Among the most momentous events of twentieth-century history is the defeat of the Communist Red Army in the Battle of Warsaw in the summer of 1920, “the miracle on the Vistula”.
History isn’t just what’s happened. It’s also what happened in the context of what might have occurred. Although largely unknown in the West, much was at stake during the Polish-Soviet War. The conflict determined whether Poland would remain free and whether Europe would be exposed to Bolshevik revolution. The conflict was a potential turning point, and one that could have a profound impact on subsequent events.
In the summer of 1920, Russia seemed poised to take over Europe.
Newly victorious in the Russian Civil War, but convinced that the capitalists were bent on strangling the cradle of Communism, the Bolsheviks looked for salvation. Their gaze fell on Germany, exhausted and embittered by defeat in the First World War, and now engulfed in civil strife between Communist revolutionaries and proto-fascist freikorps paramilitaries.
If only the Red Army’s bayonets could install a Bolshevik regime in Berlin, then the two most powerful states in Central and Eastern Europe would be united in a Communist monolith. And from there, perhaps Communism would spread to Italy, France, Hungary and beyond. Could Marx’s prediction of world revolution finally be at hand?
Unfortunately for Lenin and Trotsky, an obstacle stood in their way.
It was called Poland.
Like Communist Russia, Poland was also a newly-revived nation, though of a very different kind. The Bolsheviks only needed to overthrow the Tsarist government to take over the Russian state: the Poles had to create their own state. Though the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had extended deep into present-day Russia and Ukraine, Poland as an independent nation had been snuffed out in the eighteenth century, its territory partitioned between the Russian, German and Austrian empires. When those empires collapsed after World War I, the Poles took advantage of the chaos to resurrect their nation.
Yet as they had for centuries, Poland and Russia again would go to war. One reason was rival claims for the borderlands between the two nations—those “bloodlands” of Belarus and Ukraine that were perpetual battlefields. The deeper cause was geography; a glance at the map shows that the land bridge from Moscow to Berlin runs through Poland, whose unfortunate fate was to be wedged between Germany and Russia.
The Bolsheviks saw Poland as a semi-feudal state of nobles and rich landowners exploiting the workers and peasants. The Poles feared the Red Army would march through Poland on the way to Germany, and never leave.
Britain and France rated Poland’s chances for victory as nil against a Russian colossus endowed with vastly superior manpower and resources. But the West had not reckoned on the force of Polish nationalism, patriotism and the powerful personality of Field Marshal Josef Pilsudski, the self-taught general who proved far shrewder than the professional military officers who had so badly bungled Verdun and the Somme.
The Polish-Soviet War started in February 1919. The Russians had an army of more than 5 million men and had assembled 70 divisions for Operation Vistula, while the Polish Army, with less than a million men, could field only 20 divisions to stop them. The war was perhaps the last of its kind, involving a rich mixture of cavalry and tanks, lance and machine gun, of hardened professionals and untested civilians.
Poland has launched a preemptive offensive in April 1919 that swiftly seized Kiev. But they failed in their goal to destroy the retreating Russian armies and, even worse, discovered that the Ukrainians hated Polish nationals as much as they did the Bolsheviks. Poland also learned that nationalism cuts both ways; thousands of patriotic Tsarist officers, a group once targeted for murder by the Communists, now offered their professional expertise to the Red Army in patriotic outrage against the Polish attack.
The tide turned against Poland. Led by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the genius of mechanized warfare later executed by Stalin, the heavily reinforced Russian armies marched on Warsaw, driving the outnumbered and outgunned Polish forces before them.
The fighting was epic and merciless. The Poles raised divisions of enthusiastic but inexperienced and poorly armed volunteers, leavened by their countrymen who had learned soldiering in the armies of other countries. From America came the Kosciuszko Squadron of American volunteer pilots. From France came the Blue Army, a Polish force trained and equipped by the the Allies to fight on the Western Front, and which even brought its own tanks.
But the Bolsheviks had their 1st Cavalry Army, the dreaded Konarmiya, a horde of thousands of fast, hard-hitting horsemen led by mustachioed Marshal Semyon Budyonny. Russia also had sympathizers abroad; British dockworkers and German and Czech railwaymen heeded Moscow’s call to save the socialist motherland and refuse to load supplies for Poland. Just as in 1939, Britain and France promised support but did little, other than to send a few advisers (Charles de Gaulle among them) who claimed much credit but contributed very little to the Polish war effort.
The Russo-Polish War was a world apart from the trenches and barbed wire of the Western Front. As Hitler’s armies later discovered, the East was simply too vast for armies to form continuous lines of troops, which made warfare far more mobile. The plains of Central Poland lacked defensible terrain, and neither side had the time or resources to build the trenches that stalemated the Western battlefields. In Poland and Ukraine, the mobility and shock power of cavalry ruled. Despite the handful of tanks and air planes, the fighting was almost Napoleonic, as Cossack horsemen and Polish lancers clashed in the last major cavalry battles in history.
This war was more than a territorial squabble. It was a clash of ideologies: Christianity vs. atheism, individual liberty vs. state control. There was no thought of mercy. Russians butchered Polish soldiers, though officers were first tortured before being killed.
Lenin believed that by destroying Poland, he would create a Red Bridge to Europe — particularly Germany — which he was certain was ripe for Communist revolution.
By August 1920, Warsaw appeared doomed as the Red Army advanced on the city, where Communist sympathizers (mainly jewish) were already rising.
