1918

The year in brief

On 8 January 1918 President Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, and on 3 March Soviet Russia signed peace with the Central Powers at Brest and left the war. On 21 March Erich Ludendorff launched Operation Michael, the first of the offensives with which he meant to win the war before the Americans reached France. Further blows followed in Flanders, on the Aisne and, on 15 July, on the Marne. Meanwhile General Ferdinand Foch became the common commander of the Allied armies. On 18 July Mangin's counter-offensive took the initiative from the Germans, and 8 August at Amiens became "the black day of the German Army". In September Allenby destroyed the Turkish front at Megiddo, Bulgaria became the first of the Central Powers to lay down its arms, and on 29 September the British attacked the Hindenburg Line. That same day Hindenburg and Ludendorff demanded that Germany immediately ask for an armistice. Turkey signed an armistice on 30 October, and Austria-Hungary, beaten at Vittorio Veneto, on 3 November. On 9 November the German Empire collapsed, and on 11 November the armistice signed in the Forest of Compiègne ended the Great War in the west.

For Poland the year began with Wilson's thirteenth point, which demanded an independent state with free access to the sea, but on 9 February the Central Powers gave Ukraine the Chełm Land, which the Poles called the "fourth partition". In protest, part of the Second Brigade of the Legions broke through the front at Rarańcza, and on 11 May the Germans crushed General Józef Haller's Polish II Corps at Kaniów. On 3 June the prime ministers of France, Britain and Italy declared at Versailles that an independent Poland was one of the conditions of a solid and just peace, and on 4 October Haller was appointed commander-in-chief of the Polish Army. On 7 October the Regency Council spoke in the name of an independent Poland, on 31 October Kraków passed into Polish hands, and on 7 November a government under Ignacy Daszyński was proclaimed in Lublin. On 10 November Józef Piłsudski returned to Warsaw from German captivity, and on 11 November, as the German garrison was being disarmed, the Regency Council handed him military authority. This day was later adopted as the symbolic date of the recovery of independence. On 14 November the regents handed Piłsudski all their authority, and on 16 November he notified the world of the existence of an independent Polish state. From 1 November the Poles fought the Ukrainians for Lviv, which they took on 22 November, and on 27 December the Greater Poland Uprising broke out in Poznań.