Who won the Battle of Warsaw in 1920?
Poland won a decisive victory in the Battle of Warsaw, fought from 13 to 25 August 1920; some accounts start it on 12 August, when the first Soviet attacks hit the approaches to the capital. While Polish troops held the eastern and northern approaches, Józef Piłsudski struck from the Wieprz river on 16 August into the flank and rear of Mikhail Tukhachevsky's armies, which broke and fled. The Soviets lost 60,000 to 66,000 men as prisoners, and another 45,000 to 50,000 were interned in German East Prussia. Contemporaries called it the Miracle on the Vistula, and it is often ranked among the decisive battles of world history.3
In the summer of 1920 the Red Army swept across Poland toward Warsaw, and Moscow expected the young Polish republic to fall and the revolution to roll on toward Germany. A Polish revolutionary committee headed by Julian Marchlewski and Feliks Dzerzhinsky waited behind the front to take over the country. Instead, in a few days of fighting around the capital in mid-August, Poland shattered the Soviet offensive and flung it back east.4
From Kiev to the Vistula
The battle was the climax of the Polish-Soviet War. In late April 1920 Polish and Ukrainian forces opened an offensive into Ukraine and took Kiev on 7 May. The success did not last. On 5 June Semyon Budyonny's First Cavalry Army broke through the Polish front, and the Poles had to fall back.5
On 4 July Mikhail Tukhachevsky's Western Front attacked in Belarus. Vilnius fell on 14 July and Grodno on 19 July, and at the start of August the Red Army crossed the Bug. Tukhachevsky announced that he would take Warsaw on 12 August; the Great Soviet Encyclopedia records that the Soviet commander-in-chief, Sergei Kamenev, ordered the city taken no later than that day. Lenin counted on the support of Polish workers and on revolution spreading to Germany. The same Soviet encyclopedia later admitted that the Soviet command had failed to reckon with what it called a nationalist frenzy, stirred up, in its account, by Poland's ruling circles playing on national feeling, and a Russian school textbook of 2011, quoted by the historian Mariusz Wołos, concedes that the slogan of a Polish Soviet republic found no support among most Poles.6
A country in arms
The Polish state was close to collapse. Arms shipments were held up by railwaymen in Germany and Czechoslovakia and by left-wing unions across Europe campaigning under the slogan “Hands off Soviet Russia”, and the only safe route ran through Romania. Seeking British mediation, Poland had to accept harsh terms in July, including a border on the Bug, which the Bolsheviks then rejected anyway; Britain offered talks rather than help, while France sent arms. On 1 July a Council of State Defense was created, and on 24 July a government of national defense was formed under the peasant leader Wincenty Witos with the socialist Ignacy Daszyński as his deputy.7
The appeal to the nation worked. A volunteer army under General Józef Haller drew about 90,000 recruits, and the IPN counts over 100,000 volunteers in all, 30,000 of them from Warsaw. Between April and August the army grew from about 600,000 to over 900,000 men, according to the Polish History Museum; VLE counts about 738,000 in August 1920. There was no rising in the capital: Polish workers and peasants, Szumiło writes, did not respond to the communists' agitation. Marking the centenary in 2020, the Polish Senate called the war the collective effort of the whole nation, its national minorities included.8
The plan
Rather than simply defend the Vistula, Piłsudski decided to fight the decisive battle between the Bug and the Vistula. The regrouping order of 6 August (No. 8358/III), whose details he worked out with General Rozwadowski, moved the North-Eastern Front onto the line of the Vistula, the Wkra and the Wieprz, and a follow-up order of 8 August spelled out who would hold each sector of the Warsaw bridgehead. Three fronts took shape: General Haller's Northern Front would defend Warsaw and pin the enemy down; General Władysław Sikorski's new 5th Army on the Wkra, north of the capital, would block any attempt to outflank the city from the north; and the Central Front under General Edward Rydz-Śmigły would gather a strike group on the lower Wieprz, between Dęblin and Chełm, to hit the exposed Soviet left flank. A Southern Front under General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz was to hold Budyonny and Lwów.9
