Roughly a hundred years ago, another Russian tyrant — Vladimir Lenin — sent overwhelming forces streaming across the border of Poland.
The formerly subjugated Polish nation was attempting to resurrect itself as a sovereign state following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires as a result of the First World War. Lenin anticipated the collapse of the fledgling republic and expected his troops to drive straight through Warsaw and export the Russian Revolution to Berlin and points west. Observers didn’t give the Polish David a chance against the Russian Goliath.
In Poland then, as in Ukraine now, an inspirational leader, Marshal Josef Pilsudski, stood his ground. Then as now, the Western democracies were exhausted. The Great War had the same effect as today’s pandemic and contentious social stresses. In both eras, a demoralized public clamored for a return to normalcy. No friendly foreign power rushed to intervene on Poland’s behalf, but then, as now, some degree of assistance was forthcoming from abroad.
The French provided the Poles with materiel and military advisers, including a tall young captain named Charles de Gaulle. Some 20,000-plus Polish Americans and Polish Canadians paid their own way overseas to enlist in the Polish army as volunteers.
Ten magnificent aviators from across the U.S. formed the Kosciuszko Squadron, a unit named in honor of the gallant Pole, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who fought for our freedom and independence in the Revolutionary War. All were veterans of World War I. None had any Polish blood. Assembled by the future creator of King Kong, Capt. Merian Cooper of Jacksonville, Florida, they resisted the westward thrust of the Red Army in open-cockpit biplanes procured from Austria and Italy.
The Polish-Soviet War heated up in the spring of 1920, and by the second week of August, Poland was down on one knee. Lenin had deployed two armies under his best generals to prosecute a coordinated attack. A conventional force commanded by the youthful, smooth-shaven paragon, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, struck across the north of Poland on a direct line to Warsaw. Meanwhile, the earthy, piratical, and heavily mustachioed Semyon Budenny led 16,000 Cossack horsemen out of the Caucasus and up through the southern front. The plan was for Budenny to rendezvous with Tukhachevsky at Warsaw and close the pincers.
As city after city fell to the invaders, the Soviets invited a Polish delegation to talk peace. They offered to negotiate a surrender. But Pilsudski detected a sizable gap between Tukhachevsky and Budenny’s armies. He saw an opening for a counterattack on Tukhachevsky’s unprotected flank and staked his country on the maneuver.
It worked. Leaving a thin force to hold the capital, he surprised and encircled Tukhachevsky, forcing him into a headlong retreat. Simultaneously, a depleted line of Polish regulars, augmented by determined civilian militias, disrupted Budenny’s advance. The Kosciuszko Squadron was instrumental in putting the Red Cavalry to flight as well.
The ensuing Battle of Warsaw, celebrated as the “Miracle on the Vistula,” was one of the greatest upsets in military history and a seminal victory in European history. Lenin, precursor of Stalin and Putin, was compelled to abandon dreams of world revolution and instead concentrate on “building socialism in one country.”
At the unveiling of a monument to three members of the Kosciuszko Squadron who died in the Polish-Soviet War, a Polish statesman, Count Leon Pininski, emphasized what he called “the great moral value” the volunteers brought to Poland, in addition to their military skills. “Fighting for Poland,” he explained, was “at the same time defending the peoples of Western civilization against barbarism and crime.”
Ironically, the monument was erected in Lviv, now part of Ukraine.
Let us hope, let us pray for a miracle on the Dnieper.
Sheldon Bart is a trustee of the Foundation to Illuminate America’s Heroes and a production partner of a theatrical film about Merian Cooper’s exploits with the Kosciuszko Squadron.
