Edward Śmigły-Rydz

Biography

In 1916, in Kraków, in the middle of the war, a colonel of the Polish Legions exhibited his paintings. His name was Edward Rydz, and before becoming an officer he had intended to be an artist.

He was born on 11 March 1886 in Brzeżany, in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary. The exact place is given in different ways: the town itself, the village of Lapshyn or another village nearby; a date of 13 March is also found. His father, Tomasz Rydz, was a non-commissioned officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and died when the boy was two. His mother, Maria Babiak, died when he was about ten (by other accounts, thirteen). He was brought up by his maternal grandparents and then by a Brzeżany physician, Dr Uranowicz, for whom his mother had once worked. After graduating from the Brzeżany gymnasium in 1905, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Among his teachers are named Leon Wyczółkowski, Teodor Axentowicz and, later, Józef Pankiewicz. He painted landscapes and portraits and drew caricatures; in 1908–1909 he painted a fresco of the Virgin Mary on the façade of the Armenian church in Brzeżany. Later he also studied in Vienna and Munich.

In 1908 he joined the secret military organisation Związek Walki Czynnej (the Union of Active Struggle), founded on Piłsudski’s initiative, and, according to his biographers, decided to give to politics what had been meant for art. He moved to the philosophy department of the Jagiellonian University, where he studied philosophy and art history, but he returned to painting and finished the Academy around 1914. In 1910–1911 he attended the reserve officers’ school in Vienna and served a year in the 4th Infantry Regiment. He declined an offer to stay in the Austro-Hungarian army. He took the pseudonym Śmigły (“swift”, “deft”) in those years; in 1913 he became commandant of the Lwów district of the Riflemen’s Association (Związek Strzelecki), a Polish paramilitary organisation.

In August 1914 Rydz took command of a battalion in the 1st Brigade of the Polish Legions. He fought the Russian army on the Southern Vistula and became a major in 1914, a lieutenant colonel in 1915 and a colonel in 1916. In 1917, when the legionaries refused to swear an oath to Germany and Austria-Hungary, he was dismissed without the right to wear a uniform, and Piłsudski was imprisoned in the fortress of Magdeburg. Rydz avoided conscription into the Austrian army by pleading illness. Piłsudski entrusted him with leading the Polish Military Organisation (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa). Rydz moved its headquarters to Kraków and extended its work to Galicia; in 1918 he travelled to Kyiv.

In November 1918 he joined the Provisional People’s Government of Ignacy Daszyński in Lublin as minister of war and became a brigadier general. From then on he used the double surname. Piłsudski was displeased by his cooperation with the socialists, but confirmed the rank.

Next came the fight for Vilnius, the operation in Latvia and the capture of Dünaburg in January 1920, for which he received the Latvian Order of Lāčplēsis. In the spring of 1920 his 3rd Army took Kyiv on 7 May; on 10 June, fearing encirclement, it withdrew. In the Battle of Warsaw in August he commanded the Central Front, then the 2nd Army. He was then made a general of division. Piłsudski wrote of him in 1922 that he would recommend him as an army commander, but that he was not sure whether he could cope with the post of commander-in-chief in a war between two states.

In 1921–1926 Śmigły-Rydz was an army inspector in Vilnius. During the May Coup of 1926 he sent an infantry division to Piłsudski’s aid. From 1929 he was Piłsudski’s deputy for defence matters. On 13 May 1935, the day after Piłsudski’s death, he was appointed Inspector General of the Armed Forces. He supported President Ignacy Mościcki and became in effect the second man in the state; in November 1936 he received the rank of Marshal of Poland. He founded the political movement known as the Camp of National Unity, which alienated even some of Piłsudski’s supporters. Plans to modernise the army ran up against a shortage of funds. I would not lay the failures of the pre-war defence at his door alone, but his responsibility, to my mind, is considerable.

In August 1939, at the talks in Moscow, he rejected the Western powers’ requests that the Red Army be allowed to cross Poland, saying: “once having entered Polish territory, they will never leave it.” On 1 September he became Commander-in-Chief; on 7 September he left Warsaw with the government, and on 11 September he ordered from Brest that the capital be defended at all costs. After Soviet troops entered Poland on 17 September, he ordered a retreat into Romania and Hungary and no fighting with Soviet units except in case of attack. He himself crossed the Romanian border and was interned. On 27 October he resigned his powers, which passed to Władysław Sikorski. Śmigły-Rydz’s decisions remain a matter of dispute: some blame him for the flight, while others consider that the evacuation saved the Polish government and the gold reserve.

In Romania he initiated the creation of an underground from officers loyal to Piłsudski’s memory. In December 1940 he escaped to Hungary from the villa of a former prime minister. Sikorski, who headed the government in exile, was displeased and declared that he would regard the Marshal’s presence in Poland as sabotage. On 25 October 1941 Śmigły-Rydz travelled secretly through Slovakia into occupied Poland and on 30 October arrived in Warsaw under the pseudonym Adam Zawisza.

Five weeks later, on 2 December 1941, he died. He was buried in Powązki Cemetery under the same name; a new gravestone with his real name was placed in 1994.