The General Staff turned the concept into operational orders. Its chief since 22 July was General Tadeusz Rozwadowski, who signed nearly all the key orders. On the night of 8 to 9 August, after a meeting of Piłsudski, Rozwadowski and the French general Maxime Weygand, he drafted the special Operational Order No. 10,000, which Piłsudski approved: it strengthened Sikorski's army in the north and, according to the Polish History Museum, moved the main counterattack from the Wieprz forward from 17 to 16 August to surprise the enemy. Who deserves the credit is still debated. Piłsudski's camp claimed it for him; many historians stress Rozwadowski's part, which he himself kept quiet about. Janusz Odziemkowski counts three concepts of a counterstroke, by Weygand, Piłsudski and Rozwadowski, all aimed at the Soviet left flank, and Jarosław Centek judges the authorship hard to settle: most probably Rozwadowski's or Piłsudski's, with Weygand's share unlikely.10
The codebreakers
Piłsudski could take that risk partly because he could read the enemy's mail. In 1919 Lieutenant Jan Kowalewski of the General Staff's cipher section broke into Soviet radio codes, and the mathematicians Wacław Sierpiński, Stanisław Leśniewski and Stefan Mazurkiewicz later worked with his service; the cryptology historian Marek Grajek credits Sierpiński with breaking a new Soviet key in early August 1920 from a single intercepted message. The Polish History Museum's portal dzieje.pl adds that Kowalewski started from the word for “division”, that the bureau read almost 400 Soviet messages between August 1919 and February 1920, and that on 12 August he broke a cipher codenamed “Revolution”, whose decrypts showed that the Soviet Mozyr Group barely existed: the decisive argument for the counterattack from the Wieprz. According to the museum, Polish radio operators also jammed Soviet frequencies, and Kowalewski judged that for two critical days Tukhachevsky's entire front “could not send or receive a single radio message”.11
Radzymin and Ossów
On 13 August the Red Army attacked the outer defenses east of Warsaw and opened the fight for Radzymin; the Great Soviet Encyclopedia places the attacking Soviet divisions 23 kilometers from the capital. The town changed hands again and again, and the Polish Senate's resolution of 2019 has the fighting there go on until 17 August, when Radzymin was finally in Polish hands.12
At Ossów on 14 August the 1st Battalion of the volunteer 236th Infantry Regiment, mostly secondary-school and university students, went into battle. Its chaplain, Father Ignacy Skorupka, was killed by a shot to the head. Legend, fixed by a General Staff communiqué of 16 August, has him leading the attack with a crucifix raised above his head; other accounts say he died giving a wounded soldier the last rites, and the historian Władysław Pobóg-Malinowski wrote that a stray bullet hit him as he bent over a badly wounded man. The ethnologist Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska considers a stray bullet the most likely cause. He was buried at Warsaw's Powązki Cemetery on 17 August, and Piłsudski awarded him the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari.13
The Wkra and the Wieprz
North of the capital, in the fighting of 14 to 16 August, Sikorski's 5th Army stopped the Soviet 4th, 15th and 3rd Armies on the Wkra, exploiting, in the words of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, their lack of coordination. Mariusz Wołos stresses that the turn of August 1920 was more than the battle before Warsaw and the defense of the Wkra: the defense of towns such as Płock and Włocławek kept the Red Army from outflanking the capital.14
At dawn on 16 August Piłsudski personally led the strike group, five infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade, north from the Wieprz. It broke the thin Soviet screen at Kock and Cyców and drove into empty space, its infantry covering 50 to 60 kilometers a day and seizing crossings, bridges and rail junctions behind the armies besieging Warsaw. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia puts the advance of 16 and 17 August at 60 to 80 kilometers, enough to threaten the rear of the whole Western Front, which had no reserves to stop it.15
Rout and losses
