Józef Haller

Between 1914 and 1920 Józef Haller travelled a road that no other Polish commander travelled. He began as an organiser of volunteers on Austria’s side, fought for three years in the Legions against Russia, and in February 1918, at the head of the II Brigade, broke through the Austrian front in protest against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A few months later he was in France, where the Polish National Committee made him Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army fighting on the side of the Entente. In the spring of 1919 his Blue Army arrived in Poland as the best-equipped part of the Polish Army, and in 1920 Haller commanded the Northern Front in the Battle of Warsaw. Allied with the National Democrats, he became one of the opponents of Józef Piłsudski; after the May Coup he was pushed to the margins, and during the Second World War he was a minister in the government of Władysław Sikorski. He died in exile in London.

Officer and activist

He was born on 13 August 1873 in Jurczyce near Kraków, into a devoutly Catholic landed family with a tradition of insurrection. His father had fought in the January Uprising, and his cousin Stanisław later also became a general in the Polish Army. He spent his youth in Lwów (Lviv) and received his military education at Austrian schools in Košice and Hranice and at the Technical Military Academy in Vienna. From 1895 he served as an artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, mainly in Lwów and Stanisławów. At the beginning of the 1910s he left the army, with the rank of captain or major according to different sources.

As a civilian he devoted himself to social work. He was active in the Society of Agricultural Circles and, above all, in the Sokół gymnastic society and the emerging Scout movement. He ran military courses for young people, and according to Scouting tradition it was he who proposed the design of the Scout Cross. He did not belong to Piłsudski’s camp. The Galician Sokół stood closer to the National Democrats, and its field units competed with Piłsudski’s Riflemen.

The Legions

When war came in August 1914 Haller was among the organisers of the Eastern Legion, formed in Lwów from Sokół units and other organisations not connected with Piłsudski. As the Russians approached the city the legion was evacuated westwards, and most of the volunteers, influenced by opponents of cooperation with Austria, refused to take the oath. In September 1914 the legion was disbanded at Mszana Dolna. Only some of the soldiers, gathered around Haller, took the oath and joined the newly formed 3rd Regiment of the Legions, which Haller took command of as a lieutenant colonel.

In the autumn the regiment fought the Russians in Hungary and the Eastern Carpathians. Its sappers built a road across a pass in the Gorgany mountains, named the Legions’ Pass, and in winter the legionnaires held positions near Rafajłowa in harsh mountain conditions. In March 1915 Haller was promoted to colonel. In May he was injured in a car accident and spent many months recovering from a broken leg. On his return he joined the Council of Colonels, an informal body of Legion commanders who objected to the Legions being treated as auxiliary units, and in the summer of 1916 he took command of the II Brigade of the Legions, known as the Carpathian or Iron Brigade.

Rarańcza and Kaniów

In the oath crisis of July 1917 the paths of Haller and Piłsudski diverged. At the call of their Commandant, the soldiers of the I and III Brigades refused to swear an oath of brotherhood-in-arms with Germany and Austria-Hungary and were sent to camps, and Piłsudski himself to a German prison. The II Brigade for the most part took the oath. Haller believed that the dissolution of the Legions would deprive the Poles of their last army. The brigade became part of the Polish Auxiliary Corps, subordinate to Austria.

The break with the Central Powers came a few months later. On 9 February 1918 Germany and Austria-Hungary made peace with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, promising it the Chełm Land and part of Podlasie. To the Poles this was a new partition. Haller sent his decoration back to Emperor Charles I and led the action in which, on the night of 15–16 February, part of the Corps broke through the Austrian lines at Rarańcza to the Russian side. The Austrians disarmed and interned the remaining units.

The brigade joined the II Polish Corps, formed from Poles of the former Russian Army, and at the end of March Haller took command of the whole corps, several thousand men strong. The Germans, who occupied Ukraine after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, did not want an independent Polish force in their rear. When the Poles refused to disarm, the Germans attacked the corps at Kaniów (Kaniv) on the night of 10–11 May 1918. After a day’s fighting, with their ammunition exhausted, the corps surrendered. Haller slipped out of the encirclement and made his way through Kiev to Moscow, where he helped to organise the scattered soldiers of the Polish formations in Russia.

Commander-in-Chief in France

On 3 July 1918 Haller sailed from Murmansk and, travelling via Britain, reached France on 13 July. A few days later Roman Dmowski’s Polish National Committee co-opted him as a member. The Committee was looking for a Polish commander for the Polish Army in France, until then led by the French, and the fame of Rarańcza and Kaniów made Haller the ideal candidate: a professional officer, a Catholic close to the National Democrats, and at the same time a legionnaire who could hardly be portrayed as a partisan of Russia. On 4 October 1918, when France recognised the Polish army as an allied army, the Committee appointed him Commander-in-Chief of all Polish formations on the Entente’s side. Formally he also had under his command the Polish division fighting the Bolsheviks in the Kuban and at Odessa, which reached Poland via Romania in 1919.

