But what were the
borders to be of the new Polish state? This was quite unclear, particularly
considering that the regions of Pomerania and Silesia, as well as the port of
Gdańsk, had significant numbers of Germans and
Austrians in them who did not want to belong to Poland. There were also
disputes as to where the line between Poland and the newly-formed
Czechoslovakia were supposed to be drawn. This lead to controversial
plebiscites marred by violence and a lingering mutual resentment between the Czechs and Poles that was to prove most unhelpful in the crisis of 1938.
On the Eastern side of Poland, the newly-formed
Soviet Union got into some territorial disputes with the new Polish government,
as well as coming into conflict with the inhabitants of modern-day Belarus. In February 1919 the Polish-Soviet War broke out, and early Polish offensives met with considerable success. However, Polish logistics were poor, the army outran its supply lines, and the entire Polish front was thinly held. The Red Army also benefited from the diminishing threat of White Russian forces in the Russian Civil War, allowing more troops to be used against the Poles. The Soviets launched a series of devastating counterattacks that would ultimately see Russian troops a mere 13 kilometers from Warsaw. The Soviets then committed a fatal mistake. The rapid advance of Red forces had opened a large gap in the line between forces in the north that were attacking Warsaw and forces in the south that were attacking southwards towards Lwow (or Lviv if you're a Ukrainian). Polish intelligence and radio intercepts found this hole, and Marshal Józef Piłsudski was able to send a newly-organized force right through it. That force then wheeled to the north, cutting off the Red Army forces threatening Warsaw. This regained Polish momentum and threw the Russians into disarray. The front moved eastward, yet both sides decided that the exhausting struggle should end, with a definitive peace in place by March 1921.
The Polish-Soviet war is most significant in perhaps two regards. First, there was a lingering resentment in the Soviet Union of Poland, which was made somewhat personal by the fact that the commissar of the Southern army that had made the disastrous turn towards Lwow happened to be Josef Stalin. Second, the war cemented the reputation and influence of Josef Pilsudski, who was to be a very important figure in the Second Polish Republic (1919-1939).
Marshal Józef Piłsudski can in some ways be considered the Juan Peron of Poland. Though his formal title for much of this time was Minister of Defense, as an elder statesman he had considerable power and influence, enough so that he can be considered a virtual dictator of Poland. Part of his influence can probably be traced to the fact that the government of Poland between the wars was very unstable, and faced continuing pressure from both the far-left and the far-right. There were also serious economic problems, not only during the worldwide depression of the 1930s but also in the early 20s before the government had really figured out how to manage important things like monetary policy. Most governments only lasted a year or so, the first Polish president (Gabriel Narutowicz), was assassinated, and Piłsudski led a successful coup in May 1926. Piłsudski was sort of the great constant in the life of the Republic until his death in 1935, and his legacy is very mixed. While he did bring a measure of stability to Poland at a chaotic time, and while he stood against antisemitism and while ethnic minorities were better treated under his rule than before or after it, some of Piłsudski's methods were fascistic in nature. There is also some debate as to whether Piłsudski stood in the way of modernization of the Polish armed forces, placing too much faith in cavalry and not enough faith in airplanes. Personally, I think that he may have believed too much in cavalry largely because unlike on the Western Front of World War I, cavalry had been quite effective on the Eastern front of the same war, as well as during the Polish-Soviet war. The decision to keep cavalry was not stupid, it was just based on a different set of assumptions. Also keep in mind that tanks in, say, 1933 were still primitive, generals are always fighting the last war, and Piłsudski was no exception. As to the air force: the Polish planes of 1931 were actually among the best in the world when they were released, enough so that Willi Messerschmidt himself was allegedly caught snooping around a Polish airbase. At any rate, Piłsudski remains a controversial figure today, though in many circles he's considered a national hero, complete with statues and streets named after him (there's one of both here in Krakow, for instance).
Polish foreign policy at this time also had to be somewhat adept, and as events were to prove the policies followed by Foreign Minister Józef Beck were unsuccessful. Poland was engaged in squabbles with Lithuania over Lithuanian independence and how much land that new state was to possess. Gdańsk (Danzig) was a free city under League of Nations administration, which meant that Poland had to build a completely new port city at Gdynia. However, the Polish Corridor to the sea had the effect of slicing Germany into two pieces, the main part and East Prussia, the area around present-day Kaliningrad that included a considerable slice of what is now Poland. Both the division of Germany and continuing tension over Gdańsk would be a source of constant friction between Berlin and Warsaw, and Nazi Germany used these sorts of tensions as part of its rationale for invading Poland in September 1939.
