A day for battles: Warsaw & Blenheim

Eoin Purcell

Warsaw
I’ve written before about the completely fascinating Polish-Soviet War of 1920 and Adam Zamoyski’s excellent book on the topic: Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe. The key battle in that war The Battle of Warsaw began on this day 89 years ago. The initial stages of the battle were not that promising for the Poles as an extract makes clear:

On 13 August Sollohub attacked the outer perimeter in force, and the Polish 11th Division abandoned its positions and fled. Sollohub’s 27th Omsk Division pursued it and was joined unexpectedly by the 21st Rifle Division of Lazarevich’s army, which had strayed into the wrong sector. Together they overran the little town of Radzymin, twenty kilometres from Warsaw, but happily for the Poles the two units became so entangled that they were unable to pursue their advantage.*

Blenheim
John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough , was one the most exceptional military leaders of British history. His most celebrated victory is Blenheim when he prevented the armies of France from advancing towards Vienna in a crushing defeat made possible by his rapid and secretive march from the Low Countries to the Danube. You can a description of the battle in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World by Edward Shepherd Creasy. There is a version here in Google Books, sadly you cannot download a copy because although the text itself is well out of copyright and firmly in the public domain, the only copy that seems to be available on GBS is a Forgotten Books version (thus there is IP in the setting and it is not a public domain version)

Below is a great video on Marlborough as a Great Commander.

Quite the day for climactic battles is it not?
Eoin

*Page 84, Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s failed Conquest of Europe, Adam Zamoyski

Warsaw 1920, a quality read

Eoin Purcell

European Wars
I’ve just finished Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (responsible for an interesting recent history on the 1814 Congress of Vienna (and several others) in Vienna) a really great fast read.

Relevance
Zamoyski makes a case for the importance of Poland’s victory in the campaign (for a brief overview of the Battle of Warsaw read this wikipedia article) and it is a rather convincing one. One of the strong points in the narrative is that Zamoyski draws out the personalities of the main players pretty well (which is impressive given the short nature of the book).

The somewhat chaotic nature of the Russian commands come through very clearly and the relative inexperience of both states is also fairly obvious. By far the most impressive feat that Zamoyski achieves however is to paint through the book the possibilities and potentials that a Russian victory, or even a slightly different Russian defeat, might have opened up.

I read the book with a degree of anticipation despite knowing the outcome and despite knowing the future of many of the participants. To my mind, that alone makes the book worth reading.

Finishing Tom Holland’s Millenium. Here is a negative-ish review from someone else, more when done.
Eoin