At that time the army numbered about 17,000 men, mostly volunteers from the Polish community in America, and fought at the front under French command. It grew fastest after the Armistice of Compiègne, when Poles from prisoner-of-war camps in France and Italy were enlisted. According to most estimates, some 70,000 soldiers passed through the Blue Army, so called from the colour of its French uniforms. Its transport to Poland became a matter of dispute: Dmowski and the French wanted to send it via Gdańsk (Danzig), which the Germans and the British opposed. In the end it travelled by train across Germany. The first transports crossed the border on the night of 19–20 April 1919, and on 21 April Haller arrived in Warsaw, where he was welcomed as a hero.

Against the Ukrainians and the Bolsheviks

Haller’s army, equipped by the French with artillery, aircraft and Renault tanks, became part of the Polish Army, which had already been fighting the Red Army in the east since February 1919. The Allies stipulated that it was to be used against the Bolsheviks, but in May and June 1919 its units took part in the offensive against the Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia that decided the fate of that province. The dark side of these months was the excesses committed by Blue Army soldiers against the Jewish population: beatings, the cutting off of beards, looting and, in several places, killings. Western newspapers reported on their scale, and the Polish authorities attributed them to a lack of discipline in the newly arrived units.

After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles Haller took command of the Pomeranian Front, which in January and February 1920 took over from the Germans the part of Pomerania awarded to Poland. On 10 February 1920 in Puck, together with the minister Stanisław Wojciechowski, he performed Poland’s symbolic wedding to the sea, throwing a ring into the Baltic.

In the summer of 1920, as the Red Army advanced on Warsaw, Haller became Inspector General of the Volunteer Army, which brought tens of thousands of volunteers into the forces, among them many Scouts and schoolboys. He also joined the Council of State Defence. In August he took command of the Northern Front, responsible for the direct defence of the capital. His forces, with the 1st Army defending the Warsaw bridgehead and Sikorski’s 5th Army on the Wkra, repulsed the attack of Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s armies on 13–15 August, including in heavy fighting for Radzymin, and tied down the Soviet forces before the counter-attack from the Wieprz began. It was his most important command in the Polish–Soviet War.

Opponent of the Sanation regime

After the war Haller was Inspector General of Artillery and president of the Polish Scouting Association and of the Polish Red Cross, and in 1922 he was elected to the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, on the Christian National list. In December 1922, after the election as President of Gabriel Narutowicz, who had been elected partly with the votes of deputies from the national minorities, the right launched a violent campaign against the new head of state, and Haller spoke at its rallies. After Narutowicz’s assassination the Piłsudskiites held him partly responsible for the atmosphere of hatred. In 1923 he gave up his seat.

In May 1926 he condemned the May Coup, and in July of that year he was retired. From then on he was in opposition. In 1936, together with Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Sikorski, he co-founded the Morges Front, an alliance of opponents of the Sanation regime named after the pianist’s Swiss estate. In 1937 he became chairman of the supreme council of the new Christian Democratic Labour Party. This opposition criticised the rule of Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły and feared that the authoritarian camp was failing to prepare the country for war.

The Second World War and exile

In September 1939 Haller made his way through Romania to France. In the autumn he joined Sikorski’s government as minister without portfolio, and in the winter of 1939–1940 he went to America to recruit volunteers among the Polish community for the Polish army being rebuilt in France. After the fall of France in 1940 he reached Britain via Spain and Portugal, and until 1943 he was in charge of education in the government-in-exile. After the war he did not return to a country ruled by the communists. He died in London on 4 June 1960. In 1993 his ashes were brought back to Poland and laid in the crypt of St Agnes’s Garrison Church in Kraków.

Assessment

Haller occupies a place of his own in Polish memory. For the National Democrats he was the commander of the army that fought on the side of the victors and gave Poland a claim to a seat at the peace conference table, and in 1920 he was the defender of Warsaw. For Piłsudski’s supporters he was the legionnaire who in 1917 took the oath that the Commandant had rejected and then sided with his opponents. This quarrel lasted throughout the interwar years and kept the general out of the army for thirteen years before the outbreak of war.

Military historians stress that Rarańcza and Kaniów mattered above all politically and morally, and that Haller was an organiser and leader rather than an outstanding strategist. His achievement was to create an army that brought modern equipment to Poland in 1919, and to keep up morale in the critical days of August 1920. His image is overshadowed by the antisemitic excesses of his soldiers and by his part in the campaign against Narutowicz. On balance he is seen above all as a symbol: a general who combined in a single life both roads to independence, that of the Legions and that of the Entente, and who later, as an old man in exile, was a living testimony to the continuity of a state that had lost its independence once again in 1939.