On 20 September 1920 the Polish 2nd Army attacked the Red Army around Grodno, opening the Battle of the Niemen. A month after his defeat at Warsaw, Mikhail Tukhachevsky had rebuilt his Western Front behind the Niemen and was preparing a new offensive. Józef Piłsudski struck first, pinning the Soviets at Grodno while a strike group marched round their northern flank, and within a week the Red Army was in full retreat. The victory settled the war.
A second chance for Tukhachevsky
After the Battle of Warsaw in August, Tukhachevsky pulled his armies back to the line of the Niemen, Szczara and Świsłocz rivers and reported to Lenin that the defeat did not mean the war was lost. The Polish Press Agency account on dzieje.pl says that within three weeks he had rebuilt his armies and planned to strike with three of them, some 73,000 men, toward Białystok and Brest.1
Piłsudski presented his own plan at his headquarters in Brest on 10 September. General Edward Rydz-Śmigły's 2nd Army and General Leonard Skierski's 4th Army, together about 67,000 combat troops according to the PAP account, would attack Grodno and Wołkowysk, while a northern group of the 2nd Army marched through territory held by Lithuania and fell on the Soviet rear at Lida. Both armies were worn out by the summer's fighting, and, as the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) puts it, much depended on who attacked first.2
Grodno and the northern hook
On 20 September the divisions of the 2nd Army attacked toward Grodno. After two days of setbacks Tukhachevsky brought up his reserves, and from 22 September the fighting around the city grew heavy; the 3rd Legions Infantry Division fought especially hard at Brzostowica. On 23 September the 4th Army took Wołkowysk, lost it again the next day, but drew Soviet units away from the Grodno sector.3
Meanwhile the strike group under General Jan Rządkowski set off on 22 September, broke weak Lithuanian resistance at Sejny and seized crossings over the Niemen at Druskieniki. Its advance on Lida threatened to cut off the Soviet armies around Grodno. According to the historian Tomasz Gąsowski the crisis came on the night of 25 to 26 September, when Polish troops held both Grodno and Wołkowysk again; Lida fell to a cavalry raid, and the 1st Legions Infantry Division and the 1st Lithuanian-Belarusian Division threw back the desperate Soviet attempts to break through, at heavy cost.4
The end of the war
Tukhachevsky ordered a general retreat. The IPN dates the end of the battle to 26 September, Gąsowski's lexicon entry gives 20 to 28 September, and the PAP account follows the pursuit into early October. The Polish armies did not destroy the Western Front, which escaped encirclement at the price of a great deal of ground, but it was no longer able to attack. In the PAP account's verdict, the battle drove the Red Army back from Poland and sealed the Polish victory; an armistice followed in October.5
Gąsowski calls the Niemen the second great battle of the war and the one that decided its outcome, though in popular memory it stands deep in the shadow of the Miracle on the Vistula. The full story, including the Lithuanian side of the northern march, is told in our article on the Battle of the Niemen.6
Also on this day
- 1792: Battle of Valmy. Near Valmy in Champagne, French troops under Kellermann and Dumouriez stopped the Duke of Brunswick's Prussian army on its march to Paris early in the French Revolutionary Wars.