Beck attempted to maintain Polish neutrality between, or at least reasonably good relations with both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, while trying to quietly undermine the latter. Non-aggression pacts were in fact signed with both powers. Another keystone of foreign policy at this time was a military alliance with France, as well as improving relations with Britain. Interestingly enough, the Nazis at one point had floated the idea of an anti-Bolshevik alliance with Poland directed against Moscow, but this idea gained no traction because of Beck's long-maintained neutrality policy.
Much as I would love to talk about the Second Republic, this could take up a whole book, and indeed it has. I strongly recommend Bitter Glory by Richard Watt for more information about this era, as well as The Kings Depart by the same author, with the former book detailing the history of the Polish Republic and the second one discussing the Versailles Conference that made it possible.
I'm not going to discuss the Second World War extensively, as most people already know how that turned out. I just want to highlight a few things here that you don't hear about in school: 1) at no point during the war did Polish cavalry charge tanks. The footage of them doing so is in fact from a German propaganda film. There was an engagement or two where Poles were surrounded by tanks, and the cavalry had to run past the tanks in order to escape encirclement. 2) The Soviet Union attacked Poland on September 17, 1939. Full stop. While many know about the German invasion, the Soviet one is very seldom discussed. Worse is, after the war, the Soviets got to keep the land they had conquered in this fashion! 3) The Polish Army was hindered in part by the fact that the Germans struck as the Polish army was trying to mobilize. The severe damage done by the Luftwaffe to the Polish railway network meant that a good half of the Polish Army never got to its assigned assembly points. Poland had actually tried to start mobilizing several days earlier than they did, but were dissuaded from doing so by France and Britain. Had mobilization been completed, Poland may have held out a little longer. 4) The Polish Army seriously bloodied the Wehrmacht. Granted, it went a lot worse for the Poles than the Nazis, but there's a reason Germany didn't strike France until May of 1940. The way that the war was taught in school, the Germans attack, lose about five guys, and goosestep through Warsaw. A little bit like Desert Storm, complete with guys named Schwarzkopf. In fact, the Luftwaffe in particular was damaged seriously in the campaign, as the Polish air force was not, in fact, destroyed on the ground, and the Germans took about 45,000 casualties, with several divisions having to rest and refit extensively after the campaign.
During the occupation, there was an extensive resistance movement, led by the Home Army or Armia Krajowa (AK). These were the folks who brought you the Warsaw Uprising, which led Hitler to order Warsaw completely blown up and burned to the ground after it was put down. Stalin also didn't like the AK, so after the Soviets came into Poland a lot of these guys either got killed, sent to Siberia, or figured out some way to get out of Poland and go put roofs on houses in Chicago or something.
After the war, two things happened. First, the Soviet Union effectively took over Poland. This happened in part because FDR and Churchill believed Stalin when Stalin said "oh sure, I'll allow democratic elections in Poland" at Yalta. Unfortunately, once Churchill saw that this wasn't going to happen, he was unable to talk sense into FDR. When FDR started to have doubts about this he promptly died, leaving Harry Truman dazed and confused about Poland because nobody ever really told him anything. Churchill got booted out of office for good measure shortly after the war ended, and so at Potsdam Stalin got to do pretty much whatever he wanted in Poland.
The second thing that happened was equally traumatic. Poland was effectively shifted to the west: the eastern provinces of what had been Poland fell under Soviet control, provinces which today make up Belarus and Ukraine. A bunch of Poles were resettled to other parts of Poland, like the new western provinces of Poland that were once part of Germany. The Germans in those provinces got kicked out and settled forcibly in other parts of a shrunken German state. In this way, Poland was given control of cities such as Szczecin (Stettin) and Wrocław (Breslau), as well as Gdańsk (Danzig) and East Prussia. The shift was extremely traumatic, and I understand that in places like Szczecin the Polish occupants don't really feel a connection to the city as they never really wanted to be there in the first place.
Communist Poland, or the Polish People's Republic (PRL, Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa) is a time that I think very few people remember fondly. Again, there are whole histories about the Eastern Bloc, and I don't want to bore you with details about what Władysław Gomułka did or didn't do. Let's fast-forward to everybody's favorite part of Communism: the end of it.
