Miracle on the Vistula. Year 1920 ('Gazeta Wyborcza', Poland)
18-08-1995. If we lost this battle, the world would look different - without Poland.
The Head of State and Commander-in-Chief Jozef Pilsudski did not intend to wait. He dreamed of the resurrection of the old Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth, the federation of the Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples (it should be noted that in the original Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians are called peoples, and Belarusians as “people” - approx. Lane). Regardless of political intentions in 1919, a sober military calculation demanded that the borders of the main culprit of the divisions of Poland be moved as far as possible to the east.
In the winter of 1919, Polish units occupied positions only slightly east of Poland’s current borders.
In March, preempting the Soviet attack, the group of General Sheptytsky's troops crossed Nemen, rejected the Bolshevik troops, occupied Slonim and the outskirts of Lida and Baranovich. To the south, the Polish units crossed the Yaseldu River and the Oginsky Canal, occupied Pinzk and entrenched themselves far to the east.
In April, a strong group of Polish troops under the personal command of Pilsudski smashed the grouping of the Bolshevik troops and occupied Vilna, Lida, Novogrudek, Baranovichi.
In August, the 1919 of the year began the second Polish offensive in the northeast. Polish troops captured Minsk Belarus and stopped far to the east, on the line of the Berezina and Dvina rivers. In January 1920, the group of troops of General Rydza-Smiglogo took Dvinsk at the Latvian border and then transferred the city to the Latvian army.
Finally deal with the Bolsheviks Pilsudski wanted in Ukraine. The rout of the main forces of the Red Army in the south and the frontier on the Dnieper should have been given in the east of Pax Polonica, peace on the terms of the Commonwealth. And one more thing - the revival of Ukraine under the protection of the Polish soldier.
The bloody battles of the Polish army with the Ukrainians in Lviv, in Eastern Malopolsha, in Volyn, subsided in the middle of 1919. Before a decisive offensive, Poland entered into an alliance with the leader of the troops of Naddniprovsk Ukraine, the ataman Semyon Petlyura, who had earlier escaped with his troops on the Polish side of the front from persecution of the counter-revolutionary army of General Denikin.
This battle was inevitable. If not August 1920 of the year near Warsaw, then a little earlier - somewhere in the far eastern armchairs. We had to enter a decisive battle with the Bolsheviks, regardless of whether we would attack them or wait patiently for attacks from the east. We had to give this great fight, because the independence of Poland after 123 years of slavery could not be settled "over a cup of tea", in the silence of the offices, through 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 less mistakes wins.
Starting in April 1920, the attack on Kiev, the Polish military made more mistakes than their opponent. Intelligence has mistakenly reported that the strongest groups of Bolshevik troops are in Ukraine, underestimating, however, the huge concentration of the Red Army in the north, in the Vilnius-Belostok direction. When it was already clear that the Bolsheviks were preparing an offensive in the north, the Commander-in-Chief decided, no matter what, to strike at Kiev earlier, to encircle and smash the Soviet armies in the south, and then transfer forces to the northern front. This seemed real, however, on condition that the Bolsheviks would stubbornly defend Kiev.
But the Bolsheviks were not allowed to trap themselves. The first Polish strike, although successful, was sent to the void - the cauldron near 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, retreated to the east. The Russian army, as 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 Ukrainians. Those were not going to join the army of Petlura.
- Our ally - this time it was the Poles - turned out to be insincere: he spoke and signed one, and he thought completely different! Pilsudski was the most honest of them, but he also intended, at best, to restore some kind of “autonomous” or “federalized” Ukraine, - Ivan Feschenko-Chapivsky, the minister in the government of Petliura, wrote then. Thus, the Kiev expedition lost all meaning.
The last mistake was that the Polish command did not take seriously the cavalry mounted army of Semyon Budyonny to the Ukrainian front. When she began to walk on the Polish rear, it was too late. In the south, the retreat began.
The Kremlin made no mistakes at first. The army was prepared diligently. Shortages in armament were filled with trophies captured from the allied and White Guard troops. The number of Red Army was increased to more than a million soldiers, increased discipline. The Bolsheviks kindled nationalist sentiment in Russia. With the slogan of defense of the “Great and Independent Russia” they attracted former tsarist officers to the army. Especially a lot of them came under the red banner after the appeal of the outstanding royal general, Brusilov, who called for forgetting offenses and losses and joining the Bolsheviks.
