The Polish question in the First World War

The Polish question in 1914–1918 was the road from the partitions to an independent state. A war in which the three partitioning powers fought one another made the Polish question, for the first time since the partitions, an object of international rivalry: Russia, the Central Powers, and later the Entente and the United States outbid one another with promises to the Poles. Poles fought in the armies of the partitioning powers and in formations of their own, and their politicians bet on opposite camps. In the autumn of 1918, when all three partitioning powers had lost the war or fallen apart, the Poles took power themselves in Kraków, Lublin and Warsaw, and on 11 November the Regency Council handed military authority to Józef Piłsudski.

The Polish lands in 1914

In 1914 the lands of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth belonged to three powers. The Kingdom of Poland was subject to Russia, the Prussian partition belonged to Germany, and Galicia, a border province inhabited largely by Poles and Ukrainians, to Austria-Hungary. On 1 August the German–Russian border, which ran through the Polish lands, became a front line, and the Germans burned and shelled Kalisz. For the first time since the partitions two partitioning powers went to war with each other when, on 6 August, Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia.

The inhabitants of the three partitions served in the armies of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, on opposite sides of the front. Over the whole war, according to various estimates, between 2.9 and 3.4 million Poles were called up into the armies of the partitioning powers. They often faced one another. When Mackensen broke through the front at Gorlice on 2 May 1915, the Austro-Hungarian 12th Infantry Division from Kraków, made up mostly of Poles, was in the attack, while many conscripts from the Kingdom of Poland served in the Russian ranks.

Polish politicians split into two camps. Piłsudski bet on Austria-Hungary against Russia, which he saw as the main enemy. Roman Dmowski, leader of the National Democrats, bet on Russia and her Western allies against Germany, in which he saw Poland’s mortal enemy. On 16 August 1914 the Supreme National Committee was founded in Kraków to support the fight alongside Austria-Hungary, and on 25 November the Polish National Committee was founded in Warsaw, bringing together National Democrats and conservatives from the Kingdom. Russia courted the Poles with Grand Duke Nicholas’s proclamation of 14 August, which promised to unite the Polish lands under the Tsar’s sceptre and to grant autonomy, but did not provide for independence.

The Legions and the war on Polish soil (1914–1915)

On 6 August 1914 the First Cadre Company formed by Piłsudski set out from Kraków and crossed into the Kingdom. Piłsudski wanted to rouse the Kingdom to an uprising, but the calculation failed, and in Kielce the inhabitants received the riflemen coldly. Rescue came from the Supreme National Committee, which took the Polish Legions then being formed under its patronage. Piłsudski’s riflemen became the 1st Regiment of the Legions, but generals sent from the Austro-Hungarian army were put at the head of the Legions. In the autumn of 1914 the Polish Military Organisation, a clandestine network that eventually covered the whole Russian partition, began to operate on Piłsudski’s initiative.

The legionaries fought the Russians in the Kingdom and in Galicia. On 22–26 October 1914 they fought at Laski and Anielin; in November, during the Battle of Kraków, two battalions held off Russian attacks at Krzywopłoty for two days; and on 22–25 December the I Brigade fought at Łowczówek the hardest battle of Piłsudski’s troops in 1914. The volunteers from Lviv fared worse. During the retreat from Galicia the Eastern Legion fell apart, and only some of its men, among them those around Captain Józef Haller, took the oath and joined the 3rd Regiment of the Legions.

In the spring of 1915 Russia still tried to win the Poles over with a law giving the towns of the Kingdom elected councils, but the Russians did not manage to put it into effect. In the summer Russia lost Galicia, the Kingdom of Poland and part of Lithuania. On 5 August German troops entered Warsaw, abandoned by the Russians, and Russian rule, which had lasted since 1815, came to an end. As they left, the Russians took away the government offices, the university and factory machinery, and a wave of refugees, known as bieżeństwo, moved east. On 22 August the Warsaw Battalion of the POW marched out of Warsaw to join the Legions, but Piłsudski halted further recruitment, as he would not hand over more volunteers without political concessions from the Central Powers.