However, the excellent and advanced short-waved radio system and breaking Russian codes gave Poland a huge information advantage, which allowed the victory in the Battle of Warsaw on the overwhelming forces of Bolshevik Russia. The Polish Radio Intelligence was based mainly on deciphering enemy communications, which yielded remarkable spectrum, timeliness and reliability of the information obtained. Jan Kowalewski, broke the Soviet ciphers during the Polish-Bolshevik war. In the years 1919 to 1924 he was head of the Department II radio intelligence Cipher Bureau Section II of the General Staff at the Supreme Command.
Just as all seemed lost, Marshal Pilsudski unleashed his masterstroke, a move worthy of Robert E. Lee or Rommel. Pilsudski knew the situation required a bold stroke that could not only defeat the Russians, but also do it quickly, before they could utilize their endless pool of manpower. In a move his advisors said broke all the rules, Pilsudski removed men from the Warsaw defenses and assembled them in secret, planning to attack the Red Army at a right angle. If his unorthodox venture failed, Poland, which had regained her freedom only two years before after over a century of slavery, would again be lost. While the central Russian armies were fixated on Warsaw, a Polish strike force side-slipped to the south of the city, and then turned north in a left hook into the exposed Russian flank. Somehow — some would say miraculously — Pilsudski prevailed and the Bolsheviks were caught completely off guard. Surprised, demoralized and outmanoeuvred, the Russian armies disintegrated, with some retreating back to Russia and others fleeing to German territory to be interned.
Polish defences near Warsaw
Pilsudski’s counteroffensive was assisted by the breaking of Russian codes, a Polish specialty that they later used to crack the Nazi Enigma machine. The Polish victory at the Battle of Warsaw changed the strategic picture so abruptly that it is difficult to think of another comparable operation in the annals of European military history. Total defeat became total victory in the blink of an eye, based on the actions of a small group of weary soldiers led by an amateur. As a result of the Miracle on the Vistula, Polish independence was preserved and the Bolshevik Revolution was stopped at the Polish border.
The 1919-21 Polish-Soviet War should be considered one of the most consequential conflicts in history. Despite its significance, the war has never received lavish historic attention, perhaps because it is commonly viewed from a counterfactual perspective. It was a historical turning point that refused to turn, significant only because it prevented or delayed what might have happened.
But if history had turned, Europe could have been radically altered.
If the Red Army had entered war-torn, revolution-prone Germany in the aftermath of the Great War — an event requiring no fantastic assumptions — a Soviet dictatorship may well have spread to the Atlantic shore. When the Soviets appeared to be an unstoppable force of history, spearheaded by an irresistible people’s army, many in the West were infatuated with communism as the wave of the future.
By inflicting a clear-cut, overwhelming military defeat on the Red Army, the Poles not only prevented the Soviets from physically invading Europe, but destroyed their aura of invincibility, and hence, the intoxicating appeal of inevitability.
The Poles called their victory, the “Miracle on the Vistula.”
The above famous painting by Jerzy Kossak, “Miracle on the Vistula”, shows Polish army soldiers defending outposts of Warsaw before the Bolshevik onslaught, and over them shines the figure of the Virgin Mary. The apparition as some claim was not any accident or licencia poetica. Mary actually appeared at the time to defend the newly-revived Poland from another captivity after the partitions and to protect the land against anti-Christian ideology.
The fact of her apparition, was kept quiet for decades – uncomfortable for both parts of Polish politicians, who saw the possibility of weakening the public significance of this victory, and for the communists government after the Second World War in Poland, to whom the 1920 war was an irreparable disaster. But it has survived in the memory of the soldiers, including Soviet bolsheviks.
Father Joseph Maria Bartnik SJ and Eve Storożyńska gathered preserved testimonies of Mary’s apparition in the foreland of Warsaw, where Mary allegedly has appeared in the sky…
Not only had the new Polish nation survived, but the ensuing peace agreement gave it much of the disputed territory. The cost for both sides totalled more than one hundred thousand dead and further devastation of war-wracked economies.
Poland had defeated Soviet Russia, the a case of good defeating evil.
In 1920, Poland had stopped the Judeo Communist Revolution in its tracks. Had Poland fallen before the Red Army and advanced into a tired, war-ravaged and disillusioned Europe, then much of the continent—Germany, Hungary, Italy—might have gone Communist.
Some naive souls might have looked forward to the workers and peasants breaking their capitalist chains, but the reality would probably have been Stalin’s NKVD secret police conducting show trials in Berlin and Paris.
In the event, Poland’s independence was again tragically cut short by the Nazis in 1939, after which the country was “liberated” by the Soviets for a forty-year occupation.
But then, the Soviet empire also crumbled.
Had the Western democracies stood with Poland then the task would have been much easier, and the effect a lot more lasting.
Although most Americans and many others from the Western world are unaware of this history, it is important to understand that events in what we consider obscure outposts can have far-reaching implications. Rather than ignore struggles against tyranny in foreign lands, American policy is best served by supporting people who value freedom, wherever they may be.
August 15 is celebrated in Poland as a Feast of the Polish Armed Forces to commemorate 1920 year and the Miracle on the Vistula.
There is no doubt that Warsaw 1920 was a significant event which deserves more attention than it has received from historians.
Sadly, some ungrateful Polonophobs of other countries, the self absorbed buffoons for some reason deliberately attempt to diminish the significance of Polish victory in this war.
Do they posses any IMAGINATION?
Indeed a wonderful miracle.
Brave soldiers, good officers and leader.
God’s blessings.
Remember Lepanto also another Christian miracle.