Before the decisive offensive, the command of the northern front was received by the best Soviet commander who defeated General Denikin, Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
The Soviet blow, designed by Tukhachevsky, crumpled the left wing of the Polish front. Despite the attempts of counterattacks, the Poles gave one after the other lines of defense - the line of the former German fortifications of the First World War, and the line of the Neman, Oginsky, Shchary, Yasyedly channels, and finally the Bug and Narevi lines.
The armies of Tukhachevsky stood up in front of Warsaw.
Later, after many years, the participants of that war tried to describe and explain their actions. Mikhail Tukhachevsky claimed that he decided to attack Warsaw from the north-east and north, because, in his opinion, there were the main Polish forces defending approaches to the Gdansk corridor, which supplied supplies to the Poles from the West. Polish military leaders and military historians see something different in the concept of Tukhachevsky:
“As for me, I compared Tukhachevsky's campaign on the Vistula with the campaign also on the Vistula of General Paskevich in 1830. I even argued that the concept and direction of the operation were apparently taken from the archive of the Polish-Russian war 1830 of the year, ”wrote Marshal Jozef Pilsudski.
The then command of the Red Army consisted of regular officers of the royal army. Tsarist officers at military academies thoroughly studied history Wars, including the Warsaw maneuver of Field Marshal Paskevich.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky should have known about the storming of Warsaw in 1831, also for another reason.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky's great-grandfather, Alexander Tukhachevsky, in 1831, commanded the Olonets regiment in the 2nd Corps of General Kreutz. In the first days of the assault on Warsaw, the Tukhachevsky regiment at the head of the Corps II Corps attacked the south side of the Reduced Ordon. When the battalions of Tukhachevsky broke into the walls of Reduta, an explosion of the powder warehouse destroyed the fortifications and buried along with the defenders more than a hundred Russian soldiers and officers. Colonel Alexander Tukhachevsky, seriously wounded, was captured and died the same day.
On the south side, Redut Ordona was stormed by another column of the Russian corps, and in its ranks Colonel Liprandi, brother-in-law of Colonel Alexander Tukhachevsky. After the explosion of Redut and the death of the commander of the Russian column, Colonel Liprandi took command, and the next day broke into the second line of the Polish defense between the Will and Jerusalem slingshots. He was among the first Russians to break into the city.
In 1831, the author of the plan, according to which the Russian army was to reach the Prussian border right on the right bank of the Vistula, cross over to the left bank, return and storm Warsaw, was Tsar Nicholas I. Field Marshal Paskevich accepted the royal plan with a heavy heart. He knew that, heading down the Vistula, he opened his left flank and ran the risk of being defeated by Polish troops concentrated in the area of the Modlin Fortress.
The plan to strike the Russians on the left flank was immediately considered by the most prominent strategist of the 1831 campaign of the year, General Ignacy Prrongi. However, the commander-in-chief, General Jan Skrshinetsky - as usual, when he had just got a chance to win a decisive victory - preferred to play the game, discuss the subtleties of dinner with a personal chef and pose for painters.
The great-grandson of Colonel Alexander Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, in 1920, the main force, three armies and cavalry corps, threw to the north, following the steps of Field Marshal Paskevich.
But then we, fortunately, were leaders of flesh and blood. Located in the Modlin 5 area, General Vladislav Sikorsky's Army the next day after the weaker, central Red Army group launched an immediate offensive against Warsaw and took Radzymin, struck north on the main forces of Tukhachevsky. A hundred years ago, General Sikorsky, General Pronjiронski’s plan was excellently implemented. Although the 5 Army had three times fewer soldiers and guns than in the Bolshevik armies, General Sikorsky, in Napoleonic maneuvering with small forces, in turn broke up enemy groups and forced them to retreat.
The 203 Ulansky regiment with a truly crack dagger flew for a moment to Tsekhanov, 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 battle. Although she still had significant advantages over the troops of General Sikorsky, but at the crucial moment of the battle she could not threaten Warsaw.
Tukhachevsky first of all wanted to smash the main Polish forces that he expected to find to the north of Warsaw. In the direct attack on the capital, he sent only one army, but it also had a clear advantage over the Polish forces defending the Warsaw suburbs. 13 August 1920, the Bolsheviks hit Radzymin. So began the Warsaw battle.
