Babel, Isaac, Red Cavalry, London 1929 — 1920 Diary, Yale 1990
Budienny, S. M., The Path of Valour, Moscow 1972 D’Abernon, Edgar Vincent, Viscount, The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World, London 1931
Carton de Wiart, Adrian, Happy Odyssey, London 1950 Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Armed, Oxford 1970 Dziewanowski, M. K., Pilsudski-A European Federalist, Stamford 1969 Howard of Penrith, Lord, Theatre of Life, Vol. II, London 1936 Patterson, E. J., Pilsudski, Marshal of Poland, London 1936 Reddaway, W. F., Marshal Pilsudski, London 1939 Zamoyski, Adam, Paderewski, London 1982
In the summer of 1920, at the gates of Warsaw, there took place a battle that ranks alongside Marathon and Waterloo for its importance in history. Yet, dramatic and fateful though its consequences were, the story of how Lenin came within a hair’s breadth of shattering the Versailles peace settlement and spreading Bolshevism from Russia to western Europe has been largely forgotten.
In 1920 the new Soviet state was a mess, following a brutal civil war.
The best way of ensuring its survival appeared to be to export the revolution to Germany, itself economically ruined by defeat in World War I and racked by internal dissension. Between Russia and Germany lay Poland, only recently independent and determined
To remain so.
Now Adam Zamoyski, author of the bestselling 1812: Napoleons Fatal March on Moscow, describes how — in what became known as the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ — the Polish army led by self-taught general and former terrorist Josef Pilsudski achieved at the last minute one of the most decisive victories in military history, in which aeroplanes and tanks were swamped by swirling masses of mounted Cossacks and lancers in scenes reminiscent of the Napoleonic wars.
The shattering defeat his armies suffered in the battle for Warsaw forced Lenin to settle for communism in one country, while the twenty-year peace that followed had a profound and lasting impact on European history.
One of the founders of Pilsudski’s fighting squads, briefly Prime Minister of Poland in 1922-23, politically active in opposition to Pilsudski in the 1920s and 1930s, Sikorski would become Polish Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief in 1940, and effective war leader of the Poles until his death in a plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943.
These brigades, made up of men from western Ukraine, had been part of the Austrian army during the Great War, at the end of which they had fought against the Poles for possession of Lw6w, subsequently joined Petlura, and, when his luck ran out, Denikin’s White Army, from which they had switched to the Reds.
Sosnkowski, a firm supporter of Pitsudski and his political tradition, would succeed Sikorski as Polish commander-in-chief after the latter’s death in 1943. t As commander of the Polish 2nd Corps in World War II, Anders would distinguish himself in the Italian campaign of 1944, particularly at Monte Cassino and Bologna.
The 33rd Division (15,000 men) was subjected to eleven meetings, one hundred reading sessions, 1,000 discussions, twenty-five lectures, 104 cell meetings, thirty-seven general meetings and twenty ‘spectacles’, all in the space of three weeks.
This would later become notorious as the ‘Curzon Line’, and provide endless grounds for argument in the inter-Allied negotiations of 1943-45.
Younger brother of J6zef Haller, commander of the Blue Array and of the Northern Front during the battle of Warsaw.
In the Second World War. as General ‘B6r’, Komorowski would command the Polish Home Army and lead it during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
World History
