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The Battle of Warsaw in August 1920 has been described as one of the decisive battles of European history. The Red Army appeared to be on the verge of advancing through Poland into Germany to expand the Soviet revolution. Had the war spread into Germany, another great European war would have ensued, dragging in France and Britain. In the event, the Red Army was defeated by “the miracle on the Vistula”.
This Osprey Campaign examines the roots and outcomes of this conflict. Following the collapse of the three European empires- Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Russia- an independent Poland re-emerged from the partitions of the late 18th century. The boundaries of Poland and the other resurrected central European nations were not defined and were settled through a series of conflicts.
One of the most substantial issues was the fate of Ukraine. Several Ukrainian armies were formed but none gained firm control. In May 1920, the Polish Army intervened in the Ukrainian fighting, pushing all the way to Kiev. The Red Army, by now triumphant in most of the theaters of the Russian Civil War, turned its attention to this new threat. By focusing its forces along the northern Belarussian axis, the Red Army threatened to cut off the Polish forces to the south in Ukraine. The Polish retreat in the summer of 1920 was almost as dramatic as its spring advance.
By the late summer of 1920, two Soviet armies had advanced into Poland, one facing Warsaw and the other facing Lwow. Poland turned to France for military and diplomatic aid. An overconfident Red Army dreamed of advancing over a prostrate Polish Army into neighboring Germany to ignite a Communist revolution in the heart of Europe. After a summer of disastrous retreat, the Polish army rallied and repulsed the Red Army at Warsaw and Lwow. The subsequent autumn battles put Poland in control of western Belarus and western Ukraine, near the previous borders of 1772.
The Russo-Polish War of 1920 stood in considerable contrast to the trench fighting of the Great War. The low density of forces on both sides as well as the enormous distances made this a war of maneuver. The conflict saw a curious mixture of traditional and advanced tactics. Horse cavalry played a dominant role in the fighting, but airplanes, tanks, and armored trains lent the war an air of modernity.
The issues at the heart of the 1920 conflict were never satisfactorily resolved and were a critical ingredient in the 1939–45 conflicts in the region. Indeed the fighting in Ukraine in 2014 is only the latest reverberation in the conflicts over Europe's eastern borderlands.
