greatwar-1914:June 4, 1917 - French Government Organizes Creation of an Expatriate Polish Army Pictu
greatwar-1914:June 4, 1917 - French Government Organizes Creation of an Expatriate Polish Army Pictured - A recruiting poster for Haller’s Blue Army, directed at American Poles.France had few reliable infantry divisions in the summer of 1917. Tens of thousands of French soldiers were at that very moment in outright mutiny. Painlevé, the Minister of War, warned that he considered only two divisions reliable between Paris and the front-line, seventy miles away. In an effort to get some desperately-needed troops, the government decided to recruit a Polish army to serve alongside Britain and France on the Western Front. The legions recruited large numbers of the Polish diaspora in France, as well as 24,000 from America, and captured Polish prisoners from the German army. Three hundred Polish immigrants from Brazil also made the journey to fight in a national army. The Polish army in France entered combat a year later, in July 1918. It fought under the command of General Józef Haller von Hallenburg, and was soon known as “Haller’s Blue Army” after the color of their French-supplied uniforms. After World War I, the Blue Army returned to Poland and became the nucleus of a national army, fighting against Germans and Ukrainians on the borders as well as against the Bolsheviks during their invasion of Poland in 1920. -- source link
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