Battle of Vilna (1919)

Vilna Offensive

Polish Army enters Vilnius (Wilno), 1919.

Date	early 1919
Location	near Vilnius (Wilno), near the borders of Poland and Lithuania
Result	Polish victory

Belligerents

Second Polish Republic

Bolshevist Russia

Commanders and leaders

Józef Piłsudski
Władysław Belina-Prażmowski
Edward Rydz-Śmigły

Unknown

Strength

For the offensive:
10,000 infantry
1,000 cavalry
16 guns
For Vilnius:
9 cavalry squadrons
3 infantry battalions
artillery support
local population
Polish 1st Legions Infantry Division had 2,500 soldiers
Polish cavalry of colonel Belina had 800 soldiers

For the offensive:Western Rifle Division and other units of Western Army.
12,000 infantry
3,000 cavalry
44 artillery pieces.
For Vilnius:
2,000 soldiers

Casualties and losses

33 soldiers

Unknown. Polish military communiques note "more than 1,000 prisoners" taken.

The Vilna offensive was a campaign of the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. The Polish army launched an offensive on April 16, 1919, to take Vilnius (Polish: Wilno) from the Red Army. After three days of street fighting from April 19–21, the city was captured by Polish forces, causing the Red Army to retreat. During the offensive, the Poles also succeeded in securing the nearby cities of Lida, Pinsk, Navahrudak, and Baranovichi.

The Red Army launched a series of counterattacks in late April, all of which ended in failure. The Soviets briefly recaptured the city a year later, in spring 1920, when the Polish army was retreating along the entire front. In the aftermath, the Vilna offensive would cause much turmoil on the political scene in Poland and abroad.

Soviet Russia, while at the time publicly supporting Polish and Lithuanian independence, sponsored communist agitators working against the government of the Second Polish Republic, and considered that its eastern borders should approximate those of the defunct Congress Poland. Poles and Lithuanians, on the other hand, inspired by memories of the greatness of the erstwhile Grand Duchy of Lithuania, part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, saw their borders as lying much farther east. The leader of the Polish forces, Józef Piłsudski, discerned an opportunity for regaining territories that were once the part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and since then were part of the Prussian Empire, shaken by the 1917 Revolution and the ongoing Russian Civil War.

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