The Blue Army was the Polish Army in France, created by a French decree of 4 June 1917 and named for its horizon blue French uniforms. Volunteers from America and former prisoners of war filled its ranks. General Józef Haller took command on 4 October 1918, and in 1919 he led some 70,000 men home to Poland.
Few armies were raised in stranger circumstances. When it was formed there was no Polish state for it to serve, and its soldiers came from the Polish neighborhoods of American cities, the mining districts of northern France and prisoner of war camps in Italy. Two years later it crossed defeated Germany by train and went straight into the fighting for the borders of the reborn Poland. This is the story of the Blue Army, often called Haller's Army, from its birth in France to its merger with the Polish Army, part of our guide to Polish independence, 1914 to 1921.
What was the Blue Army?
The Blue Army was the popular name of the Polish Army in France. It was created by a decree that the French President Raymond Poincaré signed on 4 June 1917. The army was to be autonomous and to fight under its own Polish flag, but it was placed under French command.1
The name came from the uniforms. Its soldiers wore the French army's horizon blue, so it came to be called the Blue Army. After its commander it was also known as Haller's Army.2
Its organizer and first commander was a Frenchman, General Louis Archinard, head of the Franco-Polish Military Mission. A Pole, Józef Haller, took command only in October 1918.3
Why did France create a Polish army?
Until 1917 France could not do it. Russia was France's ally and ruled a large part of the Polish lands, and Paris treated the Polish question as an internal Russian matter. In 1914 Polish emigrants in France could volunteer only for the French Foreign Legion, where they formed the company remembered as the Bayonne Company.4
Two events changed the French position. On 5 November 1916 Germany and Austria-Hungary proclaimed a Kingdom of Poland under their protection, and the Entente needed an answer. In March 1917 the February Revolution brought down the tsar and weakened Russia, and France changed its attitude to the Polish question. Three months later came the decree.5
The army was raised on the initiative of Roman Dmowski's Polish National Committee, based in Paris, which gave it its political direction. Read more in our profile of Roman Dmowski.6
Who served in the Blue Army?
The soldiers came from many places. There were Polish emigrants, above all volunteers from North America, and prisoners of war of Polish nationality.7
The first unit, the 1st Polish Rifle Regiment, was formed in January 1918. Its officers were a mixed group: of its 72 officers, the French ministry history counts 20 Poles from the Foreign Legion, 4 from the Russian army, 46 from the American army and 2 from the German army.8
Until the end of the war the army stayed small. Witold Jarno puts it at fewer than 20,000 men at the time of the armistice, most of them volunteers from North America, and the French ministry history gives 430 officers and 17,000 men for its first two divisions in the autumn of 1918.9
It grew fast after the armistice, as Poles from the Austro-Hungarian army held in Italian prisoner of war camps and other former prisoners enlisted.10
How did Polish Americans join? The Niagara camp
The largest pool of volunteers was in North America, and the road to France ran through Canada. After talks with Polish American leaders, the Canadian government agreed to train Polish officer candidates, and in January 1917 the first 23 volunteers from the United States, members of the Polish Falcons gymnastic society, arrived at the infantry school in Toronto.11
In October 1917 the American government allowed recruiting for the Polish army among Polish Americans. The French ministry history dates the permission to 6 October 1917, while Zygmunt Zalewski, who describes the appeals led by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, dates the official order of Secretary of War Newton Baker to 13 October. Read more in our profile of Ignacy Jan Paderewski.12
In the autumn of 1917 the main training camp opened at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, across the river from New York State. It was named Camp Kościuszko. Its commandant was a Canadian officer, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur D'Orr LePan, and France paid for the training.13
More than 20,000 men passed through the camp on their way to France before it closed in the spring of 1919. The counts differ. Zygmunt Zalewski, drawing on LePan's own report, gives 22,395 volunteers who reached the camp between October 1917 and February 1919, and 20,720 soldiers trained in Canada and the United States who were shipped to France. The Polish Museum of America gives about 25,000 who entered the camp and nearly 23,000 who sailed. Not all of them left: Polish soldiers who died at the camp lie in the churchyard of St. Vincent de Paul in Niagara-on-the-Lake.14
Who commanded the Blue Army?
