Decree creating the Polish Army in France

On 4 June 1917 the President of France, Raymond Poincaré, signed in Paris a decree whose first article read: “There is created in France, for the duration of the war, an autonomous Polish army, subordinate to the orders of the French high command and fighting under the Polish flag.” The decree was countersigned by the prime minister and foreign minister, Alexandre Ribot, and the minister of war, Paul Painlevé, and the next day, 5 June, it was published in the Republic’s official gazette. For the first time since the beginning of the war one of the Entente powers had agreed to the creation of a Polish army as a separate armed force, rather than a handful of volunteers scattered in foreign regiments. Thus was born the Polish Army in France, later called the Blue Army after the colour of its uniforms, and Haller’s Army after the name of its last commander.

The text of the decree

The decree was short and had six articles. The French government took upon itself the creation and maintenance of the Polish army. In matters of organisation, hierarchy, administration and military justice it was to be bound by the regulations of the French army. The fourth article set out where the army was to draw its soldiers from: from Poles already serving in the French army and from Poles “of other origin” who were allowed to transfer to the Polish army in France or to enlist in it as volunteers for the duration of the war. The details were to be laid down by later ministerial instructions.

Two formulations were the most important. The army was “autonomous” and was to fight under the Polish flag, and so as a Polish formation, visible on the battlefield and in politics. At the same time it was subordinate to the French high command, and its command cadre was made up largely of Frenchmen. There was as yet no Polish authority to which the army could be politically subordinate. In the explanatory report presented to the president, Ribot and Painlevé wrote that France should make it a point of honour to cooperate in the creation and development of the future Polish army, and that the “kinship of spirit” of the two nations and the friendship of which the Poles had always given proof constituted for France a “moral duty” to contribute to this work.

The road to the decree

Poles in France had tried to create their own unit as early as August 1914. Several hundred volunteers, mainly members of the “Sokół” and the Riflemen’s Association, came forward for the army at that time. The French, however, did not agree to a separate Polish formation, chiefly because of the objections of the Russian embassy. The volunteers were enlisted in the Foreign Legion, and the best-known group, the Bayonne volunteers (PL), bled to death in May 1915 in the Second Battle of Artois. Later Polish volunteers went only to French units. As long as Tsarist Russia regarded the Polish question as its internal affair, Paris did not want to irritate an ally on whom the fate of the Eastern Front depended.

The February Revolution changed everything. On 30 March 1917 the Russian Provisional Government recognised the right of the Poles to an independent state, and in April Britain, France and Italy endorsed this. The Russian veto ceased to exist, and Polish activists in Paris, among them the writer Wacław Gąsiorowski, lobbied for permission for a Polish army. Roman Dmowski, active in London, had also long advocated the creation of a Polish army on the side of the Entente. The French authorities also had reasons of their own. A few weeks earlier the Nivelle offensive had collapsed, and the French army needed every soldier. And after the Act of 5 November Germany and Austria-Hungary had announced the creation of a Polish army at their side, and the Entente did not want to leave them a monopoly on the idea of a Polish army.

Where would the soldiers come from?

The decree opened the way to an army, but it did not provide soldiers. There were few Poles in France, and those who served in the French army were often descendants of earlier emigrants, with weak ties to Poland. The reservoir of men was above all the large Polish community in the United States. Ignacy Jan Paderewski courted it, and the American “Sokół” had long been preparing future soldiers. The volunteers could set off, however, only in the autumn of 1917, when the American authorities gave permission for recruitment. They were trained at a camp in Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada, through which, according to Polish and Canadian studies, more than 20,000 men passed. The second source was to be Polish prisoners of war from the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, conscripted against their will into the armies of the partitioning powers. In time Poles from the Russian brigades fighting in France also joined the Blue Army, and after the war tens of thousands of former prisoners from camps in Italy.

The first months

According to French sources, as early as 6 June General Louis Archinard, a veteran of the colonial conquests in West Africa, was placed at the head of the Franco-Polish Military Mission, which was to organise the new army. The first units began to be formed in the summer of 1917 at a camp in Sillé-le-Guillaume in the Sarthe department. Progress was slow, because both volunteers and Polish officers were lacking. The situation changed only with the arrival of the first large groups from across the ocean at the end of the year. At the turn of 1917 and 1918 (sources give different dates, from 17 December to 10 January) the 1st Polish Rifle Regiment was formally created.

The army also needed a political authority. On 15 August 1917 Dmowski founded in Lausanne the Polish National Committee, which soon moved to Paris. In the autumn it was recognised by France, Britain, Italy and the United States, and in 1918 the Committee obtained political direction over the army. On 4 October 1918 its command was taken over by General Józef Haller, a former brigade commander of the Legions, who had made his way to France from Russia.

Significance

The decree of 4 June did not create an army at once. As late as March 1918, according to Polish studies, it numbered just over 8,000 men, and in the fighting on the Western Front in 1918 only its 1st Regiment, and later its 1st Division, took part. According to most estimates about 70,000 soldiers passed through the Blue Army by the end of its existence. In the spring of 1919, well armed and equipped, it came to Poland and became part of the Polish Army.

More important than the numbers, however, was the political significance. The Polish question had ceased to be merely a subject of declarations. The Poles on the side of the Entente now had their own army, recognised by a state act of one of the great powers. At a time when in occupied Warsaw the Germans were trying to create a Polish army under their command, France did the same on the other side of the front. The army was the nucleus of a force that the Polish National Committee could later present as the armed arm of the reborn state and invoke at the table of the peace conference.