Occupation and the Act of 5 November (1915–1916)

On 24 August 1915 the Germans created the Government General of Warsaw, headed by General Hans Hartwig von Beseler, and the Austro-Hungarians a government general of their own based in Lublin. To win the Poles over, the Germans agreed to what the Tsarist authorities had refused for decades: on 15 November 1915 a Polish-language University of Warsaw and Warsaw Polytechnic were opened. The occupation also brought requisitions, the removal of machinery to Germany and hunger, and American food aid for the Kingdom never materialised, as Berlin and London blamed each other.

In the autumn of 1915 the Legions were moved to Volhynia. There Poles fought on both sides of the front: the Legions on the Austro-Hungarian side and the Polish Rifle Brigade in the Russian army. In July 1916, during the Brusilov offensive, the brigades of the Legions held off the Russian attack at Kostiuchnówka for three days, losing about 2,000 killed and wounded. After the fighting in Volhynia Piłsudski asked to be released from service in protest at the treatment of the Legions, and in September the Legions were renamed the Polish Auxiliary Corps.

On 5 November 1916 a manifesto of the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary was proclaimed in Warsaw and Lublin, announcing the creation of a Kingdom of Poland, “a self-governing state with a hereditary monarchy and a constitutional system”. For the first time since the partitions great powers officially promised the Poles a state of their own, but without a king, a government or borders. What the Central Powers wanted above all was Polish recruits. On 9 November the occupiers called on the Poles to volunteer, which caused outrage, and few volunteers came forward. Piłsudski did not reject the act, but he warned that raising an army without a Polish government made no sense.

Even so, the act changed the Poles’ position. The Polish question ceased to be Russia’s internal affair and became an international issue, on which both sides in the war began to outbid each other. On 6 December an ordinance on the Provisional Council of State was published, whose members were only to advise, and Piłsudski joined it as head of military affairs. Russia protested, but her allies began to press Petrograd to set a promise of its own against the German one, and on 25 December Tsar Nicholas II included among Russia’s war aims the creation of a free Poland from all three partitions.

The Polish question on the international stage (1917)

In the West Dmowski had been seeking support for the Polish cause since 1915, while Ignacy Jan Paderewski raised money for the victims of the war and tried to convince President Woodrow Wilson that the United States should back an independent Poland. As long as the alliance with the Tsar lasted, the governments of France and Britain treated the Polish question as Russia’s internal affair. The first breach was made by Wilson, who on 22 January 1917 in the Senate came out for a united and independent Poland.

The breakthrough came with the fall of Tsarism. On 27 March the Petrograd Soviet recognised Poland’s right to full independence, and on 30 March the Russian Provisional Government recognised the Poles’ right to an independent state, linked with Russia, however, by a “free military alliance”. Britain assured the Provisional Government that it fully supported the principle of an independent and united Poland, and France and Italy sent similar notes. The mood in Galicia also changed. On 28 May the Polish deputies from Galicia, meeting in Kraków on the initiative of Wincenty Witos, declared that the nation’s only aim was an independent, united Poland with access to the sea.

Piłsudski concluded that Tsarist Russia had ceased to be a threat and that Germany was becoming the main obstacle to the Polish cause. He clashed with Beseler over the shape of the Polish Armed Force, which was to be subordinate to Germany. On 2 July he left the Council of State, and on 9 and 11 July the legionaries of the I and III Brigades, at his call, refused the oath of “brotherhood in arms” with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Those who refused were interned at Beniaminów and Szczypiorno, and the soldiers from Galicia were drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. On the night of 21–22 July the Germans arrested Piłsudski, who ended up in Magdeburg for more than a year. Prison did more for his legend than two years of fighting.

Meanwhile Dmowski was building a Polish representation on the Entente side. On 4 June 1917 President Poincaré signed a decree creating an autonomous Polish army in France, fighting under the Polish flag, later called the Blue Army after the colour of its uniforms. On 15 August the Polish National Committee was founded in Lausanne with Dmowski at its head. It moved to Paris and within three months won recognition from France, Britain, Italy and the United States as an official Polish organisation. Paderewski became its representative in America. Its members were National Democrats and conservatives; there was no one from the left and none of Piłsudski’s people.

