Battle of Warsaw, 1920

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Mikhail Tukhachevsky versus Jozef Pilsudski: A Soviet army under Tukhachevsky tries to break the defensive lines of a Polish army under Pilsudski. Can Pilsudski’s risky master plan save the capital? Also known as the Miracle at the Vistula. Click on the images below to view.

Desperate, fearful men fought on both sides in this forgotten struggle for Eastern Europe. The prospect of what would happen if either side suffered defeat was well-known in all ranks.

Tactically, the battle seems simple: Tukhacevsky and Yegorov did not cooperate and therefore a wide – literal – rift developed between their two army groups which Pilsudski exploited to roll up the Soviet line from the south. Logistically, the battle is very complicated; Pilsudski was able to organize his logistics satisfactorily enough to actually launch his decisive offensive while Tukhachevsky was not. Western historians cringe at the thought of what would have happened had the Soviet horde been a more organized horde and launched its decisive offensive before Pilsudski.

The battle was relatively easy to animate compared with other massive, modern battles such as Mukden. As is typically the case, I spent more time determining the strength and casualties of each side. One issue was the fact that my animation featured only the northern half of a wider strategic campaign and so I was forced to do my own arithmetic. Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the Western World was specific as to the size of formations so I only had to subtract the formations not shown in the animation. I was therefore confronted with a casualty figure that exceeded the total number of Soviet soldiers involved. Szymczak put forward the most reasonable casualty figures in “Polish Soviet War: Battle of Warsaw” but these include the wider Warsaw campaign which I was not animating. Nonetheless, I converted these numbers to a percentage and arrived at the figures you see in the animation. Are they exact? Absolutely not. However, they serve their purpose.

- Jonathan Webb

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