The French Military Mission to Poland

Charles De Gaulle in Poland, 1920

Following an April 1919 agreement, Marshal Foch dispatched a military mission to Poland in an effort by France to aid the nascent Second Polish Republic after it achieved its independence in November 1918, at the end of the First World War. The aim was to provide aid during the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921) and to create a strong Polish military to serve as a useful ally against Germany. It was an advisory body consisting of about 400 French officers attached to staffs of Polish units at various levels. Although the French mission was small numerically, its effect was substantial in improving the organization and logistics of the Polish army. The French staff worked in parallel with a smaller British mission to Poland.

Its first commander was General Paul Prosper Henrys, previously the commander of French forces in the Balkans. The French mission commanded considerable respect and influence through the activities of its 400 officer-instructors. These men were entrusted with the task of training the officer corps in the art of military science and in the use of French army methods. Among the French officers was a future president of France, Charles De Gaulle, who was an advisor at the Polish infantry school and received Poland's Virtuti Militari for his service. 

French-Trained Polish Cavalry During the Soviet War

The French-Polish interface, however, was not without tensions and problems.  President Józef Piłsudski generally viewed the French Military Mission to Poland with a mix of  pragmatic necessity and professional skepticism, while publicly maintaining that Poland must rely on its own self-sufficiency rather than foreign strategic dictation. During the critical 1920 Battle of Warsaw, Piłsudski rebuffed attempts by Western advisors to take strategic control, preferring his own operational plans and famously appointing General Maxime Weygand [who was part of an Allied diplomatic mission, not the military mission] only as an advisor to the Polish Chief of Staff rather than placing him in command of Polish troops.

Some of the mission's most important accomplishments include:

• Unifying the Polish Army's disparate types of units, training methods, and equipment from the former German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian origins into a single cohesive force.

• Assisting with the transit and subsequent integration of General Józef Haller's "Blue Army" (a 70,000-strong force formed in France) into the main Polish armed forces in 1919.

• Reorganizing the Polish general staff with the French system with standard section for operations, intelligence, and logistics.

• Advising on Polish strategy during the victorious war over Soviet Russia.

Piłsudski Decorating Foch

In gratitude, Polish leader Józef Piłsudski personally unpinned his own Virtuti Militari medal from his uniform to award Marshal Foch in 1921, who had unstintingly supported Polish independence. Foch was later awarded the prestigious Order of the White Eagle and, in 1923, was named a Marshal of Poland—becoming the only foreign national to ever hold that rank. France would maintain its mission to Poland through 1939.