Tadeusz Rozwadowski: the chief of staff of the Battle of Warsaw

In the summer of 1920, as the Red Army closed on Warsaw, the man running the Polish General Staff was a former Austro-Hungarian general in his fifties. Tadeusz Rozwadowski helped turn a desperate plan into the orders that won the Battle of Warsaw, then spent his last years on the losing side of Polish politics.

An Austrian gunner

Rozwadowski was born on 19 May 1866 in Babin¹, in Austrian Galicia, into a family with a long military tradition. He graduated from the Military Technical Academy in Vienna in 1886¹ and made his career in the Austro-Hungarian artillery, serving among other posts as military attaché in Bucharest. He worked on artillery improvements, including a new sight and a combined shrapnel and high explosive shell.

Gorlice

In the First World War he commanded an artillery brigade and later an infantry division. During the breakthrough at Gorlice in May 1915 his guns supported the attack with a new way of using artillery fire, and he is regarded as one of the forerunners of the creeping barrage¹. He rose to the rank of lieutenant field marshal, but in 1916 he was retired, officially on grounds of poor health.

Lwów

In October 1918 the Regency Council made Rozwadowski chief of the General Staff of the new Polish army. When fighting broke out with the Ukrainians in Lwów that November, Piłsudski appointed him commander of the Polish forces in Eastern Galicia. After the city was relieved on 22 November², Rozwadowski took charge in Lwów and held it through a winter siege, short of men and ammunition, while turning volunteer units into regular troops. In March 1919 a relief force under General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz reopened the railway to Przemyśl, and Iwaszkiewicz took over the command. Read more in our account of the Battle of Lwów.

Chief of the General Staff

Rozwadowski then headed the Polish military mission in Paris. On 22 July 1920, with the Red Army advancing on Warsaw, he was recalled and appointed Chief of the General Staff³. In early August the staff worked out the operation that became the Battle of Warsaw: hold the bridgehead before the capital and the line of the Wkra, and strike the Soviet flank with a group gathered on the Wieprz. Rozwadowski signed the key operational orders, among them Order No. 10,000⁴, and directed the work of the staff throughout the battle.

Who planned the victory?

The authorship of the plan has been argued over for a century. The concept of the counterstroke from the Wieprz is usually credited to Józef Piłsudski, the commander in chief, who led the attacking group himself. Many historians stress that Rozwadowski and his staff officers, among them Colonel Tadeusz Piskor, worked the idea into a detailed plan and orders, and some rate his share as equal to Piłsudski's or greater. The French mission of General Maxime Weygand, long credited with the victory in France, is now generally seen as having played an advisory role⁵. The fairest reading is that the victory was a shared achievement.

The May Coup and after

After the war Rozwadowski became Inspector General of the Cavalry and argued for modernising the mounted arm. In May 1926, when Piłsudski marched on Warsaw, he commanded the defence of the capital on behalf of the lawful government, even ordering air attacks on the rebel troops. After the government gave up he was arrested and held without trial for about a year, first in Warsaw and then in a military prison in Wilno, until his release on 18 May 1927¹. His health was broken, and he died in Warsaw on 18 October 1928. The authorities refused an autopsy¹, and rumours that he had been poisoned spread at once. No evidence has ever confirmed them, and the circumstances of his death remain a matter of suspicion rather than proof. He was buried in Lwów, in the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów, among his soldiers⁶.