The election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II helped galvanize opposition to communist rule, partly as it cemented the Church as powerful opposition to the State. The state had never managed to smash Catholicism in Poland. Though it did try its ready best to undermine the influence of the Church, moving directly against the Church in an overt matter was ground that the Politburo was not willing to tread. In September 1980, striking shipyard workers in Gdańsk organized Solidarity (Solidarność), a labor union that became a political party that at one time counted a third of the working-age people in Poland as members. By the end of 1981, Solidarity was making so much noise that General Wojciech Jaruzelski, then-premier and commander-in-chief, felt compelled to declare martial law on December 13th, a state which lasted until July of 1983.
The period of martial law (Stan Wojenny, literally "State of War") is perhaps the most-discussed and most controversial period in Polish history. Jaruzelski claimed that he had to declare martial law as things were slipping out of control in Poland. Had he not declared martial law when he did, he maintains that Soviet troops would have invaded Poland and put Solidarity down in an entirely ruthless campaign much like that in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. Others maintain that there was no Soviet threat, and that Jaruzelski was just trying to maintain his personal power. Some have urged prosecuting Jaruzelski as a criminal and tyrant for his declaration. Others say, he's old and he chose the lesser of two evils. He also didn't get fabulously wealthy as a result of his position, and was just a soldier doing his job. I'm curious to read about this more when the anniversary rolls around again.
However, martial law was not enough to get rid of Solidarity. The government of the PRL was looking increasingly shaky, as was the Polish economy, wracked by inflation and shortages. In 1989 the government threw in the towel, held free elections that were won by Solidarity, the first Warsaw Pact country to have a non-communist government. This proved a catalyst for the unwinding of communism all over the Eastern Bloc, and in a way that nobody in their right minds would have predicted: a more-or-less peaceful rusting away of the Iron Curtain.
In this way, Poland had come full circle, from an independent country to dominated by foreign powers to a free republic, the Third Republic. I also stop the narrative here because it is very difficult to analyze anything from a historical perspective that is younger than I am. Now that we have an exhaustive and exhausting brief history, it's time to consider what it all means.
Polish foreign policy at this time also had to be somewhat adept, and as events were to prove the policies followed by Foreign Minister Józef Beck were unsuccessful. Poland was engaged in squabbles with Lithuania over Lithuanian independence and how much land that new state was to possess. Gdańsk (Danzig) was a free city under League of Nations administration, which meant that Poland had to build a completely new port city at Gdynia. However, the Polish Corridor to the sea had the effect of slicing Germany into two pieces, the main part and East Prussia, the area around present-day Kaliningrad that included a considerable slice of what is now Poland. Both the division of Germany and continuing tension over Gdańsk would be a source of constant friction between Berlin and Warsaw, and Nazi Germany used these sorts of tensions as part of its rationale for invading Poland in September 1939.
Beck attempted to maintain Polish neutrality between, or at least reasonably good relations with both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, while trying to quietly undermine the latter. Non-aggression pacts were in fact signed with both powers. Another keystone of foreign policy at this time was a military alliance with France, as well as improving relations with Britain. Interestingly enough, the Nazis at one point had floated the idea of an anti-Bolshevik alliance with Poland directed against Moscow, but this idea gained no traction because of Beck's long-maintained neutrality policy.
Much as I would love to talk about the Second Republic, this could take up a whole book, and indeed it has. I strongly recommend Bitter Glory by Richard Watt for more information about this era, as well as The Kings Depart by the same author, with the former book detailing the history of the Polish Republic and the second one discussing the Versailles Conference that made it possible.
I'm not going to discuss the Second World War extensively, as most people already know how that turned out. I just want to highlight a few things here that you don't hear about in school: 1) at no point during the war did Polish cavalry charge tanks. The footage of them doing so is in fact from a German propaganda film. There was an engagement or two where Poles were surrounded by tanks, and the cavalry had to run past the tanks in order to escape encirclement. 2) The Soviet Union attacked Poland on September 17, 1939. Full stop. While many know about the German invasion, the Soviet one is very seldom discussed. Worse is, after the war, the Soviets got to keep the land they had conquered in this fashion! 3) The Polish Army was hindered in part by the fact that the Germans struck as the Polish army was trying to mobilize. The severe damage done by the Luftwaffe to the Polish railway network meant that a good half of the Polish Army never got to its assigned assembly points. Poland had actually tried to start mobilizing several days earlier than they did, but were dissuaded from doing so by France and Britain. Had mobilization been completed, Poland may have held out a little longer. 4) The Polish Army seriously bloodied the Wehrmacht. Granted, it went a lot worse for the Poles than the Nazis, but there's a reason Germany didn't strike France until May of 1940. The way that the war was taught in school, the Germans attack, lose about five guys, and goosestep through Warsaw. A little bit like Desert Storm, complete with guys named Schwarzkopf. In fact, the Luftwaffe in particular was damaged seriously in the campaign, as the Polish air force was not, in fact, destroyed on the ground, and the Germans took about 45,000 casualties, with several divisions having to rest and refit extensively after the campaign.