In Warsaw the occupiers were looking for a new formula. The Council of State stepped down on 25 August, and the patent of 12 September transferred supreme authority in the Kingdom of Poland to a Regency Council, “without prejudice to the international position of the occupying powers”. The regents were the Archbishop of Warsaw Aleksander Kakowski, Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski and the landowner Józef Ostrowski, installed in office on 27 October 1917. On 26 November the regents appointed Jan Kucharzewski head of the first government of the Kingdom of Poland.

1918: from Brest to 11 November

On 8 January 1918 Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, and in the thirteenth he demanded an independent Polish state on territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, with free and secure access to the sea. A month later the Central Powers dealt the Poles a blow. On 9 February at Brest they made peace with the Ukrainian People’s Republic and, in exchange for grain, promised it the Chełm Land and part of Podlasie. For the Poles this was a “fourth partition”. The Kucharzewski government resigned, the Regency Council protested, and newspapers in Warsaw and Lublin came out with black borders. On 3 March Soviet Russia signed peace at Brest, renouncing sovereignty over Poland, Lithuania and Courland.

In protest against the peace with Ukraine, part of Colonel Haller’s II Brigade of the Legions broke through the Austrian front at Rarańcza on the night of 15–16 February. The Austrians disbanded the Polish Auxiliary Corps, and the legionaries they detained were taken to Hungary. Haller’s legionaries joined the II Polish Corps, a formation made up of soldiers of the former Russian army. The Polish corps in the east had a hard path: the I Polish Corps of General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki refused to be disarmed as early as January and took up the fight against the Bolsheviks, and on 11 May the Germans surrounded and attacked the II Corps at Kaniów. After a day-long defence General Haller’s corps, out of ammunition, capitulated, and Haller himself made his way to France via Moscow and Murmansk.

On 3 June 1918 the prime ministers of France, Britain and Italy declared in the Versailles declaration that the creation of a united and independent Polish state with free access to the sea was one of the conditions of a lasting and just peace. Dmowski later regarded this act as the greatest success of his diplomacy. In June the first regiment of the Polish Army in France was already at the front in Champagne. The agreement of 28 September recognised it as an autonomous, allied and co-belligerent army under the supreme political authority of the Committee, and on 4 October the Committee appointed Haller commander-in-chief of the Polish Army. There was no Polish state yet, but its army stood in the ranks of the coalition as an ally.

In the autumn the Central Powers were losing the war. On 7 October the Regency Council, in its address “To the Polish Nation”, proclaimed its will to create an independent Poland comprising all Polish lands, with access to the sea. On 19 October Polish activists in Cieszyn set up the National Council of the Duchy of Cieszyn, which was to join Cieszyn Silesia to the reborn Poland. On 28 October Polish deputies chaired by Witos set up the Polish Liquidation Commission in Kraków, and on 31 October Polish soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army disarmed the Kraków garrison without firing a shot. On the night of 6–7 November the pro-independence left set up the Provisional People’s Government of the Republic of Poland in Lublin, headed by Ignacy Daszyński. For the first time since the partitions a government was formed on Polish soil that called its state a republic.

Released in the days of the revolution in Germany, Piłsudski returned to Warsaw on 10 November 1918. The next day Polish soldiers, members of the Polish Military Organisation and ordinary citizens spent the whole day disarming the German garrison in the city, while that morning, in the forest at Compiègne, Germany signed the armistice with the Entente. On the evening of 11 November the Regency Council handed Piłsudski military authority and supreme command of the Polish forces. That day later came to be accepted as the symbolic date of the recovery of independence. Daszyński’s Lublin government placed itself at Piłsudski’s disposal, on 14 November the regents handed him all their authority, and on 16 November he notified the world of the existence of an independent Polish state.

