Category Archives: Eastern Europe

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 67ff.

The presence of American airmen in the Polish army was preceded by a series of efforts between the individual enlistment of officers, soldiers and citizens of the United States and the drafting of a separate American legion to fight in Poland. Endeavors in this field lasted as long as the Polish–Bolshevik war itself. Their one tangible result was the establishment of the Kościuszko Squadron, a military unit unique in being the sole representative of the Western Hemisphere in this war, since in 1920 the only regular military forces helping Poland were the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic under Ataman Semen Petlura and a small Belorussian Army under the command of General Stanisław Bułak Bałachowicz. Unlike the American volunteers, both of these formations fought primarily for the independence of their own nations.

The efforts of representatives of the Polish Republic were based on a variety of factors. The main one was the threat of German and Russian revolution and the continuation of the war in Eastern Europe. When Poland regained her independence in 1918, her borders were not yet defined. Her administration was based mainly on the dedication of civil servants of Polish descent, who remained on their jobs after the fall of the three occupying powers, Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary. The Army comprised barely a few tens of thousands of veterans of the Polish Military Organization, the Polish Legions, and officers and soldiers who gradually flowed in from the armies of the partitioning powers. After four years of war, during which enemy armies plundered everything that could be of any use, there was nothing left in Poland. The infrastructure of roads, railways, bridges, water-supply systems and power-plants was almost completely destroyed. One must remember that the front rolled through some areas several times.

Józef Piłsudski, Commander-in-Chief and Head of the Polish State, and the entire nation faced an enormous challenge. Confronted by shortages, many Polish politicians turned towards the West. It was not only about delivering aid to a suffering population. It was also of primary importance to repel the Bolshevik armies approaching from the east and to prevent the communist revolution in Russia from uniting with the German “Spartakus” movement. However, the young Polish state did not possess enough military might.

Thus Pilsudski’s attention concentrated on bringing to Poland the 80,000 strong army of General Józef Haller, which included a significant number of Polish residents of the United States and which was still stationed in France after November 1918. In fact, it remained there until April 1919, and became the pivot of many plans both political and military within the Polish National Committee, and also in French, British, and American circles. Haller’s Army was officially chartered in France by a decree of the French president on June 4, 1917. Following insistent appeals by the famous pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski to President Woodrow Wilson, permission was given also to recruit Poles living in America. Up until the end of the war, 24,260 American Poles served in the army’s ranks. The rest were recruited from prisoners of war, Poles living in western Europe, and Polish volunteers from other countries. That superbly trained and equipped army was no mere bagatelle in November 1918, when Poland reappeared on the European map. For both the Americans and the Poles, it had already set a precedent—as reborn Poland’s first army recruited from beyond her national territory and as the first American contingent to fight beyond its own national boundries in the sole interests of a foreign state.

The hope given by the existence of this precedent was rekindled when some of the hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers and officers of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), who were mainly based in France, indicated their readiness to serve, even under a foreign flag. It did not only affect Poland.

Among the important factors, it is also worth mentioning that as a consequence of the partitions, a significant group of Polish officers served in the armies of other states, which obviously influenced organization of the Polish army after over a century of occupation. In November and December 1918, the cadre of officers, at first derived from the Polish Legions of Józef Piłsudski, began to fill with Poles who, lacking other opportunities, had trained and become officers in the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, or to a lesser extent German armies. One can assume that in the Polish Army there was a conducive atmosphere for the transfer of officers and soldiers from other armies. We already mentioned here the consistent threat to the Republic, prevalent from the very beginning of its independent existence. Polish politicians and the military thought that a foreign military contingent would have a restraining influence on the appetites of both her large and small neighbors. On the assumptions made above, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a few days after the signing of the armistice in November 1918, asked the American Secretary of War Newton D. Baker for permission to discharge all soldiers and officers of Polish extraction from the American Army to enable them to serve in the Polish Army. According to various estimates—independently of Haller’s army, which was not a part of the American Armed Forces—there were approximately 200,000–230,000 officers and soldiers “of Polish extraction” who were serving under the Star Spangled Banner. It needs to be stressed that in the aforementioned appeal to Baker, Paderewski was only concerned with Polish “resident aliens,” excluding American citizens. Baker, who had been considered a friend to Poland, refused, fearing that the officers and soldiers would serve a nationalistic cause, which he suspected Poland of propagating. This argument managed to convince Wilson, thanks to which the project failed.