Polish Army becomes an allied army

On 28 September 1918 the French government and the Polish National Committee concluded an agreement in Paris that changed the position of the Polish troops fighting on the side of the Entente. The Polish Army in France ceased to be a formation of volunteers under French administration. From then on it was to be a single, autonomous Polish army, allied with the Entente powers and co-belligerent with them against the Central Powers, under a single Polish command and under the supreme political authority of the Committee. Polish editions of the documents give the French formula: armée autonome, alliée et belligérante sous un commandement polonais unique. The Polish state did not yet exist, but its army took its place in the ranks of the coalition as an ally, and not merely as a collection of volunteers in someone else’s army.

The road to the agreement

The army had been created by President Poincaré’s decree of 4 June 1917. Under it the army was “autonomous” and fought under the Polish flag, but it was organised by the French military authorities, paid for by the French treasury, and appointments were made by the French war ministry. In a letter to the American Secretary of State in October 1918, Roman Dmowski wrote that the army was well trained and disciplined, but that “from the national and political point of view” its position remained “abnormal”. There was no Polish political body and there were no senior Polish officers who could direct it.

This began to change when France recognised the Committee in Paris as the official representation of the Poles, followed by Britain, Italy and the United States. In February 1918 (studies give 22 or 23 February), under an agreement with the French government, the Committee took over the political direction of the army. Among other things, it could decide on the admission of volunteers and approve officers’ appointments, but command remained French. In June France, Britain and Italy declared at Versailles that a united and independent Poland with access to the sea was a condition of a just peace. In July General Józef Haller arrived in Paris from Russia and joined the Committee. The Polish army had gained a candidate for commander-in-chief.

On 7 August 1918 the Committee proposed to the French government that France and the other states recognise it as the supreme political authority of the Polish Army and that it should appoint the commander-in-chief of the army in France and of all Polish armed forces, wherever they might be organised. This is how Dmowski presented the course of events in a letter of 18 October 1918 to the American Secretary of State Robert Lansing. The negotiations lasted nearly two months, and their result was the agreement of 28 September. According to Polish studies, it was approved by Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau.

What the agreement brought

The Polish National Committee was recognised as the supreme political authority of the Polish Army. All Polish formations fighting on the Allied side, wherever they stood, whether in France, Italy or Russia, were to form one army under a unified Polish command. Its commander-in-chief was to be appointed by the Committee in agreement with the French government. At the front the army, like all Allied troops in France, was subordinate to the French and Allied high command. The Franco-Polish Military Mission, which had until then raised and run the army, was henceforth to act as an intermediary between the French authorities and the Polish command and to deal with supplies.

The most important thing was the change of status. In the language of diplomacy an “allied and co-belligerent” army is the armed force of a state taking part in the war as a member of a coalition. Polish historians stress that by recognising the army the Allies indirectly recognised as a member of the victorious coalition a Poland that did not yet formally exist. For Dmowski this was an argument that Poland had the right to sit at the negotiating table as one of the victors, and not as the object of other people’s arrangements. A few months later Polish delegates took part in the Paris Peace Conference as representatives of an allied state.

The army in the autumn of 1918

When the agreement was concluded the army was still small. According to French and Polish studies, in the autumn of 1918 it numbered just over 17,000 soldiers in two divisions that were being formed. Most were volunteers from the Polish community in America, and senior posts were still held by Frenchmen. The oldest regiment had already fought in Champagne in the summer, and in October the 1st Polish Rifle Division (PL) took over a sector of the front in the Vosges. Real expansion came only after the armistice, when former prisoners of war from the German and Austro-Hungarian armies began to join. By the spring of 1919 it already numbered about 70,000 men.

On the same day in Warsaw the Monitor Polski, the official gazette of the Kingdom of Poland, dependent on Germany and Austria-Hungary, published a recruiting appeal for the army, issued in the name of the prime minister. The Provisional Council of State had refused to issue such an appeal throughout its existence. In those same days, then, Poles were forming two armies: one alongside the Entente, the other under German and Austrian occupation.

The agreement quickly led to further steps. On 4 October the Committee appointed General Haller commander-in-chief, and on 6 October the general swore an oath on the Polish colours in the presence of military representatives of France, the United States, Britain and Italy. On 15 October the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, informed the Committee that his government recognised the Polish Army as “autonomous, allied and co-belligerent”. The British chronology of the war dates this recognition to 12 October. On 1 November the United States did the same, recognising the army as “autonomous and co-belligerent”, without the word “allied”.