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Poland War and the Polish Lands
The war split the ranks of the three partitioning
empires,
pitting Russia as defender of Serbia and ally of Britain
and
France against the leading members of the Central Powers,
Germany
and Austria-Hungary. This circumstance afforded the Poles
political leverage as both sides offered pledges of
concessions
and future autonomy in exchange for Polish loyalty and
recruits.
The Austrians wanted to incorporate Congress Poland into
their
territory of Galicia, so they allowed nationalist
organizations
to form there. The Russians recognized the Polish right to
autonomy and allowed formation of the Polish National
Committee,
which supported the Russian side. In 1916, attempting to
increase
Polish support for the Central Powers, the German and
Austrian
emperors declared a new kingdom of Poland. The new kingdom
included only a small part of the old commonwealth,
however.
As the war settled into a long stalemate, the issue of
Polish
self-rule gained greater urgency. Roman Dmowski spent the
war
years in Western Europe, hoping to persuade the Allies to
unify
the Polish lands under Russian rule as an initial step
toward
liberation. In the meantime, Pilsudski had correctly
predicted
that the war would ruin all three of the partitioners, a
conclusion most people thought highly unlikely before
1918.
Pilsudski therefore formed Polish legions to assist the
Central
Powers in defeating Russia as the first step toward full
independence for Poland.
Much of the heavy fighting on the war's Eastern Front
took
place on the territory of the former Polish state. In 1914
Russian forces advanced very close to Kraków before being
beaten
back. The next spring, heavy fighting occurred around
Gorlice and
Przemysl, to the east of Kraków in Galicia. By the end of
1915,
the Germans had occupied the entire Russian sector,
including
Warsaw. In 1916 another Russian offensive in Galicia
exacerbated
the already desperate situation of civilians in the war
zone;
about 1 million Polish refugees fled eastward behind
Russian
lines during the war. Although the Russian offensive of
1916
caught the Germans and Austrians by surprise, poor
communications
and logistics prevented the Russians from taking full
advantage
of their situation.
A total of 2 million Polish troops fought with the
armies of
the three occupying powers, and 450,000 died. Several
hundred
thousand Polish civilians were moved to labor camps in
Germany.
The scorched-earth retreat strategies of both sides left
much of
the war zone uninhabitable.
Data as of October 1992
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