Then Radzymin passed from hand to hand. Russians and Poles threw their last reserves into battle. There they fought the fiercest of all, but the battles were also conducted in a wide arc on the approaches to Warsaw. These were not impressive clashes of huge masses, but rather a series of local battles. Desperate, bloody. The Bolsheviks gave strength to the news that the roofs of Warsaw are visible from the tower of the newly captured church. The Poles knew that there was nowhere to retreat. The troops, demoralized by defeats and retreats, initially fought not too bravely, they were often covered with panic. Morale appeared after the first successes, after volunteer troops went into battle.
“Priests went to the ranks of fighters as chaplains and orderlies. Many of them returned decorated with orders. Gentry went, medium and small, almost all on their own horses. From my family, four Kakovsky, two Ossovsky, two Vilmanov, Yanovsky, almost everyone who was able to keep weapon. All the intelligentsia, students and high-school students, starting from the 6 class, went. Factory workers went massively, ”wrote Cardinal Alexander Kakovsky.
80 thousands of volunteers participated in the defense of Warsaw.
The symbol of the battle for Warsaw was the death of the priest Skorupki. After the battle they wrote that he died, leading the soldiers to the attack, holding a cross in front of him like a bayonet. So Kossak portrayed him.
It was different. A young priest Stanislav Skorupka volunteered and became the chaplain of the I Battalion 236 Infantry Regiment of the Volunteer Army named after the Veterans of the Year 1863. He did not want to leave underage volunteers alone under the bullets. The commander, second lieutenant Slovikovsky, begged him to allow him to go on a counterattack among the soldiers. When the priests died from a shot to the head, the cross was on his chest, under his uniform.
“Miracle”, as contemporaries wanted, happened on the Vistula, but could have happened earlier, far to the east, on the Oginsky channel, on the Neman or the Bug and Narevi. Immediately after the beginning of the Tukhachevsky offensive, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski intended in the east to do what he finally did on the Vistula: concentrate the shock army on the left flank of the Bolsheviks, defending the enemy’s left flank under sudden protection, cutting off the enemy’s path to retreat.
Twice the marshal did not succeed, because the Polish troops gave the planned lines of resistance. God loves a trinity - a blow from the Vepsha (River Vepsh - the right tributary of the Vistula, approx. Transl.) Turned the campaign of Tukhachevsky to the Vistula into a complete rout.
The fact that the attack on the open left flank of the Red Army, Marshal Pilsudski had considered long before, completely refutes the slander, as if the author of the concept of the attack with Wepsch was a French adviser, General Weygand or someone from the Polish, undoubtedly remarkable, staff members.
However, it is impossible not to notice that the spirit of General Pilsudski was on the maneuver of Pilsudski (this was also noticed by German historians). It was the same idea, only transferred to a much more extensive battlefield.
General Sikorsky and Marshal Pilsudski took historical revenge for the November defeat of a century ago (the November uprising 1830 d - approx. Transl.). With their battles, they honored the memory of General Pronji of the most beautiful of all possible ways.
The problem with the “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 a more human spinning of revolutionary heads from success. Tukhachevsky, convinced that the Polish army was already completely demoralized, scattered its forces and rushed westward unconsciously, not caring about supplies and reserves left behind the Neman.
Undoubtedly, Warsaw and Poland were saved by a change in the plans of Alexander Egorov, commander of the Bolshevik troops in Ukraine and Volyn. According to the plans for the winter of 1920, he had to go around the swamps of Polesie and, after a distant transition, strike from the south-east to Warsaw. Along the way, he would then have touched the Polish grouping on the Vepshe. There would have been no Pilsudski counterattack, Warsaw, taken in ticks, should have fallen - the advantage in the strength of the united Soviet fronts would have been too great. But the Bolsheviks directly in front of the Warsaw battle turned the Ukrainian-Volyn front of their troops to Lviv and Galicia. In a sense of concern for Romania. But above all, in their fantasies, they had already seen Warsaw captured by the troops of Tukhachevsky, and Yegorov was marching through Hungary to Yugoslavia.
On the Vistula, a Polish soldier fought heroically, the generals led talentedly and effectively. Infrequently in our modern history this happened, but still it is not a miracle.
Also the blow with Vepsha 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 Vepsha.
And finally, the concentration of uncovered troops on Vepshe did not mean that everything was put on one card.
