1920 Polish Campaign

[scook17]

I was watching a documentary tonight entitled 'Lenin's Secret Files' on the UK History channel, which had a section on Russia attacking Poland in 1920, a war thay they lost at a battle near Warsaw. This was news to me. I wondered what sort of awards were being issues during this time and if any were made during the Polish campaign?

Kind Regards,
Shane Cook.

[DougD]

...Poland attacked Russia in one last push to gain Belorus, Lithuania, and Ukraine ( areas Poland and Russia fought over for hundreds of years). This was under Polish leader ( maybe the last great one) Pilsudski, who took advantage of the chaos in Russia to make the grab. Long story short, the Poles did pretty well at first making it all the way to Kiev, then overextended, and were pushed all the way back to Warsaw by Tukachevsky if I rmember right (Stalin, Voroshilov, and Budenny all participated too). The Poles rallied (with French help) and pushed the Russians back to what would be the border until 1939.

Some consider it a seperate Polish-Russian war, though many (maybe most) consider it part of the Russian Civil War.

There were no seperate Polish campaign awards, just the regular civil war awards of the time.

DougD
PS-Great chapter on this fight in "Red Victory" by Lincoln.

[Al-muell]

Actually, there's a different version here, in Poland.
It's true that Poland was trying to conquer "East Ends", the lands that were considered by many "originaly polish". But real resons for Soviet campain against Poland were a little different.
After the revolution Lenin guaranteed Poland (and other countries too) a right to decide about their future (actualy it was only a part of Poland under Russian ocupation), probably i hope to establish pro-communist (if not pro-soviet) government. But after ending of WWI Poland was becoming more and more anti-soviet (although Pi³sudski was removed from power at first).
And it was one of the reasons for the war. As Tuchachevskiy stated "The great battle will decide the fate of the war and Russian nation and Polish people. Army under the sign of Red Banner and Armies of (...) white eagle await a deadly fight. (...) In the west the fate of the World Revolution are being decided. Over the corpse of white Poland leads the way to worldwide fire."
(My translation from polish translation.)

The polish army didn't realy show much courage (I have heard stories about polish soldiers running away from the battlefield after only hearing that Budionnyi was comming) and if we can belive Pi³sudski, it was reather soviet fault, not polish, that they loose that battle and were forced to sign a peace-treaty.

And btw. - Although Nazis considered Poles (as slavs) one of the "lowest" kinds of people, theu set a honour guard at Pi³sudski's sarkophagus in Wawel castle in Kraków for "Preventing the red flood from drowning the whole europe".