We talk a lot about what was going on in each of the warring countries in our regular episodes,
but there are also nations without borders that we should look at to see their contributions
and sufferings too. One such nation is the huge expanse of Poland.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War Special episode about Poland in the First
World War.
Poland has a rich and complicated history. Often sandwiched between powerful and aggressive
neighbors, it has, over the past millennium, defended its sovereignty on innumerable occasions,
only to again be overrun and subjugated by foreign powers.
Poland did not exist as a sovereign state during World War One, being part of three
other empires: the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian. Poles consequently had the distinction of
serving in all three of those armies, and it was often a case of Pole versus Pole. If
you look at the campaigns of the Eastern Front, though, a large part of them were fought on
Polish lands, with the resultant destruction of civilian property and the deaths of countless
Polish civilians.
Realize that when then war broke out, Russia advanced into big chunks of Galicia and East
Prussia. Within a year, though, it was the Germans and Austrians who had pushed into
these lands and beyond, into Lithuania and most of Russian Poland.
So you get the question- if three armies are fighting back and forth across your land,
with your people caught in the crossfire again and again, what’s a Polish patriot to do?
Well, if you were Jozef Pilsudski, the leader of the Galician Riflemen when the war broke
out, you believed that Poles should play an active role in the war if they wanted it to
lead to independence. The problem there was where? Wladislaw Sikorski and the Supreme
National Committee formed three Polish legions of volunteers that fought as units within
the Austro-Hungarian army. Their task was to liberate their homeland- Russian occupied
Galicia. But on the Russian side, another Polish National Committee was formed with
the same, but opposite purpose, so while everybody wanted independence, no one was really certain
whom it was going to be from.
In 1916, in an effort to win Polish loyalty, Germany and Austria agreed to establish a
kingdom of Poland, and on November 5th, the Two Kaisers Proclamation created a hereditary
Polish Monarchy with a constitution. It did not, however, have a government, nor did it
have defined borders, though it did have a state bank and issued currency. Two months
later, a provisional state council was established with Pilsudski as a member, but the entente
powers pretty much regarded this as a puppet government for the central powers.
When the US entered the war in 1917, though, the reestablishment of Poland was one of Woodrow
Wilson’s “12 points”, and later that year Poles in exile founded a Polish National
Committee that was recognized by the Entente. Pilsudski had by this time stopped working
with the Provisional government the Central powers supported and had been arrested. In
October 1917 a regular government was formed in Poland and independence was becoming a
possibility, but it wasn’t until the armistice that a Polish Republic, comprising Western
Galicia and Russian Poland became a reality, with Jozef Pilsudski head of state and commander
in chief of the armed forces.
It’s not for this show to talk about what happened after that, so I’ll leave that
here. This was just a short special to fill in some of the gaps that we have to leave
in our regular episodes and I thought Poland deserved a shout out, being in such an unfortunate
position throughout the war.
So, to the Polish soldiers who fought at Gumbinnen, Tannenberg, the Masurian Lakes, the Warsaw
Offensive, and all of the battles from 1915 onward that we have yet to cover, and in whatever
army’s uniform you fought them in, here’s a salute to you and your struggle for an independent
Poland against the shifting, treacherous, and above all deadly background of modern war.
If you want to find out more about Jozef Pilsudski you can check out our episode from
Week 11. A time when the generals started to realize that this war might not be over
by christmas as they thought and where heavy fighting took place in an area that today
is modern Poland. You can see that episode right here.
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