During the occupation, there was an extensive resistance movement, led by the Home Army or Armia Krajowa (AK). These were the folks who brought you the Warsaw Uprising, which led Hitler to order Warsaw completely blown up and burned to the ground after it was put down. Stalin also didn't like the AK, so after the Soviets came into Poland a lot of these guys either got killed, sent to Siberia, or figured out some way to get out of Poland and go put roofs on houses in Chicago or something.
After the war, two things happened. First, the Soviet Union effectively took over Poland. This happened in part because FDR and Churchill believed Stalin when Stalin said "oh sure, I'll allow democratic elections in Poland" at Yalta. Unfortunately, once Churchill saw that this wasn't going to happen, he was unable to talk sense into FDR. When FDR started to have doubts about this he promptly died, leaving Harry Truman dazed and confused about Poland because nobody ever really told him anything. Churchill got booted out of office for good measure shortly after the war ended, and so at Potsdam Stalin got to do pretty much whatever he wanted in Poland.
The second thing that happened was equally traumatic. Poland was effectively shifted to the west: the eastern provinces of what had been Poland fell under Soviet control, provinces which today make up Belarus and Ukraine. A bunch of Poles were resettled to other parts of Poland, like the new western provinces of Poland that were once part of Germany. The Germans in those provinces got kicked out and settled forcibly in other parts of a shrunken German state. In this way, Poland was given control of cities such as Szczecin (Stettin) and Wrocław (Breslau), as well as Gdańsk (Danzig) and East Prussia. The shift was extremely traumatic, and I understand that in places like Szczecin the Polish occupants don't really feel a connection to the city as they never really wanted to be there in the first place.
Communist Poland, or the Polish People's Republic (PRL, Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa) is a time that I think very few people remember fondly. Again, there are whole histories about the Eastern Bloc, and I don't want to bore you with details about what Władysław Gomułka did or didn't do. Let's fast-forward to everybody's favorite part of Communism: the end of it.
The election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II helped galvanize opposition to communist rule, partly as it cemented the Church as powerful opposition to the State. The state had never managed to smash Catholicism in Poland. Though it did try its ready best to undermine the influence of the Church, moving directly against the Church in an overt matter was ground that the Politburo was not willing to tread. In September 1980, striking shipyard workers in Gdańsk organized Solidarity (Solidarność), a labor union that became a political party that at one time counted a third of the working-age people in Poland as members. By the end of 1981, Solidarity was making so much noise that General Wojciech Jaruzelski, then-premier and commander-in-chief, felt compelled to declare martial law on December 13th, a state which lasted until July of 1983.
The period of martial law (Stan Wojenny, literally "State of War") is perhaps the most-discussed and most controversial period in Polish history. Jaruzelski claimed that he had to declare martial law as things were slipping out of control in Poland. Had he not declared martial law when he did, he maintains that Soviet troops would have invaded Poland and put Solidarity down in an entirely ruthless campaign much like that in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. Others maintain that there was no Soviet threat, and that Jaruzelski was just trying to maintain his personal power. Some have urged prosecuting Jaruzelski as a criminal and tyrant for his declaration. Others say, he's old and he chose the lesser of two evils. He also didn't get fabulously wealthy as a result of his position, and was just a soldier doing his job. I'm curious to read about this more when the anniversary rolls around again.
However, martial law was not enough to get rid of Solidarity. The government of the PRL was looking increasingly shaky, as was the Polish economy, wracked by inflation and shortages. In 1989 the government threw in the towel, held free elections that were won by Solidarity, the first Warsaw Pact country to have a non-communist government. This proved a catalyst for the unwinding of communism all over the Eastern Bloc, and in a way that nobody in their right minds would have predicted: a more-or-less peaceful rusting away of the Iron Curtain.
In this way, Poland had come full circle, from an independent country to dominated by foreign powers to a free republic, the Third Republic. I also stop the narrative here because it is very difficult to analyze anything from a historical perspective that is younger than I am. Now that we have an exhaustive and exhausting brief history, it's time to consider what it all means.
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