Within days Tukhachevsky's front fell apart. The Soviet 4th Army and Gai's cavalry corps were pressed against the border of East Prussia, and from 24 to 26 August they crossed it and were interned there, VLE writes, together with some 2,000 Polish prisoners they had taken. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia says that the 4th Army, the 3rd Cavalry Corps and two divisions of the 15th Army, out of ammunition, were forced into internment, while the main forces fell back east of Białystok and Brest by 25 August. Jarosław Centek notes that the Germans later sent the internees back to Russia; VLE counts 30,000 of them among the troops Tukhachevsky had on the Niemen a month later.16
Figures vary by source. Mirosław Szumiło of the IPN counts 25,000 Soviet soldiers killed, 66,000 taken prisoner and almost 50,000 who escaped into East Prussia. The Polish History Museum's calendar of the battle gives about 25,000 killed or seriously wounded, 60,000 prisoners and 45,000 interned by the Germans, stresses that the exact Soviet losses are not known, and puts Polish losses at about 4,500 killed, 22,000 wounded and 10,000 missing; VLE gives the same totals, counting the 25,000 as dead. Beata Wolszczak of the same museum counts 66,000 prisoners and 231 guns and 1,023 heavy machine guns taken.17
Elsewhere, smaller fights shielded the victory. At Zadwórze near Lwów, on 17 August, 318 of some 330 Polish defenders died holding up Budyonny's cavalry, a stand remembered as the Polish Thermopylae. In the defense of Zamość, the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes, Marko Bezruchko's Ukrainian 6th Sich Riflemen Division distinguished itself on the Polish side. Budyonny's army had been kept away from Warsaw in the decisive days, by Stalin's orders according to the Polish History Museum, by Lenin's refusal to redirect it according to VLE; at the end of the month it was beaten at Komarów by Colonel Juliusz Rómmel's 1st Cavalry Division.18› Battle of Zadwórze, 1920
The Miracle on the Vistula
The name came from an opponent of Piłsudski. On 14 August 1920 the right-wing journalist Stanisław Stroński wrote in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita of a “miracle of the Vistula”, echoing the “miracle of the Marne” that had saved Paris in 1914. Because the counteroffensive was linked to 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, the phrase suggested divine help, at odds with the view of Piłsudski's supporters, who credited the soldiers' courage and their commander's genius. The religious reading has never gone away: Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska shows how the yearly commemorations at Ossów still present the victory as the fruit of prayer and of the Virgin Mary's intercession.19
Foreign observers were impressed too. Major Charles de Gaulle, a member of the French military mission, wrote in a diary published in 1920 that “our Poles” had, as it were, put on wings, and the British diplomat Lord D'Abernon, a member of the Allied mission to Poland, called his book on the battle The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World. “The modern history of civilisation knows but few events of greater importance,” he wrote.20
Legacy and memory
The victory saved Polish independence, barely two years old, and, as VLE puts it, forced the Bolsheviks to shelve their plans for world revolution until 1939. The war was decided for good in the Battle of the Niemen in late September; an armistice took effect on 18 October, and the Treaty of Riga of 18 March 1921 fixed a border that lasted until the Soviet invasion of 17 September 1939. Soviet historians saw it differently: the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, while listing the Soviet mistakes, insisted that the defeat at Warsaw did not mean losing the war, since Poland soon accepted peace on terms less favorable than those Moscow had offered before the fighting. Centek, by contrast, notes that the Polish delegation in Riga could have claimed a border much further east but chose not to take in too many lands where Poles would be a minority.21› Battles that won Polish independence
The architects of the victory fared unevenly. Rozwadowski sided with the government against Piłsudski's coup in May 1926, was held for over a year without charge and died in 1928; even his grave is now lost. The Polish Senate's centenary resolution of 2019 names him beside Piłsudski, Haller and Witos among those who stood together to defend the country in 1920. In 1923 the anniversary, 15 August, became Polish Armed Forces Day. The communists moved the holiday to 12 October, the date of the Battle of Lenino, in 1947, and a law of 30 July 1992 made 15 August Polish Armed Forces Day again.22
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