Józef Haller reached France in July 1918. He had commanded the 2nd Brigade of the Polish Legions, led it through the front at Rarańcza in February 1918 and in May fought the Germans at Kaniów. His road is told in the Battle of Kaniów and in our biography of Józef Haller.15
On 28 September 1918 France and the Polish National Committee signed an agreement that recognized the Polish army as autonomous, allied and fighting under a single Polish command, with the Committee as its political authority. The Committee was given the right to name the commander in chief.16
Haller was appointed commander of the Polish Army in France on 4 October 1918, and from then on his name was tied to the army. The IPN notes that his fame tended to hide the fact that General Archinard had commanded it for its first sixteen months.17
Did the Blue Army fight in World War I?
It did, but on a small scale. The 1st Rifle Regiment went into the line in Champagne in June 1918, and it was still there in July, when the Germans launched their last great offensive of the war near Reims, the Second Battle of the Marne.18
On 22 June 1918, at the camp of Mailly in Champagne, President Poincaré handed the Polish regiments their colors, with Dmowski and General Archinard at his side. In the text of his speech printed in a Polish pamphlet that year, he told the soldiers that from then on the sons of Poland would fight not under a foreign sign but under their own colors.19
The regiment then became the core of the 1st Polish Rifle Division. In October 1918 the division took over a sector of the front in the Vosges, east of Raon-l'Étape, where Zygmunt Zalewski records several skirmishes with the Germans that cost five privates and a second lieutenant their lives. It was to take part in a new Allied offensive in Lorraine, which the armistice of 11 November 1918 called off. For the wider war in the west see the Western Front of World War I.20
How did the Blue Army get to Poland?
Poland regained independence in November 1918, but its best equipped army was still in France. On 16 November Józef Piłsudski, now head of the new state, asked Marshal Foch to send it home. Witold Jarno shows how the rivalry between Piłsudski and Dmowski's camp, and Allied disputes over its route, held up its departure. On the events of that November see Polish Independence Day.21
The Polish National Committee wanted the army shipped to Danzig. Germany refused, with British support, fearing a Polish fait accompli in a city whose fate was still in dispute. The solution was rail transport across Germany, with the soldiers' ammunition locked in a sealed wagon on each train and Allied officers escorting the transports.22
The Allies attached a condition. In the account of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference allowed the transfer on 17 March 1919 to secure a front against the Bolsheviks, and Paderewski assured it that the army would not be sent to eastern Galicia. Jacek Legieć notes that the Entente, in agreeing to send Haller's army to Poland, did not allow its use in Galicia, and that the Polish side did not mean to respect that condition.23
Before the departure Haller issued an order announcing that the longed-for moment had come for the Polish Army to march from Italian, French and American soil to Poland. The first transports left in April 1919. On Polish soil the army and its commander were welcomed with enthusiasm, and crowds met the trains in Greater Poland, Łódź and Warsaw.24
How big was Haller's Army?
