Poles take Vilna

Before dawn on 19 April 1919 the Polish cavalry of Lieutenant-Colonel Władysław Belina-Prażmowski (PL) attacked Vilna, which the Bolsheviks had ruled for three and a half months. The uhlans took the railway station and, with the help of the inhabitants, by noon also the city centre, Castle Hill and Cathedral Square. The fighting for the city went on for two more days, however, and on the evening of 21 April Józef Piłsudski arrived there; he had conceived the whole operation and directed it in person. For the Chief of State, who had grown up in the Vilna region, it was a very special victory.

The expedition to Vilna

The city, which the Germans had taken in September 1915, became the goal of several sides at once after they left at the turn of 1918 and 1919. The Lithuanians regarded it as the capital of the state whose independence the Taryba had proclaimed in February 1918, but in the face of the advancing Red Army their government had moved to Kaunas. On 1 January 1919 the Polish self-defence took control of the city, but on 5 January, faced with Bolshevik superiority, it had to withdraw. Vilna became the capital of Soviet Lithuania and, from the end of February, of the Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Republic (PL). As the Germans withdrew further west, the Polish and Soviet troops advancing behind them clashed on 14 February at Mosty, although neither side had declared war.

On 26 March at Brest Piłsudski issued the first orders for an offensive on Vilna and decided to command it himself. “Vilna is the key to Lithuanian and Belorussian affairs, as Warsaw is to Polish affairs,” he wrote on 7 April to General Stanisław Szeptycki. The offensive began on 16 April. Attacks on Lida, Nowogródek (PL) and Baranowicze were meant to draw the enemy’s attention away from the main objective. Belina-Prażmowski’s cavalry group, according to an IPN study 842 sabres with two guns, marched on Vilna, followed by about 4,000 infantry under General Edward Rydz-Śmigły. The cavalry covered about a hundred kilometres along roads sodden by the spring thaw without meeting resistance. When the Bolsheviks unexpectedly put up a stiff defence at Lida, Piłsudski ordered the march on Vilna halted, but according to accounts quoted by dzieje.pl, Belina did not obey the order and decided to attack.

Three days of fighting

The Polish uhlans reached the city during the night of 18–19 April and began the attack before dawn (sources give times from half past three to five in the morning). The Soviet garrison, reinforced during the fighting, numbered about 4,000 men. After a short fight the Poles took the station. Railwaymen immobilised the trains, and volunteers from among them and from the Polish population of the city took up captured weapons. By noon the uhlans held the key points of the city centre and had taken between 1,000 and 1,200 prisoners. In the afternoon the Bolsheviks went over to counter-attacks, and the cavalrymen began to run short of ammunition. At about eight in the evening the first battalion of Rydz-Śmigły’s infantry, 837 men with eight machine guns, arrived on a train captured in Vilna.

On 20 April the Poles took further districts, and during the night of 20–21 April the rest of the infantry arrived. On 21 April they crossed the Viliya, and in the afternoon the Bolsheviks left the city. According to the IPN, the Poles took about 1,800 prisoners in the fighting for Vilna. Piłsudski called Belina’s raid “the finest feat of arms performed by Polish cavalry in this war”.

The capture of the city was accompanied by violence against Jews, whom the soldiers accused of siding with the Bolsheviks. The American mission of Henry Morgenthau, which investigated the matter in the summer of 1919, found that some 65 Jews lost their lives during the three days of fighting, among them four women, and that eight were marched out of the city and shot without trial. Polish soldiers and civilians plundered more than two thousand Jewish houses and shops, and hundreds of people were arrested and deported. According to the same report, the Poles lost 33 killed in the fighting.

Federation or annexation

On 22 April Piłsudski issued in Vilna, in Polish and in Lithuanian, a proclamation to the inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (PL). In it he announced a civil administration and free elections in which the inhabitants would decide their own fate. He hoped that the Lithuanians would agree to a federation with Poland, and in that case he was ready to give them Vilna. In Kaunas this was seen as the occupation of Lithuania’s capital, and the Lithuanian government protested. Piłsudski was also criticised by the National Democrats, who opposed his federal plans and simply wanted the Vilna region incorporated into Poland. At the end of April the Bolsheviks tried to retake the city but were repulsed, and in May Polish units pushed the front about a hundred kilometres to the east and north.