[...]White Eagle, Red Star by Norman Davies | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion[...]…

I can manage my everyday business in Polish just fine, but my written Polish doesn’t really match journalistic standards quite yet.

Norman Davies, by the way, is obviously also a contributor in “Tygodnik Powszechny”. If memory serves, the last year he wrote an article where he reasoned that the Central European missile shield is really not a good idea.

Cheers,

J. J.

As the title of his work indicated, Davies was still treating the war mainly as a Polish-Soviet conflict – which is, of course, a legitimate point of view still today. He did devote some attention also to the Lithuanian and Ukrainian issues, of course.

I might note that there were also Finnish volunteers serving on both sides of the Polish-Soviet war. On the Bolshevik side, there was the 480th Finnish Sharp-Shooter Regiment of the Red Army, consisting of the Red exiles of the Finnish Civil War; this was an elite unit of 1500 men, who were veterans of the battles against the Whites and the intervention forces in East Karelia and the Archangelsk Front. They were dispatched to Poland in May 1920. Most of them ended up prisoners when they attempted to escape with Ghai’s forces to East Prussia, but some managed to get away. The surviving Finns were attached to the 18th Division of the Red Army, and participated in the operations against Armenians and Georgians in the winter of 1920-1921.

On the Polish side, there were those hapless Finnish volunteers who served in ataman Bulak-Balakhovich’s forces (Bulak was also briefly mentioned by Davies). Most of these men were former Finnish Whites who had fought against the Bolsheviks also in the Estonian War of Independence, and then basically traveled further south, looking for a new opportunity to fight against the Reds. On the Polish front, they saw serious action during the “Miracle of Vistula”, and also in Bulak-Balakhovich’s and Peremykin’s subsequent disastrous incursions to Byelorussia and Ukraine. One of these men, Kaarlo Kurko, subsequently wrote his memoirs of the conflict.

I wrote an article of Kurko and his memoirs for the Polish weekly “Tygodnik Powszechny” back in the last August. Those who are fluent in Polish can read the text from the website of the paper:

http://tinyurl.com/p6jmv9

Cheers,

J. J.

(And FB> point taken and acknowledged. )

“[The Allied militar mission's] chief, General Adrian Carton de Wiart VC, was a wasted asset. This indestructible warrior, who had lost an eye in Somaliland in ’98 [[Pirates? Plus ça change...]] and a hand at Ypres, who had been shot through the lung in South Africa, through the skull and the ankle on the Somme, through the hip at Passchendaele and through the leg at Cambrai, possessed all the qualities best designed to appeal to the Polish officers among whom he was sent. … At Mława in August 1920, he fought off a detachment of marauding Cossacks from the running board of his observation train, having at one point in his enthusiasm fallen onto the track. …” p. 94

The prolonged battle over the Curzon Line on Wikipedia is pretty good evidence that there’s nothing as dogged in defending historical myth than a Polish nationalist.

(Also, I note that the discussion page on the Wikipedia article on this war yet again confirms the empirical assertion that there’s nothing as dogged in defending historical myth as a Russian nationalist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War )