The young mathematician Stefan Mazurkiewicz, later the rector of the University Jozef Pilsudski in Warsaw and chairman of the Polish Mathematical Society, decoded the Soviet radio code. During the Warsaw battle, 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. The armies of Tukhachevsky near Warsaw were a third more number. It was enough for their command to avoid any of their mistakes. It was enough for happiness in one of the three directions of the Warsaw battle to change the Polish soldier.
Foreign observers of the Warsaw battle had the impression that a Polish soldier saved Western Europe from the invasion of the Bolsheviks. Similarly thought in Poland.
In August 1920, the Bolsheviks, however, had no intention of helping the German revolution, since it had long been suppressed. On the border of East Prussia 1 September 1920, on the Soviet initiative, two commissioners met: the German police and the Red Army. Soviet Commissioner Ivanitsky declared to his interlocutor that after defeating Poland, Moscow disavows the Versailles Treaty and will return the 1914 border of the year 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 every evening with Trotsky in the Kremlin and gives him military secrets. Trotsky had a telephone, but he connected with Germany. August 20 The Russians laid out a special telephone line from Moscow through captured Polish territories to East Prussia.
There, the Germans connected it to the line Krulevets-Berlin, walking on the seabed. That was how the Soviet-Weimar Union was created, the purpose of which was the fourth partition of Poland.
The line was turned five days after the lost Warsaw battle.
Western Europe was safe in 1920. But in the event of the defeat of Poland there were no chances for the Baltic republics and the Balkan states, not excluding Yugoslavia.
Near Warsaw, we saved their independence, elite, future.
But above all, we saved ourselves.
From the perspective of the last fifty years, it seems that, at worst, slavery would have lasted only 20 years longer. But it would not be the moderate terror of the 40's and 50's. What would be the new order, showed the massacres in Bialystok and Radzymina. Soviet Poland in the 30-ies, most likely, was waiting for the fate of Soviet Ukraine. There, a new order was built on the graves of millions of victims.
However, after the army of the Bolsheviks would have won Central Europe, the political history of our continent, for sure, would have gone completely differently. For us - tragically.
Accounts for winning 1920 of the year had to be paid later.
From the battles on the eastern front, the Polish generals made very dangerous conclusions 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 Battle of Warsaw, 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, few tanks.
In 1920, we had an advantage in the air, thanks in part to American volunteers. Polish efficiency aviation appreciated and even overestimated Tukhachevsky and Budyonny. Babel in Konarmia described helplessness in front of Polish planes.
Polish commanders were not able to use aviation effectively, and they also did not understand the great importance of aviation in the future. They saw this after nineteen years.
From the first day of the Warsaw battle in the battles for Radzymin, the Grodno Regiment of the Lithuanian-Belarusian Division commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Bronislav Bokhaterovich participated. After three days of incessant fighting, Radzymin was recaptured. Among the units that entered the city was the battalion of the regiment of Lieutenant Colonel Bokhaterovich.
In 1943, the body of General Bohaterovich was excavated in the Katyn Forest. He was one of two Polish generals killed there.
In the 1920 war of the year, Joseph Stalin was a commissar of the Ukrainian grouping of the Red Army. During the fighting, he made a fool of himself with his incompetence. His arbitrariness led to the fact that during the Warsaw battle a 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 liquidated Soviet military leaders, witnesses of his lack of talent. When asked if Stalin’s decision to kill Polish officers in 1940 had an effect on the year of 1920, it seems that it will never be possible to answer.
What does a dying soldier want?
Two things for sure.
To he died not in vain. To be remembered.
Sixteen and seventeen students, volunteers from under Ossovo, we thanked them very well. Their small cemetery with a chapel in a forest glade in Ossovo seems to be the most beautiful resting place of a Polish soldier I have seen.
Severe soldiers' graves and a chapel in the cemetery in Radzymin are well-groomed.
But, in general, there is not much left of that battle.
Several modest monuments in villages and townships.
Many important places are not marked or described. There is not even a folklore about historical places. Bar "Under the Bolshevik" in Radzymina recently renamed the "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 course of history could not turn the outcome of that battle - in 1815, Napoleon would have lost anyway.
And three quarters of a century ago, near Warsaw, Poland was saved, half of Europe, and perhaps the world.
That's all.
The text used works and memoirs of Jozef Pilsudski, Tadeusz Kutsheby, Vladislav Sikorsky, Marianna Kukel, Alexander Kakovsky, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Mark Tarczyński, Arthur Leinwand, Henrik Bulhak, Mechislav Slovikovsky.
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