Józef Haller: the general of the Blue Army

Few Polish soldiers of World War I took a longer road to independence than Józef Haller. An officer of the Habsburg army who had left it to train young Poles, he went to war in 1914 with the Polish Legions, broke through the Austrian front in 1918 in protest at a peace that gave away Polish land, escaped across Russia after a lost battle, and came home in 1919 at the head of an army of some 70,000 men raised in France. A year later he led the symbolic wedding of Poland to the Baltic at Puck and commanded a front that shielded Warsaw from the Red Army.¹

Early life and the Austrian army

Haller was born on 13 August 1873 at Jurczyce near Kraków, in the Austrian partition, into a family of the landed gentry. He went to school in Lwów, then chose the army: he attended military secondary schools at Košice and Hranice and studied artillery at the Technical Military Academy in Vienna, which he completed in 1895.²

In 1895 he was commissioned into the Austro-Hungarian artillery and served in garrisons in Lwów and Stanisławów. In 1911 he left the army and turned to Polish civic work. He joined the Sokół gymnastic society, which was training young Poles in military skills, and worked with the young scouting movement that would become Polish scouting.³

The Legions, 1914 to 1918

When war broke out in 1914, Haller led a unit of the Eastern Legion out of Lwów and then commanded the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the Polish Legions, the Polish formation fighting on the Austrian side. In July 1916 he took command of the Legions' 2nd Brigade. During the oath crisis of 1917, when Józef Piłsudski's followers refused to swear loyalty to the German and Austrian emperors, Haller kept his brigade in the field.⁴ › The Battles That Won Polish Independence, 1914 to 1921

The break came in February 1918. At Brest-Litovsk on 9 February the Central Powers signed a peace with the Ukrainian People's Republic that assigned it the Chełm region, land the Poles regarded as their own. In protest, on the night of 15 to 16 February 1918, Haller led the 2nd Brigade through the Austro-Russian front near Rarańcza to join the Polish forces on the Russian side.⁵

In March 1918 he took command of the Polish II Corps in Ukraine. On 11 May 1918, when the German command moved to disarm it, the corps fought the Germans at Kaniów and surrendered; in the historian Jan Snopko's account, it gave up after a day's fighting, out of ammunition. Haller avoided capture, made his way to Moscow, and from there through Murmansk to France.⁶

The Blue Army, 1918 to 1919

In France a Polish army already existed on paper and in camps. It had been created by a decree of President Raymond Poincaré on 4 June 1917 and drew on Poles from France, the United States and Brazil and on Polish prisoners of war from the Austrian and German armies. The color of its French-issued uniforms gave it its popular name, the Blue Army. After reaching France in the summer of 1918 Haller joined the Polish National Committee in Paris, and on 4 October 1918 he was appointed commander of the Polish Army in France.⁷

Among its soldiers were more than 20,000 volunteers from North America. They trained at Camp Kościuszko at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario, across the river from New York State. Zygmunt Zalewski counts 22,395 volunteers trained in Canada and the United States, of whom 20,720 were shipped to France; Paul Valasek puts those who reached France at about 23,000 from the United States and some 500 from Canada.⁸

According to the Ministry of National Defence, under Haller the army grew into two corps of two divisions each, with an instruction division and rear services, and two Polish divisions formed in Russia, Lucjan Żeligowski's 4th and the 5th Siberian, were placed under his command. Its part in the fighting on the Western Front in 1918 was, in the historian Jan Snopko's words, rather symbolic, but it tied Poland to the victorious Allies.⁹

By the time it was sent to Poland, the army numbered about 70,000 men (the Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives about 68,000), with, by the ministry's count, its own tank regiment of 120 Renault tanks and seven air squadrons with 98 aircraft. It arrived in Poland in 1919 and went straight into the fighting for the borders of the new state, above all in the war with the Ukrainians over Eastern Galicia and later against the Bolsheviks. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine stresses that the Allies had let the army go to Poland to face the Red Army and that Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski had assured them it would not be sent to Eastern Galicia; yet by mid-May 1919 it was deployed there, and it helped push the Ukrainian Galician Army out of the province. On 1 September 1919, the ministry notes, the army was formally merged into the Polish Army.¹⁰ › The Defense of Lwów, 1918

The wedding to the sea, 1920

In October 1919 Haller took command of the Pomeranian Front, which in 1920 took over the part of Pomerania granted to Poland by the Treaty of Versailles. On 10 February 1920, at the fishing port of Puck, he cast a ring into the waters of the Bay of Puck, the symbolic wedding of Poland to the sea. Speaking at Puck in 2021, President Andrzej Duda put the coast Poland gained under the treaty at 147 kilometers.¹¹

The Battle of Warsaw, 1920

In the summer of 1920, with the Red Army advancing on Warsaw, Haller became inspector general of the Volunteer Army, the force of volunteers raised to meet the crisis. On 10 August 1920 he took command of the Northern Front, which held the approaches to the capital in the Battle of Warsaw while Piłsudski prepared the counterstroke from the Wieprz.¹² › Battle of Warsaw, 1920

Command style

Haller's lasting achievement was that of an organizer: the historian Jan Snopko calls the Blue Army his biggest achievement, and the one that made him popular in Poland. In 1918 he took the political decision to break with Austria and carried his brigade with him; in France he took command of an army of emigrants and former prisoners of war that grew to some 70,000 men with tanks and aircraft, and brought it home; in 1920 he took charge of the volunteer army raised as the Red Army approached.¹³

Later life and death

Haller remained a public figure in the 1920s. He was chief of Polish scouting from 1920 to 1923, and in 1922 and 1923 he sat in the Sejm. A political opponent of Piłsudski, he sided with the government during Piłsudski's coup in May 1926 and was then removed from his post and retired. He farmed at Gorzuchowo near Chełmno in Pomerania and stayed active in the opposition.¹⁴ › Józef Piłsudski: the marshal who restored Poland

In September 1939 he crossed into Romania and made his way to France, where he joined General Władysław Sikorski's government in exile as a minister without portfolio. In London from 1940 he headed its education department until 1943. After the war he stayed in Britain. He died in London on 4 June 1960 and was buried in Gunnersbury Cemetery. In 1993 his remains were brought back to Poland and laid in the garrison church of St Agnes in Kraków.¹⁵

Legacy and memory

Haller's name is tied above all to the sea. Puck marks the anniversary of 10 February 1920 at his monument in the fishing port, as in 2021, when the president attended, and again in 2024.¹⁶

Between the wars Haller spent his summers in a villa in the seaside village then called Hallerowo, today part of Władysławowo. According to the Museum of the Puck Region, since 2000 the house, known as Hallerówka, has held the Memorial Centre of General Józef Haller and the Blue Army, and since 2013 it has been a branch of the museum, with a permanent exhibition on Haller's life and service and on the soldiers of the Blue Army.¹⁷

Read about the decisive weeks of 1920 in the Battle of Warsaw and the cavalry fight at Komarów, or see what else happened on 10 February in military history.