Borders and the first battles

Yet the state being born in Warsaw had neither borders, nor a recognised government, nor recognition from the powers. The Entente regarded the Polish National Committee in Paris as the representative of Poland, and it treated the former ally of the Central Powers and the socialist government, headed from 18 November by Jędrzej Moraczewski, with reserve. Agreement came only in January 1919, when Paderewski became prime minister. Greater Poland, Pomerania and Silesia remained within Germany, while in the east the troops of the German Ober Ost still stood, with the Bolsheviks approaching behind them.

First there was the fight for Lviv. On the night of 31 October to 1 November 1918 Ukrainian soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army seized the city and proclaimed it the capital of a new Ukrainian state. The Polish inhabitants, mostly volunteers without military training, took up arms and for three weeks defended themselves in the city. Among them were grammar-school pupils, students and scouts, who went down in history as the Lwów Eaglets. On 20 November a relief force from Przemyśl broke through, and by 22 November the city was in Polish hands. On the day of victory a pogrom broke out in the Jewish quarters. The fighting for Lviv opened the Polish–Ukrainian War over Eastern Galicia, which lasted until the summer of 1919.

In the Prussian partition the Poles at first acted politically. On 25 October Wojciech Korfanty demanded from the rostrum of the Reichstag that the lands of the Prussian partition and Upper Silesia be joined to Poland, and on 3 December the Polish Provincial Sejm met in Poznań, elected the Supreme People’s Council and demanded a united Poland. The Council wanted to wait for the decision of the peace conference, but on 27 December, during Paderewski’s visit to Poznań, shots were fired after a German demonstration and the Greater Poland uprising broke out. By mid-January 1919 the insurgents had taken most of Prussian Greater Poland, and their gains were confirmed by the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.

The balance sheet

None of the partitioning armies counted soldiers by nationality, so Polish losses are known only from estimates. Between 385,000 and 530,000 Poles were killed, died or went missing in the armies of all sides: Tomasz Nałęcz gives 385,000, the Museum of Polish History about 450,000 and Mieczysław Wrzosek about 530,000. The wounded numbered from about 900,000 to a million. The civilian population suffered heavily. According to Andrzej Chwalba, about 900,000 people fled or were forced to flee from Galicia, while in 1915 3.5 million people had to leave the Kingdom and the Russian partition for the interior of Russia, about a third of them Poles.

Poles also fought in formations of their own. According to various estimates 30,000 to 40,000 men passed through the Legions, the I Polish Corps in Russia numbered about 29,000 soldiers at its peak, and the Polish Army in France about 17,000 in the autumn of 1918. Most of its soldiers joined only after the Armistice, and in 1919 about 70,000 were shipped home. The political balance, however, was unprecedented: all three partitioning powers had lost the war or fallen apart, and Poland returned to the map of Europe, although the fight for its borders was to last several more years.

Who won independence

The roles of Piłsudski and Dmowski were disputed from the start. Biographers from Piłsudski’s camp, such as Wacław Jędrzejewicz, presented the Legions as the nucleus of a Polish army and as proof that the Poles had won independence themselves. Critical historians, led by Andrzej Garlicki, pointed out that until 1916 Piłsudski played almost exclusively the Austrian card, and that independence was brought above all by the simultaneous defeat of all three partitioning powers. Dmowski’s associates, such as Stanisław Kozicki, saw him as the architect of a diplomatic victory, while critics pointed out that he became convinced of independence only when Russia was weakening.

Present-day scholars, such as Włodzimierz Suleja and Tomasz Nałęcz, look for a middle way. They accept that Piłsudski did not foresee the course of the war as precisely as the legend claimed, but argue that by taking up arms in 1914 he put the Polish question on the international stage, and that in 1917 he knew how to break with the losing side in time. Today it is generally accepted that both great rivals contributed to independence: Piłsudski built the army and the authority at home, Dmowski won Poland a place at the victors’ table. The date is also disputed. Besides 11 November, people have pointed to the regents’ address of 7 October, the liberation of Kraków or the creation of the Lublin government.