Battle of Warsaw begins

On 13 August 1920 the troops of the Soviet Western Front attacked the fortifications of the Warsaw bridgehead. After several weeks of retreat, which had begun with Tukhachevsky’s offensive in Belarus, the Polish Army took its stand in the fight for the capital. The first day was hard for the defenders: in the evening the Red Army took Radzymin (PL), which lies on the road from Białystok about 20 kilometres from Warsaw, and at Ossów it broke through the first line of defence. This day marks the start of the Battle of Warsaw, which was to decide the Polish–Soviet War.

The bridgehead

The bridgehead, a belt of fortifications on the right bank of the Vistula, ran in an arc from Zegrze to Karczew. Polish sappers made use of trenches and shelters from the Great War, built earlier by the Russians and the Germans, and of three lines of barbed wire. It was defended by the 1st Army of General Franciszek Latinik, part of General Józef Haller’s Northern Front. It had four under-strength infantry divisions, about 50,000 men in all, supported by four air squadrons and armoured trains. Alongside veterans there fought volunteers, pupils and students from Warsaw’s schools, often with no training at all. The sector at Radzymin was held by the 11th Infantry Division, whose core consisted of soldiers who had come from France with Haller’s army, filled up with fresh recruits.

The plan of the Polish command, approved on 6 August, assumed that the defenders of the bridgehead would hold out for a few days. In the meantime a strike group was assembling on the Wieprz, to be led in person by the Commander-in-Chief, Józef Piłsudski. On 12 August he left Warsaw for his headquarters at Puławy.

The fall of Radzymin

The first Soviet units reached the Polish lines late in the evening of 12 August. On the morning of 13 August two experienced rifle divisions, the 21st and 27th, which had marched several hundred kilometres from Belarus since July, attacked Radzymin. The first attack, launched at about seven o’clock, was repulsed by the Polish 11th Division. At about five in the afternoon the Soviet infantry, supported by heavy artillery fire, attacked again. The battalion holding the positions in front of the town panicked, and the rest of the division fell back behind it. By the evening Radzymin was in the hands of the Red Army. The Revolutionary Council of the Soviet 3rd Army reported to Moscow that its units had taken the town by 11 p.m. and had advanced to “no further than 15 versts from Praga”. Polish intelligence intercepted the report.

South of Radzymin, at Ossów (PL), a brigade of Vitovt Putna’s 27th Rifle Division struck in the afternoon at the junction of two Polish divisions. The Poles counter-attacked until dusk but did not recover the lost positions. In the evening the chaplain of the Warsaw volunteers, Father Ignacy Skorupka (PL), arrived at the front.

That same day the commander of a volunteer regiment, Major Wacław Drohojowski, was killed at Dubienka on the Bug. On his body the Russians found an order with a map that revealed the plan of the strike from the Wieprz. The Soviet command, however, took it for a Polish hoax.

The night of 13–14 August

The loss of Radzymin caused alarm in the Polish command. General Haller ordered the 5th Army of General Władysław Sikorski, standing on the Wkra north of Modlin, to begin its attack earlier than the plan foresaw, in order to draw Soviet forces away from Warsaw. Latinik ordered a counter-attack on Radzymin for the morning, although during the night it became clear that the forces gathered for it were too weak. That day Polish radio intelligence also read a Soviet signal ordering the attack on Warsaw, which confirmed the General Staff in its decision to bring forward both counter-strikes. Polish radio stations began to jam the communications of the Soviet armies.

Warsaw lived through the day in suspense. The staff of foreign diplomatic missions had already left for Poznań at the beginning of August, and the heads of mission were to leave the city the next day. On 14 August Soviet units came within about 13 kilometres of the city limits, and Father Skorupka was killed at Ossów. Two more days of fighting were to pass before the Poles retook Radzymin.