Estimates differ. The Polish Ministry of National Defence puts the army at about 70,000 soldiers in two corps. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives about 68,000 men in six divisions, and Andrzej Nieuważny 80,000 soldiers in two army corps of five infantry divisions and a training division. The Encyclopaedia Judaica speaks of about 50,000 men who moved to the southeastern front.25
It came well armed. Both the Polish defence ministry and the French ministry history count 120 tanks, Renaults in the ministry's account, and the army brought aircraft as well: the ministry and Zalewski both name seven air squadrons.26
Haller's Army against the Ukrainians, 1919
The army arrived in the middle of a war. Since November 1918 Poles and Ukrainians had been fighting for eastern Galicia, a land the West Ukrainian People's Republic claimed as Ukrainian and the Poles as part of historic Poland. The story of that conflict is told in the Polish-Ukrainian War.27
Despite Paderewski's assurance, units of Haller's army were deployed there by mid-May. On 14 May 1919 a Polish force of about 50,000 men attacked along the whole Ukrainian front. Jacek Legieć writes that two of Haller's divisions formed the core of the northern group, which advanced along the border of Galicia and Volhynia towards Łuck and Brody, and that Haller commanded the whole operation. By 27 May, in the account of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, the Poles held Halicz and Stanisławów.28
The protests of the Entente, and the need to move troops west against a feared German attack, stopped the Polish offensive. In June the Ukrainian Galician Army struck back in the Chortkiv offensive and came to about 40 kilometers from Lwów, and on 25 June, in the account of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, the Supreme Council allowed Poland to take all of eastern Galicia up to the Zbruch. A Polish counteroffensive under Piłsudski from 28 June pushed the Ukrainian army back, and in mid-July it crossed the Zbruch, leaving eastern Galicia under Polish control.29
Violence against Jews in 1919
The spring of 1919 also brought a wave of anti-Jewish violence in Poland, and soldiers of Haller's army are named in several records. Gershon Bacon, in the YIVO Encyclopedia, writes that in eastern Galicia Jews were attacked predominantly by Poles, and singles out attacks by soldiers of Haller's army, newly arrived from France, as violence that did little to win Jews over to the new state. On 2 June 1919 the American minister in Warsaw, Hugh Gibson, reported to Washington that the commanders of Haller's troops were having great difficulty in controlling anti-Jewish action.30
The American mission led by Henry Morgenthau, which Paderewski had asked for, reported on 3 October 1919 that in almost every city and town of Poland soldiers had stopped Jews and torn out or cut off their beards. It described eight principal excesses. One was Częstochowa on 27 May 1919, where, in the mission's account, a shot by an unknown person wounded a Polish soldier, a rumor blamed the Jews, and in the riots that followed, in which Polish soldiers and civilians took part, five Jews were beaten to death. Wiesław Paszkowski's study of that day, based on the city's Jewish daily and the police report, shows soldiers of Haller's army cutting Jews' beards in the streets that morning. He gives the Jewish community's tally of five men killed, 23 seriously and 44 lightly wounded, and concludes that most of those who took part in the riots were local people rather than soldiers.31
The Encyclopaedia Judaica holds Haller's soldiers responsible for attacks on Jews in the streets and on the roads and for pogroms in Galicia, and argues that their officers knew of them. Gibson's telegram of 2 June records how the troops themselves saw it: soldiers generally convinced that Jews were carrying intelligence to the enemy, and Polish officers who had come from Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and saw the Jew as a Bolshevik.32
Haller answered with an order, which Gibson sent on to Washington in June 1919, that called such treatment of the Jewish population "unworthy of Polish soldiers" and promised courts martial for anyone guilty of it.33
What happened to the Blue Army?
On 1 September 1919 Haller's Army was formally merged into the Polish Army. Zygmunt Zalewski lists what was built on its units: eighteen infantry regiments, eight artillery regiments, a tank regiment and seven air squadrons, among others.34
Its soldiers fought on, in the war with the Ukrainians and then against Soviet Russia. The IPN names the Kiev offensive, the Battle of Warsaw and the Battle of the Niemen in 1920 among the campaigns in which units from France took part. Read the full story in the Polish-Soviet War.35
Why the Blue Army matters
Historians weigh it from different sides. Jan Snopko calls the army's part in the fighting on the Western Front rather symbolic but its political role very important, since it linked Poland to the victorious Allies, and he counts it Haller's biggest achievement. The IPN sees it as an argument for Polish statehood that helped place Poland among the victors at the Paris Peace Conference.36
It was also political property. Jarno shows that it was under the influence of Dmowski's National Democrats from the start, and that Piłsudski feared the position Haller would have in Poland at the head of his own army. The Encyclopaedia Judaica goes further and speaks of an extreme nationalist character. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine credits Haller's divisions with pushing the Ukrainian Galician Army out of Galicia in the fighting of May to July 1919.37
The memory crosses an ocean. Polish graves remain at Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Library and Archives Canada keeps LePan's diaries of the camp. In Poland the army is remembered as one of the forces that secured the reborn state, a story told in our guide to the battles that won Polish independence.38
