.
